“Sir, twenty-three.”

“Sir, eight.”

The junior nodded to Arthur. “Nine. Unmade bunk. All right, both of you come along.”

Chapter 10. Click

The young man on the podium wore a black robe with a thread of scarlet around the cowl. He waited calmly until the last cough and shuffle of feet had died away, and the only sound was the steady hum of the clock behind him.

‘Welcome to the College of Sacred Sciences of Three Mer-cantile University,” he said, and paused. Arthur leaned forward intently, and almost forgot to listen to the next words. Now he could see the thing that had been eluding him all day: it was plain in the man’s bearing as he stood there, head back, easily erect. He stood—there was no other way of putting it—as if there were no weight on his shoulders.

“I’m going to explain to you how the College operates, and what will be expected of you during your stay here. The first and most important thing is this: The College, as a General Products institution, has traditions, conventions and courses of study—all of which are followed. You are actually going to learn everything you are supposed to learn as candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Sacred Sciences: but you’ll learn it in about one twentieth the time it is supposed to take. During the rest of your time, in class and out, you’ll be studying a lot of other things, none of which is on the Gepro curriculum.

“Therefore: In every aboveground class you will be as-signed what we call a click routine. I will now assign the click routine for this class. Open the books you were given to page two.” He waited until the rustle was over. “During the remain-der of this class you will keep those books open on your desks and turn one page every two minutes. If at any time you hear a click from up there, you will immediately begin reading aloud from the top of the right-hand page to which you are turned. Now: Assume that four minutes have passed.”

The clock’s hum stopped. Arthur hastily thumbed over two pages, and hesitantly began to read aloud:

“What is the nature of the substances used in the Sacred Machines? They are of nature, for they come from the earth.” A ragged chorus swelled up, no two voices together; some of the students near Arthur seemed to be reading something else entirely. “What is the nature of the parts used in the Sacred Machines? They are of man, for man fashioned them.” The chorus was a trifle less ragged; the competing voices seemed to have dropped out.

“What is the nature of the Sacred Machines? They are of the Infinite, for neither nature nor man produced them, but they were revealed to Kusko in a dream.”

The clock was humming again. Arthur stopped reading; a few voices continued for a moment, then trailed away in confusion.

“All right,” said the lecturer. “Turn back to page two. Now assume that two minutes have passed.”

Click. “What is the nature of nature? The nature of nature is neither good nor evil. What is the nature of man? The nature of man is evil. What is the nature of the Infinite? The nature of the Infinite is good.” This time it was better. When the clock hummed again, all the voices stopped.

“All right. That was the only drill in click routine you are going to have. Remember—one page every two minutes, start-ing now. And remember this: from now on, whenever the clock clicks, it will not be a drill, it will mean that a Normal is about to enter the room.” He looked them over sardonically. “When that happens, get it right.”

Almost without a pause, he settled himself behind the lectern and began again, “Some of you will find this hard to believe. But nothing you have been or will be asked to do here is with-out purpose. The College has been organized with these ends in mind: to train you in the skills you need to survive; to train you to be useful to yourselves and your group; and to teach you to think. We expect you to memorize the Gepro texts and forget them except when they’re needed; nothing else is taught here by that method. You have already been tested, very thoroughly ...”

That was certainly true, Arthur reflected. After lunch, sore-armed from furniture moving and from half a dozen injections, he and Flynn, along with about fifteen other freshmen, had found themselves being herded down a corridor into a sudden pitch darkness. He had shuffled forward slowly with the group until a hand seized his elbow and a low voice said, “Step down” and down he had gone, twenty steps in darkness, three in light, into the windowless rooms where the tests were given: printed questionnaires, one after another, each one harder than the last. Pictures to look at and make up stories about; machines, like simplified versions of the Sacred Machines—a cap that fitted over your head, and dials that jumped and quivered. Quiet, seemingly aimless talks with men whose eyes never left your face. That was all clear, except for the machines and the pictures, and he thought he could guess at the purpose of those. But now he was beginning to wonder about something that had hap-pened earlier. Arthur, and Flynn, and a handful of others had been led into a robing room and handed small penciled scraps of paper. “All the stuff in these closets,” the junior explained, “has to be moved. Do it according to the numbers. For instance, if it says ‘23-51,’ you take all the stuff out of number 23 closet and put it in number 51. Move the name cards, too. And I want to see it done when I get back.”

Arthur’s paper had five rows of figures on it, with three pairs of digits to each—fifteen operations. But the same numbers kept recurring; there were, he discovered, only five closets in-volved. Here at the top, for instance, he was supposed to move the contents of number 60 into number 15, and 15 into 28. And then on the next line, there was 44 going into 15, turning out what he had just put in. For once Flynn was right; this didn’t make sense.

He glanced up. Some of the freshmen were doggedly empty-ing out closets and carrying armloads of clothing across the room; others were still studying the lists

He tapped his nails thoughtfully on the desk top, half aware of the lecturer’s voice. It had been a test, of course; but who had passed it? Those who followed orders exactly, even though it meant three times as much work as was needed? Or had Flynn passed?

Flynn had come by with a name card in his hand. “Just move the cards,” he had whispered to Arthur. “A fellow showed me—it’s all exactly the same stuff, in every one of those closets. How can they tell the difference?”

—Or those like himself, who had traced the movement of each number through the list, and made the transfer in five operations instead of fifteen?

Somehow it had never occurred to him before that the Col-lege might not accept him. They might make

“a janitor or something” out of him, like Flynn ... I’ll die first! Arthur thought; and wondered why the meaningless old catchphrase sent a sudden chill up his spine.

A rustle of plastic warned him, and he thumbed over two pages. A moment later, he was aware that the clock’s hum had stopped. Tingling, he read from the page under his hand, join-ing the chorus that swelled up around him.

Between sections, happening to glance up, he saw a marvel: The lecturer was standing exactly as before, but the whole look of him had changed. His shoulders, perhaps, were not quite so straight; there might have been the smallest hint of an acid smile at the corners of his mouth. It was no single thing that you could point to or measure; but you would know the man anywhere for an angel-ridden petty tyrant. The class droned away at its lesson. After about a minute Arthur heard the door open, and, peering cautiously down into the aisle, saw two men enter. One of them was Laudermilk. The other, tall and dark, was wrapped to the chin in a traveling cloak. They watched for a moment in silence, then turned away, and the door closed behind them.

Ten minutes later, without warning, they were back again. The clock hummed; the lecturer took no notice of them. They stood there, watching and listening, until he said, “Class dis-missed,” and the students began to move down toward the floor of the theater. Then, just before Arthur lost sight of them, the stranger said something in a: high-pitched voice. It sounded like, “Meerrum est!”

Now, what was the meaning of that?

Arthur finished the day bursting with matters he wanted to discuss with Flynn. If not the ideal source of information, the Sevener was at least the handiest one; he had lived all his life among Immunes, soaking up knowledge as casually as a sponge.

But when he returned to room 12, Flynn was not there. Neither was any of his luggage. There was nothing in the room to show that he had ever existed.

Late that night, propped up in bed with three pillows behind his narrow old back, Francis Laudermilk laid an ancient printed book aside with care and picked up another, almost equally fragile, the cover thumbed glossy and the pages dull. He opened it and read the last minuscule entry, written in a cipher which had grown as legible to him as clear English. He took a pen from the bedstand and began to write, rapidly and firmly.

10413. G forwarded to me some odd pages rescued from the ruins of a public library in Regina. I always like to read these, even though they sometimes frustrate me almost intolerably; so much of the world’s literature is lost to us that every scrap becomes precious. These are paper pages, burnt at the edges, dating, G thinks, from about 1940 old-style; but I think, for internal evidence, the first publication must have been much earlier. The headings on one side read, “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” and on the other, “Man and Superman”; G can-not find either title in any bibliography we possess. The con-tents are short sayings or aphorisms, grouped under titles such as “Democracy,”

“Imperialism,”

“Education.” They will con-found R and 0, who think we are the first sane political thinkers in the world. Some are incomprehensible and others seem to be rather shallow plays on words, but a few are gems. As this, from “Democracy”; “Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric” method.” And these, from “Education”: “The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent’s first duty.” And: “The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mold a child’s character.” What a delightful discovery! If we only knew the author’s name!

10414. The conviction that we are all put here to work out a series of complex ethical problems, the rules of which are never stated. An inner thing, stronger now than ever; I am less and less able to believe that it has anything to do with childhood conditioning. I find the same note everywhere; it’s the one essential; you can feel it under the most diverse and hardened patinas of dogma and disbelief. Man, the problem-solving animal: but at bottom all the problems are moral.

10415. A fine lot this year. One gave me the third worst scare of my life: B, a proxy child—the last of them I hope, but a promising specimen. It really seems to me that the race is al-ready showing unmistakable improvement; if I am right, we must make preparations for an unusually large senior class four years from now. An exhausting session about this with M in the afternoon. I do hate lying; it brings out all the worst in me. Reasonably sure he swallowed my tale about the secret island where we send our failures; I would have told him suspended animation, as more romantic and harder to refute, but then the Italian Immunes would have wanted the process. The island was better. Almost anything would have done, if I read M correctly; the Ital Ims must be the worst kind of patriots and absolute-worshipers; if they survive, they will be-gin assassinating their own people after they’ve taken power, too late, with senseless brutality, and for the wrong reasons. Note: Latin classes for promising students of Mediterranean descent immediately. What a sickness there has been in the world, and how hard it is to weed it out! Inverts, perverts, fog-heads: the universe is what I say it is if you look at it sideways. Kill the infidel, the capitalist, the Jew, the communist, the Negro, the fascist, the white man, the royalist, the goy; but never kill the moron or the maniac until he has had a chance to breed. I remember another maxim from my Publilius Syrus. “The end justifies the means.” Not if the end is foolish or irra-tional, or the means grossly inappropriate, and until now they always have been. I should have liked to tell him the truth. I would have said, Can any society be sane and wise if its citi-zens are neither? If we spend less ingenuity on breeding men than on breeding garden vegetables, do we deserve anything but what we have always got?

Chapter 11. Revolted To See You

On Mondays Arthur’s schedule ran:

900

Sacred Physics I

Physics I (UG)

1000 Mercantile Philosophy I

Mnemonics (UG)

1100 Gym

Gym

1300 Mercantile History I

Modern History I

1400 Sacred Mathematics I

Algebra I

1500 Consumer Psychology I

Psychology I

The right-hand side of the schedule was nowhere written down but had to be remembered; the left-hand side existed only on paper, but he was expected to memorize its lessons out-side class and recite them on demand. (Thank the Infinite for Mnemonics!)

Physics and Mnemonics were underground: the College, Arthur now realized, had at least twice as large an enrollment as the charter called for, and nearly all the important events in College life went on down in those concealed, soundproof chambers. Courses that required unorthodox equipment were (UG); so were all classes which the restricted Gepro curricu-lum for females made it awkward to hold aboveground. So were Nudity (Wednesday), Sacrilege I (Thursday), and Sexual Hygiene (Friday). Hundreds of students slept down there, too, in underground dormitories and “caves.” The buried portion of the College had its own generating plant, its own air system, its own store-rooms, exercise rooms, common rooms, offices. There were always enough people aboveground to fill the classrooms and counterfeit the normal routine of an orthodox Gepro school; but the real College was down below. After dinner on his fourth Monday, Arthur hurried across the court to the dormitory, through the hidden entrance and down the stair. His time was now theoretically his own until lights-out and the earphones that droned information into him while he slept. In practice, he had discovered, he had to keep running. Everything was different belowstairs. The foolishly humiliat-ing rules for freshmen were relaxed; a senior was just another student and you could call him by his first name if you hap-pened to know it; even to the faculty you were expected to be polite but not obsequious. Everything was different, except the demerit system.

Every demerit you earned on the surface had to be paid off, now that the juniors had had their furniture moved three times over, in labor down below. There were demerits for untidy rooms, demerits for untidy thinking. Time spent scrubbing floors or oiling machinery was time you couldn’t spend boning for the next day’s classes, and if you were badly prepared—more demerits.

Freshmen who got thoroughly trapped in this vicious cycle, Arthur noticed, had a way of dropping out of sight. He didn’t allow himself to think about it much, but when he did, it scared him. So he ran. At the library entrance he passed Rod Kimbrough talking to a pretty sophomore. Kimbrough had replaced the vanished Flynn as his roommate; like Flynn, he came from an Execu-tive-class Immune family. The resemblance stopped there. Flynn, if he had lasted that long, would undoubtedly have found himself at the bottom of the class. Kimbrough was near the top, several ranks above Arthur. He glanced up and waved casually. “See you at the club?”

Arthur nodded and kept going, checking off his current assignments in his mind. Bio tomorrow morning—thixotropy. Physics lab—stress photography. History, ancient literature, psych—a chapter each. Two hours’ duty swabbing corridors tonight, or whatever else the duty monitor had in ambush for him. Crash Day drill, likely as not. And the club.

The social clubs were entirely voluntary, and in fact had stiff entrance requirements: but one hour of faultless activity in them would remit you three hours of demerit time. Six of them were open to freshmen—Gepro, Umerc, Conind, Xl, X2 and X3. Kimbrough was a member of all six, and hadn’t done an hour’s duty since his first week in College.

Arthur was doing well in the Gepro Club, a little less well in Umerc, and passably in Conind, but it wasn’t enough; with the demerits for blunders in Club, he was hardly more than breaking even. He had applied for X1 and passed the exam; his initiation was tonight.

He ducked into the cubbyhole he occupied this month with Kimbrough, showered and put on a clean jumper, brushed his hair, and with a glance at the clock, was off again. X1 met in a suite of rooms at the end of L corridor. Arthur found a closet marked with his name in the ante-room and changed into tight blue knickers, a close-fitting tunic with floppy sleeves, and a torn, dirty rag that covered both and hung down to his ankles. A watch, wallet and other articles went into his pockets. He ran off the instruction booklet in his head to make sure it was all there, hunched his shoulders, and opened the door.

The club mistress, a square-built girl in an orange wig, came forward to meet him. “Revolted to see you,”

she said, and spat at his feet. Arthur breathed a little easier; that meant this was a social evening, and the ceremonies would be simple. He re-membered to spit back, and the mistress led him toward the center of the wide room, holding her nose.

The other members retched courteously as they passed. “This is Picknose,” said the mistress, giving him the name which would be his for the remainder of the meeting. “He is of no worth, and may die at any moment; please do not trouble yourselves about him. Picknose, I counsel you to avoid Sir Filth—” a big, serious sophomore whom Arthur had seen around the campus—“Lady Slime—” a tall brunette—“Sir Frogstool—Sir Pustule—Lady Rot—Parson Running-sore—Squire Stench—Miss Cesspool and her mother, Dame Rumpsmear—”

Arthur acknowledged all the introductions by coughing or hawking, as the case required, and got safely seated beside two orange-wigged sophomore girls called Dame Gallstones and Lady Moldy. Kimbrough was on the other side of the room, talking earnestly to the same girl Arthur had seen him with earlier.

“Your health is failing, I trust?” inquired Dame Gallstones.

“I may not last the evening,” Arthur told her, improvising. “I would not have presumed to come, but—”

“Healthy young pig!” said Gallstones indignantly, and slapped him with an orange disc that clung to his rags. That meant one demerit. “Begin again!”

He had been boasting, Arthur realized too late; that kind of thing was politeness only if you said it about somebody else. “Uh, my health is of an insipid sameness.” He thought he saw Lady Moldy reaching for another orange patch, and hastily added, “It’s disgusting of you to ask.”

Lady Moldy relaxed. “And your family—if any of them are left standing?”

Could you boast about your family? The relevant section of the manual stubbornly refused to come clear.

“My uncle has the pip and my sister’s teeth are falling out—otherwise we are all well.”

Slap. Another patch. Two demerits—and his handicap for the hour was five. “I mean to say, we are all in average health.”

After that it went a little better. “What do you do, Pick-nose?”

The booklet was plain on that point. “I play tennis, and ride, and, uh, go to dances.”

They made clucking sounds. “But don’t you ever get time for amusement?”

“Oh, yes. Ten hours a day, I clean sewers.”

“How nice! ”

He got through the interrogation without another demerit, and was free to listen while Dame Gallstones, Lady Moldy, Sir Squathard and Squire Stench struck up a three-quarters in-comprehensible conversation, full of places and things that weren’t in the booklet. They included him politely, every now and then, but as a rule all he had to do was say, “Yes, indeed,” or cough, or retch. Then the mistress and her helpers came around with revile-ments—little crisp cakes, dyed black so as to look burnt, and glasses of some sweet beverage, that tasted perfectly good if you could ignore the fact that it was greenish-black and scummed on top. Arthur ate and drank with the rest, groaning and spitting; then the plates were broken, the members moved from one divan to another, and conversation began again.

Kimbrough appeared from somewhere and sat down beside him.

“What time is it, Picknose?”

Arthur was wondering himself; he glanced automatically toward the wall clock, but it was draped; you could hear its steady hum but not see it. Remembering, he pulled out his watch. “Seventeen twenty.”

He put the watch away, then caught his breath as he remem-bered—not quickly enough: “... Any personal possession displayed must be destroyed or defaced.” The mistress and her deputies were everywhere; one of them leaned over and slapped a patch on him.

