Isaac Asimov

Presents

The Golden Years

of Science Fiction

Sixth Series

Edited By

Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

THE RED QUEEN’S RACE Isaac Asimov

FLAW John D. MacDonald

PRIVATE EYE Lewis Padgett

MANNA Peter Phillips

THE PRISONER IN THE SKULL Lewis Padgett

ALIEN EARTH Edmond Hamilton

HISTORY LESSON Arthur C. Clarke

ETERNITY LOST Clifford D. Simak

THE ONLY THING WE LEARN C.M. Kornbluth

PRIVATE—KEEP OUT Philip MacDonald

THE HURKLE IS A HAPPY BEAST Theodore Sturgeon

KALEIDOSCOPE Ray Bradbury

DEFENSE MECHANISM Katherine MacLean

COLD WAR Harry Kuttner

THE WITCHES OF KARRES James H. Schmitz

NOT WITH A BANG Damon Knight

SPECTATOR SPORT John D. MacDonald

THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS Ray Bradbury

DEAR DEVIL Eric Frank Russell

SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN Cordwainer Smith

BORN OF MAN AND WOMAN Richard Matheson

THE LITTLE BLACK BAG C.M. Kornbluth

ENCHANTED VILLAGE A.E. van Vogt

ODDY AND ID Alfred Bester

THE SACK William Morrison

THE SILLY SEASON C.M. Kornbluth

MISBEGOTTEN MISSIONARY Isaac Asimov

TO SERVE MAN Damon Knight

COMING ATTRACTION Fritz Leiber

A SUBWAY NAMED MOBIUS A.J. Deutsch

PROCESS A.E. van Vogt

THE MINDWORM C.M. Kornbluth

THE NEW REALITY Charles L. Harness

Foreword

The years 1949 and 1950 saw into print some of the best science fiction ever written. The technology and the fears brought about by the atomic age pressed new horizons and the concept of absolute mortality upon the world, and it was through this most disturbing vision that the science fiction giants finally found their wings. In this, the sixth volume in the highly acclaimed series of anthologies edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, the reader will find a thoroughly satisfying collection of stories guaranteed to beguile the mind and shake the soul. Selections by legendary writers such as Arthur C. Clark, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Clifford D. Simak, and A. E. van Vogt make this volume a must-have for the science fiction addict or historian, readers just beginning to explore the field, and that eternal (and non gender-specific) audience, the Common Man, for whom many of these cautionary tales have been written.

C.L.S.

Introduction

In the world outside reality it was a very violent year. On June 25 North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The United States, under the banner of the United Nations (the Soviets were out of the building protesting some-thing else, and couldn’t use their veto), went to die assistance of South Korea with air strikes and an expeditionary force. The North Koreans advanced steadily, forcing the U.S. and Republic of Korea troops back to a small area on the southern coast of the peninsula. Defeat was narrowly averted when General Douglas MacArthur engineered a remarkable landing far behind enemy lines at Inchon. Allied forces then pushed the North Koreans back across the border, pursuing them all the way to within a few miles of the border with the People’s Republic of China at the Yalu River. However, on December 28 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed the Yalu and began to force the Allies back as the year ended. Earlier, on January 25, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in testimony regarding his membership in the American Communist Party. Anti-communism reached fever pitch with the emergence of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who charged in a speech that he had a list of “known communists”

working for the State Department, and the passage on September 20 of the McCarran Act, which forced even suspected communists and former Party members out of government service. Especially vicious was the publication Red Channels, a book that accused American citizens, particularly figures in the entertainment industry, of communist connections. Careers and lives were ruined on hearsay and through guilt by association.

Other highlights of the year included American recognition of Vietnam, the seizure of Tibet by Chinese Communist forces, and the formal decision by the Truman administration to develop the hydrogen bomb. The biggest heist in American history oc-curred when seven men took $2,700,000 in cash and money orders from the Brink’s Express Company in Boston. French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman advocated a plan for the sharing of Europe’s coal and iron ore deposits—this proposal would eventually lead to the formation of the European Economic Community or “Common Market.”

On August 25 President Truman ordered Federal troops to seize the railroads in order to prevent a threatened strike. The President was the object of an assassination attempt on November 1, when Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to break into Blair House, where the Trumans were staying—one guard and one attacker were killed. During 1950 the mambo became a dance craze in the United States. Uruguay defeated Brazil 5-4 to win soccer’s World Cup. The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued its first “Most Wanted” list, while What’s My Line and Your Show of Shows, the latter starring Sid Caeser, were hits on television. Minute Rice and Sugar Pops appeared on grocery shelves. Pablo Picasso sculpted “The Goat” as Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts debuted in the newspapers. Outstanding novels included The Wall by John Hersey, A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, The Short Life by Juan Carlos Onetti, and Across The River and Through The Woods by Ernest Hemingway. There were 8,000,000

television sets in the United States, serviced by over 100 TV stations. Orion was introduced by DuPont.

