Besides, he had a shifty look to him when he said there would be no tricks in the magic. But he comes back in a minute, his keychain damn near tripping him up, he’s so loaded down with stuff and paraphernalia. Real weird lookin’ items, too.

“Copped ‘em from the lab over at the U.,” he explains, waving a hand at the untidy pile of stuff. “Well, here goes. Remember, there may be more of a mess than is usual with an experienced practitioner, but I’m strictly a goony-bird in this biz, Jack.”

“Hey, wait a minute with this magic stuff...” I began, but he waved me off impatiently, and began manipulating his implements.

So he starts drawing a star-like thing on the ground, pouring some stinkin’ stuff into a cauldron, mixing it up, muttering some gibberish that I could swear had “Oo-bop-shebam” and “Oo-shoobydooby” in there somewhere, and a lot of other.

Pretty soon he comes over, sprinkles some powder on me, and I sneeze, almost blowing him over.

“Gesundheit,” he mutters, staring at me nastily.

He sprinkles some more powder on me, mutters something that sounded like, “By the sacred ring-finger of The Great Gods Bird and Prez, man, hip this kid to what he craveth. Go, go, go, man!

“Now,” he inquires, around a bag in which he is rattling what sounds like bones, “whaddaya want?”

I had been thinking it out, in between incantations, and I had decided what I wanted: “Make me so’s I can run faster than anyone in the school, willya.” I figured then Underfeld would have to take me on the team.

The little gnome nods as if he understands, and starts runnin’ around and around outside this star-like thing, in ever-decreasing circles, faster n’ faster, till I can hardly make him out. Then he slows down and stops, puffing away like crazy, mumbles something about, “Gotta layoff them clover stems,” and so saying throws this pink powder on me, yelling as loud as he can, “FRACTURED!” Up goes a puff of pink smoke and what looks like a side-show magician’s magnesium flare, and the next thing I know, he and the stuff is gone, and I’m all alone in The Woods.

So that’s the yarn.

Hmmm? What’s that? Did he make me so I could run faster than anyone else in the school? Oh, yeah, sure.

You know anybody wants to hire a sixteen-year-old centaur?

When I first arrived in Hollywood in February of 1962 I found myself thinking about the next story frequently. There is no logical reason for its insistent reappearance in my thoughts, except that somehow there seems to me a subtle similarity between the “atmosphere of doom” in the allegory that follows, and the land of the Film Industry. Though everyone out here has been most kind to me, not only in matters of friendship, but in such dandies as giving me large sums of money (most of which I don’t deserve), I sometimes wake in the morning expecting to hear a sepulchral voice intoning, “Okay, strike the Hollywood set!” and I’ll look out the window to see them rolling up Los Angeles and environs. There is an unreality here that superimposes itself over the normal continuum, effecting a world-view much like that observed through a dessert-dish of Jell-O. Or like the one I cannot seem to forget, in the story I called The Sky Is Burning They came flaming down out of a lemon sky, and the first day, ten thousand died. The screams rang in our heads, and the women ran to the hills to escape the sound of it; but there was no escape for them...nor for any of us.

The sky was aflame with death, and the terrible, unbelievable part of it was...the death, the dying was not us!

It started late in the evening. The first one appeared as a cosmic spark struck in the night. Then, almost before the first had faded back into the dusk, there was another, and then another, and soon the sky was a jeweler’s pad, twinkling with unnameable diamonds.

I looked up from the Observatory roof, and saw them all, tiny pinpoints of brilliance, cascading down like raindrops of fire. And somehow, before any of it was explained, I knew: this was something important. Not important the way five extra inches of plastichrome on the tail-fins of a new copter are important...not important the way a war is important...but important the way the creation of the Universe had been important, the way the death of it would be. And I knew it was happening all over Earth.

There could be no doubt of that. All across the horizon, as far as I could see, they were falling and burning”

and burning. The sky was not appreciably brighter, but it was as though a million new stars had been hurled up there to live for a brief microsecond.

Even as I watched, Portales called to me from below. “Frank! Frank, come down here...this is fantastic!”

I swung down the catwalk into the telescope dome, and saw him hunched over the refraction eyepiece. He was pounding his fist against the side of the vernier adjustment box. It was a pounding of futility, and strange. ness.

A pounding without meaning behind it. “Look at this, Frank. Will you take a look at this?” His voice was a rising inflection of disbelief.

I nudged him aside and slid into the bucket. The scope was trained on Mars. The Martian sky was burning, too. The same pinpoints of light, the same intense pyrotechnics spiraling down. We had alloted the evening to a study of the red planet, for it was clear in that direction, and I saw it all very sharply, as brightnesses and darkness again, all across the face of the planet.

“Call Bikel at Wilson,” I told Portales. “Ask him about Venus.”

Behind me I heard Portales dialing the closed circuit number, and I half-listened to his conversation with Aaron Bikel at Mt. Wilson. I could see the flickering reflections of the vid-screen on the phone, as they washed across the burnished side of the scope. But I didn’t turn around; I knew what the answer would be.

Finally, he hung up, and the colors died: “The same,” he said sharply, as though defying me to come up with an answer. I didn’t bother snapping back at him. He had been bucking for my job as Director of the Observatory for nearly three years now, and I was accustomed to his antagonisms--desperately as I had to machinate occasionally, to keep him in his place.

I watched for a while longer, then left the dome.

I went downstairs, and tuned in my short-wave radio, trying to find out what Tokyo or Heidelburg or Johannesburg had to say. I wasn’t able to catch any mention of the phenomena during the short time I fiddled with the sweep, but I was certain they were seeing it the same everywhere else. Then I went back to the Dome, to change the settings on the scope. After an argument with Portales, I beamed the scope down till it was sharp to just inside the atmospheric blanket. I tipped in the sweeper, and tried a fast scan of the sky, but continued to miss the bursts of light at the moment of their explosion. So I cut in the photo mechanism, and set a wide angle to it. Then I cut off the sweep, and started clicking them off. I reasoned that the frequency of the lights would inevitably bring one into photo focus.

Then I went downstairs, and back to the short-wave. I spent two hours with it, and managed to pick up a news broadcast from Switzerland. I had been right, of course. Portales rang me after two hours and said we had a full reel of photos, and should he have them developed.

This was too big to trust to his adolescent whims, and rather than have him fog up a valuable photo, I told him to leave them in the container, and I’d be right up, to handle it myself. When the photos came out of the solution, I had to finger through thirty or forty of empty space before I caught ten that had what I wanted.

They were not meteorites.

On the contrary.

Each of the flames in the sky was a creature. A living creature. But not human. Far from it.

The photos told what they looked like, but not till the Project Snatch ship went up and sucked one off the sky did we realize how large they were, that they glowed with an inner light of their own and--that they were telepathic.

From what I can gather, it was no problem capturing one. The ship opened its cargo hatch, and turned on the sucking mechanisms used to drag in flotsam from space. The creature, however, could have stopped itself from being dragged into the ship, merely by placing one of its seven-taloned hands on either side of the hatch, and resisting the sucker. But it was interested, as we learned later; it had been five thousand years, and they had not known we had come so far, and the creature was interested. So it came along. When they called me in, along with five hundred-odd other scientists (and Portales managed to wangle himself a place in the complement, through that old charlatan Senator Gouverman), we went to the Smithsonian, where they had had him installed, and marveled...just stood and marveled. He--or she, we never knew--resembled the Egyptian god Ra. It had the head of a hawk, or what appeared to be a hawk with great slitted eyes of green in which flecks of crimson and amber and black danced. Its body was thin to the point of emaciation, but humanoid with two arms and two legs. There were bends and joints on the body where no such bends and joints existed on a human, but there was a definite chest cavity, and obvious buttocks, knees, and chin. The creature was a pale, milky-white, except on the hawk’s-crest which was a brilliant blue, fading down into white. Its beak was light blue, also blending into the paleness of its flesh. It had seven toes to the foot, seven talons to the hand.

The God Ra. God of the Sun. God of light.

The creature glowed from within with a pale, but distinct aura that surrounded it like a halo. We stood there, looking up at it in the glass cage. There was nothing to say; there it was, the first creature from another world. We might be going out into space in a few years--farther, that is, than the Moon, which we had reached in 1963, or Mars that we had circumnavigated in 1966--but for now, as far as we knew, the Universe was wide and without end, and out there we would find unbelievable creatures to rival any imagining. But this was the first.

We stared up at it. The being was thirteen feet tall.

Portales was whispering something to Karl Leus from Caltech. I snorted to myself at the way he never gave up; for sheer guff and grab I had to hand it to him. He was a pusher all right. Leus wasn’t impressed. It was apparent he wasn’t interested in what Portales had to say, but he had been a Nobel Prize winner in ‘63 and he felt obligated to be polite to even obnoxious pushers like my assistant.

The army man--whatever his name was--was standing on a platform near the high, huge glass case in which the creature stood, unmoving, but watching us.

They had put food of all sorts through a feeder slot, but it was apparent the creature would not touch it. It merely stared down, silent as though amused, and unmoving as though uncaring.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, may I have your attention!” the Army man caroled at us. A slow silence, indicative of our disrespect for him and his security measures that had caused us such grief getting into this meeting, fell through the groups of men and women at the foot of the case.

“We have called you here--” pompous ass with his we, as if he were the government incarnate, “to try and solve the mystery of who this being is, and what he has come to Earth to find out. We detect in this creature a great menace to--” and he went on and on, bleating and parodying all the previous scare warnings we had had about every nation on Earth. He could not have realized how we scoffed at him, and wanted to hoot him off the platform. This creature was no menace. Had we not captured him, her, it--the being would have burnt to a cinder like its fellows, falling into our atmosphere.

So we listened him to the end. Then we moved in closer and stared at the creature. It opened its beak in what was uncommonly like a smile, and I felt a shiver run through me. The sort of shiver I get when I hear deeply emotional music, or the sort of shiver I get when making love. It was a basic trembling in the fibers of my body. I can’t explain it, but it was a prelude to something. I paused in my thinking, just ceased my existence if Cogito Ergo Sum is the true test of existence. I stopped thinking and allowed myself to sniff of that strangeness; to savor the odor of space and faraway worlds, and one world in particular.

A world where the winds are so strong, the inhabitants have hooks on their feet, which they dig into the firm green soil to maintain their footing. A world where colors riot among the foliage one season, and the next--are the pale white of a maggot’s flesh. A world where the triple moons swim through azure skies, and sing in their pas. sage, playing on a lute of invisible strings, the seas and the deserts as accompanists. A world of wonder, older than Man and older than the memory of the Forever.

I realized abruptly, as my mind began to function once more, that I had been listening to the creature. Ithk was the creature’s--name?--denomination?--gender?--something. It was one of five hundred hundred-thousand like itself, who had come to the system of Sol.

Come? No, perhaps that was the wrong word. They had been… Not by rockets, nothing that crude. Nor space-warp, nor even mental power. But a leap from their world-what was that name? Something the human tongue could not form, the human mind could not conceive?--to this world in seconds. Not instantaneous, for that would have involved machinery of some sort, or the expenditure of mental power. It was beyond that, and above that. It was an essence of travel. But they had come. They had come across the mega-galaxies, hundreds of thousands of light-years...incalculable distances from there to here, and Ithk was one of them.

Then it began to talk to some of us.

Not all of us there, for I could tell some were not receiving it. I don’t attribute it to good or bad in any of us, nor intelligence, nor even sensitivity. Perhaps it was whim on Ithk’s part, or the way he(?) wanted to do it out of necessity. But whatever it was, he spoke to only some of us there. I could see Portales was receiving nothing, though old Karl Leus’s face was in a state of rapture, and I knew he had the message himself. For the creature was speaking in our minds telepathically. It did not amaze me, or confound me, nor even shock me. It seemed right. It seemed to go with Ithk’s size and look, its aura and arrival. And it spoke to us.

And when it was done, some of us crawled up on the platform and released the bolts that held the case of glass shut; though we all knew Ithk could have left it at any second had it desired. But Ithk had been interested in knowing--before it burned itself out as its fellows had done--and it had found out about us little Earth people. It had satisfied its curiosity, on this instant’s stopover before it went to hurtling, flaming destruction. It had been curious...for the last time Ithk’s people had come here, Earth had been without creatures who went into space. Even as pitifully short a distance into space as we could venture. But now the stopover was finished, and Ithk had a short journey to complete. It had come an unimaginably long way. for a purpose, and though this had been interesting, Ithk was anxious to join his fellows.

So we unbolted the cage--which had never really confined a creature that could be out of it at will--and Ithk was there! not there. Gone!

The sky was still flaming.

One more pinpoint came into being suddenly, slipped down in a violent rush through the atmosphere, and burned itself out like a wasting torch. Ithk was gone.

Then we left.

Karl Leus leaped from the thirty-second story of a building in Washington that evening. Nine others died that day. And though I was not ready for that, there was a deadness in me. A feeling of waste and futility and hopelessness. I went back to the Observatory, and tried to drive the memory of what Ithk had said from my mind and my soul. If I had been as deeply perceptive as Leus or any of the other nine, I might have gone immediately. But I am not in their category. They realized the full depth of what it had said, and so perceiving, they had taken their lives. I can understand their doing it.

Portales came to me when he heard about it.

“They just--just killed themselves!” he babbled. I was sick of his petty annoyances. Sick of them, and not even interested any longer in fighting him.

“Yes, they killed themselves,” I answered wearily, staring at the flaming, burning sky from the Observatory catwalk. It always seemed to be night now. Always night--with light.

“But why? Why would they do it?”

I spoke to hear my thoughts. For I knew what was coming. “Because of what the creature said.”

“What it said?”

“What it told us, and what it did not tell us.”

“It spoke to you?”

“To some of us. To Leus and the nine and others. I heard it.”

“But why didn’t I hear it? I was right there!”

I shrugged. He had not heard, that was all.

“Well, what did it say? Tell me,” he demanded.

I turned to him, and looked at him. Would it affect him? No, I rather thought not. And that was good. Good for him, and good for others like him. For without them, Man would cease to exist. I told him.

“The lemmings,” I said. “You know the lemmings. For no reason, for some deep instinctual surging, they follow each other, and periodically throw themselves off the cliffs. They follow one another down to destruction. A racial trait. It was that way with the creature and his people. They came across the megagalaxies to kill themselves here. To commit mass suicide in our solar system. To burn up in the atmosphere of Mars and Mercury and Venus and Earth, and to die, that’s all. Just to die.”

His face was stunned. I could see he comprehended that. But what did it matter? That was not what had made Leus and the nine kill themselves, that was not what filled me with such a feeling of frustration. The drive of one race was not the drive of another.

“But--but--I don’t underst--”

I cut him off.

“That was what Ithk said.”

“But why did they come here to die?” he asked, confused. “Why here and not some other solar system or galaxy?”

That was what Ithk had said. That was what we had wondered in our minds--damn us for asking--and in its simple way, Ithk had answered.

“Because, “ I explained slowly, softly, “this is the end of the Universe.”

His face did not register comprehension. I could see it was a concept he could not grasp. That the solar system, Earth’s system, the backyard of Earth to be precise, was the end of the Universe. Like the fiat world over which Columbus would have sailed, into nothingness. This was the end of it all. Out there, in the other direction, lay a known Universe, with an end to it...but they--Ithk’s people--ruled it. It was theirs, and would always be theirs. For they had racial memory burnt into each embryo child born to their race, so they would never stagnate. After every lemming race, a new generation was born, that would live for thousands of years, and advance. They would go on till they came here to flame out in our atmosphere. But they would rule what they had while they had it.

So to us, to the driving, unquenchably curious, seeking and roaming Earthman, whose life was tied up with wanting to know, needing to know, there was nothing left. Ashes. The dust of our own system. And after that, nothing.

We were at a dead end. There could be no wandering among the stars. It was not that we couldn’t go. We could. But we would be tolerated. It was their Universe, and this, our Earth, was the dead end.

Ithk had not known what it was doing when it said that to us. It had meant no evil, but it had doomed some of us. Those of us who dreamed. Those of us who wanted more than what Portales wanted.

I turned away from him and looked up.

The sky was burning.

I held very tightly to the bottle of sleeping tablets in my pocket. So much light up there. Bluntly put, the following story has truly been used. I am always astounded at writers who sell and re-sell and re-resell their stories or books, wringing every last possible penny from them. But in the case of the following epic, I can truly say I take backseat to no man. The idea occurred to me in my first days at Ohio State University, back in the early Fifties. I wrote it and it was published in the Ohio State Sundial, the humor magazine I later edited. When I got to New York in 1956, I submitted the idea as story-continuity to EC Publications, now the producers of Mad magazine, then the producers of such goodies as Weird Science-Fantasy comics, in which this story appeared as “Upheaval.” Between these two appearances, however, the story showed up in the amateur science fiction magazine I published, Dimensions. In that incarnation it was called “Green Odyssey.” Eventually, I wrote it as a full short story and it appeared in Bill Hamling’s short-lived Space Travel Magazine. No two of these setting-downs were alike, incidentally. Then the radio performance rights were purchased by an outfit that was planning to revive Dimension X for Sunday listening on the Mutual Broadcasting System. It never got off the ground, but I had been paid, so that was another sale. There may have been another conversion or two of this story, but I can’t remember right now if such was the case. What I do remember is that the basic tenet of this story-You ain’t as hot an item as you think, Chollie!--has appealed to every editor who has seen it. Which speaks well for mankind, I guess, if you think there’s validity in the encounter viewed in Mealtime While the ship Circe burned its way like some eternal Roman Candle through the surrounding dark of forever, within: “You make me sick, Dembois! Absolutely sick to my gut!”