Furious, Arthur pulled the watch out again, dropped it and stamped on it, muttering, “Lousy watch!

wormy watch! creti-nous watch! germy watch!” until the thin shell bent, the crystal popped out, the hands flew off and the works were mashed into a metal pancake. Kimbrough was moving away again. Arthur sent a brooding look after him, but Kimbrough only grinned behind his hand. It wasn’t his evening. Later, while Parson Runningsore was chanting (“For all our curses, All-Lowest, we thank Thee; lift not Thy maleficent rump from us; let Thy blackness enfold our steps ....”), he happened to glance up and see Kimbrough and his girl stealing away, unobserved by the mistress, into one of the private rooms. Jealousy tangled his tongue and be retched when everyone else was spitting. Spat!

Another demerit.

He left the chamber with four orange patches on his rags. Four demerits out of five: that meant he had spent an hour to get thirty-six minutes’ remission of duty.

It could have been worse. But why did Kimbrough always have to do better?

“My dear Francis!” said Migliozzius effusively, taking both his hands. “I am delighted to see you back. Was your trip hard? You look tired, let us sit down.”

“No, no,” Laudermilk said, “you’re very good. I’m not in the least tired. It distressed me to leave you, Ezius, but you understand, it was necessary.”

“Of course, of course! I understand perfectly, you are too kind, you must not apologize. Your young man, Mr. Hovey, has been most obliging, most helpful, in your absence.”

Laudermilk frowned. “Hovey? My dear Ezius, hasn’t Dean Flint been showing you around?”

“Ah, no. He explained to me, he is unusually pressed during this month. But Mr. Hovey is a very nice young man.”

“Ita, I know him, but after all he’s not even a member of the faculty, only a student. Really, Ezius, I’m annoyed. I distinctly told Flint to take care of you while I was gone.”

Migliozzius looked contrite. “Please, Francis, in these internal matters you must of course do as you think good, but it is far-thest from my wish that Dean Flint should have trouble on my account.”

“Of course, Ezius. We’ll say no more about it. But at any rate, I’m sure it was very patient of you to put up with Mr. Hovey—there must have been many questions that he couldn’t answer to your satisfaction?”

“Yes,” said Migliozzius intensely, forgetting Mr. Hovey at once. “One thing puzzles me most extremely, Francis. Here have I been studying your College for nearly a month, and still I have not discovered what you teach!”

“What we teach?” said Laudermilk, wrinkling his forehead. “Your philosophy—what you believe!”

Laudermilk tut-tutted. “Really, Ezius, you ask me not to take this seriously, but it gets worse and worse. Didn’t young Hovey show you around to the philosophy seminars?”

Migliozzius involuntarily made a face. “The seminars and discussion groups, yes—those little men and their cups of tea, all saying different things—some of them most vile; I cannot understand why you permit—” He hauled himself up short. “But pardon me, perhaps I have not understood—Do you mean that these are all?”

Laudermilk nodded.

“But surely,” said Migliozzius, “forgive me, there must be some central point of view, some official—”

“Oh, no,” Laudermilk said quickly. “I see now what you are getting at, Ezius. No, I’m afraid you’ll think us very primitive, but there are so many theories, so many ways of looking at ethics, the human condition—we have never felt able to say that one is right, all the others wrong. Perhaps none of those we know is right. Unless we can be sure, we feel it would be a very grave error—”

“Very good, very prudent,” Migliozzius muttered. “But still, to countenance that Professor Bamburger with his—”

“In confidence,” said Laudermilk honestly, “I agree with you. But you see our problem. When the one true system comes along, presumably it will drive out all error: until then, we can only give everything a fair trial .... Which reminds me; I don’t wish to pry, Ezius, but perhaps you Italian Im-munes have some beliefs which are not as yet taught here—?”

“Ah, yes,” said Migliozzius with a half-doubtful look. “I have not mentioned this heretofore—not out of reluctance, I assure you, but thinking, perhaps, you would not like—”

“I understand. We all have to be careful at times. But I wonder, Ezius, if you would feel able to conduct a little semi-nar—or a series of informal gatherings?”

“You would permit?”

“My dear Ezius, we should be honored. Who knows, this flay be the true system for which we’ve been waiting!”

Migliozzius’ expression grew intense and confidential. “It is,” he said.

10441. An experiment I haven’t the courage to perform. Officiating at the Midsummer Sales or some event of equal gravity, I should like to stand on the platform in full view of the customers and stick out my tongue at the Trademark. Am half convinced that no one would dare believe his eyes, and that if anyone did, the rest would take him for a demon, not me. This curious easy talent of man’s for deluding himself (and the long unnatural strain of learning to see what one looks at). I don’t suppose you could slice it out of the brain without cutting the creative imagination away too. The unseen, un-heard, unfelt and altogether preposterous more fiercely fought for, every time, than the visible, audible, tangible, sensible. One is constantly tempted to give the young ones something to Believe In; almost anything would do. But that gift is always wrapped with a chain.

10442. Still absolutely no confirmation of the illicit analogue rumors. They are oddly persistent. It is perhaps too easy to dismiss them as wish-fantasies; but I ask myself how the information could have leaked in the first instance if they are true. Must remember to suggest we trace back, as far as prac-ticable, movements and occupations of all cases of “posses-sion” in the upper classes during the last year.

10443. I have put off writing this. The disappearance of AS is explained. We were apprehensive that she had been taken by the Umerc Guard at the time of my visit to Darien; but her body was found, early yesterday morning, in a wrecked copter in the Waltham Preserve north of Bethlehem. Apparently she was attempting to reach Greenfield. It was of course impossible for us to claim the body. H deeply distressed, appears too calm; I am concerned about him.

10444. M spent three hours explaining the Ital Ims’ world-view to me tonight. My problem now is to get him to talk about anything else. His suspicions are I think now wholly dis-armed; a society that has no dogma of its own, and cheerfully lets him push his, can’t possibly be dangerous. Unfortunate about Italy: they had the same opportunity as we, but this prophet of theirs, Fabrizius, turned up at exactly the wrong moment and now they are all Naturists. These turning points are rare and delicate. It’s no wonder that there had never been a rational society in the world before, the wonder will be if we bring it off. Ital Im philosophy quite typical and I think very dangerous. Christianity: All men are equal because God cre-ated them all. Communism: All men are equal because all have an equal share in the work of the world. Naturism: All men are equal because they are all specimens of the same func-tional organism. A spiral nearer the truth, always with the near eye shut. Such an easy thing to begin, so grindingly hard to stop. In the country of the purblind, the two-eyed man must squint .... M starts his indoctrination meetings tomorrow; no doubt he feels that in the time he has left he can make at least one or two converts. Unhappily, he is probably right.

Kimbrough stood before the mirror, patting depilatory cream onto the blue stubble of his cheeks; at 18, he had to depilate morning and evening. With a book open on his lap, Arthur sat watching him in a mood that sometimes came over him, a sort of vague puzzlement. He envied and admired Kimbrough; it was impossible not to want to like him as well, but somehow he never could.

“Date tonight?” he asked.

Kimbrough turned, wiping a tissue along his underjaw. The white coverall he wore was an issue jumper, but where Arthur’s hung wrinkled and sagging like the utilitarian garment it was, Kimbrough’s looked like a tailored uniform. “No, not tonight.” He grinned. “How about you? Or have you passed your finals with Mother Jones yet?”

Arthur twitched with a half-angry annoyance. “Mother” Jones was a handsome woman in her forties, one of several staff members—of both sexes—who conducted an informal course popularly known as

“Mattress I.” Arthur had fallen briefly in love with her and had been quietly, efficiently and painlessly cured; his respect for her had only increased when he realized that the same thing undoubtedly happened to at least half her students. “I told you about Sally—” he began.

“Oh, sure, the little blonde freshman, I forgot.”

“—But she’s got ten hours to work off this week. I’m not going anywhere.”

Kimbrough sat down and lighted a cigarette. “No duty, yourself? That’s right, you’re doing better in the clubs these days. Why not come along with me, then?”

“Where to?”

“Migli. Visiting prof—open house every night down in G.”

“Tea and philosophy?”

Kimbrough frowned slightly and nodded.

“No, thanks,” said Arthur.

Kimbrough looked irritated. “Without even asking what it’s about? That attitude won’t get you far, Ridler.”

“I’ve already tried two of those things. Vogt and Darbedat. I don’t even like tea.”

“Don’t be flippant; you don’t know what you’re talking about. You didn’t like Vogt or Darbedat. All right, why not?”

“Mainly because they’re both so sure of themselves. And all the regulars at those meetings are the same. Ask a question, or even quote one of them to the other one, and they look at you with a pitying smile and talk gibberish. But they can’t both be right.”

Kimbrough sighed. “Well, your instincts are good, anyway, even if you’ve got all the wrong reasons. Now listen. Have you ever given any thought to what’s going to happen to you when you graduate from here?”

“Some,” said Arthur. “I can’t see us all being turned into Deacons and D. S.’s; they don’t need that many.”

Kimbrough snorted. “You’ll be lucky to make deacon, the way you’re going. What else would you want to be?”

“Something useful. As far as I can make out, the deacons are just going to sit around on their prats until we take over—”

“Which could be a generation from now, or two. All right—you aren’t hopeless. You want to be an Agent.”

“What’s—”

“I’m telling you. There are two kinds of Immunes. One kind sits around waiting. The other kind does all the work and takes all the risks—and has all the fun. Those are the Agents. There happens to be three of them in my family at the moment, so I know what I’m talking about. It’s the only thing to be: but you have to work for it, Ridler. What do you think the social clubs are for?”

“To train us to work in Conind and Umerc, I’d suppose. But what about the experimentals?”

“Check. And what about Migli tonight? Tell me this, Ridler, who runs the Immunes? Who’s going to run the continent if the changeover does happen in our lifetimes? The Agents. Now you can figure this out for yourself. Somewhere among all these different cultural and political systems there’s the one we’re actually going to adopt—the best one, the right one. So: who do they want for the inner circle when the time comes to administer that program? People who choose it voluntarily, Ridler, and show their ability in it—speak up, get themselves noticed.”

“You think Migli is the one?” Arthur asked after a moment. Kimbrough’s lips dragged hard on the cigarette. He flipped it away. “I don’t think. I know,” he said.

10462. P brought me this shortly after I returned to the Col-lege this morning; it is by FJ, a senior in his pout phil semi-nar: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That every human is unique. That each has needs that can be better satis-fied, or only satisfied, under a government of law, and others which cannot be satisfied under a government of law without destroying it; and that such government exists to promote the satisfaction of the first and restrain the satisfaction of the second. That in forming themselves into societies governed by law, humans inhibit the operation of natural selection and must therefore practice artificial selection or degenerate and perish. That the existence of supernatural entities, absolute moral principles and ‘natural’ rights is unproven; and that a government which cannot stand without them will not stand.” This is almost too good; I accused P of indoctrinating his students; he took me half seriously and denied it with vigor. The rest of J’s argument is somewhat muddy, but for succinct-ness I think this opening statement of his could hardly be im-proved upon. P delighted; made sure I had noticed the echo of the American Declaration, which J must have unearthed from the archives on his own initiative. We have pledged ourselves not to object if our heirs come rationally to conclusions which differ from ours; all the same, each time a student like J reaches this stage, it is as if the world had passed another crisis. 10463. By a process of elimination we now think it im-probable that an illicit analogue program of the necessary scale can have been mounted anywhere in Gepro territory. That leaves only some five million square miles to be investigated—Conind, Umerc, Canalim, Reinosud—and, of course, our continuing enigma, the Blank. It’s in the highest degree un-fortunate that we should have to spend so much effort on what is almost certainly a wild-goose chase, but if this danger actually exists, we alone have any chance of preventing it.

10464. Daydreaming again this afternoon, an indulgence I allow myself too often. I was in one of their cities this time, quite a startling place, not like anything I’d seen before at all—a hundred fifty, two hundred years ahead, I suppose; myself safely buried and forgotten, all the nasty intermediate years done with. Enjoying myself tremendously until it struck me what the difference was—all the beauty was functional, hy-gienic, orthopsychiatric; not a particle of expressive, com-municative beauty, and I had a sudden conviction that my great-great-&c. grandchildren didn’t even know the word. That spoiled it. It’s a thing I don’t like to think of very often; I haven’t the emotional equipment any more to adjust to it, but of course it’s inevitable. If we succeed, we shall have destroyed art along with the anxiety joke: art is a product of culture, and culture is the enemy of civilization. The cultured man sees what he has been taught to see, or, within limits, what he chooses to see; the civilized man sees what he looks at. 10465. Dozed just now and fell to dreaming of the Blank. Unpleasant. The place has an obsessive quality, not rational—whatever it is in that little pocket west of the Cascades has never done us any harm, except to make sure (how?) that no one who enters it or even flies over it ever comes out again—but being completely unknown, it equates with all the fear-symbols of the Unknown. Stern eyes: lightnings. 10466. M’s time is up tomorrow; he returns reluctantly to Fabital, leaving behind one pseudoconvert, who will carry on the discussion group since it has proved so effective—and five real ones. I get an occasional flash of the most appalling anguish of sorrow and guilt when I think of them; no help for it; the only anodyne for that is to cease to be human.

Aching and aglow from his judo class, Arthur was jogging happily along toward home and bed. The instructor had kept him overtime; hardly anyone else was abroad in the under-ground corridors. Every other glow-lamp was out; the world was dim and sleepy and peaceful.

He came to an intersection, and realized that he was passing for the hundredth time one of the few corridors he had never used. Whether it was because of accumulated curiosity or his transient feeling of virtue, Arthur paused and looked specula-tively down it. The underground part of the College was not built upon any regular plan; corridors branched and curved unexpectedly, and some of them, Arthur knew, ran around the periphery for hundreds of yards without a branch or intersection. If he took this one, it would almost certainly lead him home as quickly as the direct route. If not—well, he could use the exercise. Arthur had been gaining weight rapidly during the last couple of months, and his athletic coaches were beginning to be pointedly dissatisfied with the way he distributed it.

... Besides which, it would be one small variant in his routine, to polish off rather a nice day. Arthur turned at the corner and trotted off in the new direction.

The corridor ahead of him grew darker swiftly as it curved: every third glow-lamp was lit, then every fourth. For a moment Arthur was afraid he had misjudged the time and was going to be caught by lights-out; but when he glanced back he could tell by the brighter light that the corridor was getting darker in space, not in time.

Novi/ four lamps were dark to one glowing. That was unusual: out of pattern. Arthur slowed down to a walking pace, thinking it over, just as a brighter patch came into view ahead. In it, for an instant, he saw two figures.

Tiny and bright, they paused close together and then passed out of sight, presumably through a doorway in the inner wall. One of them had been Kimbrough. The other was wearing senior’s black. Arthur slowed down still more and finally stopped altogether. He leaned against the wall, frowning. Could he have been mis-taken? He reviewed the image: his memory of it was clear, sharp, and definite. It was Kimbrough. But what in sanity’s name would Kimbrough be doing out of quarters so close to lights-out?

That hadn’t been a cross-corridor he and the other man had disappeared into—he could see that much from here. It was a doorway, the only one in that whole stretch of wall. It was closed now, uninformative

... but wherever Kimbrough and the other man had been going, it couldn’t have led them back to quarters.

Arthur’s mind was ticking over possibilities, none of them very pleasant. The longer he stood here, the more risk he ran, himself, of being wigged for absence at lights-out. On the other hand, if he happened to be passing when Kimbrough and the other man came out, there might be still other con-sequences ... and the fact that Arthur couldn’t imagine what they might be was enough in itself to give him pause. What exactly was so uneasy-making about the situation? Kimbrough, Arthur knew without having thought much about it, had been going regularly to the tea-and-philosophy sessions at Migli’s. Lately he had stopped talking about them, though

And that must have been what had made him feel uneasy about Kimbrough, long before tonight, without quite realizing it. There was the heart of the problem. Why had Kimbrough stopped talking about Naturism? Because he had lost interest, himself? Cancel—it was clear from Kimbrough’s manner that he was more deeply involved, not less. Because he had given up hope of converting Arthur?

Cancel—Kimbrough was not the type to give up trying to convince anybody about anything; moreover, Arthur’s vulnerability as his roommate made him the perfect guinea pig for new approaches. Because he was doing something that had to be kept secret from Arthur—from the whole rank and file of the College? A conspiracy within a conspiracy?

Arthur flattened himself against the dark wall. Up ahead, the door was opening. One man came out. It wasn’t Kimbrough. He paused a moment as the door closed behind him, glanced in both direc-tions, and then set off rapidly away from Arthur; but not before Arthur had seen the bright wetness, reddish against the black of his sleeve.

Chapter 12. A Primer Of Motives

The room in which Anne Silver lay had been built as a closet, and looked it. The walls were plain, color-impregnated metal. There was no bed, nor any other furniture; she slept on the floor, when she was able to sleep. There was almost room enough for her to stretch out; not quite. For exercise, she could take three steps down the room, one across, three back.

Certain improvements had been made in the room before she was moved into it. These were: a lock on the door; a cesscan in the corner; a brilliant blue-white light in the ceiling; and a sliding drawer by means of which food and water could be passed into the room.