Joe Louis attempted to regain his heavyweight boxing championship, but lost a decision to Ezzard Charles. Americans were the mostly proud owners of over 40,000,000 cars. Top films of the year included The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria Swanson, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and the wonderful The Lavender Hill Mob. The last two featured Alec Guinness. The Cleveland Browns won the National Football League Championship, while the New York Yankees defeated the surprising Philadelphia Phillies four games to none to take baseball’s World Series. Cyclamates and Sucaryl were introduced, and the Wallace and Wyeth laboratories developed tranquilizers. Two of the most influential books were The Human Uses of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener and The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer.

The Haloid Company of Rochester, New York, produced the first Xerox copying machine. Middleground won the Kentucky Derby, while Al Rosen and Ralph Kiner led the American and National Leagues in home runs. Marc Chagall painted “King David.” It was a wonderful year for the theater as The Country Girl by Clifford Odets, Come Back Little Sheba by William Inge, and Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers all opened on Broadway. The Diners Club was founded as book publishers rejoiced. Popular musicals included Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam, and Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls. America was singing “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” “It’s So Nice to Have a Man Around the House,”

and “If I Knew You Were Comin I’d Have Baked a Cake.”

Florence Chadwick broke the record for swimming the English Channel. Smokey the Bear became the symbol for fighting forest fires. There were about 2,520,000,000 people in the world. Death took George Bernard Shaw and painter Max Beckmann.

Mel Brooks may have still been Melvin Kaminsky.

In the real world it was a simply terrific year.

In the real world the eighth World Science Fiction Convention (the Norwescon) was held in far away Portland, Oregon. Also in the real world Galaxy Science Fiction was born and under the editorship of H. L. Gold quickly established itself as one of the premier magazines in the field. If this was not enough, The Magazine of Fantasy, launched the year before, changed its name to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and also rapidly achieved excellence, transforming Astounding Science Fiction from the “Big One,” to one of the “Big Three.” The tide continued to rise with the appearance of Damon Knight’s excellent Worlds Beyond, Raymond Palmer’s/Beatrice Mahaffey’s Imagination, Malcolm Reiss’ Two Complete Science Adventure Books, and a refurbished Future Combined With Science Fiction Stories. In England, Walter H. Gillings started Science-Fantasy, an uneven magazine but one that would enjoy a long life. These events overshadowed the folding of A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine in October.

In the real world, more important people made their maiden voyages into reality: in January—Cordwainer Smith with “Scanners Live in Vain”, in February—Paul Fairman with “No Teeth for the Tiger”; in March—Gordon R. Dickson (co-authored with Poul Anderson) with “Trespass!”; in April—Mack Reynolds with “Isolationist”; in the summer—Richard Matheson with “Born of Man and Woman”; in November—Chad Oliver with “The Land of Lost Content”; and in December—J. T. McIntosh with “The Curfew Tolls.”

More wondrous things happened in the real world as outstanding novels, stories and collections were published in magazines and in book form: James Blish began his “Oakie” series of novelettes, while L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt published their first “Gavagan’s Bar” story. The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon appeared in Fantastic Adventures, Judith Merril’s first anthology, Shot in the Dark, appeared in paperback, and sf fans had the pleasure of reading Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury as part of Doubleday’s new science fiction line. A. E. van Vogt brought together earlier stories in an attractive package and produced The Voyage of the Space Beagle. On a more serious note, veteran science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard published an article entitled

“Dianetics, the Involution of a Science” in Astounding, which eventually led to controversy, to the distraction and temporary loss to sf of several important writers, and, incidentally to the establishment of something that considered itself a new religion.

The non-print media began to embrace science fiction with the release of Destination Moon, (based very loosely on Robert A. Heihlein’s juvenile novel Rocketship Galileo), The Flying Saucer, The Perfect Woman, the unforgettable Prehistoric Women, and the moody Rocketship XM. Tom Corbett: Space Cadet debuted on television.

Let us travel back to that honored year of 1950 and enjoy the best stories that the real world bequeathed to us.

The Red Queen's Race

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

Astounding Science Fiction, January

Marty Greenberg does have a tendency to pick my stories for this series. Not all of them, of course, but more than I think he ought to. Unfortunately, he insists on having the sole vote in this matter. He says I am too prejudiced to vote, which is ridiculous on the face of it. However, I don’t dare do anything to offend him, for he does all the skutwork in this series (Xeroxing stories, getting permissions, paying out checks, etc.) and does it most efficiently. If he quit on me, there would be no chance whatever of an adequate replacement. And then having picked a story, he refuses to write a headnote for it. He insists that I do the job alone.

Well, what can I say about “The Red Queen’s Race”?

I. I wrote it after nearly a year’s layoff from writing because I was working very hard to get my Ph.D. Once I got it, I went back to writing at once (with RQR as a result) and since then I have never had a sizable writing hiatus (or even a minor one) in my life.

2. Someone once said to me, “I didn’t know you ever wrote a tough-guy detective story.” I said, “I never have.” He said, “How about ‘The Red Queen’s Race’ ?”—so I read it and it certainly sounds tough-guy detective. I’ve never been able to explain that.