“Sick? Why you sleazy crumb, I ought to break you in half! Who the hell do you think you’re--”

“All right! Now! That’s it from the both of you. I’ve got enough on my hands now with just getting there and back--I said knock it off, Kradter--just getting there and back, and I’ve heard enough swill from both of you on this trip! So kill it before I take a spanner to your heads. Read me?”

There were three of them riding the flame to the stars. Three on a Catalog Ship sent to chart the planets of unknown stars, and to take brief studies of the worlds themselves. They were three months out, on a jump between their last world--an ivy-covered ball of green they had named Garbo because it was the single planet of its star--and their next one, which had no name. Nor chart position; nor star whose light had reached the Earth as yet. But there was another island of star clusters across this immensity of black between galaxies, and as soon as they had hopped it through Inverspace, they would find yet another shining light to draw them on. It had been that way for over one year and nine months. They had catalogued over two-hundred and twenty worlds, each one different from its predecessors.

But the work was not enough. Time hangs like an albatross about the neck of the spacewanderer. He sees blackness all about him, and occasionally the starshine, and even more occasionally the crazy-quilt patchwork that is Inverspace. There is no radio contact with Earth. There is little recreation and even less provision made to keep fit and alert.

But nature knows when its creatures need sharpening. So, the arguments. There were three of them: Kradter, who was descended from Prussians, and had the look of them. Tall, with heavily-muscled torso and the square, close-cropped blonde hair of his ancestors. Rigid in his thinking unless pried forcibly from the clutch of his convictions. Poverty and determination had combined to bring him into the highpaying but dangerous SeekServ branch of the Navy. He was a Lieutenant, with the opinion that rank was unimportant, only drive was essential.

The second was Dembois, who was a bigot.

He came from Louisiana wealth, and his background was one of idleness, dissipation and revelry. A serious affair with a lovely quadroon girl had forced his father to order the boy out of the city, and into the Navy. Authority and wealth and position had saved Dembois from a prison sentence, but for him the Navy was sentence enough. He despised the SeekServ, and it was for that reason he had joined it. Self-punishment, in the adolescent “Look how I’m suffering, aren’t you sorry you threw me out of the house!” tradition had prompted his signing-on. He loathed the furry and tracked and tentacled and finned and feathered aliens he discovered on the worlds of space.

He hated Negros and Jews, Catholics and Orientals. He was uncomfortable in the presence of poor people, sick people, crippled people or hungry people. Yet there was a fierce determination in him, also. What he wanted to do, he did thoroughly and well; what he did not want to do, but knew he must do, he did in a similar fashion. He was an Ensign II.

The third was the Captain of the Circe.

His past was the reflective, mysterious face of a mirror; any man might look, but all he would see was the image of himself. No more. His past was silent in its shell, but its form was there to be seen in the man. His name was Calk.

His personality dominated the Circe, held the other two in check. Calk was strong, perhaps too strong for his own good. The bickering was beginning to tell on him.

“What the hell was it all about this time?”

Dembois and Kradter spoke together, their voices rising automatically in anger as they found competition.

Calk was forced to shut them up again. Then he motioned to Kradter. “Okay. You first. What was it this time?”

Kradter looked disgruntled, and yanked his pipe from where it was thrust pistol-like in his belt. He dug a finger into the blackened bowl and growled something unintelligible.

“Well, now look, Kradter, if you want to say something, say it. If you don’t, there isn’t an argument, nothing to settle, and I can go the blazes back to my plot-tank.”

Kradter looked up, as though ready to throw a string of cursewords, but merely said, instead, “We were arguing the nobility of Man. “

Calk’s eyebrows went up. They were thick and black, and struck the impression of two slanted caterpillars inching up his forehead.

Kradter explained hurriedly, expecting Dembois to burst in momentarily. “I was saying that the poor slobs we find on these worlds deserve human care. It’s our obligation to these lesser creatures to provide them with the comforts a greater race can offer.”

Dembois snorted, and Calk looked over sharply. “Now, what was your beef, that you wanted to start a brawl?”

Dembois looked angrily at Kradter. “ And I say it’s not our place to do anything for these stinking savages.

The only thing we owe them is conquest. They’d overrun us in a month if we gave them the chance. Kill the bloody bastards, that’s the answer to colonial expansion out here.

“Put them away for good, the first thing we see them. It’s the only way we can be sure we’re protected. This ass--” he stopped at Kradter’s bleat of anger, and tensed as the other man took a halfstep forward. Calk stopped them. “Okay, knock it off. So one of you thinks we should play Big Daddy to the poor natives, and the other thinks we should mow ‘em down on sight. Okay. Fine. Good. Now shut your traps and let me get our plot set, or we’ll wind up frying inside some sun when we popout.”

He gave them both a strange look, and murmured, “Homo superior,” and walked out of the lounge.

The other two sat staring at points between them. Neither spoke. No crossbow bolts were loosed.

The Circe moved out.

A green fog in the ever-changing pattern of Inverspace. Green, roiling, oily dark fog. A speck of crimson that flickered and steadied and exploded into sharp golden fragments.

A lurch, a twist, the guts heaving and the puke-masks: filling, and the eyeballs burning without heat. The roots of the hair straining, and the arches of the cheekbones stretching the skin tight as a corpse’s. Then a grey-out, a black-out, a white-and-black-out and the ship was traveling in the normal universe again.

They were in sight of the cold, chiselled stars and the steady multi-colored stars. They were a Catalog Ship and there was work to be done. The constellation firmed out in the plot-tank, superimposing itself almost exactly over Calk’s lined-in course. The CourseComp chattered eerily and the few discrepancies in course variation were merged, so that the wing-shaped constellation was directly on the Captain’s pattern. Dembois and Kradter knocked politely on the door to the control cabin, and slid it open when Calk said absently, “Come.”

“How’s it set?” Dembois asked.

“About three points off, but we’ve corrected already,” Calk replied, indicating the plottank. He slipped the infrared goggles off and stuck them on their pad. “You start undogging the gear yet?”

Kradter nodded, addressing the nod totally to Calk, and Dembois’s lips pursed in annoyance that the conversation had been stolen away from him. He thrust back into it with, “I hope we don’t run up against any eetees.

The last batch was enough to turn my stomach for quite a while.”

Kradter whirled on him again. “I thought we had this out once and for all, man. I thought you understood our job is to befriend and aid these unfortunate--”

“Bull!” Dembois snarled. “Show me in the Regs where it says that? Show me, or shut your Heinie trap-eetee lover.”

Kradter had swung before Calk could stop him. He caught Dembois along the cheekbone and spun the smaller man. The Ensign II staggered backward, crashed into the bulkhead and slid to one knee, shaking his head.

Kradter was moving forward when Calk caught him, slipping his hands under the Prussian’s armpits and up behind his neck, where they locked. He dragged Kradter half off the floor in a full-nelson and shook him solidly, taking the Lieutenant’s breath away.

“Now...knock...off...that...stuff!” Calk whispered loudly in Kradter’s ear. He held the man completely paralyzed, his feet dangling a quarter inch off the floor. Tremendous muscles stood out on Calk’s arms, beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt, and a blue pulse of nerve throbbed at his right temple. Dembois staggered erect, clutching his face, and made a few idle stepping motions; then, in a blur, he hurled himself at Kradter and sank a doubled fist into the Lieutenant’s belly. Kradter gasped and moaned softly and slumped in Calk’s grasp.

The Captain dropped him, reached over with one hand and brought a judo cut down on the Ensign’s neck.

Dembois clattered to the deckplates beside his adversary.

Calk returned to the plotting seat, and snapped his goggles back on. Once more he murmured softly to himself: “Homo superior!”

The three outer planets were catalogued without difficulty. The blue dwarf was not able to reach them with its rays, and they were frozen; but there were deep treasures of pitchblende and phosphorous and trace elements from which ferro-zinc could be collandered and strained with little effort. They were marked in the Jog as triple-A planets, well worth the trouble to reach and mine.

The center ring of planets--fifteen of them--was not as worthwhile. There were three desert worlds (too much harsh silicon), seven barren rock worlds without atmosphere, and ignored by the hand of God (nothing grew there, nothing of value), four jungle planets (one with technicolored tyrannosauri), and one oddity.

They saved the oddity for last.

Before they would catalogue the inner round of worlds--there appeared to be nineteen, though one of those they credited as being a moon of a blue and white planet might have had an atmosphere of its own--they would set down and explore the oddity.

The oddity was a pale silver globe without ground feature and without atmosphere. It was a great ball of smooth tinfoil set in the black of space, a featureless plain without hump or depression, mountain or valley, stream or even rock formation. No grass and no clouds. In fact, nothing. They stared down at the planet inching its way to greatness in the ports. It was as though they were settling toward a gigantic beachball.

“That’s impossible!” Dembois gasped.

“How can it be impossible, you clown? It’s there, isn’t it?” Kradter was spoiling for another fight. The pains in his stomach had not yet completely left him.

“Break!” Calk snapped. “Not this close to landfall, you, two. And it may be impossible, but it’s there, and we have to check it out. No telling what a planet like that might have beneath the surface.”

Dembois cast a sharp glance at the potentiometer and the gauging devices for composition. “They say you’re wrong, Captain.”

Calk turned to the dials and studied them at length. They read zero. Not negative, as they read in space, but zero. But that, too, was impossible. The planet had to be made of something. They looked at each other, and said nothing, for there was nothing to say. They had encountered a phenomenon. “Could it be contra-terrene?” The question hung unasked in the air of the control room. The only way to answer it was to test.

They shot out the missile when they were still ten miles above the smooth silver surface, and it sped down down down without hindrance of air or course correction. It hit, and exploded. But its indestructible plasteel devices continued to register on the Circe’s banks, so it was apparent the planet was of matter, not the anti-matter that would disintegrate the rocket on ‘contact.

They landed.

When the three men emerged from the ship, sliding down the landing ramp as children on a playground slide, they were encased in bulky pressure suits and clear bubble helmets. Each carried a triple-thread stun-rifle, for despite the utterly safe appearance of the planet, there was no question as to carrying weapons. Space was deep and angry at Man. Its creatures were varied and utterly unpredictable. So they never took a chance.

As they walked out across the featureless plain, their chest-consoles humming and gauging and studying, they moved in a tight triangle.

Calk, in the front, as the apex of the triangle, cast about warily, his triple-threader swinging in lazy arcs.

“Have you noticed the ground?” Kradter asked, his voice hushed and solemn as a man in a cathedral, transmitted over the intercom system.

Calk nodded, but Dembois put it into words.

“It’s spongey. Springy. Like the ‘giving’ floors back at SeekServ Central. What’s it made of?”

“I don’t know,” Calk answered, and that was the final word any of them said. There was a shivering in the planet. A soft trembling, like a bowl of jelly. It shivered and pulsed and seemed to deepen as they stopped.

Then, through their intercoms, they heard a distinct crunch and clang, and as one they spun around. Half a mile behind them the Circe was trembling, tottering, falling, and then The planet swallowed the ship.

They screamed. Each of them, and the pitch was the same. The meaning behind the screams was the same.

They were lost, stranded out here, somewhere out in the nowhere, with only the oxygen in their tanks to sustain them, and their transportation gone!

Then...they realized the greater danger. The planet was carnivorous!

They realized it too late.

Beneath their feet, the ground swelled, like a bubble bursting, and abruptly opened with a wet, smacking sound...

Their screams were cut short as they fell fell fell--and the silver, featureless, spongey ground closed without a break. Without an indication that a ship of space and three men had been there. In the syrup. Grey and all-consuming. Heaving, tumbling, dragged deeper and deeper, thrust into the maw of a force without form. The allness was about them; they were being...

EATEN ALIVE!!

The grey substance held them fu a rubbery grip. They could move but slightly. Grey and sparkling, coating their helmets. Breathing was clear, but seemed so oppressive. The planet of grey featurelessness was alive, the entire world was a creature, an entity, and they were in its gut. They turned over and over wishing knowing hoping not caring but knowing that this was all of it down to the bottom without end and without hope and hands out and legs out and their fingers spread and their eyes wide as their throats tensed and tore at the screams that rattled within their helmets...

Overhead, the Circe swam into view, was there a moment, no longer, and gone out out and out gone again in the silver nothingness that lived held would not release them goodbye. The trembling was coming again. Suddenly. Then they felt the planet around them heaving, tremors starting low and roiling, spilling, sucking upward. They had no hope. In a few minutes the air must surely give out, for they had been down in the heart of this living world for eons, centuries, eternities, and when the air went, they would die.

The pricklings at their skin told them the digestive fluids of the planet were even now trying to assimilate the fabric of the bulky pressure suits. But there was the heaving...

And they felt themselves rising, speeding as they rose, and the silver was growing lighter and lighter and with no warning they were

POP!

thrown up and out of the planet, like corks shooting to the surface of a lake, and they fell back to the sponged surface. They were free.

The planet trembled violently, agitated beyond belief. Like pebbles they were flipped and tossed and hurled and thrown, bouncing bouncing bouncing. The Circe emerged from the planet, two hundred feet away, lying on its side, being jostled and caromed as they were.

Without hesitation they scrambled madly for the ship, and threw themselves through the lock. Fighting the unending bouncing and jostling movement of the mad planet they got to the controls and the dampers went in and the fire chambers spurted The Circe blasted off without care of course, the men thanking God for their lives, thanking Providence for the inexplicable release from sure death.

Behind them, the silver planet settled slowly, and the trembling ceased. It was silent and solid once more.

Kradter was still sheet-white.

“We’ve got to get back into contact with Earth!”

Dembois’s voice quavered. “That thing is a horror! A menace’ We’ve got to get Earth to burn it out of space!”

Calk’s laughter stopped them. They stared at him, for the first real signs of emotion were contorting the Captain’s face. His roars of mirth broke against the bulkheads and tinkled like dust motes about them. For a second they thought of hysteria and slapping him, but when Kradter took a step forward, Calk waved him away with a mirth-weakened hand.

Finally, he stopped, sucking in breath, and clutching his sides. “Oh, you two give me such a pain in the ass!”

he laughed. Then his face went rigid again. His voice steadied and he looked at them.

“Don’t you know even yet?

Don’t you understand what’s happened?” They stared at him, uncomprehending.

“All the way out here,” he said, bitterness living in his words, “you’ve been telling me how great and wonderful man is. How he rules the universe, how it’s his job to show eetees the way, or destroy them. As though Man were the end-product of the life race, as though we were at the pinnacle of development. You never could have considered that there was a higher life-form than us.”

“What are you talking about,” Dembois snapped. “ Are you crazy?”

Calk’s face was angry, really angry, as he said: “You asses! You conceited, selfimportant asses. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? Homo superior, ha! That’s the joke of the century. You fools, can’t you see...

“Man has just had the greatest insult of all thrown at him!

“That planet vomited us up!”

You know the world is going to end. There’s no question about it, no supposition, no ravings from a bushy-bearded fanatic that may prove false…this is the real thing, we all go splat a week from next Wednesday. What do you do?

What if you were a young man who had never enjoyed the manifest pleasures of a woman’s body? What if you had been hidebound and stultified all your days, when you got wind of the coming Boom?

What then? Why, perhaps you would follow a course of action similar to the hero of this little piece, in which I tried to say that everything is relative, and even dross, under the proper conditions, can be as good as gold. And you know, it’s indicative of our current Clipster Culture that very often the ones who would rob are the ones who get robbed, the fleecers get fleeced, and hypocrisy counts for nothing when the chips are down. In other words, the love of a less than kindly creature can be the single most important possession in the universe on The Very Last Day of a Good Woman Finally, he knew the world was going to end. It had grown in certainty with terrible slowness. His was not a perfect talent, but rather, a gem with many small flaws in it. Had he been able to see the future clearly, had he not been a partial clairvoyant, his life might not have come to what it had. His hunger would not have been what it was.

Yet the brief, fogged glimpses were molded together, and he knew the Earth was about to end. By the same rude certainty that told him it was going to end, he knew it was not self-deception--it was not merely his death. It was the final irrevocable finish of his world, with every life upon it. This he saw in a shattered fragment of clarity, and he knew it would come in two weeks, on a Thursday night.

His name was Arthur Fulbright, and he wanted a woman.

How strange or odd. To know the future. To know it in that most peculiar of fashions: not as a unified whole, as a superimposed something on the image of now, but in bits and snatches, in fits and starts. In humming, deliberate quickness --a truck will come around the corner in a moment--that made him--Native Dancer will win-almost a denizen of two worlds--the train will leave ten minutes early--he saw the future through a glass darkly--you will find your other cuff link in the medicine cabinet--and was hardly aware of what this power promised.