For clothing she had a man’s ragged undershirt, gray and stiffening with grime. She had kept her hair combed with her fingers, but it was tousled and felt greasy to the touch. Her scalp itched. She could not bear to look at herself in the mirror. She was dirty, with a kind of ground-in, hardened dirt that she had never seen nor imagined.

The next worst thing was the loneliness. It would have been a relief to be able to talk to herself, but she took it for granted that the room was bugged for sound. She could not be sure there were no concealed vision cells in the room, for that matter. Knowing how much a trained operative could pick up, simply by watching the play of expressions on an un-guarded face, she denied herself even the luxury of thinking about what was going to happen to her next.

Sprawled, waking or half asleep under the bitter blue-white light that never went out, she tried to let her mind sink down into the slow oceanic swell of not-thinking. When that failed, she brought up old neglected scenes from her childhood, pick-ing over every bead in a long-lost necklace, tracing every line in a forgotten face.

It had taken her a long time to learn this detachment, this floating, mind-almost-free-of-body existence. At first she had twitched and paced, and explored all the fittings of the room with her fingernails. She had done mathematical problems in her head, mentally recited all the Consumer texts, bits of instruction manuals, fragments of pre-analogue poetry she knew.

For weeks, even after she found out who her true captor was, she had hoped for rescue ... until he had casually men-tioned he had arranged for a girl wearing her clothes to die in a copter crash a hundred miles away.

If the Immunes thought she was dead, that ended the matter. She had no real existence anywhere else;

“Anne Silver” was only a set of fictitious records in Gepro Archives. The little Consumer girl who had grown up in one of the Gepro en-claves of Manhattan Island had been dead and forgotten for a long time now.

It was curious, she was discovering, how little of yourself was real and permanent. Clothes could be taken away, nail polish would wear off; fatigue and discomfort would show you quickly enough that your body was only a loathsome encumbrance; memories of other people and places you would never see again soon faded. What was left? An “I,” formless and without boundaries, caught between nowhere and no-where.

Click.

Her whole body tensed. She sat up, facing the door, realizing that in spite of everything she was reacting just as she was meant to—looking forward to these rare interviews, as if to holiday treats—because anything, anything was better than a world in which nothing happened. The lock rattled faintly. The door slid back. There, at a cautious distance, holding a tangler gun ready, stood pocked, smiling little Morris.

It always took a few minutes for her eyes to adjust. She found the usual chair by touch; it was lost in the swimming green darkness. Across the room, Morris’s head was nothing but any eyeless golden blur, afloat in that sea. Nearer, high on either side, was a metallic glimmer that she knew was the support for a tangler gun. Her chair was bolted to the floor, and she knew from experience that once she had sat down, the guns would fire automatically if she tried to get up again before Morris gave her leave. She had felt little surprise when she discovered that the Guards who captured her in the jaypee that night—how long ago?—that the Guards had turned her over to Morris, and that Morris was keeping her as his own private prisoner—an impossible thing, if Morris had been a Normal ... There had always been something about Morris ... she had told Higsbee so. But it had been a shock when she found out what he wanted.

“... if he is an Immune, he still isn’t one of us and never can be: he’s an Immune for Umerc.”

Higsbee had been right; but it was worse than that.

Morris was an Immune for himself.

She relaxed. She was more confined here than in the blue-white glare of her room, but she felt no impulse to struggle. The cushioned comfort of the chair—the warmth—the dark-ness lulled her.

“Today,” said Morris, “I thought we might begin by dis-cussing the nature of reality.”

His head was coming more plainly into view, glowing theatrically golden in the dimness. She could see the outlines of his shoulders, and the massive chair he sat in. The walls were still the darkest, deepest green of all greens, and the floor was an abyss.

Morris continued, “For instance—are you convinced that you yourself are real?”

She stirred: the question came across that green-ink ocean as if spoken by a voice in a nightmare.

“Define ‘myself’,” she said faintly.

Morris chuckled. She could see the rest of him, now, like a ghostly gold-wire abstraction—lying at ease in the chair, one hand—in which there was probably still a gun—draped absently across his thigh. “This is not a trick question—use any definition you like, or none. Do you believe you are real? Do you exist?”

She said distrustfully, “Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I experience it,” she said. “If I didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be any ‘I’ to wonder whether I do or not.”

“Ably put,” said Morris, biting the words. He leaned for-ward, and his face fell into crescents of green shadow. “Now tell me—what about other people, who don’t happen to be here at the moment?

Higsbee, for instance. Is he real?”

She stiffened a little. “As real as you are.”

“Good—but you see me, and hear my voice, and that’s why you can say I am real; isn’t that true? You don’t see Higsbee or hear him. What makes you say he exists?”

“I remember him.”

“And you say he exists.”

“Yes.”

“But what if I tell you he is dead?”

Anne’s fingers curled and relaxed. “Is he?”

“I’ll let you wonder, unless you are very reasonable—but it doesn’t matter, you see. You were sure he existed, and then,’ for a moment, you realized that perhaps he did not .... Now go a step further. When you saw Higsbee and heard him—if you did—was he real then?”

“Yes.”

“So confident! But when you were very small, did you never see and hear a demon incarnate, on All Sales Night? Didn’t it seem real to you? And yet didn’t you later learn that it was only plastic and papier mache, with a voice-tape inside it? And what about all the millions who see ’angels’ whenever they try to do something wrong? They see and hear the angels: those are your reasons, too. They say the angels are real; you say Higsbee is real. But you would tell me that they are wrong, and you are right.”

Anne was silent.

Morris nodded. “I know; you don’t want to admit you have no angel. It doesn’t matter; let me ask you to pretend you don’t believe in angels—still, you believe in Higsbee. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Why?”

She thought about it. “I know. I can tell.”

“Can you? Then—is this real?” His arm whipped up, and a ball of flame arced sizzling across the room at her face.

She gasped and ducked.

The flame-ball was gone without a whisper; she had felt no heat, no passage in the air. Glancing to one side of the room and then to the other, she saw the gleam of light dying in two dark lenses: soligraph projectors.

“That wouldn’t fool me twice,” she said.

“Once is enough,” said Morris tensely. “You’ve just seen that you can change your mind about what things are real. You knew it already, but you had conveniently forgotten: you had to be shown. Now tell me: isn’t it possible, don’t you know in your heart it’s possible, that Gordon Higsbee is a phantom, an illusion—like the whole world, except yourself?”

Herself, floating alone in the bitter blue-white light or the warm green darkness ... “It’s possible,” she said.

“Then will you die for him?”

She relaxed, deliberately. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ll tell you.” And she knew what was coming; she had heard it so often, it was as if the channel for every word had been physically carved out in her brain: “You’re a member of a conspiracy—a secret organization of people without angels. I was sure of it when you met that boy who crossed the Wall. Higsbee is probably also a member, and perhaps some others of your staff—but that isn’t enough. You know hundreds of members. And you will tell me their names.”

She stirred. “If there were such an organization,” she said carefully, “it seems to me you’d want to join it, not destroy it.”

“Tell me why.”

“Safety in numbers.”

He snorted. “Danger in numbers! Every time you add a member, you increase the probability that one of them will be caught and betray you all; eventually the probability becomes a certainty. Try again.”

“Companionship. Mutual accomplishment.”

“Leaving the first aside, if you mean that a committee can accomplish more than one capable man, I suggest you haven’t seen many committees.”

Weariness—or was it some drugged vapor in the air?—made her head swim. “Morris,” she said after a moment.

“Yes, Miss Silver.”

“What do you want? I don’t understand you—so cold. What do you want?”

“And yet I understand you so well,” said Morris softly. “You don’t want much from life—only to exercise your talents to their fullest, and to take some enjoyment from a world that has treated you badly. I want nothing more.”

Silence fell again. “What’s your talent?” she asked.

“I rule,” said Morris, quietly.

After a moment his voice burst out again: “You don’t know what it’s like, to be the only competent man in a world of morons, and to have to hold yourself in—hold yourself in—I must tell you, Miss Silver, that I was born to a third-rank Executive’s wife who had spent the night in a joy palace. My father was probably a Consumer. I was classified as Executive C. After fifteen years of effort I have risen two grades above that level, and I find myself at the top of my career, taking orders, nominally, from a stock-holder’s younger son who can’t be trusted to trim his own toenails. Only a miracle could raise me any higher.” He took a deep breath. “You are my miracle, Miss Silver.”

He rose and came toward her, two slow steps. “With this I can go over his head, straight to the Chairman himself. Do you understand? I can frighten them as they have never been frightened in their silly lives. I can take anything I want, and I can keep it. Do you understand now? I shall be the man who administers the tests that decide who is a demon. Do you imagine that anyone who offends me, or stands in my way, will pass those tests? Do you understand now?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

He came two steps nearer. “You’re real,” he said. “You have your life, and nothing else—the rest is flickers and darkness. Give me the names. I’ll reward you—and protect you.”

She gazed up at him as he stood poised, head thrust forward like a museum model of a small, deadly dinosaur. “How do I know that?” she asked. “Am I real to you?”

Nearer. “So real,” he said with a lover’s softness. “I have watched you and wanted you, Miss Silver. Think now. Tell me the names, and I will make you queen of the world.”

Nearer. She could see into the green pools of shadow under his brows, and his eyes were hiding there, cool and watchful.

He had played her like a fish, week after week; he had seen her struggles growing weaker until now she lay afloat, waiting for his net.

“If I could believe you—” she said faintly.

He took another step. He must have turned off the auto-matic gun circuit, she judged, or he would never have come this close; a stray cord might catch him. Would he come closer still? Probably not. His eyes were narrowing; Morris was nobody’s fool.

Her vision wavered a little; the light was so tricky ... And this was the last chance; if it didn’t work, back to the blue-white room. She tensed the muscles of her thighs slowly, without a movement to warn him. Now! She hurled herself upward.

—Not quickly enough. Morris’s gun fired with a cha! of compressed air, and the long sticky loops of the tangler cords whipped out in festoons, hardening in air, curling around her body from breast to thighs. Off balance, she tottered, fell to her knees; only a violent contortion saved her from sprawling. Morris’s lips were pressed thin as he stared down at her. After a moment he glanced at the gun in his hand, then drop-ped it with a grunt of disgust. The slack strands between her body and the gun clung instantly to the carpet, anchoring her still more firmly.

Still badly balanced, Anne struggled not to fall. The loose tangler strands lay coiled directly in front of her. The adhesive of which they were made clung fiendishly to any warm sur-face; it could be cut, but there was simply no point in trying to pull it away until it crystallized and dropped off by itself. It was possible to get into intolerable positions while wrapped in tangler cords. It had been known to happen. Morris moved stiff-legged back to his chair and opened a compartment in it. He came back with a pair of heavy shears and a roll of thin paper. He tossed the end of the paper at Anne, then began walking around and around her, unreeling the paper as he went, wrapping it around her, covering up the sticky cord. When he had made her into a shapeless cocoon of paper, he paused and examined her critically. He thrust out a sandaled foot and delicately probed at the paper, pressing it closer, making sure that the sticky cord was nowhere exposed.

Then he balanced himself carefully, drew his foot back again, and kicked her in the belly. Anne half doubled over, choking and sweating. Bound like a kneeling mummy, her back still held in the arch it had taken when she leaped, she teetered on her knees. The slack of the tangler cords lay uncovered where her face and hair would touch it if she fell. She fought with every muscle to draw herself back, and won.

Morris watched her in silence for a moment. She could not see his expression; he was only a wavering blur, like a figure seen at night through a rainy windowpane.

She waited. Probably he would kick her again; if he did, she was done; it was impossible, she couldn’t do that again. But instead, after a moment, he knelt beside her and set to work with the heavy, blunt-jawed shears, cutting the cords that held her to the floor.

A whisk of cold air from a pressure flask chilled the blades of the shears; Morris clipped through one strand, chilled the blades again, and went on to the next.

She tried to say, “Morris—”

Her vision was clearing; she saw him flick a glance at her, but he said nothing. He cut another strand. She tried again. Her voice came out a hoarse, breathless whisper.

“Later,” said Morris soberly. “I want you out of here. Then we can discuss it, Miss Silver. Perhaps I’ll tangle your hair to the wall, and then your knees to your elbows. Then we can talk very well, while you hang by your hair. Or perhaps I will fasten you down to the floor, with your eyelids stuck open, so that you can watch the light all the time. Then we can talk very well, while you watch the light.”

“Please,” she said in her choked voice. “I’ll tell you the names—”

Morris stared at her narrowly. “Yes? Tell, then.”

“James P. Han—” Her voice cracked; nothing but a breathy sound came out. Morris leaned closer. “Hannigan? Han what?”

She tried once more: “Hanrihan.”

“Hannigan?” Morris glanced at the shears in his hand, saw they had warmed and clung to the cords, and dropped them irritably. He hesitated, uncertain, but she was bound, defenseless, helpless, weaponless. He moved closer still, tilting his head to hear.

But she had one weapon that Morris, a civilized man, had never thought of. Her head lashed out like a snake’s, and her teeth clenched in his throat.

She lay beside the body for a long time, feeling too stupefied to move. Eventually she roused herself, fumbled for the pres-sure flask and shears, and began the long, exasperating labor of cutting herself free. When she had finished, her body was still plastered all over with paper-covered tangler cord; there was nothing she could do about that; at least she could walk and move her arms. She searched Morris’s body for keys and weapons, found nothing, useful, but suddenly noticed that he had been wearing fitted plugs in his nostrils. She knew what that meant—narcotic gas, as she had half-suspected before. That accounted for her light-headedness, and that curious dreamy feeling of detach-ment; by now her blood stream must be full of it.

She sat down again, staring at Morris’s upturned face. He had had it all timed and calculated—the gas, the persuasion. And, truly, it would have been easy and pleasant to give in to him. But, of course, she never would have done it.

Morris’s jaw was agape, showing his fine white teeth. His eyes were staring at her in astonishment; he seemed to be asking silently, Why?

Lone-wolf logic, pack logic ... “You wouldn’t understand,” she told him. In the arm of the chair, after much fumbling, she found the button that shut off the flow of gas, and then the one that started the blowers to flush it out of the room. Gradually she began to feel more normal. The effect of the gas wore away; time began to mean something.

Time! It might be dangerous to lose a minute.

The first thing was to find out where she was. She had been brought here unconscious; “here” might be some up-district retreat of Morris’s, or

She slid the door open a crack. Beyond was what looked like the central room of an ordinary Executive-class private suite.

She listened, heard nothing, and ventured across; the room was dark and untidy, windowless. She went to what she judged was the outer door of the suite, listened fruitlessly, and padded across to one of the smaller rooms. It had a window. She dialed it to “clear” and looked down along the anonymous face of a moderately tall building to a huddle of hangars and warehouses, and then a blank vista of cultivated fields, fading into the twilight. It looked utterly unfamiliar, and told her nothing. She crossed to the other side of the suite. If this were a tower room Jackpot! The opposite room did have a window, and when she dialed it, she looked out on a scene that she recognized instantly. She was in the local Airtourist Hostel, and that was Darien Airport spread out below her, with a jetliner just coming in from the south. Beyond, lights burning golden in the violet haze, was Darien itself; she could see the tower of the Intersocial Chambers, where Gordon Higsbee was—or had been ....

She went swiftly back into the room where Morris lay, and wasted a few minutes searching for the communicator she had been wearing when she’d been captured. No such luck; probably it had been planted on the body of the girl in the wreck, along with the rest of her equipment. She found clothes in the closet: sandals, tight trousers that she was able to get into by splitting the seams, a traveling cloak, a floppy hat. Morris’s kit, with his cosmetics in it, was lying on a chair. She washed her face in a laver, painted and powdered herself, tucked the grimy, blood-stiffened mass of her hair up out of sight under the hat. With the traveling cloak draping her from shoulders to knees, it ought to do. It would have to.

The door opened on an empty corridor. She took the down-stair to the lobby and walked casually toward the door, head down, fumbling in Morris’s kit as she went.

Bad luck: a young Guardsman was just outside the door when she came out. He stepped back automatically, then looked startled. His nostrils wrinkled; he sniffed, and stared. She was past him, moving a little more rapidly. What must she smell like to him? She’d forgotten it entirely; she had grown used to it—if only she’d thought of perfume before she left!

“One moment, sir!” His footsteps came after her.

Anne kept going, faster now. The broad promenade along the front of the airport building was almost deserted; there was no cover, no bolt-hole.

“You in the black cloak! Stop!”

At the curb a few yards away stood a scarlet two-seater “egg”—an ovoid metal shell balanced big-end-up on a single fat wheel. It was a guard machine, fast and maneuverable—the gyro-balanced shell hung steady while the core was free to revolve full circle. The door was open, the steps out. Anne sprinted for it, unfastening her cloak and letting it flop behind her. There was another shout. The cloak was violently plucked out of her hands just as she reached the egg. Anne had expected it; the Guards were taught to fire tanglers at the legs of running people. She took the steps at one bound, slammed into the driver’s seat, hit the door stud with the heel of one hand and grabbed the steering bar with the other.