For years, a soft, brown shambling man all hummed words and gentle glances, living with his widowed mother in an eight-room house set about with honeysuckle and sweet pea. For years, working in a job of unidentifiable type and station; for years returning to the house and the comforting pastel of Mother.

Years that held little change, little activity, little of note or importance. Yet good years, and silent.

Then Mother had died. Sighing in the night, she had slowed down like a phonograph, like the old crank phonograph covered under a white sheet in the attic, and had died. Life had played its melody for her, and just as naturally had trembled to an unsatisfactory end.

For Arthur it had meant changes.

Now, no more the nights of sound sleep, the evenings of quiet discussion and backgammon or whist, the afternoons of lunch prepared in time for a return to the office, the mornings with cinnamon toast and orange juice ready. Now it was a single-lane highway that he would travel alone. Learning to eat in restaurants, learning where the fresh linens were kept, sending his clothes out to be mended and cleaned.

And most of all, coming to realize in the six years since Mother’s death, that he could see the future once in a while. It was in no way alarming, nor even--after living with it so long--surprising. The word terrifying, in connection with his sight of the future, would never have occurred to him; and had he not seen that night of flame and death, the end of the world, the power would never have troubled him. But he did see it, and it made a difference.

Because now that he was about to die, now that he had two weeks and no more, he had to find a purpose.

There had to be a reason to die without regret. Yet here he sat, in the high-backed wing chair in the darkened living room, with the empty eight-room house around him, and there was no purpose. He had not considered his own demise; Mother’s going had been hard enough to reconcile, but he had known it would come some day (though the ramifications of her death had never dawned on him).His own death was something else.

“How can a man come to thirty-nine years, and have nothing?” he asked himself. “How can it be?”

It was true, of course. He had nothing. No talent, no mark to leave on affairs, no wake, no purpose.

And with the tallying of his lacks, he came to the most important one of all. The one marking him as not yet a man, no matter what he thought. The lack of a woman. He was a virgin; he had never had a woman.

With two weeks left on Earth, Arthur Fulbright knew what he wanted, more than anything, more than fame or wealth or position. His desire for his last days on Earth was a simple one, an uncluttered one.

Arthur Fulbright wanted a woman.

There had been a little money. Mother had left over two thousand dollars in cash and savings bonds. He had been able to put away two thousand in his own account. That made four thousand dollars, and it became very important, but not till later.

The idea of buying a woman came to him after many other considerations. The first attempt was with a young woman of his acquaintance, who worked as a steno-typist in the office, in the billing section.

“Jackie,” he asked her, having passed time with her on occasion, “would you--uh--how would you like to go to a--uh--show with me tonight...or something?”

She stared at him curiously, seeing a cipher; but having mentally relegated the evening to smoking a little grass and washing her hair with a girl friend, accepted.

That evening she doubled her fist and gave him such a blow beneath his rib cage, that his eyes watered and his side hurt for almost an hour.

The next day he avoided the girl with the blonde, twirled ponytail who was browsing in the HISTORICAL NOVELS section of the Public Library. He had had a glimpse often enough--of the future--to know what this one meant. She was married, despondent, and did not wear her ring out of hostility for her husband. He saw himself in an unpleasant situation involving the girl, the librarian, and the library guard. He avoided the library.

As the week wore through, as Arthur realized he had never developed the techniques other men used to snare girls, he knew his time was running out. As he walked the streets late at night, passing few people, but still people who were soon to perish in a flaming death, he knew his time was slipping away with terrible swiftness.

Now it was no mere desire. Now it was a drive, an urge within him that obsessed his thoughts, that motivated him as nothing else in life ever had. And he cursed Mother for her fine, old Southern ways, for her white flesh that had bound him in umbilical impotence. Her never-demanding, always-pleasant ways, that had made it so simple to live on in a pastel world of strifeless, effortless complacency. To die a-flaming with the rest of the world...empty.

The streets were chill, and the lamp posts had wavering, unearthly halos about them. From far off came the sound of a car horn, lost in the darkness; and a truck, its diesel gut rumbling, shifting into gear as a stop light changed, then coughing away. The pavement had the sick pallor of rotting flesh, and the stars were lost in inkiness on a moonless night. He bunched himself tightly inside his topcoat, and bent into the vague, leaf-picking breeze slanting toward him. A dog howled briefly somewhere, and a door slammed on another block. Abruptly, he was ultrasensitive to these sounds, and wanted to be joined to them, inside with the love and humor of a home. But had he been a pariah, a criminal, a leper, he could not have been more alone. He hated the philosophy of his culture that allowed men like himself to mature without direction, without hope, without love. All of which he needed so desperately.

At the intersection, halfway down the block, a girl emerged from shadows, her heels tock-tock-tocking rhythmically on the sidewalk, then the street, as she stepped across, and went her way. He was cutting across the lawn of a house, and converging on her from right angles before he realized what he was doing, what his intentions were. By then, his momentum had carried him. Rape.

The word flowered in his mind like a hot-house flower, with blood-red petals, grew to monstrous proportions, and withered, black at the edges, even as he scooted briskly, head down and hands in coat pockets, toward their point of intersection.

Could he do it? Could he carry it off? She was young and beautiful, desirable, he knew. She would have to be. He would take her down on the grass; and she would not scream, but would be pliant and acquiescent. She had to be.

He raced ahead to the spot where she would meet him, and he lay down on the moist, brown earth, inside the cover of bushes, waiting for her. In the distance he could hear her heels counting off the steps till he was upon her.

Then, even as his desire ate at him, other pictures came. A twisted, half-naked body lying in the street, a mob of men screaming and brandishing a rope, a picture of Mother, her face ashen and transfigured with horror. He crammed his eyes shut, and pressed his cheek to the ground. It was the all-mother, consoling him. He was the child who had done wrong, and his need was great. The all-mother comforted him, directed him, caressed him with propriety and deep devotion. He lay there as the girl clacked past. The heat in his face died away, and it was the day of the end, before he fully returned to sanity and a sense of awareness.

He had escaped bestiality, perhaps at the cost of his soul.

It was, it was, indeed. The day it would happen. He had several glimpses that day, so shocking, so brilliant in his mind, that they reaffirmed his knowledge of the coming of the event. Today it would come. Today the world would spark and burn.

One vision showed great buildings, steel and concrete, flashing like magnesium flares, burning as though they were crepe paper. The sun was dull-looking, as though it might have been an eye that someone had gouged out.

The sidewalks ran like butter; and charred, smoldering shapes lay in the gutters and on the rooftops. It was hideous, and it was now.

He knew his time was up.

Then the idea of the money came to him. He withdrew every cent. Every penny of the four thousand dollars; the vice president of the bank had a peculiar expression on his face, and he asked if everything was all right. Arthur answered him with an epigram, and the vice president was unhappy. All that day at the office--of course he went to work, he would not have known any other way to spend that last day of all days--he was on edge. He continually turned at his desk to stare out the window, waiting for the bloodred glaze that would paint the sky. But it did not come. Shortly after the coffee break that afternoon, he found the sensation of nausea growing in him. He went to the men’s room and locked himself in one of the cubicles. He sat down on the toilet with its top closed, and held his head in his hands.

A glimpse was coming to him.

Another glimpse, vaguely connected to the ones of the holocaust, but now--like a strip of film running backward--he saw himself entering a bar.

There were words in twisting neon outside, and repeated again on the small dark-glass window. The words said: THE NITE OWL. He saw himself in his blue suit, and he knew the money was in his pocket.

There was a woman at the bar.

Her hair was faintly auburn in the dim light of the bar. She sat on the bar stool, her long legs gracefully crossed, revealing a laced edge of slip. Her face was held at an odd angle, half-up toward the concealed streamer of light over the bar mirror. He could see the dark eyes and the heavy makeup that somehow did not detract from the sharp, unrelieved lines of her face. It was a hard face, but the lips were full, and not thinned. She was staring at nothing.

Then, as abruptly as it had come, the vision passed, and his mouth was filled with the slippery vileness of nausea.

He got to his feet and flipped open the toilet. Then he was thoroughly sick, but not messy.

Afterward, he went back to the office and found the yellow pages of the phone book. He turned to “Bars”

and ran his finger down the column till he came to “The Nite Owl” on Morrison and 58th Streets.

He went home especially to freshen up...to get into his blue suit. She was there. The long legs in the same position, the edge of slip showing, the head at that strange angle, the hair and eyes as he had seen them.

It was almost as though he was reliving a dramatic part he had once played; he walked up to her, and slid onto the empty stool. “May I, may I buy you a drink, Miss?”

She only acknowledged his presence and his question with a half-nod and soft grunt. He motioned to the black-tied bartender and said, “I’d like a glass of ginger ale. Give the young lady whatever she, uh, she wants please.”

The woman quirked an eyebrow and mumbled, “Bourbon and water, Ned.” The bartender moved away.

They sat silently till he returned with the drinks. Then the girl said, “Thanks.” Arthur nodded, and moved the glass around in its own circle of moisture. “I like ginger ale. Never really got to like alcohol, I guess. You don’t mind?”

Then she turned, and stared at him. She was really quite attractive, with little lines in her neck, around her mouth and eyes. “Why the hell should I care if you drink ginger ale? You could drink goat’s milk and I couldn’t care less.” She turned back.

Arthur hurriedly answered, “Oh, I didn’t mean any offense. I was only--”

“Forget it.”

“But I--”

She looked at him with vehemence. “Look Mac, you on the make, or what? You got a pitch? Come on, it’s late.”

Now, confronted with it, Arthur found himself terrified. He wanted to cry. It wasn’t the way he had thought it would be. His throat had a choke lost in it. “I--I, why I--”

“Oh, Jeezus, wouldn’t ‘cha know it. A freak. My luck, always my luck.” She bolted the rest of her drink and slid off the stool. She smoothed the miniskirt over her thighs and backside as she moved toward the door of the bar.

Arthur felt panic rising in him. This was the last chance, and it was important, terribly important! He spun on the stool and called after her, “Miss--”

She stopped and turned. “Yeah?”

“I thought we might, uh, could I speak to you?”

She seemed to sense his difficulty, and a wise look came across her features. She came back and stopped very close to him. “What now, what is it?”

“Are you, uh, are you do, doing anything this evening?”

Her sly look became businesslike. “It’ll cost you fifteen. You got that much?”

Arthur was petrified. He could not answer. But as though it realized the time had come for action, his hand dipped into his jacket pocket and came up with the four thousand dollars. Eight five hundred dollar bills, crackling and fresh. He held them out for her to see, then the hand returned them to the pocket. The hand was the businessman, himself merely the bystander.

“Wow,” she murmured, her eyes bright. “You’re not as bad as I thought, fella. You got a place?”

They went to the big, silent house, and he undressed in the bathroom, for it was the first time, and he held a granite chunk of fear in his chest.

When it was over, and he lay there warm and happy, she rose from the bed and moved to his jacket. He stared at her, and there was a strange feeling in him. He knew it for what it was, for he had felt a distant relative to it, in his feelings for Mother. Arthur Fulbright knew love, of a sort, and he watched her as she fished out the bills.

“Jesus,” she murmured, touching the money reverently.

“Take it,” he said softly.

“What? How much?”

“All of it. It doesn’t mean anything.” Then he added, as if it was the highest compliment he could summon: “You are a very good woman.”

“Why, thanks, honey.”

She held the money tightly. Four thousand dollars. What a simple little bastard. There he lay in the bed, and with nothing to show for it. But his face held such a strange light, as though he had something very important, as though he owned the world.

She chuckled softly, standing there by the window, the faint pink glow of midnight bathing her naked, moist body, and she knew what counted. She held it in her hand.

The pink glow turned rosy, then red, then blood crimson.

Arthur Fulbright lay on the bed, and there was a peace deep as the ocean in him. The woman stared at the money, knowing what really counted.

The money turned to ash a scant instant before her hand did the same. Arthur Fulbright’s eyes closed slowly.

While outside, the world turned so red and hot, and that was all. While in the US Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky, one of my duties was Troop Information NCO, and the story that follows (published in a magazine at that time) seemed to me an interesting departure from the usual stodgy troop lectures I was required to give. I read this story to a number of groups of hardened twenty-year men (as well as sixmonthers and two-year draftees) and asked for comment. Those who spoke up (inarticulation is an occupational disease in the Army after a three-year period) said it wasn’t as fantastic as it sounded. That it seemed such a thing might some day come to pass, and they wanted to know how I, a man who had never been in combat, had been able to devise such weird ideas, and put them down in a form that seemed rational. I told them I had glimpsed hell, and that I thought some day perhaps the whole world would be that hell, unless we stopped trying to strangle decency, unless we stopped trying to turn logic and imagination and the hearts of men toward a Battlefield

SATURDAY The first needle of the “day” came over Copernicus Sector at 0545...and seven seconds. The battery commander on White’s line was an eager-beaver. His bombardment cut short the coffeepause Black’s men had planned to enjoy till at least 0550. When the hi-fi in the ready dome screeched--a vocal transformation of the sonorad blip indicating a projectile coming through--the Black men looked at one another in undisguised annoyance, and banged their bulbs onto file counters.

Someone muttered, “Spoil sport!” and his companions looked at him and laughed; obviously a repple officer, fresh from the Academy.

One of the veterans, who had been with the outfit when Black had been Black One and Black Two--before the service merger--chuckled deep in his throat. He began to dog down the bubble of the pressure suit. But before the plasteel bowl was settled in place, he gibed, “Cookie-boy, you shoulda been up here when White rung in a fullblooded Cherokee named Grindbones or somethin’. You’da been on the line a’reddy at 0500. He was lobbin’ ‘em in solid by this time...had a hell of a job get tin’ him croaked.” He chuckled again, and several other officers nodded in remembrance.

The young lieutenant addressed as “Cookie-boy” turned an interested glance on the older man. “How did you manage to kill him? Full-day batteries at double strength? Spearhead through the craters?”

The veteran winked at his friends, and said levelly, “Nope. Easier’n that.”

The young lieutenant’s attention was trapped.

“Waited till he went down, and had a goon squad put a blade into his neck. Real quick. Next day, had our coffee without sweat.”

The young lieutenant was still. His face gradually became a mask of disbelief and horror. “You...you mean you...oh, come on, you aren’t serious/”

The veteran stared at him coldly. “Sonny, you know I’m serious.” He dogged down the pork-bolts on his helmet. He was out of the conversation.

Yet the lieutenant continued to protest. He stood in the center of the ready dome, his helmet under his arm, his other arm thrown toward the rounded ceiling fu a theatrical pose, and blurted, “But-but that’s illegal! When they declared the Moon a battlefield, that was the reason, I mean, what’s the sense of using up here to fight, if we still kill each other down there, I mean--”

“Oh, shut up, will you, for Christ’s sake!” It was a lean, angular-faced Major with a thread-scar from a single. beam across the brutal cut of his jaw. “This wasn’t war, you young clown. This was a matter of a man who fought, and stuck too closely to the rules. What you learned in the Academy was all floss and fine, man, but grow up!

Use your noodle. What they taught you there doesn’t always apply out here.

“When someone crosses too many wheat fields, he’s bound to find a gopher hole. This Indian stepped in one of those, that’s all.”

The Major turned away, dogged down, and joined the rest of the line company’s officers at the exitport. The young lieutenant stood alone, watching them, still muttering to himself. For with the other men on intercom only, they could not hear what he was saying: “But the war. The--the war. They said we wouldn’t chew up the Earth any more. The war...up here it’s so much cleaner, a man can fight or die or...but--but they said they killed him on his way down.

“He was going home, to Earth, and they killed him--”

The Major turned with sluggish movement in the pressurized dome, and waved a metaltooled gauntlet at the lieutenant. It was time to move to the units.

The lieutenant hurriedly dogged down, and joined the group. The veteran officer who had first spoken, turned the younger man around with rough good humor, checking the pork-bolts. Then he slapped the lieutenant on his shoulder with a comradely gesture, and they went into the exitport together. The hi-fi had been screeching constantly for a full three minutes. Outside, the Blacks and the Whites went into the five thousand and fifty-eighth day of the war. That particular war.

The needles came across all that early morning. In the dead black of the Darkside, their tails winked briefly as vector rockets shifted them on course. No sound broke across the airless cratered surface, but the tremors as each missile struck rang through the bowels of the dead satellite like so many gong-beaters gone mad.

Where they struck, great gouts were ripped from the grey, cadaverous dust of the surface. Brilliant flashes lived for microinstants and then were gone, for without air there could be no flames. Where the needles struck, and the face of the moon tore apart, new craters glared blindly up at space. At 0830 on the dot, the first waves of armored units spread out from the ragged White line near Sepulchre Crater and advanced across the edge of the Darkside, into the blinding glare of the Lightside. Vision ports sphinctered down into narrow slits; filters that dimmed the blaze of light clicked over the glassene ports; men donned special equipment, and snapped switches that cut in conditioning units and coolant chambers--and turned off the feverishly working heaters.

The armored crabs came first, sliding along, hugging the contours of the moon’s face, raising and lowering themselves on stalk-like plasteel rods.