She heard the Guardsman’s whistle shrilling as she whirled the core around, centered the bar and shoved it hard forward. The egg leaped into motion with bone-crushing suddenness and roared down the nearest avenue between two buildings toward the highway.

Down at the end of the tunnel, two little red figures were moving frantically. One of them raised his arm; threads arced across the opening; as she bore down on them, she could see him turn, tangler gun in hand, and slap it against the wall on his side—making a barrier across the narrow way. She hesitated a fraction of a second, trying to decide if her momentum would take her through—but tangler stuff was strong! She whipped the bar around.

With a whine of tortured rubber, the egg grabbed for traction, skidded, bounced, shuddered violently, and darted off down the way it had come. She emerged onto the field again in time to see the original Guardsman, weaponless—his gun still tangled to the cloak—running out to bar her way. She headed straight for him, watched him jump clear—and saw the stout gates closing across the two other exits to the main road.

The only other way out was across into plowed fields ... and there was a light Guard copter slanting down

The jetliner was still standing near the end of the south runway, open and empty, tubes hot. Anne got there just as half a dozen light Guard machines, eggs and prowlers, boiled out of the underground parking area and started toward her.

The airport’s public-address horns were blatting thunderous warnings as she fed power to the jets, turned to head up the north runway, and took off.

The trouble with a jet was that there were so few places you could set it down. Anne did her best; the liner had inter-social markings, and she took it west as soon as she could into Conind territory, then north into Canalim. It wasn’t good enough. The first interceptor appeared from the northeast as she was angling westward across the Lakes. She turned, but could not lose him. Forty minutes later, as she was flying south-westward across the central districts, the second interceptor appeared from the direction of Nashville. She was forced to turn again, and both pursuers gained.

It happened again as she was approaching the desert. This time her pursuer came from the south; she had to turn north westward. All three planes gained on her, following doggedly, steadily. The indicator in her reserve fuel gauge was bouncing on the lower pin.

Another plane appeared on her left, riding lights winking balefully; then another on her right. She jockeyed for the best course between them as she nosed the plane down, hoping still for a landing in some mountain field.

Then, as a new map segment clicked into view on the instru-ment board, she realized what was being done to her.

The map indicator was crawling slowly toward a sprawling white area west of the Cascades—pure white, on her Inter-social map. It was the Blank, the place from which no traveler returned; the enigma, more mysterious than the mountains of the moon: the dumping ground for all the “demons” and misfits of every North American society.

The indicator crossed the line.

Chapter 13. Woman’s Place

What happened to people who disappeared from the College? Arthur wanted very badly to know. It wasn’t a thing any more that he could push down below the surface of his mind; Kimbrough had spoiled that.

If it could happen to Kimbrough, it could happen to him. Sitting at the rear of an early-morning classroom, Arthur half-listened to the lecturer while he mentally rearranged his data. There wasn’t much of it. The door he had seen close behind Kimbrough had been locked when he got there, and although he’d risked going back twice more just before lights-out, he hadn’t found out anything. What did happen to people like Flynn and Kimbrough? Those who must know wouldn’t say; those who didn’t know had learned not to ask. There was a vague impression current that they were transferred to other Immune schools; Arthur had heard it expressed indirectly, more than once, in bull sessions and elsewhere.

Transferred to other schools, without notice, without the chance of saying good-by to friends? It was just possible enough to get by, as a thing nobody happened to talk about—unless you had seen a man walking away from that lonely room with blood on his sleeve.

Arthur was concentrating on that lead now, since he had nothing else. His mental image of the man in black was worn from much handling, but with the help of mnemonic techniques he had learned early in the semester, he was able to bring it back ... The man came out of the room, paused with his face in shadow, looked both ways, and struck off rapidly down the corridor. the face simply would not come clear: Arthur had been looking at his sleeve, not his face. The only useful bit of the whole sequence was a single instant just before the man passed out of the light. Reliving it now, Arthur saw the blockiness of the blond head, and the slope of powerful shoulders. He thought he would know the man again, if he saw him at the right angle. He had already eliminated all the fair-haired men he knew to be members of Migli’s group; now he was stumped. He couldn’t very well go peering around behind every blond senior and graduate student in the College. But there had to be a way, because—

“Ridler!”

Arthur came erect with a start. A tall graduate with red piping on his cowl was standing beside the lecturer; he crooked a finger.

“Sir!” Arthur scrambled up and hurried down the aisle. The man’s blond brows were knitted with impatience. “You’re wanted,” he said curtly. “Let’s go.”

Arthur stood for a terrible moment staring after the blond man as he moved to the door: the wide well-shaped blond head, the sloping shoulders ...

He recovered himself and followed, just in time to avoid making himself conspicuous. With Arthur a pace behind, they headed toward the nearest Underground entrance.

Arthur mapped out a tentative program of judo strategy, and went on to consider ways and means of getting out of the College and into hiding. He thought he was beyond shock; but he discovered otherwise when the blond graduate led him past the entrance, down the street to the administration build-ing, and into the anteroom of a large office.

“Wait here,” he said, and disappeared inside.

Arthur looked dazedly at the pleasant-faced young lady who sat behind the orthotyper desk. “Who was that?” he asked.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Mr. Hovey,” she said. “The Arch-deputy’s proctor.”

After what seemed like a long time Hovey came out again and nodded to Arthur as he passed. Arthur, who was remembering another time when he had been ushered in to see Laudermilk, went in with very mixed feelings.

“Sebastian!” said the old man happily, beaming from behind a huge, cluttered desk. “I’m delighted to see you; sit down, sit down. Gracious, you’re looking well. Have some of these dates, they’re delicious. Now. Tell me all about yourself—are you happy? Are you getting on well?”

“Passably well, sir,” said Arthur.

“Good,” said Laudermilk positively. “I predicted it. I knew you’d do well here. You’ve gained ten pounds, at least.”

“Fifteen,” said Arthur, pleased in spite of himself.

“Amazing. And very fortunate, as it happens.” Laudermilk glanced at the clock. “Well, we have a few minutes. Sebastian, I’m going to tell you why I wanted to see you today. You may know—or, on second thought, you probably don’t—but every so often it’s possible for us to send undergraduates on what I might call field trips, in other societies. Now I want you to think about this—I’ll tell you as much about it as I can—”

He paused a moment. “Put it this way. At a certain place, something may or may not be happening which we feel would be extremely dangerous to us. We have to find out whether it is or not. We’ve been looking a long time for some indication, and now we have one—but just a hint, you understand, not nearly enough to be certain.” He looked apologetic. “I hope you’re following this.”

“Yes, sir,” said Arthur.

“Good. Well, what it all leads to is, we need someone to pose as a member of the group where this thing may or may not be happening. You can see that it’ll be dangerous and quite difficult. Yes? Was there something—?”

“Which society is it, sir?”

“I oughtn’t to tell you even that, perhaps, but I can see that you’d like to know. It’s Conind.”

Arthur said, “But that’s the worst of my s. c. ‘s, sir. I have a C rating in the Conind club.”

“I know. Ordinarily, we would look for someone with more aptitude for Conind, and perhaps for someone more experi-enced. But your club mistress agrees with me that you can learn to do it. And the fact is that we need you for a special reason. With all that weight you’ve put on, you have a close resemblance to the young man you’re to impersonate—closer than anyone else we have available. Now that really is all I can tell you. The man you’re to work with will be here in a few minutes. If you decide to do it, you’ll have two days of in-tensive Conind drill before you leave ... Is anything wrong?”

“No, sir.” There did not seem to be any reasonable doubt, Arthur was thinking, that students who did not suit the requirements of the College were being destroyed—what was the hideous old word? murdered

—and that Laudermilk knew about it. He didn’t want to believe such a thing; he found himself liking the old man as much as ever. But leaving that aside, looking at him now—snowy-haired, his leathery old face all alert and good-humored as he waited—Arthur asked him-self, Would he kill me, if he thought it was necessary? And the answer came clear: like lightning. A sudden feminine voice remarked, “Commissioner Higsbee to see you, sir.”

Laudermilk touched a stud on his desk. “Ask him to come in.” He looked at Arthur, waiting. Was all this an elaborate device to get him out of the way? Was he being extinguished more subtly than Kimbrough? It seemed entirely possible. But if so, where was the advantage in saying no?

“I’d like to do it, sir,” he said.

“Excellent. I was sure we hadn’t made a mistake—Gordon, how are you? Come in, come in. I want you to meet a young man you’ve heard of before—Sebastian Fidler, born Arthur Bass. Commissioner Higsbee has just finished an assignment in Darien where you had all your trouble, Sebastian. How well this is all working out!”

Higsbee was an odd fish, Arthur decided two days later. He was cool and precise in his talk; he had a swift, powerful intelligence—it was a pleasure to listen to him, as it was to watch a good heavyweight fighter at work. And then there was an infrequent flash of ironic humor ... but it was all remote, somehow colorless, as if the inner Higsbee were absor-bed in something else—some private grief or obsession. It made Arthur’s skin crawl; but at least, where their job was concerned, there was nothing uncertain or weak about Higsbee. Just now that was all that counted.

That there was a job, after all, was clear from the brutal two-day squeeze session he had been through, not to mention the amount of equipment they had given him and trained him to use. The ornate ring on his finger contained a tiny click-signal broadcasting unit, with which he could tick out code messages to Higsbee. The hearing aid in his right ear was not what it seemed to be, but a voice receiver; there was a tiny vision eye in the cheap-looking brooch which fastened his robe; and the new filling in the back molar con-tained, he had been told, a locator device that would enable Higsbee to follow him wherever he went.

So far, so good. There hadn’t been time to let his hair grow out to Conind length, so they had depilated him and fitted on a waved and scented wig, so flexible, and so well glued to his scalp, that he could hardly tell it wasn’t his own. He was trimmed, clipped, anointed, and tinted to a virile glow about the jowls, and here he sat in the copter that was taking them north along the coast—a typical Conind male to look at him, delicately draped in white lawn, his eyes modestly cast down—and a Conind male, too, on the surface of his mind, where a series of learned clichés went ticking over as naturally as his pulse. Just below that level there was Arthur the conspirator; and further under that, making him feel like a three-layered cake, was the real old original Arthur: the young man who had escaped from the JAS

robing room, and the Glenbrook Store, and Gloria (faded memory!)—who had got himself into trouble in Darien and had been rescued from a rooftop—and who was wondering now whether he could bear to leave the Immunes, now that he had found them. And where could he go? What would he do?

Dawn was washing up thinly above the mountains to east-ward. “There’s Eugene,” said Higsbee, pointing to a cluster of lights down in the wide gray valley. “Portland is only another hundred miles; we’ll be landing in about twenty minutes.”

Arthur nodded. Watching the brightening landscape unroll beneath them, he deliberately pushed back the doubting, fear-ful part of his mind. To keep it there, he reviewed what Higsbee had been telling him since yesterday.

“It was Laudermilk who got us our first lead,” Higsbee had said. “It occurred to him that if there was anything to the rumors—and if they were true, the results would be horrendous—then somebody who had an analogue repression against tell-ing must have told anyhow: or rather hinted at it, worse luck. Well, a thing like that ought to have shown up eventually as what the Normals call

‘possession’—somebody taking too much psychic pressure, blowing up, throwing off the analogue influence, usually with a good loud bang. All right. We looked into the reports of all such incidents in the last year, and we found one case that looked promising. A little Coninder named Ericson, secretary to one of the Conind members of an inter-social commission that was meeting in Philadelphia. Ran amok, poured ink over his superior’s head, and managed to get away into downtown Philadelphia for two hours before they caught up with him and hauled him off to Disposal.

“Well, there was a perfect possibility. In those two hours, Ericson might have let something drop that could have traveled for a week, by word of mouth, before some official spy picked it up. It would have been garbled, and all the details, if any, shorn off it; and the result would have been just what we have now—that everybody’s heard it, but nobody knows where it came from.

“So we looked into Ericson’s antecedents and found that he used to belong to one of the most powerful families in north-west Conind. Better and better. We found out, further, that one branch of his family, in Portland, has been running through quite a surprising number of males lately. Now that’s all we know. To find out any more, we’ve got to get you into the household. So you’re going to be Carl Smeltzer, one of the young males that Marcia Hambling—that’s the acting mother of the family I told you about—bought when she was in—”

“Bought!” said Arthur involuntarily. “Sorry. I can’t get used to that, somehow. That’s why I rank so low in the Conind club.”

“I know. You were brought up in Gepro, and that’s the most intensely patriarchal of the Middle American societies. You can’t expect all that to wear off in a few months. But get used to it: bought. You’re her property, until she decides to sell you, trade you, give you away or have you sent to Disposal. She’s the acting head of a powerful branch of a great family, and you’re a no-account male from Denver. If she says lick my boots, you lick.”

“But do I have to like it?”

“You have to think it’s normal. Don’t forget that for an instant. You have a good general resemblance to Smeltzer, and we’ve improved it all we can. Marcia Hambling buys a lot of males—and she’s near-sighted. We think you’ll get by, if you stay in character. Not otherwise.”

That was something to think about ... And here came Port-land over the horizon, big and glittery, with a, pale ribbon of water behind it.

The address was on the neat white signpost at the edge of the road, opposite the tube exit: 17 ROSE

LANE. Arthur stood agape. It was the first time he had ever seen a Stockholder-class dwelling, in any society—there was no room for them in Glenbrook, surrounded as it was by Umerc territory—and although he knew what to expect, it shocked him.

Slope upon gentle slope of green rose from the road, between ranks of mathematically pruned evergreens, to a long pillared building that was like a slab of sugar laid down at the top of the rise. There were no paths anywhere: guests, Arthur thought, no doubt arrived by copter, and supplies were prob-ably delivered by an underground passage direct to the storage cellars. He hesitated, and then began to walk up the long approach. He wouldn’t begin by asking foolish questions; Higsbee was watching through the eye in his brooch, and if he thought Arthur was doing something wrong, could say so.

But that perfect pathless green was intimidating. Arthur’s sense of intrusion grew with every step, until by the time he had reached the broad, ground-level portico, he fully expected to be seized and bowled all the way down to the bottom again.

“In theory,” said Higsbee’s papery voice in his ear, “you shouldn’t be here at the main entrance.”

Arthur stifled a curse; the big door was opening. “Try to brazen it out. You won’t succeed, but it’s better if you try.”

There was a pale-eyed youth in a saffron robe standing in the doorway, looking suspiciously at Arthur. Stiff-legged with embarrassment, Arthur went to him.

“Well?”

“Carl Smeltzer, expected by Madam Marcia Hambling.” Arthur stepped in and handed him his traveling cloak. The doorboy glowered. “Bought?”

There being no help for it, Arthur nodded. The doorboy made a sound of contempt and flung the cloak back at him. “That way,” he said, gesturing with his thumb, and walked off. Arthur’s ears burned as he went in the indicated direction. In the middle layer of his mind, he knew perfectly well that Higsbee had trapped him into this situation on purpose: be-cause feeling this way was a necessary part of his impersona-tion. But on the top level he was cringing with bottled-up resentment, and he didn’t like it.

This was different, somehow, and worse than the everyday humiliation of being a Junior Assistant Salesman in Glenbrook. The Conind club meetings in College had only partly prepared him for it. Here he was property; and the worst of it was that when he tried to follow Higsbee’s instructions, and think of this as normal, he partly succeeded ...

The room he entered was a huge egg-shaped chamber, win-dowless and illuminated only by scattered glow-lamps under antique red shades. The walls were heavily draped; the carpet was thick. The almost imperceptible breeze of the air-con-ditioning seemed to have stopped as he crossed the threshold; the air was still, hot, and heavy-scented.

Nobody noticed him at first. The men were dressed like him-self in robes with puffed quarter-sleeves, cinctured across the chest and falling in ample folds to the ankles. The women, of whom there seemed to be dozens, were all wearing scarlet beehive skirts, and nothing above. Arthur stiffened. That meant some kind of ceremony, probably an important one, particular-ly if—yes, there were the older women, the multi-paras, with skirts cut away in front to let their bellies bulge out. Here was a pickle! What if the room were already sealed to non-family males, and the doorboy hadn’t told him about it for spite?

Before he could escape, a passing many-mother caught sight of him and stopped sharply. She was about forty, olive-skinned, plump and ungainly; her eyes were brilliant under untidy brows.

“Yes?” she said.

Arthur introduced himself again, uncomfortably aware that people nearby were turning to watch him. “If I’ve come at an inconvenient time, Madam—”

“It’s no business of mine. Marcia isn’t here. Ursula!” she bellowed, turning. “Here’s another slut of Marcia’s—do some-thing about it.” And without another glance at Arthur, she walked away. A nearby male, a tall brunet in violet, grinned unpleasantly at him and flexed his muscles, hands on hips. Another many-mother came bustling over, looking sweaty and harried, wisps of gray hair escaping from her mobcap. “I haven’t got time now,” she said irritably. “Why did he have to come today, in Goddess’

name?” She peered after the other woman. “Gertrude! You’ll just have to induct him, if you want him here, or else—”

Gertrude shouted something muffled over her shoulder as she left by another doorway. Ursula’s broad face puffed with anger. “Well, I can’t—” she squalled, and fell into a fit of coughing. Through the noise she was making, and the hum of talk behind her, Arthur caught another voice—young and shrill, pitched up at the cracking edge of hysteria. “Is it a new boy? I want to see him! Let me see him! Let me see him! ”

A chorus hushed her, and then there was a new voice, as high as the other, but weak and piping: “Bring him here!”