The Black batteries detected their coming, but not their nature, and the first barrages were low-level missiles that zoomed silently through the glaring sunlight, passed completely over the crabs, and shusssssed off into the Darkside, and space, where they would circle aimlessly till the men from Ordnance Reclamation went out with their dampening nets and sucked the missiles into the cargo hatches of the ships. But as the crabs flopped and skittered their way toward the Black line, the sonorad was able to distinguish more easily what they were. The cry went up in the tracking cells buried deep under the pumice of the moon, and new batteries were readied/launched! Doggie-interceptors screamed silently from their tubes, broke the surface of the moon like skin divers reaching water’s surface, and began to follow the line of terrain, humping over rises, slipping into craters, always moving out.

The first ones made contact.

Within the crabs, the shriek of rending metal was a split microsecond ahead of the roar and flash of the doggie exploding. Great gouts of flame roared out angrily...and were gone as quickly, leaving in their place a twisted, bloody scrapheap where the crab had been. Another doggie struck. It caught the crab and lifted it backward and up on its stiltlegs, and then it exploded violently. Pieces of bodies were thrown two hundred feet into the airless nothing above the moon, and fell back soddenly.

All along the line the doggie’s were tracking their prey and demolishing them. On the far right flank, one crab managed to train its twenty-thread on an incoming doggie, and exploded the missile before it hit. But it was a short-lived victory, for two others, coming on collision courses, zeroed in and struck simultaneously. The flash was seen fifteen miles away, the roar trembled the ground for thirty miles. But White’s offensive for the day was just beginning. In streaming waves the footsoldiers were coming up behind the crabs. They were small pips on the sonorad units in Black GHQ, and though they could not tell if what was coming was human or mechanical, Black continued to send out the doggies. It was a waste of missiles; precisely what White had been counting on. The doggies homed in, and exploded, hundreds of them, each finding a lone man and atomizing him so quickly, no bit of pressure suit, weapon or flesh could be found. The missiles came down like hail, and where each struck, a man died horribly, without time to scream, with his body exploding inward in a frightful implosion of power and fire. Hundreds died all along the line, and as the doomed foot-soldiers drew the fire, the jato teams soared up from White Central and streaked before little gouts of flame, toward the Black perimeter.

Each man wore a harness over his pressure suit, with a jet unit, to drive him across the airlessness.

While their brothers died in flaming hell below them, the jato units soared through the empty sky, above the level of the terrain-skimming doggies, and dropped down like hunting falcons on the batteries.

Each man carried, in a drop-pouch, a charge of ferro-atomic explosive on a time fuse. As they whipped over the batteries, the men released their deadly cargos, directly into the barrels of the threaddisruptors, and sped up and away, back for their own lines. It was futile, of course, for sonorad had caught them, and trackbeams snaked out across the sky, picking each man off like moths caught in a flame. The jato units were snuffed out in midair, even as the ferro-atomics went off inside the disruptor barrels.

Great sheets of metal exploded outward, ripping apart the bunkers into which they had been set. The disruptors shattered their linings, throwing their own damping rods out, and in one hell’s holocaust of exploding ferro-atomics, the entire battery went skyward. Three hundred men died at once, faces burned off, arms ripped loose from sockets, legs broken and shredded. Bodies cascaded from the sky and the steel ran with blood.

It was a typical day in the war.

The trackbeams probed outward, scouring the ground for landmines planted by the footsoldiers, and exploded them on contact, then moved on. Eventually, they probed at the firm outer shell of the White perimeter.

Then the charged trackbeams of White met the Black beams, and they locked. They locked in a deadly struggle, and at opposite ends of those beams, men at control panels, in shock helmets, poured power to their beams, in a visible struggle to beat down the strength of the other. A surge, a slight edge, a nudge of force, and White was dominant. The beam raced back the length of the weakened Black beam, and in a dome two hundred miles away, a man leaped from his bucket seat and clawed at his helmet...even as his eyes spouted flame, and his mouth crawed open in a ghastly scream. His charred body--burnt black inside--turned half-around, writhing, as the man beat at his dead face, and then he fell across his console.

The trackbeam was loose inside the bunker. In a matter of moments, no living thing moved in the bunker dome. But it was a double-edged weapon, for associate trackbeams of the doomed White had centered in, and now five of them joined in racing back along the Black’s length. The scene in the White bunker dome was repeated. This time a woman had been under the helmet.

So it went. All day. One skirmish of foot-soldiers with ensnaring nets who stumbled across a Black detonation team, near Abulfeda Crater ended strangely, and terribly. The detonation team was wrapped in the gooey meshes, but had barely enough time to toss their charges.

The charges exploded, killing the ensnaring outfit, but also served to shatter their own helmets. They lay there for minutes, those whose helmets had merely cracked, until their air ran out, and then they strangled to death. The ones who died initially were the lucky.

At day’s end, at 1630 hours, the death toll was slightly below average for a weekend. Dead: 5,886.

Wounded: 4. Damages: twelve billion dollars, rounded off by the Finance & Reclamation Clerk. The batteries were silent, the crabs back in their depots and pools; the airless dead face of the moon left to the reclamation teams, who worked through the “night, “ preparing for Monday rooming, when the war would resume.

The commuters were racked, and as the Blacks filed into their ships, as the Whites boarded theirs, the humming of great atomic motors rolled through the shining corridors of the commuters. Inside, men read newspapers and clung to the acceleration straps for the ride down.

Down to Earth.

For a quiet evening at home, and a quiet Sunday... before the war started again. Almost as one, they roared free of the slight gravity, and plunged down toward the serene, carefully-tended face of the Earth. The young lieutenant hung from his strap and tried to block out the memory of what had happened that day. Not the fighting. God, that had been just fine. It had been good. The fighting. But what the older men had said. That was like saying there was no God. The moon was for war, the Earth was for peace.

They had knifed a battery sergeant on his way down? He looked about him, but all faces were turned into newspapers. He tried to put it from his mind forcefully.

Behind the commuters, the blasted, crushed and death-sprayed face of the Moon glowed in sharp relief against the black of space.

What had the Major said later: War is good, but we have to retain our perspective.

SUNDAY Yolande was in the kitchen dialing dinner when the chimes crooned at her. She turned from the difficult task of dictating dinner to the robochef, and wiped a stray lock of ebony hair from her forehead.

“Bill! Bill, will you answer it...it’s probably Wayne and Lotus.”

In the living room, 2/Lt. William Larkspur Donnough uncrossed his long legs, sighed as he turned off the tri-V, and yelled back softly, “Okay, hon. I’ll get it.”

He walked down the long pastel-tiled hall and flipped up the force screen dial, releasing the wall into nothingness. As the wall flicked out and was gone, the outside took form, and standing on Bill and Yolande Donnough’s front breezeway were 2/Lt. and Mrs. Wayne M’Kuba Massaro.

“Come on in, come on in, “ Bill chuckled at them. “Yo’s in the kitch fixing dinner. Here, Lotus, let me have your hood.”

He took the brightly-tinted hood and cape offered by the girl, a striking Melanesian with an upturned Irish nose and flaming red hair.

He accepted Wayne Massaro’s service cap in the other hand and stuck the apparel to the rack, which turned into the wall, holding the clothing magnetically.

“What’ll you have, Wayne, Lotus?”

Lotus raised a hand to signify none for her, but Wayne Massaro made a T with his hands. He wanted a teaball with a shot of herro-coke.

When Bill had jiggered the mixture together, warmed it and chilled it again, when they settled down in the formfit chairs, Donnough looked across at the other lieutenant and sighed. “Well, how’d it go your first day up there?”

Massaro frowned deeply.

Lotus broke in before her husband could answer. “Well, if you two are going to talk shop, I’m going in to see if Yo needs help; “ She got up, smoothed the sheath across her thighs, and walked into the kitchen.

“She’ll never get used to my making the war a career,” Wayne Massaro shook his head in affectionate exasperation. “She just can’t understand it. “

“She’ll get used to it,” Bill replied, sipping his own hiskotch. “Lotus still has a lot of that Irish blood in her...

Yo was the same way when I came in.”

“It’s so different, Bill So very different. What they taught us in the Academy doesn’t seem quite true up there. I mean--” he struggled to form the right phrase, “--it’s not that they’re going against doctrine...it’s just that things aren’t black and white up there--as they said they’d be when I was in the Academy--they’re grey now. They don’t start the morning bombardments on time, they drink coff when they should be posting, and--and--”

He stopped abruptly, and a hardness came into the set of his head. He jerked quickly, and bent to his drink.

“N-nothing,” he murmured, principally to himself.

Donnough looked disturbed.

“What happened, Wayne? You flinch-out when the barrage came over?”

Massaro lifted his eyes in a shocked and startled expression. “You aren’t kidding, are you?”

Donnough leaned back further, and the formfit closed about him like a womb. “No, I suppose I wasn’t. I know you better than that, known you too long.”

There was a great deal of respect and friendship in his words. Each man sat silently, holding his drink to his lips. as a barricade to conversation for the moment. Filtered memories of shared boyhoods came to them, and talk was not right at that moment.

Then Massaro lowered the glass and said, “That jato raid came off pretty badly didn’t it?” The subject had been altered.

Donnough nodded ruefully, “Yeah, wouldn’t you know it. Oh, hell, it was all the fault of that gravel-brained Colonel Levinson. He didn’t even send over a force battery cover. It was suicide. But then, what the hell, that’s what they’re paid for.”

Massaro agreed silently and took a final pull at the tea-laced highball. “Uh. Good. More, daddy, morel”

Donnough waved a hand at the circle-dial of the robot bartender set into the recreation unit against the wan.

“Dial away, brother frat man. I’m too comfortable to move.”

A gaggle of female giggles erupted from the kitchen, and Yolande Donnough’s voice came through the grille in the ceiling. “Okay you two heroes...dinner’s on. Let’s go.” Then: “Bill, will you call the kids from downstairs?

“Okay, Yo.”

Bill Donnough walked to the dropshaft at one corner of the living room, and slid his fingernail across the grille set into the wall beside the empty pit. Downstairs, in the lower levels of the house--sunk fifty feet into the Earth--the Donnough children heard the rasp over their own speakers, and waited for their father’s words.

“Chow’s on, monsters. Updecks on the double!”

The children came tumbling from their rooms and the play area, and threw themselves into the sucking force of the invisible riser-beam that lived in the dropshaft. In a second they were whisked up the shaft and stepped out in the living room: First came Polly with her golden braids tied atop her round little head in the Swedish style. Her hands were clean. Then Bartholemew-Aaron, whose nose was running again, and whose sleeves showed it. Verushka came next, her little face frozen with tears, for Toby had bitten her calf on the way upshaft; then Toby himself, clutching his side where Verushka had kicked him in reflex.

Donnough shook his head in mock severity, and slapped Polly on the behind as he urged them to the table for dinner. “Go on you beasts, roust!”

All but Verushka, the children ran laughing to the dining hall which ran parallel to the tiled front hall of the house. Dark-haired Verushka clung to her daddy’s hand and walked slowly with him.

“Daddy, are you goin’ to the moon tomorra’?”

“That’s right, baby. Why?”

“Cause Stacy Garmonde down the block says her old ma--”

“Father, not old man!” he corrected her.

“--her father’s gonna shoot you good tomorra’. He says all Blacks is bad, and he’s gonna shoot you dead.

Tha’s what Stacy says, an’ she’s a big old stink!”

Donnough stopped walking and kneeled beside the wide, dark eyes. “Honey, you remember one thing, no matter what anybody tells you: “Blacks are good. Whites are bad. That’s the truth, sweetie. And nobody’s going to kilt daddy, because he’s going to rip it up come tomorrow. Now do you believe that?”

She bobbled her bead very quickly.

“Blacks is good, an’ Whites is big stinks.”

He patted her head with affection. “The grammar is lousy, baby, but the sentiment is correct. Now. Let’s eat.”

They went in, and the children were silent with heads only half-bowed--half staring at the hot dishes that opopped out of the egress slot in the long table--while Donnough said the prayer: “Dear God above, thank you for this glorious repast. and watch over these people, and insure a victory where a victory is deserved. Preserve us and our state of existence...Amen. “

“Amen.” Massaro.

“Amen.” Lotus Massaro.

“Aye-men!” the children.

Then the forks went into the food, and mouths opened and dinner was underway. As they sat and discussed what Was what, and who had gotten his, and wasn’t it wonderful how the moon was the battlefield, while the Earth was saved from more destruction such as those 20th Century barbarians had dealt it.

“Listen, Bill,” Massaro jabbed the fork into the air, punctuating his words, “next Sunday you and Yo and the kids come on over to our hovel. It’ll cost you for a robositter next week. We’re sick of laying out the credits.”

They smiled and nodded and the dinner date for next Sunday was fumed up.

MONDAY The commuter platforms. The ships racked one past another, pointed toward the faint light they could not see. The light of the dead battlefield. Moon. The Blacks in their regal uniforms queueing up to enter the vessels, the Whites in splendid array, about to board ship.

A Black ship lay beside a White one.

Bill Donnough boarded one as he caught a glance at the ship beside. Massaro was in line there.

“Go to hell, you White bastard!” he yelled. There was no friendliness there. No camaraderie.

“Die, you slob-creepin’ Black! Drop!” he was answered.

They boarded the ships. The flight was short. Batteries opened that day--the five thousand and fifty-ninth day of the war--at 0550. Someone had chopped down the eagerbeaver. At 1149 precisely, a blindbomb with a snooper attachment was launched by 2/Lt William Larkspur Donnough, BB XO in charge of strafing and collision, which managed to worm its devious way through the White defense perimeter force screens. The blindbomb--BB--fell with a skit-course on the bunkerdome housing a firebeam control center, and exploded the dome into fragments.

Later that evening, Bill Donnough would start looking for another home to attend, the following Sunday.

Who said war was hell? It had been a good day on the line.

The pun, a sadly-misunderstood delicacy in the confectionary of humor, holds for me the same kind of infectious hilarity as a vision of three brothers named Marx, chasing a turkey around a hotel room, or wiry Lenny Bruce retelling his hazards and horrors on a two-week gig in Milwaukee, or Charlie Chaplin, caught among the gears of mechanized insanity in “Modern Times.” Humor comes packaged every which way, and profundities about its various guises and motivations do nothing whatsoever to explain why one man’s chuckle is another’s chilblain. In science fiction, with the notable exception of the work of Kuttner, when he was wry and wacky, the pun and humor in general have come of rather badly. Perhaps “funny” and “science fiction” are incompatible, or perhaps the fantasist takes himself, his Times, and its problems too seriously. Whatever the reasons, from time to time I have tried to make sport of the established genres of science fantasy, as in this fable called Deal From The Bottom There was really quite a simple reason for Maxim Hirt’s presence in the death cell. He had bungled the murder badly. The reason for his bungling was even simpler. Maxim Hirt was awfully stupid.

He had fancied himself an actor, and for a while, had even managed to convince a few people that such was the case. Then came the advent of television, and he had taken a healthy swing at appearing weekly in the homes of the nation. The paucity of his talent was painfully apparent to anyone viewing Clipper Ship, his series (where. in he played a clipper ship pilot for hire, the networks being anxious to avoid the hackneyed soldier-of-fortune for hire theme) for a famous beer concern.

It was only after the first thirteen weeks, when signs of sponsors on the horizon were dim, very dim, for renewal, that Maxim Hirt took to the telephones, to call the critics.

“Hello, Sid?”

“Who’s this?”

“Max, Sid. Old Maxie Hirt, out in Coldwater Canyon.”

“Yeah, Max. What can I do ya?”

“Just wanted to call, let you know my new series, y’know Clipper Ship--”

“Yeah, Max, I know.”

“--let you know it’s got a real winger comin’ up this Thursday night. Filmed it down in Balboa. Real coocoo, see it’s about this broad, she’s got an uncle who found a cache of diam--”

“What is it ya want, Max? A plug? So all right, so I’ll give you a plug. Now...anything else, Max, I’m busy.”

“No, no, nothing else, Sid. Just thanks a lot. I, uh, I need this plug, Sid.”

“So okay, Maxie, okay, so take it easy. G’bye.”

The review, ghosted by a writer of true action adventures for the hairy-chested men’s magazines, read: We caught Maxim Hirt’s new series Clipper Ship last night. Somehow we got the impression it was about a rugged, handsome guy who rents his plane and his talent to the highest bidder. Now that the light from the idiot box has faded, we don’t know where we could have gotten that idea, because the paunchy, punchy bumbling of Hirt indicates no talent whatsoever. With luck, this abomination will not see renewal and Hirt can fold his tent...

Etcetera. The use of the word “bumbling” seemed almost mandatory when speaking of Maxim Hirt. Which was the reason, when he killed Sidney Gross, the columnist (after Clipper Ship folded its chocks and silently so forth), that he was apprehended. It was also the reason he managed to bungle away his lawyer’s defense, and talked himself right into the death house.

Where he now sat, pad and pencil in hand, jotting down notes on what he would like for his last supper.

Maxim, being what he was, and being basically stupid, had managed to jot only one delicacy for that final repast. Baked beans.

He was sitting on the hard-tick mattress, doodling, trying to think of something else for dinner, when the air just beyond his nose shivered, shimmered and solidified into the form of a medium-sized man. The man wore a pair of tight jeans, a black turtleneck sweater and thong sandals. His beard had a definitely Mephistophalean point to it.