“Go, then,” said Ursula crossly, and gave him a shove. Stumbling wound busy groups of people, Arthur crossed the room and found himself staring at a wheelchair containing a small, dark bundle, from which two yellowish eyes glared back at him.

“Come closer, boy,” the voice piped. Arthur did so, and then hastily got down to a properly respectful position on his knees. The bundle was a woman, dark and shriveled as an armload of dried sticks. She wore a faded, triple-pointed red cap, signify-ing that she was the matriarch of this family: And no wonder, Arthur thought. She must be over a hundred.

“Get up, get up, I can’t see you,” she said querulously. Arthur scrambled to his. feet. The reason her eyes looked so odd, he realized, was that they were behind huge archaic lenses, framed to perch on her nose.

“What’s your line, boy?”

“Smeltzers of Denver, please, madam.”

“Smeltzers. A thin line. Sold you to Marcia, did they? Think you’ll enjoy that?”

“Yes, please, madam.”

She cackled. “Maybe you will. Best thing a man can hope for in life, to serve a good fertile woman. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, please, madam.”

“Sure it is.” She cackled again, gasping. “I know some things you don’t know, boy. I could surprise you, if I felt like it.”

A bony woman bustled up, fussing with the folds of dark stuff that were piled around the old woman’s shoulders. “Care-ful, now; greatmother, you’ll catch cold. You know how delicate—”

“Let me alone!” The old woman picked petulantly at the shawl until she had opened it, showing a chest like leather stretched over a birdcage. “Know how old I am, boy? I’m a hundred and sixty-seven.”

Arthur started. This was the year 140 of the present calen-dar. If she was speaking the truth, the woman must have been 27 when the first analogue societies were founded. She wasn’t merely old, she was prehistoric!

“That’s all right,” she said delightedly, watching his face. “I saw how it all began. I know things I won’t tell.”

“Greatmother—”

“I won’t tell, I said!” she snapped. “I’m just telling you, boy, you want to realize how lucky you are. Isn’t that right? Man’s place is in the mill. The hand that tips the ladle rules the world.”

“Greatmother—”

“A girl’s best friend is her father!”

“Greatmother, they’re ready to start,” said the bony woman firmly, and began to wheel the old woman away.

“Birds should sing,” the old woman squalled over her shoulder, “but a man should be still! Man’s work is never done!”

“Greatmother—”

“They also serve, who only impregnate!”

After a moment the bony woman reappeared alone, flushed with irritation. “There isn’t time for you now,” she said. “You’ll have to wait outside. Quick!”

Arthur took one last glance before he stepped outside. The knot of people at the far end of the room had divided; the rest of the crowd was moving back, and he could see the alcove with the moon-symbols carved in the lintel. Inside, there was a covered table on which a young girl was stretched out; at this distance, she looked barely nubile. At her feet, an old man was fussing about a smaller table that held a clutter of equipment. He lifted some small thing, and Arthur saw the flash of steel. Higsbee’s voice said, “They have a superstition that it’s un-lucky for a strange male to be in the house during a defloration ceremony.”

Arthur jumped. He turned instinctively toward the exit. But, he reminded himself, the lower orders needed permission to leave a house. In the nearest archway, a violet-clad houseboy stood watching him sardonically.

Advise, he clicked out on his signal-ring.

“Better stay where you are,” said Higsbee’s voice finally. “They may be furious to find you there or not, depending on various things, such as who sees you first when they come out.”

Be specific, Arthur demanded ..

“Impossible.” Higsbee sounded remotely amused. “They use mescal at these things, in order to see visions of the Good Goddess and so on. It makes them hard to predict, but don’t worry about it. Nothing they can do to you will damage you permanently.”

Arthur kept his opinions to himself and waited. There was a lot of silence inside the chamber, and then some low chanting that got on his nerves, then silence again.

After about half an hour the door suddenly slammed back into the wall and women began to stream out, flushed and glitter-eyed. Arthur, huddled on his bench in an alcove, tried to make himself inconspicuous. Gertrude and Ursula wandered by arm in arm with fixed smiles on their faces; Ursula’s hair was more disheveled than ever, and she was humming under her breath. Milling slowly around the hall, the crowd was breaking up into little groups, all quiet and dazed-seeming, but with a fierce, faraway glitter in their eyes. Three old men with cameras scurried past, and about half the crowd gradually oozed out in the direction of the portico. After another quarter of an hour, some of the people wandered back while other groups dispersed. The hall was emptying; the faces Arthur saw looked calmer, sleepy-lidded and dull. He was beginning to think no one was going to notice him at all when a plump brown-haired girl suddenly appeared in front of him, planted her feet and stared.

Arthur arose nervously. It took him an instant to recognize the girl as the one he had seen on the table inside: she couldn’t be more than ten or eleven, but she was dressed now in the same kind of ceremonial clothing her elders wore ... and looked better in it, to Arthur’s critical eye, than they did. She was feverishly bright still, her eyes puffy, lower lip petulant and cruel. “You’re the new boy,” she said. “Hm!”

“Yes, madam.”

“I may take you for my lover. Or, I may not.” She put one chubby hand on her brow in a careful gesture.

“Well, move around a little—let me see what you’re built like.”

Arthur obeyed unwillingly, feeling like a prize calf. The second time around, a stringy many-mother made an irritated gesture at him, and he stopped.

“Come away now, Diane,” said the woman. “Look what mama’s bought for you.” She pulled forward a young-old man with sleek hair, reeking of rosewater. He looked at the girl side-long and grinned. Diane barely glanced at him. “Go away, I don’t want you.” She turned. “I want you!”

The thin woman said shrilly, “Girl, don’t be a fool. I bought this one for you from Floria Goodrich—he’s guaranteed. Now be sensible. You can’t have that one anyhow—he belongs to your Aunt Marcia.”

She seemed to think that settled the matter, but the girl didn’t. “Today I am a woman!” she yelled, making heads turn all along the hall. “I get to choose! It says so in the ceremony book!” She whirled on Arthur. “Lie down, you,” she said, and began pulling up her brocaded skirt.

“What’s this?” a deep contralto demanded, and the gather-ing crowd parted to let a tall, regal woman pass. The top of Arthur’s head was about level with her chin, and although she was wearing ordinary traveling clothes instead of the open-topped ceremonial dress, it was obvious that she was built on a heroic scale. Arthur stared at her in awe: there was something fascinating about the mammoth bosom, the balanced thrust of the belly, the pillow-sized buttocks. When she moved, she quaked.

“I’m glad you’re back, Marcia,” the thin woman was saying, with mixed relief and irritation, “though why you couldn’t be here for your own niece’s Initiation—”

“All right, dear,” said Madam Marcia, with an edged soft-ness; and to Arthur, “Who are you?”

Arthur identified himself for the third time. The big woman stepped closer—suffocatingly close (“Oof!”

said Higsbee’s wry voice in his ear)—and peered at him with large, liquid eyes. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember. I bought you last week and asked them to ship you. Now what’s the trouble?”

Diane and her mother began talking at once; Madam Mar-cia listened to them both, unruffled, gazing with icy patience at the wall over their heads.

“... I told her he belonged to you, Marcia, but—”

“... the most important day of a woman’s whole life—”

Madam Marcia stopped them both with a raised hand. “I understand. I’ll settle it,” she said, and a deathly hush fell. “We’ll let the wench himself decide.” She smiled at Arthur. “Which will you choose, boy—Diane or me?”

Arthur knew the right answer, but the words stuck in his throat. “Marcia!” said Higsbee’s voice sharply.

“I choose you, madam,” said Arthur.

Diane burst into furious tears and was led off, stamping her feet. “Show him to my apartments,” said Madam Marcia over her shoulder as she turned away, pulling off her gloves.

“Sorry to nudge you that way,” said Higsbee’s cool voice as Arthur followed a houseboy down the hall, “but I was afraid you’d show indecision. It would have been out of character. Marcia’s a powerful woman—the real Carl Smeltzer jumped at the chance to be sold to her.”

Arthur ticked back, Right.

“And on top of everything else,” Higsbee said, “she has what the Coninders regard as a gorgeous figure.”

Arthur waited in his cubicle, but nothing happened. He got hungry and fed himself from the autochef. He killed time by talking with Higsbee, who turned infuriatingly laconic. His signaling finger got tired, and he gave up. Hungry again, he fed himself. The big central salon of Madam Marcia’s suite re-mained empty; if there were other males, like himself, waiting each in his cubicle, he heard nothing of them. Eventually he discovered with astonishment that it was after midnight. He ticked out to Higsbee, Did you ever go through this?

“Many times,” said Higsbee promptly.

Good night, he tapped out viciously.

“Pleasant dreams,” said Higsbee.

It occurred to him that it was entirely possible that Madam Marcia wouldn’t visit her apartments for another week. He dozed off.

Someone was shaking him. “Mm?” he said, opening his eyes, half-awake. A huge gray bulk was leaning over him in the dim light from the doorway. “Get up,” said Madam Marcia. He scrambled out, his heart pounding. “Put your clothes on,” she told him. She watched, smoking a thin cigar in a holder, while he got into his robe and brushed his hair. Then she heaved herself up, gracefully enough, from the armchair and walked over to him. “Now. Are you loyal to me? Will you do anything?”

“Yes, Madam Marcia.”

“Good. Get your cloak and come along ...”

Arthur followed her out into the dim corridor to an upstair; they rode in silence to the roof. The roof was still and dark under a starless gray sky; it was still hours before dawn. Madame Marcia climbed into a copter. Arthur followed.

Madame Marcia took the controls and they rose clear of the roof, but began to drop again almost immediately. They landed on the dark lawn near a summerhouse that stood glim-mering faintly on the shore of a small lake.

Madame Marcia yawned and stubbed out her cigar. “There are some young men in that building,” she said. “Go and wake them and bring them here.”

Arthur stumbled across the lawn in a state of dumb wonder. He clicked at Higsbee to see if he was awake. H. H.

“Yes?”

What do you make of it? he asked.

“Wait and see,” said Higsbee, irascibly, and yawned in his ear. There were, indeed, four young men asleep in cubicles in the summerhouse. Arthur awakened them all and got them to dress, and the five of them trooped back to the copter and climbed in.

“All here,” said Madam Marcia comfortably. She stopped Arthur as he was about to clamber back into the rear seats with the rest. “You: can you fly a copter?”

“Yes, Madam Marcia.”

“Fly, then.” She moved back, and Arthur got into the pilot’s seat, moving it forward until he could reach the controls.

“That is the heading,” said Madam Marcia, reaching over his shoulder to point to a glowing line in the illuminated map. “Climb to two thousand; I will tell you when to come down.”

A gloomy silence fell in the copter. When they had been in the air nearly twenty-five minutes, flying south-southeast to-ward the foothills of the Cascades, a bell rang on the control board. “Press the stud beside the map,” said Madam Marcia.

When Arthur did so, the glowing line snapped around until it was aligned almost directly north and south. He followed the new heading without waiting to be told, and the copter droned south for an hour. When a mountain which the map identified as Diamond Peak showed up ahead, Arthur climbed to ten thousand. Madam Marcia made no comment. A few minutes later, the bell sounded again; the new heading was west by south.

Another forty minutes brought them within approach dis-tance of a small settlement on the east bank of a dry creek. “Land there,” said Madam Marcia.

As Arthur took the copter down, Higsbee’s voice came sud-denly in his ear: “What is that, Rosetown?”

Right, Arthur clicked.

“The supply rail runs through there,” Higsbee’s voice mut-tered. “Myrtle Creek, Glendale, Grants Pass—Yes, by all that stinks in Conind!”

Arthur twitched. What?

“I think I know where you’re going. The perfect place, I should have thought of it before ... Isn’t that a train lamp down there?”

Madame Marcia leaned forward, peering. “Drop faster,” she said.

“I think that settles it. If I’m right; you’ll all be in a freight car heading south about ten minutes from now. And, let’s see,

I imagine the train will stop long enough to let you of some-where inside a tunnel ..”

Arthur ticked out impatiently, Going where?

“To the caves, Sebastian. The old Oregon Caves. Down, down, down!”

Up beyond the partition, somebody let out a startled yell.

A shudder ran through the little group in which Arthur stood. After a moment the line moved a few steps closer to the bend in the narrow corridor. There was a silence, while they all strained their ears: then the yell again, in a different voice.

They all shuddered. The line moved forward. There were, Arthur guessed, only about four ahead of him now. What was going on up there?

Somewhere in the labyrinth of natural and man-made passages on the way down, moving through light into darkness into light again, they had lost Madam Marcia; but somebody in Stockholder costume had always been on hand to order them onward. Finally they had reached a room crowded with other young men, from which they’d been called four at a time into a room containing a row of perfectly ordinary sacred machines—analogue machines, as he had learned to call them. With a few omissions—costumes, music—it was almost exactly like the Confirmation Chamber he remembered from his boyhood.

“That’s all we need, pretty nearly,” Higsbee’s satisfied voice had said in his ear. “Don’t try to fight the anesthetic. Relax and do as you’re told.”

An attendant in white shorts and halter had buckled him in and fitted the helmet on his head; and that was the last he remembered. He felt no different from the treatment, but then you never did, even if you were a Normal. Now here he was, with a gang of others who had been through the analogue room, waiting for—what?

There was a shriek from the next room. A moment later the swinging door opened and an attendant beckoned. The man ahead of Arthur stepped in.

Arthur counted off the seconds. The yell came. The door opened.

Arthur walked into a bare room that had four people in it: a bored gray-haired woman in shorts and singlet, the attendant who had let him in, and two young men with bewildered expres-sions. Arthur recognized them as the two who had been be-fore him in line. It was good, anyway, to see that they were still on their feet.

The gray-haired woman began reeling off a memorized speech that began,

“We-must-all-do-as-Goddess-commands-no-matter-what ...” It took him a while to catch her drift; even-tually he realized she was telling him that, along the borders of the civilized world, people had been influenced by the near-ness of demons—not demons themselves, mind you, and not possessed, just influenced, but stubborn nevertheless; and to make them see the Light of Truth again, Goddess had ordained a somewhat unusual procedure.

“To make this possible, Goddess has sent you a new angel—and for the inscrutable glory of Goddess, this angel will let you do things you never could do before.” The woman gestured at Arthur, then at the other two in turn. “You and you—drag him across the room. Go ahead.”

One of the young men took the other one by the arm and waited for Arthur; both of them grinned weakly. Arthur’s mind was working too fast for him to keep up with it: if this meant what he thought it did—why, the possibilities inherent in releasing hostility repressions, if that’s what they were doing, and multiplied by the tens of thousands who were processed here, the possibilities were staggering. Dazedly, he walked over and took the man’s other arm. His opposite number tugged, while the man in the middle held back. This, Arthur thought, would be where the shout came in. He helped pull the middle man across the room; stopped, looked around as if expecting his angel, and shouted with amazement. Ten minutes later, having served his turn as puller and pulled for the next two recruits in line, Arthur found himself in a group being marched across the floor of a long, broad cavern toward what looked like rude barracks on the far side.

“Who’s that in the scooter sidecar, coming this way?” Higs-bee asked suddenly. “Get me a clear view.”

Arthur contrived to stumble clear of the group as the scooter approached. The passenger, an imposing woman Arthur had never seen before, glanced at him incuriously as she passed. “Good!” said Higsbee with enormous satisfaction. “That nails it down good and proper. All we have to do now is get you out of there.”

Explain.

“I’ve got this all taped, vision and sound, and the locator record too, but that could be faked. We had to have some-thing to tie this to Conind, and we just got it—that woman was Madame Euphemia O’Ryan, a member of the Intersocial Commission, and there’s no faking her.”

Show tape to Comm? Arthur asked.

“Exactly. We need just one more thing, visual evidence to support the locator record ... Where would you put the in-firmary in a layout like this?”

Caught off guard by the change of subject, Arthur stared around. Back along corridor, he tapped out.

“Good. I think so too—and hope so, because there are at least three emergency exits back there. Get sick.”

That was easy, anyhow. Arthur stopped, clutched his middle, and sagged over slowly. He lay on the floor, groaning and writhing ad lib., until two male attendants showed up with a stretcher and carted him back.

The infirmary turned out to be full; through the open door-way, Arthur could see a couple of young men on cots, looking very green—casualties of the re-conditioning process, no doubt. The stretcher bearers set him down and went away.

Arthur got up as a new herd of recruits came along. He said to one of them in an authoritative voice, “Lie down there,” and as the bewildered young man obeyed, Arthur trotted down the hall to the door with the red light over it.

Twenty minutes of hard climbing brought him to the surface, in the middle of a clump of scrub pine. Higsbee’s copter was circling overhead.

“Where are we going?” Arthur asked, as Higsbee headed the copter northeastward. They had started out to the south—back to the College, Arthur had naturally supposed. Higsbee did not reply immediately. He was studying the scope of a high-powered radar unit, not standard in small craft. “There’s an object,” he said finally, “making large silly circles over us at about fifteen thousand. I just want to see what it’ll do if we move over a little ....”