“Aaargh!” aaarghed Maxim as the tail which protruded from a slash in the seat of the jeans whipped across his legs.

“Oh, sorry, man,” said the bearded one. “Reflex, like a shiver, every time I get summoned. Wildsville, y’know, man.”

Maxim Hirt was not very bright, but he knew a devil when he saw one. Even one who looked as beat as this item. “Y -y-y-yough, “ Maxim pontificated.

“Oh, excuse the far out garb, daddy-cool. I just came from a set with a Tin Pan Alley song plugger. He wanted a hit, y’know. Hell, his soul ain’t worth much, but then, business is business.”

“I--I d-didn’t summon y-y-you...” Maxim warbled heavily.

“Sure ya did. The doodle there,” he pointed a sharp, dirty fingernail at the pad, “that’s the sacred symbol, man. Like the hippest.”

“But I was just d-d-doodling,” Maxim argued.

“Cuts no ice, Father,” said the devil. “The song plugger didn’t know he was summoning, either. You’d be surprised how close to the ancient runes some of them rock n’ roll lyrics get.”

Maxim Hirt felt sweat coolly crawling. “What do you want from me?”

The turtled neck went up and down. “Me? Man, I don’t want nothin’. I mean, like you invited me to the pad.

What do you want?”

Maxim Hirt fed a bitter laugh to his lips. “There’s not much you can do for me...by the way, do you have a name? Are you...are you Satan?”

The bearded one doubled with laughter, fell to the concrete floor and flopped about helplessly, his tail thrashing the walls, floor and bunk with terrible cracks. Finally he settled to rest, leaned his feet against the wall and mumbled, “Oh, man, you gas me. Satan; Satan, yet! Hell, we retired the old man aeons ago. Kicked him downstairs to a desk job. Hell, you’d never catch him out in the field. Thinks he’s too good; shows you what a good press agent can do. Makes a personality out of a cat, next thing you know he’s holding you up for elevator clauses, the whole schlepp.”

“But who’re you’!” Hirt persisted. (The madness of it all hadn’t really caught up with him yet.) “Oh, man, if you must hang a tag, lay it on me like Skidoop. You dig’!”

“Y-yes, I suppose so.”

“Now, like I’ve made the scene, Pops, so what do you want’! You name it, I frame it. Swing.”

“Like I was saying,” Hirt squeezed his hands together in anguish, “there isn’t anything you can do for me, unless you can get me out of here. Otherwise I go to the gas chamber tomorrow morning.”

Skidoop shook his head, and looked ceilingward. “No skin, man. I can do almost anything, but not that. It involves your destiny, and that’s His bailiwick.” He pointed at the ceiling. “Got the whole damned market on destinies cornered. Got there first. “

“Well, then what good are you?”

Skidoop looked pained. “Man, I’m beginning to feel you are very unhip. Come to think of it, you dig Camus, Goethe, Kerouac, Rexroth, the rest of the boppers’!”

“Uh...” Hirt began.

“I figured. You’re so far out you’d have to masquerade to get back in. But like my uncle Moishe keeps tellin’ me, biz is biz. So what can I do for you, right?”

“Yes. What can you do for me’!”

“Well, we can always introduce an extenuating circumstance, that’s cool. No rules against that; I introduce the e.c. and you change your own destiny. How’s that swing’!”

“Fine, but how can you do it’!”

Skidoop fingered his beard, muttered something about getting a bellows and trimming it with a pair of wire cutters, and jubilantly replied, “There! You’re writing down your last meal. So okay, so I give you the ability to eat.

To eat and eat and eat, just keep feeding your face, without any debilitating physical side-effects, and they never gas you.”

“They never gas me’! Why not’!”

“Who ever heard of killing a guy when he’s eating his last meal’! It can’t be done. It’s barbaric. A cincheroonie.”

Maxim Hirt’s commercially handsome face sloughed into an expression connoting thought. A look of guile overcame his features. “You guarantee it’ll work? I can keep eating indefinitely and it won’t hurt me at all?”

The bearded one waved a negligent palm. “Not a bit.”

“I’ve heard about deals with you people,” Hirt noted. “I’d have to have immortality along with it. You might fix it so I’d eat myself to death. Can you give me immortality with it?”

Skidoop thought for a moment, then said thoughtfully, “Well, we’d have to put in a clause about that.

Contingent on whether or not they avoid frying you. If they don’t, you get the immortality. But if they do, why should I waste valuable life-force on you, since His destiny ruling would come first, anyhow, and they’d gas you anyway.”

“I get immortality if this extenuating circumstance works, right?”

“Correct-o-roony,” said Skidoop, snapping his fingers in contrapuntal variation. Hirt again looked wary. “What do you get? I’ve heard about how you guys always gyp a client.”

“The vicissitudes of a bad press, man. Nothin’ but a hard sell from Him. We wouldn’t stay in business long if we didn’t give good service.”

“What do you get, then?”

“Your soul, man, the standard kick.”

Hirt went white, and shook his head from side-to-side with frantic intensity. “Uh-uh, uhuh, uh-uh!” he voted the motion down.

Skidoop spread his hands. “Oh, man, will you like please cool it. I mean, fade blade. You know what your soul is?”

Hirt waggled his head again.

“It’s only your imagination. That’s all. I mean, they jabber about this and that and the soul kick and the life force kick, and all of it, when the straight poop is that it’s only your imagination.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, daddy-cool. And let’s face it, if I wasn’t bound by the Fair Trade Union, I wouldn’t even have come on this summons. I mean, let’s face it, dad, you haven’t got much imagination to begin with. “

“And nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Honest Injun?”

“Tear out my heart and hope to burn!”

“Okay, it’s a deal. But let’s get it straight once more...”

“I’ll run through it, from the top: I give you the ability to keep eating, as long as you live, and if they don’t gas you, then you get immortality on top of it. In exchange for which all I take is your imagination.”

“Where’s the pen to sign the paper?” Hirt asked, now anxious.

“Paper, pen? Oh, man, all them modern fantasy writers been corrupting the legend again. We do it in blood; good old legal tender. No contract, just a mix of the haemoglobin, tom.”

Hirt was surprised.

“What type are you, man, so I’ll know if I have to ring in a notary with all-purpose corpuscles? CP A, Corpuscle Public Accountant.”

Hirt tried to remember, then said, “I’m type ‘O’.”

“Nutsville,” Skidoop caroled, and bit a hole in his wrist. The blood began spurting. He offered a finger to Hirt, and the condemned man used the sharp fingernail to start a scratch on his own forearm. They mixed.

“Done!” Skidoop chortled, grabbed the imagination in both hands, wrenched it loose, and split the scene.

Maxim Hirt sat on the bunk, and knew an would be well. He had it knocked. Which was true. Because when they brought him his meal, he ate and ate and ate and ate.

And did not stop eating; so they commuted his sentence to life, because you can’t strap a man in the gas chamber who hasn’t finished his last meal.

Which would not have been such a bad way to finish out a life, sitting there eating an day and night, except that when Skidoop took Hirt’s imagination, he took Hirt’s ability to think of anything else but baked beans to eat.

So the last meal consisted of baked beans, plate by plate by plate by... Obviously, it was a deal from the bottom.

In many ways, it was a fate worse than death.

Since I was thirteen, to greater or lesser degree, I have been a rootless person. Oh, there have been homes and residences and all the trappings of being settled, but aside from my days in New York, which always seem to me to be the best days, I’ve wandered. Up and down and back across the United States, wherever the vagaries of life have carried me with my writing, military service, marriage, job opportunities or just plain chance. And from these peregrinations has come the belief that not only is home where the heart is, but the heart is undeniably where the home is. I was also prompted by this obscure notion, to write The Wind Beyond the Mountains It is down in the Book of the Ancestors with truth. The Ruskind know but one home. Ruska is home, for home shall be where the heart is. The stars are not for the Ruskind, for they know, too, that the heart is where the home is.

Wummel saw the shining thing come down. He watched it from the stand of gnarlbushes as the pointed thing flamed across the sky, streaking toward the red sun. It flashed brightly above the land, and disappeared quickly.

Wummel found himself shaking.

His pointed face quivered, and his split tongue slipped in and out of his mouth nervously. It had not been a bird, that was obvious. Nor a beast of the land. Whatever it had been, it stirred a strange sensation in him.

As though he were seeing a long-missing brother returning from across the mountain passes, coming home finally, after a long, long absence. But that could not be: this metal thing he had never seen before. Yet he could not shake the feeling.

Wummel, for the first time in a life filled with fears, was terribly frightened. He crouched down, his triply-jointed legs crossing under him. He crouched down to watch the sky. If the flaming thing was to make another appearance, he would be there when it did. He had not long to wait. The sun had slipped across the pale blotch of grey sky, when the thing appeared again. The thing dipped as it approached The Forest, and banked down toward the rising yellow-feathertops of the trees. In a few moments Wummel saw the falling thing point its sharp beak into the trees, and disappear through the foliage.

A muted roaring came to Wummel’s horn-bell ears, and a ropey pillar of angry smoke twisted up into the late afternoon sky.

The roaring grew in violence, then suddenly ceased. The semi-silence of The Forest dropped down again, as though it had never been shattered.

The swip-swip-swip of the forest crickets resumed. The cough and growl of the land beasts took up where it had died. A yellow-striped prowl-cat slipped through the trees at the edge of the clearing. The wind whistled softly in among the yellow feather-leaves, and The Forest looked as it had always looked. Only Wummel, of all the Ruskind, knew the thing had come, knew The Forest was not as it had always been.

And he turned immediately, scuttling off on digger fingers and triple--jointed legs, to tell the Ruskind. He might have sent the message by thought to the One, who would have told the Ruskind, but--somehow--this message had to be delivered personally. He disappeared through the undergrowth. In The Forest, there was movement from the thing that had ceased to flame.

“Sellers, dispatch your crew into that section of the forest over there. See if you can find anything of the creatures who built that village.

“Galen, I’d like you to take the flit--be careful now--and check if those mountains we saw are inhabited.

Let’s make this a thorough one, boys. It’s the last one before home.”

He fitted the picture of a spaceman. Tall, bronzed from many suns; wide and blocky hands, altogether able hands that commanded with ease.

Eyes blue as the seas over which he had flown, a mouth that spoke sharply, but bore no grudge. A man with lines of character in his face; not a blank mold of a face that smiled and made sounds, but a face that had been the home of sadness and hard times. A man who had grown tired but never beaten, searching for an ideal.

“This survey has to be really good, Charlie,” the Captain said to his First. “There’s talk back home about too much for appropriations for the Mapping Command. They may swallow us into the mercantile guild systems.

That wouldn’t be so hot.” He spoke earnestly, and there was a depth to his words. The First Mate wanted badly to touch this man, to lay a hand on his arm and say, “We’ll make it, Vern,” or something less trite. But he could not. Instead, he remarked, “You look tired, Vern. Catch much during the last leg?”

The Captain shook his head and grinned broadly, though the weariness was moving in his eyes. “You know me, Charlie. ‘No-Wink, No-Blink, No-Nod Kovasic’ they called me at the Academy.”

Then, the jibe still moist on his lips, he sobered.

“Bring something back, Charlie. Bring it back--we need it bad. We need something to open their eyes back home. To make them understand we’re not just idly flitting around the galaxy--that we can bring back useful information. We have to keep the Command in business. It was thirty years coming, Charlio--be a hell of a note to lose it now.

“We need it, Charlie.” He added softly, almost to himself, as he turned away, “Need it bad.”

They came clumping through The Forest, nineteen of them, walking strangely. They moved erect, with their hands swinging at their sides. Their hands were even different. How could they dig without spade-shaped fingers? How could they hear from those odd little flat things so close to their heads?

Their eyes. Such strange eyes. Mere, angry slits.

The eyes watching the strange ones were not slits. They were huge, platter-like organs without lids. They watched unblinking as the strangers from the flaming thing tromped through The Forest. They were going to the Village Home.

The thought went out from the One, to the other Ruskind, Be careful, my children. They seem to bode no harm, but they are not of Ruska, they are not the Ruskind; not of the land, nor of the sea, nor of the air we know. Be careful.

Wummel heard the thought, and hunkered deeper under the spread roots of the gnarlbush. Yet...there was something about these strange erect wanderers that drew him. Is it because I saw them first? he wondered. Or is it something else. I feel--I sense--a deeper bond in these strange ones. They are not wholly unknown to me.

He reached out daintily, searching with his mind, plucking delicately as though on some fragile musical instrument.

A stirring of buried racial memory. A common germ, a flame, a whirling nebula and a throwing-out of flashing arms. One parent. One world, so far back even the concept had been drowned by memory on memory.

He watched their progress, deeper into the mingled tree-shapes. The Forest held many of Wummel’s people.

The Ruskind had left the Village Home, till the strange ones left the planet. His eager eyes caught the every flicker of their bodies, the every tread of their step, the every thought of their minds. A wild, conflicted and confused something, as rolled and entwined as the slender stringer arms of the sewlan vines. Their minds were never at rest. They could not speak between each other-in thoughts--and they struggled in the cages of their bodies to communicate.

Occasionally one would move its mouth at the other, and a fraction of the real communication would be understood.

There was a wandering in them. They were never at rest. Their lives were meshes of step and run and scamper. Never at peace, never at rest, always driven on, always driven on... Father, the thought blossomed. I want to follow them, I want to listen more to them. Thought returned: Be careful, my son.

They caught him in the village. They had been studying the thatchy hutches, when the First Mate had seen him. He had been watching them from the edge of the forest, and the First caught the movement of his green fur from the comer of his eye.

He had dispatched men to circle the thing, and they had closed in on it carefully. It had started to scamper away when they were a good twenty feet from it. But the enmeshing action of the power-driven elasticord in their Molasses-guns had trapped it.

The little thing lay still, as they picked him up, warped into a small furry ball, with the adhesive elasticord wound about him in many twistings. They carried him out of the forest, and laid him before the First Mate.

It lay still even as they surrounded him. It stared up out of saucer-sized yellow eyes, and the green smooth fur of its flanks quivered under their gaze.

“Is it animal, vegetable, or...” one of the noncoms began, but the First Mate cut him off with a wave of the hand.

“Do you feel anything?”

The others shook their heads, but the First noticed one man whose eyes had clouded, whose brow was furrowed with lines of concentration. As though he were listening for a sound, far off.

“Queer lookin’ little thing,” one of the men said. “Wonder what it eats. Or if we can eat it!” He began to chuckle.

The First cut him off hard.

“Shut up!” His face had an odd shine to it, as though a thin film of perspiration was about to break through.

“I--I--” the words only half-formed. He knew what he wanted to say, but he could not. The thing before him was a beast of the woods; a dumb thing with neither mind nor manner. Still...he was certain it was--he could hardly form the thought--speaking to him!

Strange words with a strange tone. Words and thoughts of a million years. The thoughts of an entire race; a race that had never left its world, that had never climbed from the dirt, and yet was sublimely happy. Tied to its world, and at peace with the universe.

The First Mate had been in space eighteen years. He had grown hard fighting for the Mapping Command, and it had been many more years than he could remember since he had cried. But he felt the tears beginning. The thoughts were too sweet, too clear, too demanding in their picturing.

“Take him to the ship,” he said, turning toward the forest. “We’ll let the Captain have a look at him.”

The men lifted the little beast and carried him back through the foliage. The First Mate followed a few feet behind, his head lowered. They wanted to take Wummel to Earth. He could hear them saying it in the caverns of their minds. The thought came strongest from the man they called the Captain. He thought, and the thoughts came to Wummel, and Wummel listened, but he could only listen at first.

To Earth, the thought said. To Earth, and the Command is saved. And the wandering won’t be stopped, and we can go off across the Rim and find the last planet ever. Then we can come back. But tin they find the last planet, there will be movement.

These were thoughts lower than thoughts. They were buried deeper, deeper than the fibers knew they reached. Buried down where this Captain could never really see them, only feel the burning of their message in his legs. And he moved, always moved--without rest.

Constantly driven on, with no sleep, with no rest, no ending. Wummel felt the heart in him go out to these strange beasts of the eternally nighted sky. They were terrible in their everlasting wandering. Even the home world was to them merely a base to which they could return occasionally. Now they wanted to take him from his home.

Wummel considered it, the chill spreading up from his spine. He knew he was as deeply rooted to Ruska as the sewlan or the gnarl-bushes. Could it be conceivable that he might go, and never return?

Wummel found it difficult to live on his world, sometimes. The land beasts were huge, hungry and fearsome. The prowl-cats and the sytazill were always on the hunt, and Wummel’s people had never quite learned to avoid them. For the land beasts were not precisely ignorant brutes. They had minds, and souls, Wummel imagined, and their actions could not always be predicted. It was better that way. Then too, there was the sucking valley, where the mud ran up over the walls of the canyon and dragged down those unlucky enough to be blown there during the Time of Winds. There were many things that made life hard for the Ruskind. But it was good, too.