Fifty miles farther along, the object was still there. It was a jet, evidently, with a cruising speed much faster than the cop-ter’s: hence the circles. And it was maneuvering to stay directly overhead as the copter moved.

“Anyhow,” said Arthur, without paying much attention to what he was saying, “you’ve transmitted the tape, haven’t you? They can’t stop that.”

“To hell with the tape,” said Higsbee precisely. “I am think-ing of saving our necks.”

They climbed, and rose between two of the lesser Cascades. On the other side, a low overcast was gathering over the big lake and the country beyond. Higsbee nosed the copter down. “Horton, Hunter, Hildebrand,” he muttered, reading the map. “Yonna Valley, Kitts, Bonanza—all in a twenty-mile line. Good.” Feathers of cloud began to whip past them, thickening slowly; Arthur thought he could make out two of the villages Higsbee had mentioned, strung out along a creek. Then the landscape wheeled majestically around through half a circle;’ creek and villages slid out of sight.

“Not going to land there after all?”

“I never meant to,” said Higsbee. “I hope they’ll think. I was fool enough—it’ll keep them busy hunting for a while—but one copter landing is an event in little places like those. Our only chance is to lose ourselves in the nearest mob—right there at the tip of the lake. Klamath Falls.”

Pop. 22,000, Tourist resort, Arthur read from the code at the edge of the map. “What’ll we do, join a boating party, or sightseers?”

“Neither. We’ll go where the real mob is—in Store.”

It was, of course, the best possible place to hide. But just as’ they reached the top of the first upstair, Higsbee in the lead, a woman appeared at the stairhead, blocking their way. It happened too quickly. Arthur thought Higsbee had merely lost his balance; but as the body toppled, twisting, Arthur saw the long knife-hilt standing out, just below the sternum. He watched with detachment—too shocked to feel anything—as Higsbee’s body rolled and slid toward the bottom, Con-sumers scuttling aside to give it room. Then he turned toward the woman; only a second or two had passed; the stair above him was just sliding in under the guard. He recognized the woman. It was the olive-skinned one, Madam Gertrude—the first one who had spoken to him at the Hamblings’. And, staring at him as he rose, she took a deep breath and screamed: “Guard!” It was miraculous: the golden uniforms appeared everywhere in the crowd, below him and above. “Murder!” screamed Madam Gertrude. “He killed that man! I saw it myself”

His trial was quick.

Bound tight as a caterpillar in the adhesive tangler cords, and with a gag in his mouth to keep him from uttering any blasphemies, Arthur stood in the prisoner’s box and heard the evidence: a taped record of Madam Gertrude Hambling’s statement, and the statements of two of the arresting officers.

“Open and shut,” said the magistrate. Her jowls trembled with revulsion. “I sentence it to Disposal. Take it away.”

Chapter 15. State Of Mind

Box and all, they had loaded him into the rear compartment of a golden Guard copter. They had opened the box from the rear and strapped a parachute on his back; it was less than com-fortable to lie on. They had cut the tangler cords and removed the gag, but he was shackled to a set of rings inside the box. Over him was the curved, featureless roof of the compartment. Behind him, in the forward wall, there was a small win-dow through which the two Guards could inspect him if they felt like it. So far, they hadn’t.

The compartment stank of fear. How many trussed bodies had been dumped in here—and where had they all gone?

More precisely, what had happened when they got there? Arthur—the new, College-trained Arthur—knew what no Con-sumer anywhere was supposed to know: that “Disposal” meant being deposited in a tiny pocket of territory, a few thousand square miles, of what had once been the State of Washington.

But that was no comfort.

It was mountainous country—the high ridge of the Cascades on the east, lordly Mt. Rainier to northward, Adams and St. Helens to the south. On the old maps, there were a few towns in between—Morton, Randle, East Creek Junction. Now there was nothing. The Immunes did not know, nobody knew what was there. All the midcontinental societies dumped their crimi-nals in the Blank because it was simpler and surer than the Great Desert or some other wasteland; but what happened to them, they didn’t know. They only knew that nobody ever came out again.

The vibration of the copter’s engine altered subtly; the body swayed a little. They were hovering. Arthur thought he knew what that meant.

Without warning, the floor beneath him dropped away. He toppled with a yell, twisting out of the overturned box. Off to one side, the earth was wheeling with a vast, sickening slow-ness. Icy air stung his eyes and stopped his breath.

There was a tiny tug at his back, and, half a second later, a violent one that nearly split him in two. Stunned, Arthur found himself swinging pendulum-wise from a white flower of fabric that belled out over his head. The earth was under him where it belonged; the copter was out of sight somewhere above. He was drifting rapidly, under a cold sunny sky, toward the edge of a low blanket of cloud ... no, not cloud; he couldn’t make it out. Above him the copter came into view past the edge of the canopy. Its engine sounded suddenly odd. It seemed to be trying to turn, And not making it. But the strangeness that wasn’t cloud was coming toward him alarmingly fast. As he drifted it had spread out under him—neither cloud nor mist, but he couldn’t see the ground through it, and the tall cloud-capped peaks beyond had some-how vanished, too. He was falling—toward what?

He looked around frantically for the copter. There, at any rate, it still was. But it was acting oddly: vanes spinning at full speed, fire spouting from the tubes, it ought to have been going somewhere; instead, it was settling lightly and deliberately, like a milkweed seed on a calm day. Come to think of it, Arthur realized, the wind seemed to have stopped, just about the time he crossed the line into this—but he still didn’t know what to call it. Looking down, it was as if he were staring into water reflections with his eyes not focused right, as if he could blink and make sense out of it, but it kept shifting ... He landed. The ground melted into view quite suddenly, and his feet touched with only the faintest jar. He was erect on a sloping meadow of cropped, bright green grass, while the parachute slowly collapsed into an enormous white pancake at his feet. The strangeness, whatever it had been, was gone—there was the sky, of that sweet sharp blue that comes only in early autumn, and there, drifting down to a landing on the slope a few hundred yards below him, was the copter.

But a parachute landing, a faint memory suddenly reminded him, was supposed to be about equal to a fifteen-foot jump ...

What was wrong?

Here came the two guards, toiling up the slope. Down below, the copter had settled on one stubby wing and looked oddly fixed, like an old relic, overgrown with vines. He could see the Guards’ faces now; they looked pale and strained.

“Mother of All,” one of them kept saying. He looked dazed, and his eyes didn’t seem to focus on Arthur.

“It froze, right when I tried to turn. Just like that—the wheel froze. Mother of All.”

“Uriah, there’s the demon!” said the other one behind him, pointing. They both stepped back, elbows wide, and the second one pulled out a little gas-pellet gun. He pulled the trigger. The pellet rolled out of the barrel and dropped at his feet.

“Plop,” said the Guard, dazedly.

The other one had a tangler gun in his hand. He aimed it at Arthur; his hand was shaking. “There!” he said, and pulled the trigger. The gun coughed apologetically; a few thin strands dripped dismally from the muzzle.

“’S bewitched us!” shouted Uriah, and they both turned and ran, diagonally down the slope, separating as they went. One disappeared into a brush-choked ravine, the other around the shoulder of a low ridge.

Arthur turned slowly. Everything looked so normal and ordinary, and yet—where was Mt. Adams? He remembered it clearly; it had been plainly in view when he was coming down—a big, imposing mountain. You couldn’t miss it. Where was it now?

He thought he was facing south, but to make sure he turned around again. This time he saw something that hadn’t been there before—a slender little man with a timid face, standing a little above him on the slope. He was dressed in a single white garment, shorts and singlet combined; it seemed a little in-adequate for the climate. “Hello there!” he called, wiggling his fingers.

“Hello,” Arthur returned cautiously. The little fellow smiled and walked closer. He had a round, baby-pink face, with features as pale and indistinct as a child’s drawing, “I knew you were coming,” he remarked. “That’s why I thought I’d come over and meet you, Elkanah.”

Ignoring this last, Arthur said, “Which way is south, can you tell me?”

“South of what?” the little man asked vaguely. “It’s all rela-tive, you know.”

“South of here. The Blank. Which way is out?”

“Oh. Well, there isn’t any way out.”

He blinked mildly, craning his neck to look up at Arthur. “This is all there is,” he added. “I mean, there’s some more, up that way, but it’s all like this. La ilaha illa allah. You can’t get out of the universe.”

Cracked, Arthur thought uneasily. Was this what happened to people who were dropped into the Blank?

Was that why they never came out—because they became convinced there was no place to go?

If so, why? Arthur tried once more. “We came in,” he said. “We flew in, in that.” He nodded toward the copter. Now there was an idea; if he could fix whatever was wrong with the machine.

“Oh, no,” the little man was saying. “Those things can’t fly, you know. They’re heavier than air. They fall.”

Arthur glanced at him, then peered down the slope again. Was there something odd about the way the copter looked, or not? Decisively, he started off down the slope.

Behind him, the little man’s voice said, “Would you like to see that one? All rightie.”

The grass flowed suddenly up past him, as if he had lost his footing and taken one gigantic, impossible step to catch him-self. He tried to fling himself backward, trembling all over. But he and the little man were standing quietly two feet away from the grounded copter. The moving earth was unaccountably still again.

And the copter, gray and rusty, did have vines growing all over it. Arthur turned and stared at the meek little man. What he had just seen was impossible; therefore the little man had somehow persuaded him it had happened. Or, contrariwise, he had just seen it happen, and therefore it wasn’t impossible. “But I came in it,” he said. “I saw it land, right here.”

“Oh, no,” said the little man kindly. “You’ll soon get over that. Let’s go and get it taken care of now, shall we? You’ll feel so much better. Come along, Arthur.”

Arthur said, “How did you know my—” But the little man was twinkling away up the slope, his pink pipestem legs work-ing with careless energy. Arthur set his teeth and followed. Around the far side of a large boulder they came upon the Guard called Uriah, running as fast as he could go and not getting anywhere.

“Quadhosh, quadhosh, Uriah,” said the little man. “Come along, now.”

Uriah, pale and perspiring, looked as if he were about to faint. He gulped speechlessly and fell in behind Arthur.

Up at the top of the slope, back against a fallen tree, sat the other Guard. “Quadhosh, Daniel; come along with us,” and the Guard heaved himself up and followed along. They took a barely perceptible trail that meandered down into a fir-car-peted hollow and came up again, to all appearance, at the top of the high ridge that had been two miles away a moment before. Arthur was beyond wonder. Like the others, dazed in the cold pine-scented air, he followed and said nothing.

They trooped through the cathedral hush of an old pine forest, out onto a sun-drenched meadow. In the middle, half overgrown and tilted out of plumb, were what looked like the two oldest analogue machines in existence.

“Here we are,” said the little man happily. “Now just lie down here—” As the two Guards obeyed, he turned anxiously to Arthur. “You won’t mind waiting? We seldom have more than two at a time—it never seemed worth while to make an-other machine, but we can if you wish.”

“No, no,” said Arthur numbly. “Go right ahead, I’m in no hurry.” He was staring at the machines—bulky, angular things, half again the size of the ones he knew. The lettering on the dials was old-fashioned and dim

The little man was fussing around the two machines and the Guards on their cracked leather couches. After a moment he stepped back beaming. “Lizkur,” he said, waving his hand. The Guards’ eyes promptly closed; both machines hummed, and the dial indicators swung over. Where was the power coming from? Arthur poked the grass away from the base of the nearest machine, found the place where the power leads ought to be. There was nothing there at all. The little man was at his elbow, disconcertingly. “The Power is all around us,” he said, with a gold-toothed smile, and winked mysteriously.

Slack-jawed, Arthur looked back at the machine. He poked at the grass again, then stooped and pulled

,

it aside. There at the bottom, in raised metal letters, he could read: PSYCHO-THERAPEUTIC

EQUIPMENT CO., INC., A Division of the Kusko Psychiatric Institute, Inc., Chicago, Illinois. Model 101.

The very first production model—nearly a century and a half old! Even if it had a power source, it shouldn’t still be running ... Arthur got up, with a buzzing in his head. The machines had stopped. The two Guards were getting up, look-ing as if someone had just promoted them to Chairmen of the World.

“Truth,” said one of them intensely to the other, and made rippling motions with his fingers.

“Substance,” agreed the other, letting his hands float in the air like water lilies. They both glanced at Arthur and smiled distantly; then one of them, while the little man looked on approvingly, climbed onto his partner’s shoulders and from there climbed a step higher into the empty air—and from there another step, and another, until he was a trudging figure dwindling, gnat-sized, against the clouds.

Arthur turned, and saw the other Guard frowning slightly, concentrating. After a moment a hair-thin golden halo glowed into being over his head. It hung unsupported and insubstan-tial. It pulsed rhythmically, like a Store sign.

“Oh, no!” said Arthur.

“Oh, yes,” said the ex-Guard solemnly.

A large mountain lion dropped to the ground from nothing-ness, strolled past the Guard, and lay down. It was followed by a small woolly lamb, which curled up against the lion. Both of them stared offensively at Arthur.

“Glory!” said the ex-Guard. “Mirabilia, mirabile dictu. We can do anything we believe in and we can believe in anything!” He strolled off, followed by the lion and the lamb.

“Now then, your turn!” said the little man cheerfully, stand-ing beside one of the empty couches.

“I’d rather not,” said Arthur desperately. Whatever happened to people under that antique analogue helmet, it broke all the rules he knew, and he wanted no part of it. He backed away a step. “If it’s all the same to you—”

“But,” said the little man in a wounded tone, “you can’t stay here unless you take the treatment.”

“That’s it,” Arthur told him. “I’ll leave, if you’ll just—”

“But there isn’t anywhere to go. I told you that. Negative thoughts, negative thoughts—I shall have to be firm.” The little man’s hair, what there was of it, began to stand on end. Little blue sparks jumped between the nails of his outstretched hand, as, frowning, he pointed to the couch. Arthur lay down.

When he came to, the first thing he saw was the little man’s beaming, expectant face. He sat up slowly. Beyond the first face there were two more at different heights, constructed somewhat differently, but both, it seemed to Arthur, wearing exactly the same cheerful, prim expression. Remembering the last thought he had had before he went under, Arthur gazed at the top of the first little man’s head, concentrating: Let there be a butterfly sitting there. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed when nothing of the sort happened. But the three gentlemen—all of whom, he saw now, wore the same hygienic one-piece garment—were still looking expectant. There was nothing to do but fake it and hope.

“Glory!” he said, booming it out from his chest.

All three beamed harder. “Perceptions,” said the one on the left, making slow duckbill motions with one hand.

“Immanence,” said the second, describing a circle in the air.

“Circularity,” said the third, hooking his first and fourth fingers together.

“Constitutionality,” said Arthur at random, waving his hands in what he hoped was a mystic pattern. Apparently it was the wrong one. All three gentlemen jumped as if he had said a bad word; their prim smiles changed to frowns. When Arthur backed away, they all floated after him like balloons on a string. When he turned, more of them popped into view out of nowhere, all with the same sex-less pale faces and the same onion-eyes.

They were babbling, all at once. Hands were waved. Then they fell silent, staring at him in a ring. Their left hands came up and swung down again in unison, while they shouted a word that was like a thunderclap.

Arthur had squeezed his eyes shut and flung his arms up automatically. When he looked again, all the pale men were gone. He was standing in a ring of golden light that lay on the grass like melted butter. At the other side of it, ten feet away, a dark-haired young woman sat cross-legged, head down. She looked up.

“You!” she said.

Arthur had trouble convincing himself that this was the girl he had last seen in the joy palace in Darien. It wasn’t just the hair color—nothing about her matched his memory. He rea-lized, finally, with a curious icy shock, that it was himself who had changed. Three months in College had been enough to turn him mentally inside out; he wasn’t the same person any more.

He found that disturbing. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t recognized Anne, except that it had made him understand that if he were to go back to Glenbrook now, and see his parents, they would be strangers ... If a thing like that could happen to you in so short a time, where could you expect an end to it? Was there any real unchangeable Arthur down at the bot-tom somewhere, or not?

They were walking along a narrow glen, heading southward in the late sunlight. The golden ring stayed sedately around them wherever they went, as if somebody up in the sky were following them with a searchlight. It was no hindrance at all, unless the two of them tried to walk in different directions; they had tried that only once, and Arthur’s right foot still tingled from the shock.

“Forget about your troubles for a minute, if you think you can,” Anne said wryly, “and finish telling me what happened in Conind.”

Arthur did. When he got to Higsbee’s death, she stopped short. He turned and looked at her; it seemed to him that she was pale. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot you knew him—was he anything special to you?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t think so,” and listened without in-terrupting until he got to the end, the trial and Disposal.

“So you weren’t able to get in touch with anyone—Lauder-milk, anybody at the College?”

“I didn’t have time,” he said. “Anyhow, Higsbee was my only contact.”

She nodded impatiently. “Have you got any kind of com-municator, anything?”

“Just this,” he said, pointing to the button in his ear. “One way—receiving only, and at that I haven’t heard a sound out of it, let’s see, since Higsbee picked me up outside the caves.”

She clenched her fists impatiently.

“But Higsbee had already transmitted all the information,” Arthur said.

“Do you know that? Are you sure?”