It was good when the triple moons rose in blue and fire-red and white. Then the coolness came. When the long magenta blossoms of the aloo broke forth and shot many feet into the air, showering all the hills till they were carpeted bright and happy with the color. And most of all, Wummel loved the sighing, whispering, chortling winds that blew to him from beyond the mountains. He had often wanted to go there, beyond the stark black mountains, and see the Wind Lord who made the happy puffs that became the wind. They wanted to take him from that, all that, and send him hurtling through a black and a dead and a night so deep that no man and no Ruskinda would ever see to its far end. He knew of the stars. He had seen them. His people spoke of them. But not to go there. Never that!

They wanted to make a wanderer of him. They wanted him for show and study on their own base world, their Earth.

They wanted to cast him from his home and set him--as they did--wandering on that star-road that never ended, but twisted and wound in among the eternal graves of the beings that had wandered to their deaths.

The tears, thick and oily, started to Wummel’s eyes, even as the Earthmen let the big plug-door sigh shut, blocking away the light of Ruska. And the bolts thrust home. Then he felt the shivering, and the roaring, and the hungry urgency of the metal itself, as the ship pleaded to the men, thundered its desire to go. Go, and never return.

Never stop again on this world of the three moons and the blue, blue seas, and the razortoothed mountains, and the winds blowing from beyond those mountains. Never come again. And never!

The takeoff was a sloppy one. Somehow the tapes had been fed in with a bit too much fervency, as though the Drivemaster had wanted away from the tiny world.

Captain Kovasic stood with his back to the little cage. He stood watching through the viewport as the multicolored world dropped away under them, till it was a picture drawn on a blackboard.

He felt the thoughts bubbling up in him, and he turned, reluctantly. He stared at the little green creature, huddled into a ball, its huge eyes staring. The creature was shivering, mocking the quivers of the ship itself. Kovasic felt that had the being possessed eyelids, it would surely have had them screwed tightly, painfully shut.

The thoughts roiled and swirled, like dirty oil on an angry sea, and he felt the rising of his own longing in his throat. A longing he had never actually known he possessed. He knew, with a startling burst of clarity, the writing in the Book of the Ancestors. He knew of the Ruskind and of the roots that grow deeper, far deeper, than the mere roots of race. He knew he was a wanderer, that all his people were wanderers, and how they would end. He knew, too, what he had done to Wummel.

He watched as the little creature’s golden eyes frosted over, and its fur ceased quivering. The First Mate had not wanted to come to the bridge. He had known the creature was there, and he had not relished the ideas and disturbing thoughts the being seemed to create. But he came, because he knew the progress report must be delivered. At all times the Captain must know how far they had come, how fast they were going, how soon they would arrive. All the information of running. When he stepped onto the bridge, he saw only the Captain’s back, and the blind, blank black face of the viewport. The Captain had deaded it. Space was cut off for the first time since the ship had been launched.

“Captain...?” His voice was a softness, as though all the fragile glass and spiderweb of the silence hanging between them might shatter.

“It died,” Kovasic said, staring straight ahead into nowhere.

“Died? The specimen? How? What could have...?”

“It couldn’t live away from the planet. We broke its heart. It’s that simple; laugh if you want--breaking its heart--but it died, that’s all. And now we’ll go home. Home.” He said the last word with an odd, thick sound. As though it had been something he had known so very long age, and forgotten, and substituted another meaning for it, and now suddenly had learned what it was again, and knew he was damned because it was beyond him forever.

“The Command. It’ll be--it’ll get swallowed by the mercantile...” The First began, fumblingly.

The Captain whirled, his face half-angry, half-imploring.

“Don’t you understand, Charlie? Don’t you know? You ran away from the creature, you must have heard what it said.

“Don’t you see? The Command, the mercantile guilds, Earth, the searching, the always hungering for more more more more...”

He ground to a stop, as though it all meant what he said it meant. Empty nothing. Then he said the one thing that did matter. He said it knowing he was sounding the one truth that was inescapable. The one truth that Wummel had died because he knew had been deprived him: “There is no home, if there is no rest. There is no rest if there is no Home.”

Then he turned back to the viewport. The First Mate moved to leave, but the soft words of the Captain, spoken against the deaded surface, stopped all movement. Staring at the empty surface, he murmured.

“It died, and the last thing it felt...” he paused.

“It pitied us, Charlie. That’s all. It didn’t hate us for killing it.

“It just pitied us.”

In the original edition of ELLISON WONDERLAND, this space was occupied by a short story appearing under the title, “The Forces that Crush.” Some years later I rewrote it, included it in my collection

THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD (Signet Books, 1974), and it appeared under the title Paul Fairman gave it when he published it in Amazing Stories back in the fifties: “Are You Listening?” I didn’t want to let it appear twice so soon, so I’ve pulled out of obscurity a nice little fable about a robot that I’ve always liked. Now, if it weren’t that my oId friend Isaac Asimov has written just about everything there is to write about robots (and what Ike didn’t do, Kuttner did as Lewis Padgett), I would have no trepidations, but Ike and I have been gigging each other with love and truculence for almost twenty-five years, and I just know he’ll have some smartass remarks to make the next time I see him, when, with twinkle in eye, he finds some circumlocutious way to compare his famous robotics stories with my humble, yet undeniably brilliant, effort called Back To The Drawing Boards Perhaps it was inevitable. and perhaps it was only a natural result of the twisted eugenics that produced Leon Packett. In either case. the invention of the perambulating vid-robot came about, and nothing has been at all the same since.

The inevitability factor was a result of live tri-vid, and the insatiable appetite for novelty of the vid audience. If vid broadcasts came from Bermuda in tri-vid color with feelie and whiff, then they wanted wide-band transmission from the heart of the Sudetenland. If they got that, it wasn’t enough; next they wanted programs from the top of Everest. And when they had accomplished that--God only knows how--the voracious idiot mind of the audiences demanded more. They demanded live casts from the Millstone, circling above the Earth; then it was Lunar fantasics with authentic settings...and Mars...and Venus...and the Outer Cold Ones. Finally, Leon Packett stumbled upon the secret of a perfect, self-contained tri-vid camera, operating off a minute force-bead generator; and in his warped way, he struck instantly to the truth of the problem--that the only camera that could penetrate to those inner niches of the universe that the eyes of man demanded to glimpse, was a man himself.

How completely simple it was. The only gatherer of facts as seen by the eyes of a man...were the eyes of a man. But since no man would volunteer to have his head sliced open, his brains scooped out, and a tri-vid camera inserted, Leon Packett invented Walkaway.

In all due to the devil, it was coldly logical, and it was a beautiful bit of workmanship. Walkaway had the form of a human being, even to ball-and-socket joints at the knees and elbows. He stood just under seven feet tall, and his hide was a burnished permanodized alumasteel suit. His hands could be screwed off, and in their stead could be inserted anyone of three dozen “duty” hands, withdrawn from storage crypts, located in the limbs. His head was the only part of him that was slightly more than human. Brilliantly so, again offering Satan his plaudits.

Where the center of the face on a human would have been, the revolving lens wheel with its five turrets bulked strangely. Beneath the lens wheel a full-range audio grid lay with criss-crossed strangeness. The audio pickups were located on either side, as well as front and rear, of the head. Two sets of controls were used on Walkaway. One set was imbedded in the right arm (and would snap up at the proper coded pressing of a lock-snit at the wrist) and was chiefly used by Walkaway himself when he was asked to play back what he had heard or seen.

The other console controls were in the back, and to my knowledge, were never employed after Walkaway’s initial test runs. He disliked being pawed.

Naturally, the dissenters at Walkaway’s birth, who declaimed the sanity of giving a robot volition and “conscience” with as much strength as his metal frame held, were shouted down. The creature--well, wasn’t he?--had to have the right of free choice, if he was going to get the story in all its fullness and with a modicum of imagination, which the vid audience demanded.

So Walkaway was made more human.

He was able to disagree, to be surprised, to follow instructions almost as they were given, and to select the viewing subjects he wished, when he was filming. Walkaway was a most remarkable...what?

Creature.

“Leon, you’ve got to do it. Don’t be obstinate, that’s just being foolish. They’ll get him somehow, Leon!”

Leon Packett spun in the chair, facing the window. His back was very straight, and his neck held a rigid aloofness. “Get out, McCollum. Get out and tell your pony-soldiers to do the same. Leave me alone!”

Alan McCollum threw up his hands in eloquent frustration. “Lee, I’m trying to get through to you, for God’s sake! All I ask is you listen to them, and then make a decision--”

Packett spun in the chair. His feet hit the floor with a resounding clump and he leaned one elbowed arm at McCollum. His index finger was an unwavering spear, the tip of which aimed between McCollum’s sensitive dark brown eyes.

“Now look, McCollum. I spent fifteen years in a cellar lab, working what I could, and experimenting as best I could, soldering old pieces together because I couldn’t get a Frericks Grant. Then I happened to think of putting two old gadgets together, and I came up with a miracle. Now I’m big time, and the Frericks Foundation uses me in their institutional advertisements.”

His lean, horsey face was becoming ruby-blotched.

“But Walkaway is mine, McCollum! Mine! I dreamed him up and I sweated constructing him. I starved for fifteen years, McCollum. Fifteen. You know how long that is? While you and all your MIT buddies were piddling around putting chrome on old discoveries, I was missing all the good things.”

McCollum’s jaws worked. His eyes dulled with suppressed fury. “That isn’t fair, Lee. You almost enjoy your misery, and you know it.”

Packett stood up. His face was a crimson and milk patchwork. “Get out!” he snarled. His thin lips worked loosely, and his nostrils flared. “Get out and leave me alone. Walkaway is not going to Carina. Not Epsilon Carinae, not Miaplacidus, nowhere in Carina. Walkaway is staying here, where I can keep getting my commissions, where I can guarantee my future. It’s been too dirty for me to start being patriotic now, McCollum, so you can trot out there and tell your Space Patrol buddies I’m not in the market.”

McCollum was about to shout an answer, but he stood up instead. Stood up and stared at the contorted features of Leon Packett.

He turned and took three steps to the slidoor. With his palm--but not fingertips--fitted into the depression, he paused, and looked back at Packett. “There are doctors who can help you, Leon.”

“Get out, you sonofabitch!”

A heavy plastex ashtray crashed into the wall beside McCollum’s head. His fingertips touched and the door slid.

Perhaps he knew it was inevitable. The machinery he had always despised, now ground its wishes out in the dust of his ambitions. He had suffered by his own hand, and had cursed the powers that had overlooked him. But now they wanted his vid-robot, his Walkaway. He knew they would reimburse him handsomely, but that was not what he sought.

Packett knew, and he moved to preserve his will, despite the loss of his invention. Late into the night he worked, on the smallest, most unnoticeable alterations in the printed circuitry of Walkaway’s “mind” and “conscience”. Late into the night on a space of plastex no larger than the surface of an eyeball. And when he fell into an exhausted sleep, as the daylight ribboned across the laboratory walls, Walkaway stood as he had stood.

Unchanged.

Apparently.

But changed.

Inwardly.

He managed to salvage his old age. By the simple expedient of refusing to allow ownership to switch from his hands--and after his death the hands of the Frericks Foundation--into the hands of the military, he preserved a hold on Walkaway. The Guard--his terminology “Space Patrol” had long since been aborted, despite the tabloid’s efforts to keep it alive--were forced to hire Walkaway. They signed him on as a civilian employee, paid a monthly wage, a per diem remuneration, as well as travel expenses.

The wages were to be paid on demand, and books were kept by the Frericks Foundation, whose interest in Packett and Walkaway were more than merely scientific. With the world-famous Leon Packett associated with them, there could be no doubt about doles and grants. The Frericks Foundation had men at its helm whose interests penetrated into other fields than scientific: politics, finance, authority. The men were exceedingly careful to keep books.

The Guard’s first enterprise in which Walkaway figured prominently was the remote from Bounce Point.

Bounce Point was the super-satellite constructed out beyond Pluto. It had been thrown up as the last outpost of Solar enterprise. Man’s final touch with what was known, before he leaped off into the unknown.

From Bounce Point, great and silver and ebony in Pluto’s sky, Walkaway was destined to begin the long ride out.

McCollum and his contemporaries had not been idle. While Leon Packett nursed his hatred of Authority and the Machine of Empire, they had been hard at work. The warp-drive was ready. Nuzzling the gleaming inner hull of its drive chamber, the warp-drive was larger than later models would surely have to be. It was a giant nest of power units, small inside larger, larger inside still larger, and finally, resting in a brace-socket at the tip of the final unit, a force-bead of incalculable power. That was the random factor. How hard could the warpdrive be pushed by this force-bead?

What were the effects on a man, sent through not-space?

For the test, what better guinea pig than a metal man with a camera face. In tri-vid, with audio pickup, what better record could be offered for study.

The initial flight of W-1 to Carina, lost in the star heaps of space, would be accomplished with no human hand at the controls. The robot would take the bounce.

Leon Packett lay on a dirty bunk in a haven back of the CentralPort space pads. The room was a flop, with the tackboard walls only stretching halfway to the ceiling. The other half of the wall was strand-wire, put in to offer a slight deterrent to thieves in the other cubicles, in no way to offer privacy. Packett lay on the bunk, a half-emptied bottle of Paizley’s rigid between his side and his arm, held upright by his armpit. His long, almost oriental eyes were closed in stupor, and his horsey face was a Madame Toussoud wax reproduction. His breathing was irregular...

...when McCollum found him.

“Packett!” All civility was gone. There are worse things than insults. The insults had not alienated McCollum. The others had. “Packett! They want you. Get out, Packett!”

He dragged the bottle with its sour smell from Leon Packett’s armpit, and threw it to the floor. Where the wrench of the bottle had not disturbed the drunken man, where McCollum’s shot-like shouts had not roused him, the soft gurgling emptying of the bottle succeeded.

Packett came straight up on the bunk, hands in his wild hair, and he screamed. With eyes closed, with deep lined areas about the sockets, he shrieked. “Let me alone!”

Then he opened his eyes.

After he had sobbed, and dry-heaved, McCollum got him to his feet, and out of the filthy, wino-odored cubicle. There was a small argument about three days rent, with a ferret-like man behind the cage, but McCollum flashed over a five-note and they went into the street. Where the sounds of traffic overhead on the expressways deafened Packett, rising over him, like the spread, leathery wings of a pterodactyl, and dropped over him with suffocating strength. He tried to bolt back into the building. McCollum was forced to hit him.

The hack ride was uneventful.

The Frericks Foundation rose alabaster on the third tier of the New Portion. McCollum would have paused to clean Leon Packett’s face and innards, had not the Guard representatives spotted them as they left the hack at tier level. The gay uniforms of the Guard were ranked in the hall as McCollum steadied his sodden cargo into the building.

“My God, purulent!” one Guardsman snorted sourly.

“Is that Packett?” a dapper, balding Guardsman asked. His shoulders bore Commander boards. McCollum nodded. He tried to move past with Packett.

The Commander stopped them. McCollum explained, “He was on the Stripo He’s not been well.”

“Don’t cover for him, McCollum. He’s a waste, and there should be no glossing. The man is a waste. Can he talk?”

McCollum shrugged still supporting Packett, whose legs were taffy. “I suppose. I don’t know how much coherence you’ll get out of him, but I suppose he can talk.”

The Commander nudged a thumb toward a conference room. “Bring him along.”

They started toward the room, and Packett began to blather. Even as they thrust him into a chair, his words fumbled and roiled. “They with power...laws and can’t do, and do, and have this with what they let you do. I know!

I’ve always known! The wheels with grinding down and they are afraid, so they rule you...rule...”

He went on ramblingly, almost semi-conscious, his words--more, his accents--tirades against authority and government. They had hampered him, but he would get even.

The Guard listened closely, for after all, this was Packett, the inventor of Walkaway. They listened, and finally, the Commander put his gloved hand, his crimson gloved hand, across Packett’s mouth. “That will be enough, man,” he deep-throated, with suppressed fury.

“Tell him what we want, McCollum,” the esoteric purulent-caller urged the Frericks man.

McCollum’s eyebrows went up and his lips thinned with resignation. The military never could pull its weight in these matters. “Leon,” McCollum said, slipping to one knee beside Packett’s chair. “Leon, they want to take Walkaway back to the drawing boards. They think he has too much initiative. Leon?

Can you understand--”

“No!

“No, by God, damn their eyes, no! Not a touch. Not a wire. Nothing! He stays as he is!

If they want to use him, damn them they’ve robbed me of my fortune, now they’d pick my brain work apart, no I say!”

They argued and pleaded and cajoled and screeched at him for the better part of five hours. But he was firm.

He still owned Walkaway. The Frericks Foundation employed Packett by grant, but Walkaway was still his own, and when it came down to it, not a military personnel at all. Walkaway was a free entity. A bond slave of metal set free. If they wanted him to go to Carina--as Packett had resolved it to himself--he would go as he was now, today, now.

So the Guard had to accept it that way. They had to take Walkaway with his individuality...too much for a robot? And they had to send him on the first bounce to the stars, as a metal man with thoughts of his own.

That was as it should have been.

For had not Leon Packett created Walkaway?

Had not Packett re-arranged the circuits to provide a hidden factor the Guard knew nothing about?

Had it not all been planned that way?

To results we know now.