Arthur opened his mouth, and shut it again. “I think so. I remember now, I asked him but he didn’t answer. Still, he must have, mustn’t he? I can’t think of any reason why not.”

“Neither can I, but that’s not good enough.” She stopped, frowning, snapping her fingers nervously.

“We’ve got to get out of here—or get a message out, at least.” She stared thought-fully down the broad slope onto which the glen opened. “Does this look like anywhere near the place you landed?”

He looked around doubtfully. “It might be, but—no. No copter. If this were the place, it ought to be right down there.”

“Count that out. Copters always disappear after the first few hours. The Cornanites don’t believe in them.”

“The who?”

“Cornanites. Cornan was their founder, the one who built the Blank. He didn’t believe in copters, so they don’t.”

“Ha,” Arthur said. Then he scowled. “Look—you’ve been here, since when?”

She murmured something.

“What?”

“More than a month. Now take another look around. How far inside the line would you say you drifted before you hit?”

Arthur considered. “Not far, I suppose—a hundred, a hun-dred fifty yards.”

“Then that ought to be the line, right about there—at the top of that low ridge.”

“Sure; but it isn’t—there’s nothing beyond there but more low ridges. No snow-capped mountains, and there ought to be two visible from here.”

“I know. Still, unless we’ve made a mistake, that’s the line. It is and it isn’t. Selah.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Arthur furiously. “If it is, where is it? If it isn’t, what happened to it? A thing that’s there is there, isn’t it—whether anybody believes in it or not?”

Her body seemed to tense. She turned blindly toward him and took hold of the front of his robe. “If you knew,” she said in a choked voice, “how glad I was to see you—”

Utterly surprised, Arthur helped her to sit down on the grassy bank. All the taut, controlled planes of her face had re-laxed into childlike curves. Her eyes were unfocused and glit-tery. Her hands jumped when they felt his, and clutched hard.

Arthur found himself able to free one arm, and put it around her. She was warm and trembling. Experimentally, he kissed her. He was only half prepared for the response that hurled her tight against him. He was bitten, clawed and bowled over before he recovered himself; then it was an equal contest.

Anne rolled over and sat up with a sigh. She smiled at Arthur. “I needed that,” she said. Arthur absently patted himself, looking for cigarettes. He glanced up with a sheepish grimace; Anne smiled wryly and shook her head. “I haven’t any, either. I’ve been here—five weeks. They’ve been trying to train me, every day. I was be-ginning to feel—” She stopped, her throat closed, and she plucked savagely at a blade of grass.

“I’m all right,” she said after a moment. “I’m all right.”

“ Trying to train you, you said,” Arthur ventured. “With the machines, all this time?”

She shook her head. “The machines wouldn’t work on me, of course. They couldn’t understand it. Evidently we’re the first true Immunes ever to come here. It’s upset the Cornanites ter-ribly—they feel they’ve got to convert me, or—” She stopped and swallowed convulsively again.

“Convert you to what?” Arthur asked. “That’s what I was going to ask you to tell me, if you can. How does it work—where does it start from?”

“The machines,” said Anne with strained patience, “are set up to make people believe they can accomplish anything, just by willing it to happen. And when you believe it—really be-lieve it—it seems that you really can do it.”

They looked at each other. Arthur said “But,” and his mouth began to form the silent syllable “How?”

“I don’t know,” said Anne. “It’s one of the buried facul-ties.” She hesitated, pinched up a tiny clot of earth and grass-blades. “This is something Gordon explained to me once. I won’t say that I understood it, but I can give you as much as I got. Here’s what we know about ourselves and the uni-verse.” She showed him the pinch of dirt. “And here—” she waved her free arm—“is what’s left over. We just don’t know enough, to be sure we know all about anything. There are things we can’t do, probably, just because we never heard of them, or think they’re impossible.”

“But,” Arthur said, “if a power like this is really everything you say, then why is there just this little gang right here? By the law of probability, we all ought to have had it millions of years ago.”

She said slowly, “It isn’t viable. The Cornanites don’t believe in sex.”

He stared at her. “You don’t mean—”

“They don’t believe in it. So it doesn’t exist here. There aren’t any children born .... They don’t believe in death either, but once in a great while one of them gets tired. Then he just disappears. Into another plane of reality, they say. But if the other societies ever quit feeding them new people, eventually they’ll all wither away.”

“I was just thinking,” Arthur said, “I haven’t seen any women here. Except you.”

She laughed—a short, unpleasant sound. “There are women here, all right—or people who used to be women, just as there’re people who used to be men. You can’t tell them apart. They all cut their hair the same way.”

Arthur was looking at her in horror.

“Shall we talk about something else?” she asked, through her teeth.

Arthur thought a moment. “Talk about how to get out, would be the best. No, wait a minute—this is the same thing, really. Something else that was bothering me: analogue theory, in College—I remember the lecturer made a special point of this. That the analogue process can make the subject believe in something false to fact, but can’t protect him against the consequences of such belief. I mean, you can make a man believe there’s no chair in the middle of the room, but he’ll fall over it just the same. Now that’s the kind of thing I can’t square with this business .. I know, I know theory has to be altered to agree with observation, but how—”

A pleasant voice remarked, “It’s quite simple. Our Founder believed in the ability of the machines to give others the Power, and so of course they could.”

He, or she—a spare figure in the usual one-piece garment—stepped nearer and looked closely at Anne. She tried to turn her head away; Arthur could see her neck tendons straining; but she couldn’t turn.

“Not yet,” the, person said in a disappointed voice. “Pollice verso.” He, or it, went away. Anne shook her head, eyes closed. “We haven’t got much time,” she said. “They’ll have a conference now. Then—what that one said. Pollice verso. That means they’ll destroy us.” She grunted, and her face twisted.

“What’s the matter?” said Arthur, touching her.

“All this time,” she whispered. “Telling me things ... Bleat-ing Goad! You don’t understand.” Her eyes widened and focused on him. “Five weeks—they’ve had five weeks. It’s turn-ing me inside out. You’re thinking it’s because they can’t convert me that way, just by talking and looking. But they can.”

Arthur sat stunned. “You mean it’s working—? Do they know?”

“No. Always—kept it down when they’re near. But it’s get-ting stronger.”

Her eyes closed again.

He shook her. “Come on—is this a time to give up?”

She had gone limp and wall-eyed, but he dragged her to her feet; after a moment she shoved him away.

“Can walk myself,” she said faintly but clearly. She started off down the slope with Arthur behind, walking in a series of lurching arcs. As they mounted the next rise, she stared desperately at the blurred distance, trying to pick out some meaningful detail. Where was the invisible, intangible line? Here? There?

Anne sat down suddenly, and Arthur squatted down beside her and thought about it. Could it really be that the Blank was a self-contained Einsteinian universe—that, as the little man had kept saying, there was no way out? Arthur picked up a twig and sketched with it absently on the grass. Call this oval area the Blank. Here at the top, call that “A” and call the bottom “A’.” Call the left and right sides “B” and

“B’,” and so on around—“C” opposite “C’,” “D” across from “D’,” meaning—meaning that no matter where you tried to leave the Blank, you’d simply enter again from the opposite side. And you wouldn’t be aware that you’d crossed all that territory back-wards in the wink of an eye, because to you, “C” and “C’” would be right next to each other.

So how could you ever tell where the line really was?

‘He traced his sketch over, macerating grass-blades, and stared at it hungrily. Well, suppose there was a certain little range of hills here, part inside the magic circle and part out-side—then to someone inside the Blank it would seem that the range chopped off abruptly, wouldn’t it? Same for other land-marks—big boulders, trees, anything that happened to be right on the line would seem to be chopped in half. Excited, he stood up and stared around.

“Give them credit,” said Anne faintly.

... Credit, Arthur thought reluctantly, for being a little brighter than that. They could set the limits of the Blank any-where they liked; they didn’t have to chop boulders in half, or anything so crude. Anne grunted, moving a little as if in pain. Her eyes were shut tight; her lips were parted. That was what was bothering him the most: what was happening to Anne? She had said she was afraid the Cornanites were converting her—making her into one of themselves. She was fighting it, evidently. If she lost—there’d be one more sexless mystic, and only one person left in the Blank who didn’t belong there: Arthur.

She grunted and moaned, and said suddenly, “Get ready!” With that, her eyes opened. She looked at Arthur with a flash of fear in her eyes, and started to get up.

But the ridge was abruptly crowded with white-clothed little persons, all standing still, all glitter-eyed, all looking in their direction. Anne shrank back against Arthur, and he put his arm around her. One of the Cornanites pointed a hygienic finger: “What shall be done with them?”

And a chorus rose: “Woe! Woe!”

“In thy filthiness is lewdness,” said the first, “because I have cleansed thee and thou wast not cleansed, thou shalt not be cleansed from thy filthiness any more, till I have caused my wrath toward thee to rest.”

The chorus echoed in a chant.

Out of nowhere, one of the Cornanites suddenly had a candel-abrum in his hand. He waved it, the fourteen candle-flames swaying as he chanted: “Eum a societate omnium Cornani-torum separamus, et a liminibus sanctae Conditoris Ecclesiae in coelo, et in terra excludimus.”

A queer chill was running up Arthur’s torso. He turned to Anne and said, “What—?”

“Excommunicating us,” she whispered. “He’s reading us out of the world—”

Arthur grasped at a sudden hope. “Out of this world—back where we came from?”

“Out. Out of everything. Destroying us!”

“—et damnatum cum diabolo, et angelis eius .”

Now the chorus had candelabra too, and the whole ridge bloomed with pale light. ‘Vikatah! Vikatah!”

they shouted.

Arthur tried to lift his feet, but they seemed riveted to the ground; Anne’s limp weight nearly threw him off balance. Was she unconscious again?

“Anne!”

She didn’t answer.

“—doneo a diaboli laqueis resipiscat, et ad emendationem .”

Anne was moaning and writhing in his arms; but suddenly she squirmed erect and he felt her back straighten firm. He couldn’t see her face, but the nearest Cornanite stared at her pop-eyed and waved his candelabrum frantically. “Stop! Stop!” he shouted. “She is gaining the Power!”

Confusion: the chorus milled closer, the leader dropped his candelabrum. Anne was straining upward on tiptoe, taut as a cable, and it was painful for Arthur to hold her. She had his arm gripped tight and he couldn’t let go. Then, to his horror, blue sparks began to play around the tips of her floating hair. The leader pounced and snatched up his candelabrum again. “She wants to escape!” he shrilled.

“Continue, in interitum carnis—carnis, ut spiritus eius salvus fiat in die indicii. All together”

Glaring like so many fiends, sparks crackling among them, the chorus shouted, “Fiat, fiat, fiat!”

Then there was a howl, and it seemed to Arthur that all the candelabra came hurtling through the air while the ground quaked under him

They had leaped, it seemed to him now. They had leaped, with Anne suddenly soaring forward, jolting Arthur along be-hind with an incredible strength. Anne had done it—had suc-cumbed and believed, and then used her new power to move them.

And they had landed.

The high hillside was silent. Looking around, dazed, Arthur discovered that the Cornanites were no longer there. Half a yard behind where they sat sprawled there began a belt of—not mist, but something distorting in the air, a twisting that hurt your eyes, a smoky confusion. It was the edge of the Blank, and they were outside it. And there, to southward beyond a high ridge, was a snowcapped monarch that could only be Mt. Adams.

Anne was slumped as pale as death, her forehead sweat-beaded, bluish lids sunken over her eyes. Arthur took her in his arms. “Anne! Anne?’

She groaned and stirred. After a moment she sat up, whisper-ing, “What happened? Where are we?”

Before he could answer, the long-forgotten communicator button in his ear suddenly began to shrill:

“Crash day! Crash day! A Coninder army is crossing the Gepro border near Sacra-mento. We have unconfirmed reports of two others across the continent. This is war, repeat, war!”

Chapter 15. World Enough

On the morning of the third day after they escaped from the Blank, they came down out of the hills, following a river all the way, to a dingy city built where the river flowed into the Columbia. It had taken them all that time, pushing themselves hard, to come a distance that Arthur’s Guard copter had crossed in about ten minutes.

Anne had changed. It had happened, Arthur surmised, back there in that instant when she had worked whatever miracle had gotten them unharmed out of the Blank. He hadn’t noticed till later, because there wasn’t much to notice. All the weirdness was gone out of her, but some of the life was gone too. She wouldn’t talk about that climactic moment, and wouldn’t let him talk about it; on every other subject she was quiet, sensible and reserved. She would respond readily to any question or remark, say what there was to be said in the few-est possible words, and stop. It was as if she had simply lost interest. Arthur was hungry, dirty, chilled, and snappish with fatigue. But his voice receiver had been shrilling warnings at intervals for most of the first day; when it stopped for good, his alarm grew. It was the first time in his life that he’d been free to move and yet cut off from that endless stream of information that he associated with freedom. It was like being deprived of a drug. He felt that world-shaking, terrible, perhaps wonderful things— something—was going on in his absence, and it drove him wild. Out there somewhere,-his world was shaking itself into a new pattern before he had had a chance to decide where he be-longed in it. Neither had he entirely decided how he felt about Anne, and now here she was, a sleepwalking stranger who had, it seemed to him, very possibly ruined herself in order to save his life ..

He left her hidden outside the town and went in to steal clothing and a copter. He moved quickly, with the minimum necessary caution and no more. He was in no mood to skulk. He was ragged, half-naked, bramble-scarred and out of breath, an instant object of suspicion to anyone who might see him; but he discovered that he wasn’t much worried about that.

Confidence and speed protected him. He got the copter and the clothes, discovering meanwhile that this was the town of Kelso, a good twenty miles farther west than they thought they had been heading. It was in Gepro territory, which meant at least that Arthur’s costume had trousers and Anne’s was big enough to cover her.

He put the copter down in the field where he had left Anne. She came over, fast enough but with that irritating looseness in her stride, as if it didn’t really matter whether she got there or not .... He hauled her in brusquely and took off again, tinker-ing with the communicator-vision dial with one hand.

“... third day of the demonist outbreaks,” said a voice abruptly, “Salem is still in the grip of Terror.” The picture bloomed in slowly; it was a young man, pausing for emphasis, with a nervous lock of hair down his forehead. The red com-ponent of the picture kept fading in and out as if something were wrong with the equipment—or with the engineer. “Guards flown in from Spokane are again trying to quell the rioting in the downtown section. All Consumers and lower-grade Execu-tives are again warned to stay away from this area unless given special instruction.” He cleared his throat. “Formal Founder’s Day observances will be held all over the continent tomorrow, Founder Dine’s Day in the midwest, Founder Glasscock’s Day in the west, south and southwest. In Salem, the usual parade will not be held, owing to—”

Arthur turned it off. He turned to look at Anne; she was sitting beside him with a look of calm interest just fading from her face. She looked back at him, as if she were mildly curious about what he was going to say next, but could wait.

“Anne,” he said, “What do you know about Crash Day?”

“What do you want to know?”

He ground his teeth. “Where will the College people be by now? Laudermilk and all the rest? How do we get back in contact?”

“That depends. They might have gone to Reinosud, just north of Hermosillo. Or District Four, down in the Panhandle. Or Phoenix. Or they might still be in the underground section of the College, sealed off.”

“Well, what are people like us supposed to do—agents who’ve lost contact?”

“I know a drop address where we can wait until somebody gets in touch with us.”

Arthur considered this, and didn’t like it. “How long?”

“Hard to say. Probably not more than a week.”

Arthur’s fists clenched on the wheel. “Anne, we can’t wait a week. That’s a war down there.”

“Laudermilk knows about it now,” she said reasonably, “whether Gordon warned him or not. There’s no hurry.”

“Pretend there is,” Arthur told her. “What else can we do, besides hang around a drop address until we get wrinkles?”

She considered. “The only contact I have this far north is in Frisco.” She added, “Ten will get you one he isn’t there now.”

“All the same—” said Arthur.

The only way to get into downtown San Francisco was to take the copter in, in defiance of law. They saw other private copters over the city; the risk seemed worth taking. The streets were a scrambled mass of confusion. Judging by what they had seen from the air, it was nearly as bad in Berkeley and the Bay area. San Francisco had been invaded twice, once from Conind, once from Umerc. Arthur watched as a handful of struggling Gepro and Conind citizens was engulfed by a ragged line of Umercers. It was not enough to hold them for long; the whole combination broke up and new groups began to form.

What he saw here was almost certainly being repeated in thousands of places, all across the continent. How had it grown so fast?

The address where Anne’s contact might or might not be was several blocks down the street. Arthur had tried to call him from a booth inside the building where they had landed, but the channels were clogged with priority calls. There seemed to be only one thing for it, unless they gave up and went away, and that was to try to reach him on the ground, straight through the busiest part of the fighting. Arthur surveyed the mob once more, then glanced doubt-fully at Anne. In this condition she’d be more hindrance than help, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving her behind; he couldn’t quite convince himself she could be trusted to be there when he got back.—If he got back.

“Come on,” he said, and pulled her after him in a sprint down the sidewalk, close to the building line. For the first hun-dred yards they were lucky; everyone they passed was too busy to notice them. Then they struck an area where one of the big, whirlpooling concentrations was just breaking up. A wild-eyed combatant lunged at Arthur; then another, and another. He straight-armed the first two; the third ducked un-der his hand, grabbed and hung on.

Failing to break the grip, Arthur worked an arm free and punched the man in the solar plexus. He dropped, but the pause had been fatal: they were surrounded, squeezed into the middle of a tight group of Gepros, surrounded in turn by yell-ing Umercs.

Arthur’s impulse was to struggle; instead, he pulled Anne tighter against him and then relaxed, letting the crowd carry them. When the group was broken a few yards farther on by a spearhead of Coninders, he and Anne managed to get clear for another half-block’s run before they were again captured. Released once more, Arthur saw the number they were looking for and pulled Anne through the doorway. They looked each other over. They were disheveled and dusty, clothing ripped, faces shining with exertion; Anne had a scratch down one cheek, but that was the worst of it. Arthur urged her along the hall.

The apartment they wanted was locked; no one answered the signal. The lock, Arthur judged, was a simple latch type attached as an afterthought to the inside of the door; the house dated back to the early first century A. A., when locks had been thought unnecessary. He threw himself against the door experimentally, then again, harder, and again. Wood splintered; the door sagged open. The apartment seemed empty. There were still clothes in the closets, foodstuffs in the autochef, but the air was stale and there was a thin film of dust over everything. Arthur prowled into the master bedroom and out again. Anne was standing near the doorway, staring at the carpet as if fascinated by the design; Arthur ignored her and went to a filing cabinet in an alcove across the room. After a moment, she followed him.

Arthur had just found, without surprise, that there was nothing at all in the filing cabinet, when suddenly there was a thin scuttling behind him and he turned to see somebody small and quick making for the door.

Arthur bounded after, nearly caught the small figure in the doorway, and did catch it just outside. It squeaked and whirled, all elbows; Arthur chopped it under the ear, and it collapsed. It was a boy, about fifteen, dressed in the tatters of a middle-grade Consumer’s outfit. Tears had streaked his face; there was a crust of dried blood at the corner of his mouth. Arthur carried him back inside. “Who’s this?” he demanded.

Anne peered closer, lifted the boy’s face with gentle fingers. “Tommy Garcia,” she said after a moment.

“Not an Immune—the Agent here used him for errands.”

“Then maybe he knows. Get some water.”

The boy moaned and came to. His wild glance went from Arthur to Anne.

“What were you doing in here?” Arthur demanded.

The boy cringed. “Mr. Paul, he said I could. What hap-pened, did I trip? He give me the key when he left, and he said to look after the place, but—”

“Where did Mr. Paul go?”

“He didn’t say. I wunt of come here, but I was just so tired, I had to lay down somewheres or die. I been captured three times. It don’t look like it’s never gone stop. I’m sure glad you folks are Gepros instead of them demons, like. I been captured already three—”

“Who captured you?” Arthur asked.

“First time, Umercs. That’s what they call themselves. They told me I’m a Umerc now, put me under that machine, and I tell you the truth, it was just like they said, I craved dirty food with ‘U/M’ on it and I wanted to capture more fellows to make them crave it too. And I got some too, but first thing you know the Coninds got me. That was yesterday. I tell you, I never worked so hard—”

Disgusted, Arthur took a last look around the room and went out. The boy and Anne trailed after him; the boy was still talking.

“—can’t rest hardly because you got to get them demons, like, but where at’s it all gone end?”

They huddled in the outer doorway, looking to see how the fighting went. “Who captured you the third time?” Arthur asked absently.

“Wasn’t no third time,” said the boy’s voice behind him. A thin cord descended around Arthur and Anne, and drew tight. The boy’s voice yelled lustily, “Conboys! Conboys, over here!”

Two Coninders detached themselves from the crowd and started over. Cursing, Arthur swung himself around, trying to locate the boy. The boy danced nimbly backward, holding the end of the cord; Arthur rushed him, carrying Anne along, and got close enough to kick him in the kneecap. He went down, looking horrified and reproachful, and Arthur was able to loosen the cord enough to slip it off before the two Coninders burst in. He knocked their heads smartly together, and went on out into the street with Anne.

The trip back was more eventful than the trip down; the crowd’s slow total motion still seemed to be in the other direc-tion. Arthur had to use his elbows a good deal, and his hands more than once. The experience helped relieve his feelings, but not much; he was still simmering when they reached the copter again.

“That drop address I mentioned is just a few hundred miles away,” Anne said reflectively.

“No! I’m not going to sit out the war. You can if you want—I’ll find you another copter.”

She let that go by. “That leaves Reinosud, the Panhandle, Phoenix and the College. Which?”

Arthur considered, gnawing a thumbnail. “There hasn’t been any specific danger to Immunes, that we know of ...”

“No,” Anne murmured.

“—or any breach in our security. If it had been me, I would have stayed put and pulled in my ears. We’ll try the College.”

The campus looked deserted, and was: nothing but a stray dog on the street, no one in Ad building, no one in the classrooms. Arthur made for the nearest underground entrance, and groped for the concealed door control. It wasn’t there.

He looked more closely. There was not a seam or a hairline crack where the control panel or the door itself ought to be. He thumped the wall incredulously. It seemed solid; it was solid—it was an ordinary, lumpish, incredible, uncommunica-tive wall.

“Pull in your ears, you said,” Anne murmured.

Arthur considered. They had been in the College for three-quarters of an hour now; if anybody was watching them from down below, it would seem he had decided not to let them in. A muscle in Arthur’s jaw began to jump. He rummaged around the laboratories, Anne following at her own pace, until he found some rags that would burn. He tied them around the tip of a lecturer’s pointer, soaked them in lubricating oil, and set fire to them. A satisfactory amount of black greasy smoke billowed out.

Holding the torch, Arthur trotted along the hall, in and out of classrooms, watching every ventilator grid to see if smoke was sucked into it. On the tenth try, the smoke vanished. Arthur stood under the grid, complacently watching his smoke pour out of sight, until there was a faint shoe-scrape behind him. He turned just in time to take the brunt of a tangler-gun discharge that glued him and Anne together. A gas capsule burst, at the instant when the blow’s shock made him draw a breath. Very efficient, ran his last thought, but you’d think they could have shown it sooner .... In the anteroom of what used to be the Conind club suite, several students were sitting under a huge mid-continent map speckled with colored pushpins. The pins were arranged in con-figurations that looked as if the normal shapes of Gepro, Umerc and Conind territory had melted and flowed. The map was much pricked, as if the pins had been moved around a lot, but no one was paying any attention to it now. Two of the students were working at orthotypers, one at a miniature litho press, one was making notes from a huge book of tables, and the rest were huddled around something Arthur couldn’t see. A blond young man—Hovey, the Archdeputy’s proctor—came out of the inner rooms, moving fast. Their guide stopped him. “These two say they’ve been to the Blank and got out—by way of Frisco.”

Hovey had stopped, fully attentive, looking and listening. He nodded curtly to Arthur, glanced at Anne, then at the guide. “Searched? Tested? All right.” He consulted his watch. “Come on.” Their guide faded back; Hovey herded them through the inner door.

Inside, the big central room was full of men and women at communicators. Hovey led them across to one of the smaller rooms, went in first, and motioned them after him.

Laudermilk sat behind the desk, listening to someone on a console communicator. He looked up absently; then his eyes focused and he turned slowly, his hands groping flat on the desk top. His old face came apart at the wrinkles. He gulped for air, and tears leaked out of his eyes. Hovey was at his side, concerned. “It’s all right—” said Laudermilk with an effort. “I’m sorry.” The tears were running down his face, but he smiled a wonderful shaky smile, look-ing at Arthur and Anne. “I thought you were both dead,” he told them.

At Laudermilk’s elbow the communicator said something querulous. Laudermilk turned to it with an exclamation. There was a garbled moment, while Hovey left, and Laudermilk ex-plained to the voice.

“Two minutes,” he said. “Two minutes, only,” and pressed the OFF stud.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice trembling, “everything that’s happened to you. In two minutes.”

They tried. Long before the time was up the communicator was shrilling again, the “emergency” ‘light blinking furiously, and Laudermilk had to attend to it. “Yes?” The communica-tor muttered, clearly audible only where Laudermilk sat. “All right—no, just sit tight and watch.” Muttering. “That’s all. You can’t do any more; the conference is starting now.”

He switched off; immediately the board lighted again and he was telling someone to expect a replacement for the dis-trict board of supervisors within an hour. A moment later, he was bawling a description at Hovey and turning the outer office upside down until Hovey poked his head in again: “Got one—he’s in north Seven. Say three hours.”

Arthur listened, fascinated and on edge. Laudermilk was arranging for a group of Guard vehicles to evacuate an Im-mune day school in Tucson. He was sending a flying squad of engineers to safeguard power installations in Manhattan Beach. He was—Arthur stiffened—apparently arranging the de-tails of an assassination.

Eventually the calls began to slacken. Laudermilk took one more which, to judge by his expression, he had been waiting for. “Yes? ... Yes. That’s good news, Arnold. I’m immensely relieved ... Yes, I know they did, but all the same—” He laughed and switched off.

“The conference is over,” he told Arthur and Anne. “Now we can begin to relax.”

“What conference?” Arthur asked.

“Didn’t I tell you? The intersocial conference—very high level. It took them five mortal hours; how I wish I could have been there. Ranting and raving; like a zoo at feeding time. But they finally came to it; it was the only thing they could do, of course—it was what they went there for. The war is over—that is, in principle. Enforcing it will take a little longer.”

Laudermilk had a crowded little suite filled with all manner of strange things—tapestries, ivory chessmen, leather-bound books, bells, wood carvings, ancient golf clubs. While Arthur and Anne ate, Laudermilk brought them up to date. The rumors about Conind had so alarmed the ruling circles in both Umerc and Gepro that they had set up similar illicit analogue training programs. “—Proving,” said Laudermilk, “that there was at least one unabsorbed Immune, as we thought, in every one of them. That’s one good thing that has come out of this—in the general confusion, we managed to kill them all.”

Arthur stirred. “That woman in Portland. Hambling. Gertrude Hambling.”

“Yes. She was one; so was her sister Marcia, as it turned out.”

“Madam O’Ryan?” asked Anne.

“Yes; she too. There was a whole nest of them in Conind. Then there was Clay Willard MacKichan VIII in Gepro, and Noel-Noel Dilworth in Umerc, among others—both very highly placed. Quite dangerous. That’s always been a weak spot of ours: we had no control over what went on in the ruling circles, anywhere.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow involuntarily. He would have sworn the old man was not watching, but Laudermilk turned to him and added, “Too dangerous. The only way to get an Agent into any ruling family would be to plant him there at birth, and we were very much afraid the result of that would be just one more Stockholder, and probably a rather dan-gerous one. We could try to recruit him at any convenient age, of course, but would we dare? We thought not.” He let his benevolent smile linger on Arthur for a moment, then turned to Anne again. “As it is,” he said, “there’s a mess that will take years to clean up. Gordon and Arthur helped a great deal. Short as it was, that warning gave us an advantage.”

“He did get through, then,” Anne said. She seemed almost normal again, sitting there, proud in her rags ... Almost? She was normal, Arthur realized. When had it happened? He couldn’t remember.

“Oh, yes,” Laudermilk was saying. “He got through. We took defensive measures right away, that probably saved us heavy losses, perhaps even exposure. And of course we orga-nized a campaign immediately to keep the Guard out of the fighting as much as possible.”

He turned to Arthur, whose bewilderment probably showed. “Now you see, that had two results. It increased the standing of all our people in the Guard—that’s a useful by-product—and it saved the Guard forces to be used now, all working together.”

“What I’m wondering,” said Arthur, who was wondering about several things, “is what effect this will have on the people who’ve been through the fighting—not just seeing people of other societies, but in a sense being them. You talk about cleaning up a mess; is there any way to clean that up?”

Laudermilk looked unhappy. “We don’t know. If you want my guess, there’s going to be an appalling number of mental breakdowns in the next six months or so. What it amounts to is that we’ve all had a good shaking; if there had been any weapons used, of course, it would have been a different and uglier story.”

“I was surprised at that,” Anne put in. “Why weren’t they? Conind had time to make them.”

“You’re thinking of the wars in history books,” said Laudermilk. “I made the same mistake; we all did. Why kill people to get territory, when it’s so much easier to convert them to loyal subjects?—so they thought. Well .... There’s another reason, probably. It isn’t easy for an untrained person to handle a killing weapon, even an Immune. The woman you spoke of, Sebastian, was exceptional. You haven’t had weapons drill yet, have you? No, I thought not; that comes in the second year. Well—”

He reached into a drawer, and produced a squat object that looked something like a tangler gun and something like an archaic pistol. “This is what you’ll use, chiefly. It’s our own development; it fires a noisy missile that spreads on contact. I shouldn’t anticipate, but you’ll be firing at simulated human targets—quite realistic. My point is, you won’t find it easy to do. It’s an idea we don’t grow up used to; we don’t have the toy guns and bombs to play with that our ancestors once had. It will take you a session or two, probably, before you can pull the trigger, knowing what will happen to the target if you hit.”

He laid the gun casually on the table before him. “They splatter,” he said. Arthur stared at it in sick fascination. Irrationally (because there had been no sound from that room) he was seeing again the bright wet blood on Hovey’s sleeve.

“No, Arthur—” He looked up, startled. “That is not,” said Laudermilk, “the way we kill students at the College.” .

For a choked instant he could feel his face working, beyond his control; he knew that what he was feeling was written there nakedly.

“I’m sorry,” said Laudermilk after a moment, “but that was necessary. It’s clear enough, Arthur, that you haven’t got just the usual freshman doubts; you’ve learned something you weren’t meant to know about yet. Tell me what it was. If you have any reservations about me, or the College, or the Im-munes in general, tell me those, too. Let’s get it cleared up now.”

Arthur knew the futility of lying. He wasn’t prepared; he had given away too much. He took a deep breath. “Did you kill Flynn?” he demanded.

“Flynn?” Laudermilk looked reflective. “I can’t recall. Tell me something about him.”

Pages 188-189 of the Sphere 1967 text are missing

have a good reason to think that three people out of ten would be hopelessly insane without their

’angels.’ You want to get down from this tiger; so do we. Will you tell me how to go about it?”

Arthur made an irritable gesture. “Do it gradually. In a generation—”

“No. Not enough sane people are being born to run the essential services—food supply, power, sanitation. Eventually, of course, here and elsewhere, we Immunes will be forced to take control. We are trying to put that off as long as possible ... Yes, I mean it. We would like to delay that event until there are enough of us to fill the necessary posts, but we don’t think we’ll be that lucky. There is going to be a crash, in spite of all we can do, probably before this century is over. It’s not going to be pretty.”

After a moment he added, “When I said just now that each of us carries many lives in his hand, I meant lives of the Nor-mal population. We’re trustees, like it or not. Your grandchil-dren may be able to do what they please; I profoundly hope so. We do what we have to; some of that is not pretty, either. I don’t think I’d call us the least fortunate of human beings, though; I myself have had a full life, crowded with joys be-yond any reasonable anticipation ....”

Arthur discovered that the tension had somehow impercep-tibly drained out of him. The gun that lay near Laudermilk’s hand had lost its sinister significance: it was just another tool of the trade, to be used at its own moment, which was not now.

Watching Laudermilk—and Anne, sitting cool and watchful beside him—Arthur could hardly fit them to the unformed suspicion that had been growing in his mind: that there might be a third or a fourth reason why the College killed freshmen—too much concern with ideals, say, or an unfortunate associa-tion with other people’s bad luck (Anne’s capture in Darien, Higsbee’s death) ....

“Why did you come back, Arthur?” Laudermilk asked.

Fatigue was pulling at his shoulders. “Why?” he repeated stupidly.

Laudermilk nodded. “You had had these doubts about us even before you left, isn’t that true? You had a chance to think about it—you could easily have gone off on your own. Why didn’t you? Why did you come back?”

When Arthur hesitated, frowning, Laudermilk said kindly, “Shall I tell you? It was because you had nowhere else to go. You’re one of us, now. Anne?”

She nodded. “He’ll do.”

“I thought as much. We have made you unfit for any but an Agent’s life, Arthur. Can you resign yourself to that?” He put the gun away.

“Can try,” said Arthur, with an effort. He was so deliciously tired, it was almost too much trouble to think.

“I promise you no peace or contentment,” said Laudermilk softly, “no family in the old good sense, not even happiness—I think you both belong to a generation that will never know how to be happy. No prizes; you won’t live to see the world you make, and if our descendants shape it themselves, as I hope, it’ll be one you wouldn’t like if you could see it .... Nothing at all, except the rewards of competence and curiosity, and an occasional windfall of laughter. I think you will find it is enough.”

A few minutes later, he watched them leave together. Both of them were unsteady with fatigue; their arms were around each other’s waist. They were grimy; tattered and bedraggled, and the average Stockholders’ haberdasher, he thought, would not give a tenth-credit for either of them. But to Laudermilk (as he told himself ironically, yet content enough, sitting there in the weariness of his years) they were the most beautiful things in the world, this side of Jordan.

[1] “Mr. Migliozzius, welcome, welcome. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you, but, to tell the truth—”