The ship was crazily-shaped. It was a sundial. With a thick trunk, and two clear faceplates at either end. Great face plates of clear substance, through which Walkaway could train his turret eyes, and see the universe as it whirled by in not-space. The drive apertures were set at angles around the thick trunk of the ship, and there were no sleeping compartments, no galley, no chairs, nothing a metal servant would find useless. The ship W-1 blasted free of Bounce Point on March 24th, 2111, its sole occupant a robot named Walkaway, whose face was a triple-turret tri-vid camera, and whose mind was the mind of a metal man with initiative. A certain initiative that only one man knew existed.

The ship left on March 24th. On March 31st, Leon Packett gripped a pair of heavy scissors and thrust them deep into his neck.

His will was a masterpiece of maudlin self-pity; but it released Walkaway from all human obligations, setting him in toto free. He was a singular now. Not an invention, but a civilian employee of the military Guard. He was to receive payment per diem for his work, and his accounts were to be handled by the Frericks Foundation.

Whatever Walkaway earned, remained his own.

The ship went out on March 24th 2111.

It returned three hundred and sixty-five years later.

And the future began.

Oh, Lord! The records were covered with dust. But valid, that was the rub. The Frericks Foundation had sunk in its own mismanagement, and a pleasure sanctuary had risen on its whited bones. The New Portion was now called the Underside, for tiers had risen high on high to the fiftieth level above that tier. Now there was a planetwide government, and the ship W-1 had become a legend. The robot Walkaway had become a Myth. The ship had never been heard from again, and as will happen, with all cultures, time had passed the concept of star travel by.

There was a broken-nosed statue of Leon Packett on the third tier, many miles from where the Frericks Foundation had stood. A statue that called him one of the great inventors of all time and all Mankind. There were no scissors in the statue.

When the ship came down past the Moon, and its warning gear telemetered out the recog-signals, the Earth Central control tower was lost in disbelief. A sloe-eyed brunette who was in charge of deciphering and matching recog-signals with the call letters of those ships out, called for a checker. Her section chief, a woman who had been on the job for eighteen years, matched the recog-signals, and turned to the younger girl with a word lost on her lips.

The call went in to Guard Central immediately.

They denied landing co-ordinates to the W-1 and held it aspace till they had found the records in the subcellar of the pleasure sanctuary on the third level. When they had the files, they knew the story completely, and they sent word to berth-in the W-1.

Walkaway looked the same.

Huge and graceful, his face vaguely human, his body a sort of homo sapiens plus, he slid down a nylex rope from the cargo aperture of the sundial-shaped ship. He had not bothered to lower the landing ramp. As he came down the single strand, his metallic reflection shone in the smooth landing-jack’s surface. The reflection of Walkaway shone down and down and over again down as he slid quickly to the pad. They watched, as they might watch a legend materialize. This was the fabled robot that had gone out to seek the stars in Carina, and had returned. Three hundred and sixty-five years the W-1 had been away, and now it had returned. What would the vid-cameras of this perambulating robot show? What wonders awaited man, now that his interest was roused in the immensities of space? The Guard watched, ranked around the pad, as Walkaway slid down the nylex rope. The great sundial-shaped ship held high above them--unlike any other of the sleek vessels in the yard--tripod poised on its high-reaching legs.

Then the robot touched Earth, and a shout went up.

Home is the hunter, home from the hill...

Three hundred and sixty-five years. No one was left who remembered this creature of flawless metal. No one who had seen Walkaway go out on the shuttle to Bounce Point. Bounce Point that was itself two hundred years dust. Gone in the struggle for the Outer Cold Ones.

The robot came across the pad, his shining feet bright against the blackened pad-rock, and his close-up turret ground near-to-silently away, taking in the reception ceremony for posterity. Before the Guard representative could issue forth with the practiced phrases of a hundred other receptions, the robot said clearly, “It is good to be back. Where is Leon Packett?”

How strange it was--they said later--a legend stood asking them about another legend. Paul Bunyan inquiring after Zeus. What could they say? Few of them even knew of the man named Leon Packett. Those who knew, were vague where he was concerned. After all, three hundred and sixty-five years. The Earth had changed.

“I asked: where is Leon Packett? Which of you is from the Frericks Foundation?”

There were no answers. And then someone in the front ranks of the Guard, someone who knew his history, said: “You have been gone three hundred years and more, robot.”

“Leon Packett...?”

“Is dead,” finished the Guardsman. “Long dead. Where have you been so long?”

And a circuit closed as data was fed to Walkway.

And the future was assured.

Loneliness. Leon Packett had done his work well. The attempts to take Walkaway back to the drawing boards would have shown them what Packett had done. He had freed the robot’s soul completely. Not only legally, but in actuality. Walkaway felt great sadness. There had only been one other who knew his inner feelings. That had been Leon Packett. There had been empathy between them. The man a bit mad, the robot a bit man. They had spent evenings together, as two childhood friends might have; the man and the faceless metal creature, product of the man’s mind. They had not talked much, but a word had brought understanding of concepts, of emotions: “All of them.”

The robot immobile, answering metallically, “Power.”

“Someday, someday...”

“Checks.”

“Balances.”

“Oh, Walkaway. Someday, just someday!”

“I know.”

The nights had passed restlessly for Packett, while the sickness within him festered. The robot had been constructed in the image of the man. Seeing everything through its vid-eyes, hearing everything through its pickups, but saying little, working hard. Then Packett had known he would die, and Walkaway would live on. An extension of himself; the sword he would someday wield.

He had worked long into the night, foreseeing where others would not foresee, could not foresee, though they had the knowledge. For Leon Packett had been gifted. Sick, but gifted, and he had left his curse, left his justice, left his vengeance, to live on after he was gone.

Walkaway learned of Leon Packett’s death, and the circuit Packett had tampered with, that he had wanted to close at the knowledge of his death, snapped to with a mental thud that only Walkaway felt, that the universe was soon to know.

The robot turned to the Guardsmen and made the one request no one would have considered, the one request that was his legally to make: “Pay me my wages.”

Three hundred and sixty-five years on Earth. Nine months and fifteen days in space. The warp-drive had been better than ghosts had thought. Memories of McCollum and his fellows from MIT lived within the force bead, and had given it power. Better, far better, it had been, than their wildest imaginings. But Einstein had been correct.

Mass, infinity, time zero. He had been correct, and Walkaway had earned three hundred and sixty-five years worth of wages. Per diem. Plus travel pay according to military regulations. They could not withhold it on grounds that he was using military transportation; Leon Packett had seen to that: Walkaway was a private citizen.

Plus interest accrued.

The sum was staggering. The sum was unbelievable. The sum could, would, must bankrupt the Earth government. It was unheard-of. The Prelate convened, and the arguments raged, but Walkaway needed no defense.

He merely requested: “Pay me my wages.” And they had to do it. Oh, they tried to dodge their way out of it. They tried to ensnare him in legalities, but he was a man of alumasteel, and legalities could not affect him.

The circuit had closed, and his life’s plan was set. In the mind of Walkaway burned the conscience and soul of his creator. Leon Packett was not dead. In his creation was re-born the intense, vibrant hatred of power and government and authority. In Walkaway was the perfect weapon; indestructible, uncaring, human as human it need be, inhuman as inhuman it must be, to bring about the downfall of that which Packett had despised.

Fifteen years in a cellar laboratory had carried forth for over three hundred years, and the future was molded on printed circuits.

Finally, they acceded. They paid him his wages. The government of Earth was bankrupted. The world belonged to a man of alumasteel. It was no longer Earth. Had he wished, he might have named it Walkaway’s World.

For such it was.

Leon Packett had foreseen much. He had applied Einstein’s equations, and he had known what would happen. The scientists of the Frericks Foundation had known, also, and they had considered it all. But the job had had to be done, in that era before Man had turned inward once more. They had feared what might happen, but not considered it an inevitability. They had looked on it the way the farmer looks on earthquake. Yes, it might happen, but that would be an act of God, not a thing that must be.

But they had not considered Leon Packett. He had taken steps. He had altered his creation, and made it want its pay, when it knew he was dead. For dead he was dead, and alive he was dead. But in the soul of Walkaway he lived again.

So he had created an act of God.

Twisted in thought, crying in the darkness of his tormented mind, Leon Packett had changed the future.

Changed it so irrevocably, evened the score so beautifully, Man would remember and curse and live with his name forever. They had known of the possibility, and they had tried to prevent it.

“Let us take Walkaway back to the drawing boards,” McCollum--that shadow lost in the past--had cried.

But Leon Packett had overruled him, “No!”

He would not let his name and his future be stolen from him. There was no need for him to go on living out a worthless life. That was bitterness. He had a tool that would and could and needed to drive forward to his ordained destiny. He had Walkaway, and though they suspected what might be, what could be, they never thought it needed to be. They figured without the drive and thirst of Walkaway’s master. They figured without the hatred of a man for himself and for all other men.

Walkaway wanted his wages.

He got them, by getting the Earth.

There was not that much money in the world. Nor was there that much property. But there was the government, and soon Walkaway was the government.

That was the future Leon Packett built for himself, as the shrine of his memory. Walkaway was not vindictive.

But Leon Packett was.

There haven’t been many changes. Not many. Not for us. It has been the same for a very long time.

Walkaway was fair, and carried forth Packett’s desires in the only way an alumasteel man could.

Changes? No, not many.

But you’ll forgive me, of course. I must hurry now. I’m quite overdue. I should have been at my lubrication hours ago.

Man alone. Man trapped by his own nature and the limits of the world around him. Man against Man. Man against Nature. All of thee inevitably come down to the essential question of how courageous a man can be in a time of massive peril. They all come down to how a man can survive, by strength of arm, by fleetness of foot, and most of all, by inventiveness of intellect. This has been the subject of much that I have written, perhaps because I see my Ties and my culture in the most “hung-up” condition it has ever known. Each man, each thinking individual, for the first time in the history of the race, completely--or as near completely as prejudiced mass media will allow--aware of the forces hurling him into the future. The Bomb, ready to go whenever the finger jumps to the proper button, the ethics slowly but steadily deteriorating, the morality finding its lowest common level, and each man, each thinking individual, virtually helpless before the fluxes and flows of civilization and herd instinct. Yet, is he really alone?

Ever? Or is the imagination and fierce drive to survive a tenacious linkage among us all?

And if it is, then are we not brothers to the man who had Nothing for My Noon Meal There was a patch of Flubs growing out beyond the spikes, and I tried to cultivate them, and bring them around, but somehow they weren’t drawing enough, and they died off before they could mature. I needed that air, too. My sac was nearly half-empty. My head was starting to hurt again. It had been night for three months at that time.

My world is a small one. Not large enough to hold an atmosphere any normal Earthman could breathe, not small enough to have none and be totally airless. My world is the sole planet of a red sun, and it has two moons, each one of which serves to eclipse my world’s sun for six of the eighteen months. I have light for six months, dark for twelve. I call my world Hell.

When I first came here, I had a name, and I had a face and I even had a wife. My wife died when the ship blew up, and my name died slowly over the ten years I have lived here, and my face-well, the less I remember that, the easier it is for me.

Oh, I don’t complain. It hasn’t been easy for me here, but I’ve managed, and what can I say? I’m here and I’m alive as best I can be here, and what there is, there is. But what there is not, is greater than mere complaining could bring back.

The first time I saw my world it was as a small egg of light in the plot tank on the ship I shared with my wife. “Do you think that has anything for us?” I asked her.

At first it was good to remember her; when I did, a sweetness came to me, burning away my tears and my hate. At first. “I don’t know, Tom, maybe.” That was what she said. “Maybe.” That was the sweet word, the way she said it. She always had a soft blonde way of saying maybe that made me want to wonder.

“The ore hold could do with something to chew on,” I said, and she smiled with her full lips and her teeth that gently nuzzled her lower lip. “Have to pay for these damn honeymoons of yours somehow.”

I kissed her playfully; we were often happy like that; simply happy, by being together. Together. What that meant to me, I never quite knew, happy as I was. Our enjoyment of one another was so uncomplicated, that it never struck me how it could be with her gone.

Then we passed through that fog of subatomic particles that float beyond the orbit of Firstmoon, and though they did not register on the tank, they were there and they were here and gone. Leaving in their wake a million tiny invisible punctures in the hull of the ship. The holes would not have leaked enough air in a month to cause my wife or myself any discomfort, but they had pierced the drive chambers, also. The particles were, not rock, but something else, perhaps even contra-terrene, and what they did to the drive chambers I will never know. For the ship lost power and slewed off toward this, my world, and miles above the surface it exploded. My wife died, then, and I saw her body as I was whirled away in the safety section of the cab. I was safe, with great tanks of oxygen strapped to my hutch, and my wife was still there in the companionway between the metal walls. In the companionway between the galley and the cab, where she had gone to prepare my coffee.

She was still there, her arms outstretched to me, her skin quite blue--excuse me, it, it hurts still--as I was whirled away and down. I saw her that once.

My world is a harsh world. No clouds fleece its twelvemonth black skies. No water runs across its surface.

But then, water is no problem for me. I have the circulator, which takes my refuse, and turns it into drinkable water.

There is a strong ammonia taste to the recirculated water, but that doesn’t bother me too much.

It’s the air that I have trouble getting. At least that was the case before I discovered the Fluhs and what I needed. I’ll tell you about it, and about what has happened to my face; I’m frightened. Of course I had to live.

Not at all because I wanted to live; when you’ve been a space bum as long as me, and nothing to moor you to one rock, and then along comes a woman who dips up life in her eyes and hands and does it all for you--and then she is taken away so quickly...

But I had to live. Simply because I had air in the cab, and a pressure-suit and food and the circulator. I could subsist on these for quite a while.

So I lived on Hell.

I woke and went through enough hours of nothingness to make me weary, and then I slept again, and woke when my dreams grew too crimson and too loud, repeating the tracks of the “day”

before. Soon I grew bored with my life in the cab, close and solitary as it was, and decided to take a walk on the surface of this world.

I slipped into my air-suit, not bothering to put on the pressure shell. There was barely enough gravity on the planet to keep me comfortable, and occasionally I got stiff pains in my chest. But with the heating circuits printed into the material of the air-suit, I was in no real danger. I strapped the oxygen unit to my back, and slipped the bubble onto the yoke, dogging it down over my head with ease. Then I inserted the hose between oxygen unit and bubble and sealed it tightly with a wrench, so I would lose no air from leakage. Then I went out.

It was twilight, as the sky dimmed on Hell. I had had three months of light already, since I had landed in the safety hutch, and I assumed perhaps two months of light had passed before I came. That left me with a month, roughly, before Secondmoon slipped completely across the face of the tiny red sun which I had not named. Even now, Secondmoon was coming across its disc, and I knew it would be darkness for a full six months by that moon, then another six from Firstmoon, then light again for a brief six. It had not been difficult to chart orbits and eclipse periods during the past three months. What else had I to do?

I started walking. It was difficult, and I found that by taking long hops, I could cover distances three times as great as those possible.

The planet was nearly barren. No great forests, no streams or oceans, no plains with grain standing on them, no birds, and no other life but mine and When I first saw them, I was certain they were trumpet flowers, for they had the characteristic bell-shaped perianth with delicate stamen projecting slightly from the cup. But as I drew nearer I realized nothing so Earthlike-even in outward appearance--could occur here. These were not flowers, and on the spot, in the muffled breathing of my helmet, I called them Fluhs.

They were a brilliant orange on the outside of the bell, fading down into a bluish-orange and then a simple marine blue on the stem. Inside the cups they seemed not so much orange as golden, and the blue of the pistils was topped by anthers of orange. Quite colorful they were, and pleasant to look upon. There were perhaps a hundred of these plants, growing at the base of rock formations that were highly unnatural: tall and leaning at angles, and all smooth and sharp-edged, like spikes, flattened off at the tops. Not so much like rocks, but like the image of salt crystals or glass, under ultramagnification. The entire area was covered with these formations, and with an instant’s loss of reality, I seemed to see myself as a microscopic being, surrounded by great flat-edged, flat-topped crystals that were in reality merely dust or microspecks.

Then my perspective returned, and I stepped closer to the Flubs, to examine them more closely, for this was the only other life that had managed to exist on Hell, apparently, drawing sustenance from the thin, nitrogen-laden atmosphere.

I leaned over to stare deeper into the trumpet-blossoms, resting on one of the slanting pillars of pseudo-rock for support. That was one of my first mistakes, nearly fatal, and to color my life on Hell. The pillar crashed--it was a semiporous volcanic formation, almost scorialike in composition--and loosened other rocks that had rested on it. I fell forward, directly atop the Flubs, and the last thing I felt was my oxygen helmet shattering about my head.

Then the blackness that was not as deep as space slid down over me. I should have been dead. There was no reason why I should not have been dead. But I was living; I was...breathing! Can you understand that? I should have been with my wife, but I was alive.

My face was pressed into the Flubs.

I was drawing oxygen from them.

I had stumbled and fallen and cracked open my helmet, and should have died, but because of strange plants that sucked the nitrogen from the thin atmosphere, circulated it and cast it back out as oxygen, I was still alive. I cursed the Fluhs for depriving me of quick, unknowing surcease. I had come so close to joining her, and had lost the chance. I wanted to stagger away from the Fluhs--out into the open where they could not give me air--and gasp away my stolen life. But something stopped me. I was never a religious man, and I am not now. But there seemed to be something miraculous in what had happened. I can’t explain it. I just knew there was a Chance that had thrown me down into that patch of Flubs.

I lay there, breathing deeply.

There was a soft membrane around the base of the pistils that must have held in the oxygen, allowing it to leak out slowly. They were intricate and wonderful plants.

...and there was the smell of midnight.

I can’t describe it any more clearly. It was not a sweet smell, nor was it a sour smell. It was a tender, almost fragile odor that reminded me of one midnight when I had first married her, and we were living in Minnesota. Crisp, and pure and uplifting that midnight had been, when our love had transcended even the restrictions of marriage, when we first realized we were more in love than in love with love itself. Does that sound foolish or confused? No, to me it was perfectly clear. And so was the smell of midnight from the Flubs. It was the smell perhaps, that made me go on living.

That, and the fact that my face had begun to drain.

As I lay there, I had time to think about what this meant: the bottleneck in oxygen-lack is the brain. After five minutes of oxygen starvation, the brain is irreversibly damaged. But with these Flubs, I could wander about my planet without a helmet--were I able to find them everywhere in such abundance. As I lay there thinking, gathering strength for the run back to the ship, I felt my face draining. It was as though I had a great boil or pus-sac on my right cheek, and it was sucking blood down into it. I felt my cheek, and yes, even through the glove I could feel a swelling. I grew terrified then, and plucking a handful of Fluhs--close to the bottom of their stems--I thrust my face into them and ran frantically back to the ship. Once inside, the Fluhs wilted and falling down over my fist, they shriveled. Their brilliant colors faded, and they turned gray as brain matter. I threw them from me and they lay on the deckplate for a few minutes, then they crumbled to a fine ash.

I pulled off my air-suit and my gloves, and ran to the recirculator that was constructed of burnished plasteel; my reflection lived there clearly. My right cheek was terribly inflamed. I gave a short, sharp squeal of terror and pawed at my face, but unlike a pimple or boil, there was no soreness, no pain. Just the constant draining feeling.

What was there to do? I waited.

In a week, the sac had taken shape almost completely. My face was like no human face, drawn down and puffed out on the right side so that my eye had been pulled into a mere slit of light shining through. It was like a gigantic goiter, a goiter that was not on the neck, but the face. The sac ended just at the jawbone, and it did not impair my breathing a bit. But my mouth had been dragged down with it, and when I opened it, I found I had a great cavernous maw instead of the firm lips that had formed my mouth. Otherwise, my face was completely normal. I was a half-beast. My left side was normal, and my right was grotesquely pulled into a drooping, rubbery parody of humanity. I could not bear to look at myself for more than an instant or two, each “day.”

The flaming redness of it had gone away, as had the draining, and I did not understand it for many weeks. Until I ventured once more onto the surface of Hell.

The helmet could not be repaired, of course, so I used the one that my wife had used when she was with me.

That set me thinking again, and later, when I had steadied myself, and stopped crying, I went out.

It was inevitable that I should return to the spot where my deformity had first occurred. I reached the spikesas I had now named the rock formations--without event, and sat down among a patch of Flubs. If I had drawn off their life-giving oxygen, they seemed no worse for it, for they had continued to grow in brilliance and were, if anything, even more beautiful.

I stared at them for a long time, trying to apply what smattering of knowledge I had about the physics and chemistry of botany to what had happened. One thing, at least, was obvious: I had undergone a fantastic mutation.

A mutation that was essentially impossible from what Man knew of life and its construction. What might, under exaggerated conditions, have turned out as a permanent mutation, through generations of special breeding, had happened to me almost overnight. I tried to reason it out: Even on a molecular level, structure is inextricably related to function. I considered the structure of proteins, for in that direction, I felt, lay at least a partial answer to my deformity. Finally, I removed the helmet, and bent down to the Fluhs once more. I sucked air from them, and this time felt a great light-headedness. I continued drawing, first from one flower and then the next, till I knew. My sac was full. It all became reasonably clear to me, then. The smell of midnight. There was more than just odor there. I had assimilated bacteria from the Fluhs; bacteria that had attacked the stabilizing enzymes in my breathing system.

Viruses perhaps, or even rickettsiae, that had--for want of a clearer term--softened my proteins and reshaped them to best allow me to make use of the Fluhs.

To allow me to oxygen-suck, as I had been doing, developing a bigger chest or larger lungs would have done me no good. But a balloon-like organ, capable of storing oxygen under pressure...that was something else again. When I sucked from the plants, oxygen bled slowly from the blood haemoglobin into the storage sac, and after a while I would be oxygen-full.

I could then proceed without air for short periods, even as a camel can go without water for periods of greater duration. Of course I would have to have an occasional suck to restore what I had used up in between; in an emergency, I could go without for a long while, but then I would need a long suck to replace completely.

How it had occurred, down on the nucleoprotein level, I was not that much of a biochemist to understand.

What I knew, I knew via hypno-courses I had taken many years before in Deimos University’s required classes. I knew these things, but had never studied enough to be able to analyze them. Given time and sufficient references, I was sure I could unravel the mystery; unlike Earth scientists, who discounted almostinstantaneous mutation as a fantasy, I had to believe...it had happened to me. I had only to feel my face, my puffed and now ballooned face, to know it was true. So I had more to work with than they did.

At that moment, I realized I had been standing erect for some minutes, my face nowhere near the Fluhs. Yet I was breathing comfortably.

Yes, I had something to work with, where they did not, for I was living the nightmare fantasy they said was impossible.

That was six months ago. Now it is well into night, and judging from the way the Flubs are dying, there will be nothing when light comes. Nothing left to breathe. Nothing for my noon meal. It was so dark. The stars were too far off to care about Hell or what lived there. I should have known, of course. In the eternal darkness of twelve months’ night, the Flubs died. They didn’t grayash as did the ones I first picked. No, instead they retreated into the ground. They grew smaller and smaller, as though they were a motion picture being run backward. They got tinier and finally disappeared entirely. Whether they incysted themselves, or just died completely, I never knew, for the ground was much too hard to dig in, and what little I’d been able to scrape away, where the scorialike formations extended onto the ground, revealed nothing but small holes where the blossoms descended.

My head was starting to hurt again, and my sac was emptying out all the faster, because my breathing-which I had learned to draw shallowly--was deepening with effort. I started back toward the ship.

It was many miles around the planet, for I had been living in caves and subsisting on the rations brought with me, for the past three “days.” I had been trying to track down a thriving patch of Fluhs, not only to get oxygen to replenish my emptying sac, but to further study their strange metabolism. My oxygen supply in the hutch was fast diminishing; something had gone broke in the system when I had landed...or perhaps the same particles that had caused the ship’s reactors to explode, had caused invisible damage in the oxygen recirculator. I didn’t know. But I did know I had to learn to live on what Hell could give me...or die. It had been a difficult decision. I had wanted very much to die. I was standing in the open, with the heated cowl of my airsuit grotesquely drawn about my head and sac, when I saw the flickering in the deep. It burned steadily for an instant, then continued to flicker as it fell toward the tiny planet.

I realized almost at once that it was a ship. Unbelievable, unbelievable, but somehow, in some manner I could never understand, God had sent a ship to take me from this place. I started running, back toward my hutch, what was left of my ship.

I stumbled once, and fell, only to scramble along on all fours till I could get my balance. I continued running, and by the time I had reached the hutch, my sac was nearly empty, and my head was splitting. I got inside and dogged the lock, then leaned against it in exhaustion, drawing deeply, deeply for the air inside.

I turned toward the radio gear, even before the ache was gone from my head, and threw myself roughly into the plotseat. I had almost forgotten how valuable the set could be; lost out here, so far over the Edge, I had never even given serious consideration to the possibility of being found. Actually, had I stopped to consider, a visit was not so unbelievable after all; my ship had not exploded all that far off the trade routes. True, I was far out, but any number of circumstances could combine to bring another ship my way. And they had.

And it had.

And it was.

I flipped on the beacon signal, and set it to all-bands, hearing the bdeep-bdeep-bdeep of it in the hutch, going out, I knew, to that ship circling the planet. That done, I turned slowly in the plot chair, hands on my knees-only to catch sight of myself in the burnished wall of the recirculator. I saw my sac, grotesque, monstrous, hideous, covered with a week’s growth of spikey beard stubble, my mouth drawn down in a gash. I was hardly human any longer.

When they came, I would not open the lock for them.

Finally, I allowed them in. There were three of them, young, clean-limbed, trying to hide their horror at what I had become. They came in and stripped out of their bulky pressure-suits. The hutch was crowded, but the girl and one of the men squatted on the floor and the other man perched on the plot tank’s edge.

“My name--” I didn’t know whether to say “is” or “was” so I slurred it, easily, “Tom Van Home. I’ve been here about four or five months, I’m not sure which.”

One of the young men--he was staring at me openly, he could not take his eyes off me, in fact--replied, “We belong to the Human Research Foundation. Expedition to evaluate some of the worlds out past the Edge for colonization. We--we--saw the other half of your ship. There was a worn--”

I stopped him. “I know. My wife.” They stared at the port, the deckplate, the bulkhead. We talked for some time, and I could see they were interested in my theories of nearinstantaneous mutation. It was their field, and soon the girl said, “Mr. Van Home, you have stumbled on something terribly vital to us all. You must come back with us and help us to get to the heart of--of--your, uh, your change.” She blushed, and it reminded me a little of my wife.

Then the other two started in. They used me as a buffer, asking questions and answering them, and making me warmer and warmer to the prospect of returning. I was caught up in a maelstrom of enthusiasm. A feeling of belonging stole over me, and I forgot. I forgot how the ship had gone out like a match; I forgot how she had stood there frozen in the companionway, blue and strange; I forgot all the years I had spent burning in space; I forgot the months here; and most of all I forgot the change.

They pleaded with me, and said we should go right now. I hesitated for an instant, not even knowing why, but unconsciously crying to myself not to listen. Then I relented, and got into my airsuit. When I pulled the heated cowl up about my sac, they all stared for a long moment, until the girl nudged one of the fellows, and the other broke into a nervous titter.

They jollied me, telling me how important my discovery would be to mankind. I listened; I was wanted. It was good, so good, after what seemed an eternity on Hell.

We left my hutch, and started across the short space between their ship and my life cubicle. I was pleased and surprised to see how shining their ship was; they were proud of it, they took good care of it. They were the new breed--the high-strung, intelligent scientists with the youthful ideas and the glory in them. They weren’t tired old folks like me. The ship was lighted by automatic floods that had come out on the hull, and the vessel shone in the night of Hell like a great glowing torch. It would be good to go to space once more. We came up to the ship, and one of the men depressed a stud that started a humming inside the ship. A landing ramp slid down from far above as the outer lock opened, and I knew this was a more recent model than my ship had been. But then, that didn’t disturb me; I had been a poor space bum before I met her. She had been all the drive I’d ever needed.

I took a step forward, up the ramp, and two things happened, almost simultaneously: I caught a glimpse of myself in the glowing shell of the ship. It was not a pretty picture. My ghoul’s mouth, drawn down and to the side like a knife wound. My eye, a mere slit of brightness, the sac so hideous and veinstreaked. I stopped on the ramp, with them directly behind me. And the second thing happened.

I heard her.

Somewhere...far off...in a bright amber cavern hung down with scintillant stalactites...swathed in a shimmering aura of goodness and cleanliness and hope...younger than the next instant...radiantly beautiful and calling to me...calling with a voice of music that was the sound of suns flaring and stars twinkling and earth moving and grass growing and small things being happy...it was she!

I listened there for a moment that spanned forever.

My head tilted to the side, I listened, and I knew what she said was truth, so simple and so pure and so real, that I turned and edged past them on the ramp, and returned to Hell again. Her voice stopped in the moment of my touching ground.

They stared at me, and for a short time they said nothing. Then one of the men--the short, blond fellow with alert blue eyes and hardly any neck--said, “What’s the matter?”

“I’m not going,” I said. The girl ran down the ramp to me. “But why?” She almost sounded tearful.

I couldn’t tell her, of course. But she was so small, so sweet, and she reminded me of my wife, when I had first met her, so I answered, “I’ve been here too long; I’m not very nice to look at--”

“Oh--” and she tried to stop me, but it was a sob, so it did not interfere.

“--and you may not understand this but I--I’ve been well, content here. It’s a hard world, and it’s dark, but she’s up there--” I looked toward the black sky of Hell, “--and I wouldn’t want to go away and leave her alone. Can you understand that?”

They nodded slowly, and one of the men said, “But this is more than just you, Van Horne. This is a discovery that means a great deal to everyone on Earth.

“It’s getting worse and worse there every year. With the new antiaging drugs people just aren’t dying, and they’ve still got the Catho-Presbyte Lobby to keep any really effective birth control laws from being enacted. The crowding is terrible; that’s one of the chief reasons we’re out here, to see how Man can adapt to these worlds. Your discovery can aid us tremendously.”

“And you said the Fluhs were gone,” the other man said. “Without them, you’ll die.” I smiled at them; she had said something, something important about the Flubs.

“I can still do some good,” I replied quickly. “Send me a few young people. Let them come here, and we’ll study together. I can show them what I’ve found, and they can experiment here. Laboratory conditions could never match what I’ve found on Hell.”

That seemed to do it. They looked at me sadly, and the girl agreed...the other two matched her agreement in a moment.

“And, and--I couldn’t leave her here alone,” I said again.

“Goodbye, Tom Van Home,” she said, and she pressed my hand between her mittened ones. It was a kiss on the cheek, but her helmet prevented it physically, so she clasped my hand. Then they started up the ramp.

“What will you do for air, with the Fluhs gone?” one of the men asked, stopping halfway up.

“I’ll be all right, I promise you. I’ll be here when you return.” They looked at me with doubt, but I smiled, and patted my sac, and they looked uncomfortable, and started up the ramp again.

“We’ll be back. With others.” The girl looked down at me. I waved, and they went inside. Then I loped back to the hutch, and watched them as they shattered the night with their fire and fury. When they were gone, I went outside, and stared up at the dim, so-faraway points of the dead stars. Where she circled, up there, somewhere.

And I knew I would have something for my noon meal, and all the meals thereafter. She had told me; I suppose I knew it all along, but it hadn’t registered, so she had told me: the Fluhs were not dead. They had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself, from the caves and porous openings where the rock trapped the air. They would be back again, long before I needed them. The Fluhs would return.

And someday I would find her again, and it would be an unbroken time. This world I had named, I had not properly named. Not Hell.

Not Hell at all.

There really isn’t much to say about this next story, save that I’ve tried to make a bit of a caustic comment on the “faithful” and their faith. I have no quarrel with those who wish to believe--whether they believe in a flat Earth, the health-giving properties of sorghum and blackstrap molasses, Dianetics, the Hereafter, orgone boxes, a ghostwriter for Shakespeare, or that jazz about the manna in the desert--except to point out that nothing in this life (and presumably the next) is certain; and faith is all well and good, but even the most devout should leave a small area of their thoughts open for such possibilities as occur in Hadj It had taken almost a year to elect Herber. A year of wild speculation, and a growing sense of the Universe’s existence. The year after the Masters of the Universe had flashed through Earth’s atmosphere and broadcast their message.

From nowhere they had come down in their glowing golden spaceship--forty miles long--and without resistance shown every man, woman, and child on Earth that they did, indeed, rule the Universe.

They had merely said: “Send us a representative from Earth.” They had then given detailed instructions for constructing what they called an “inverspace” ship, and directions for getting to their home world, somewhere across the light-galaxies.

So the ship had been constructed. But who was to go? The Earthmen who pondered this question knew the awesome responsibility of that emissary. They had to be careful whom they picked. So they had reasoned it was too big a problem to lay in the hands of mere humans, and set the machines on it. They had set the Mark XXX. the UniCompVac, the Brognagov Master Computer and hundreds of the little brains to the task.

After sixteen billion punched cards had gone through three times, the last card fell into the hopper, and Wilson Herber had been elected. He was the most fit to travel across the hundred galaxies to the home world of the Masters of the Universe, and offer his credentials to them.

They came to Wilson Herber in his mountain retreat, and were initially greeted by threats of disembowelment if they didn’t get the bell away and leave him in his retirement!

But judicious reasoning soon brought the ex-statesman around. Herber was one of the wealthiest men in the world. The cartel he had set up during the first fifty-six years of his life was still intact, run entirely now by his lieutenants. It spanned every utility and service, every raw material and necessity a growing Earth would need. It had made Wilson Herber an incalculably wealthy man. It had led him into the World Federation Hall, where he had served as Representative for ten years, till he had become Co-Ordinator of the Federation.

Then, five years before the golden Masters had come, he had completely retired, completely secluded himself. Only a matter of such import could bring the crusty, hardheaded old pirate out of his sanctuary--and throw him into the stars.

“I’ll take the credentials,” he advised the men who had come to him. He sat sunk deep in an easy chair, a shrunken gnome of a man with thinned grey hair, piercing blue eyes, and a chin sharp as a diamond facet.

“You must establish us on a sound footing with their emissaries, and let them know we walk hand-in-hand with them, as brothers,” one of the men had told Herber.

“Till we can get what we might need from them, and then assume their position ourselves, young man’”