3. If you were planning to write anyway (I wouldn’t ask you if you weren’t) do write to Marty to the effect that you loved this story. I want him to think highly of himself and of his expertise, and not even dream of quitting the team.—I.A.

Here’s a puzzle for you, if you like. Is it a crime to translate a chemistry textbook into Greek?

Or let’s put it another way. If one of the country’s largest atomic power plants is completely ruined in an unauthorized experiment, is an admitted accessory to that act a criminal?

These problems only developed with time, of course. We started with the atomic power plant—drained. I really mean drained. I don’t know exactly how large the fissionable power source was—but in two flashing microseconds, it had all fissioned.

No explosion. No undue gamma ray density. It was merely that every moving part in the entire structure was fused. The entire main building was mildly hot. The atmosphere for two miles in every direction was gently warm. Just a dead, useless building which later on took a hundred million dollars to replace. It happened about three in the morning, and they found Elmer Tywood alone in the central source chamber. The findings of twenty-four close-packed hours can be summarized quickly.

1. Elmer Tywood—Ph.D., Sc.D., Fellow of This and Honorary That, onetime youthful participant of the original Manhattan Project, and now full Professor of Nuclear Physics—was no interloper. He had a Class-A Pass—Unlimited. But no record could be found as to his purpose in being there just then. A table on casters contained equipment which had not been made on any recorded requisition. It, too, was a single fused mass—not quite too hot to touch. 2. Elmer Tywood was dead. He lay next to the table; his face congested, nearly black. No radiation effect. No external force of any sort. The doctor said apoplexy.

3. In Elmer Tywood’s office safe were found two puzzling items: i.e., twenty foolscap sheets of apparent mathematics, and a bound folio in a foreign language which turned out to be Greek, the subject matter, on translation, turning out to be chemistry.

The secrecy which poured over the whole mess was something so terrific as to make everything that touched it, dead. It’s the only word that can describe it. Twenty-seven men and women, all told, including the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Science, and two or three others so top-notch that they were completely unknown to the public, entered the power plant during the period of investigation. All who had been in the plant that night, the physicist who had identified Tywood, the doctor who had examined him, were retired into virtual home arrest.

No newspaper ever got the story. No inside dopester got it. A few members of Congress got part of it.

And naturally so! Anyone or any group or any country that could suck all the available energy out of the equivalent of perhaps fifty to a hundred pounds of plutonium without exploding it, had America’s industry and America’s defense so snugly in the palm of the hand that the light and life of one hundred sixty million people could be turned off between yawns.

Was it Tywood? Or Tywood and others? Or just others, through Tywood?

And my job? I was decoy; or front man, if you like. Someone has to hang around the university and ask questions about Tywood. After all, he was missing. It could be amnesia, a hold-up, a kidnapping, a killing, a runaway, insanity, accident—I could busy myself with that for five years and collect black looks, and maybe divert attention. To be sure, it didn’t work out that way. But don’t think I was in on the whole case at the start. I wasn’t one of the twenty-seven men I mentioned a while back, though my boss was. But I knew a little—enough to get started.

Professor John Keyser was also in Physics. I didn’t get to him right away. There was a good deal of routine to cover first in as conscientious a way as I could. Quite meaningless. Quite necessary. But I was in Keyser’s office now. Professors’ offices are distinctive. Nobody dusts them except some tired cleaning woman who hobbles in and out at eight in the morning, and the professor never notices the dust anyway. Lots of books without much arrangement. The ones close to the desk are used a lot—lectures are copied out of them. The ones out of reach are wherever a student put them back after borrowing them. Then there are professional journals that look cheap and are darned expensive, which are waiting about and which may some day be read. And plenty of paper on the desk; some of it scribbled on. Keyser was an elderly man—one of Tywood’s generation. His nose was big and rather red, and he smoked a pipe. He had that easy-going and nonpredatory look in his eyes that goes with an academic job—either because that kind of job attracts that kind of man or because that kind of job makes that kind of man. I said: “What kind of work is Professor Tywood doing?”

“Research physics.”

Answers like that bounce off me. Some years ago they used to get me mad. Now I just said: “We know that, professor. It’s the details I’m after.”

And he twinkled at me tolerantly: “Surely the details can’t help much unless you’re a research physicist yourself. Does it matter—under the circumstances?”

“Maybe not. But he’s gone. If anything’s happened to him in the way of”—I gestured, and deliberately clinched—”foul play, his work may have something to do with it—unless he’s rich and the motive is money.”

Keyser chuckled dryly: “College professors are never rich. The commodity we peddle is but lightly considered, seeing how large the supply is.”

I ignored that, too, because I know my looks are against me. Actually, I finished college with a “very good” translated into Latin so that the college president could understand it, and never played in a football game in my life. But I look rather the reverse.

I said: “Then we’re left with his work to consider.”

“You mean spies? International intrigue?”

“Why not? It’s happened before! After all, he’s a nuclear physicist, isn’t he?”

“He is. But so are others. So am I.”

“Ah, but perhaps he knows something you don’t.”

There was a stiffening to the jaw. When caught off-guard, professors can act just like people. He said, stiffly: “As I recall offhand, Tywood has published papers on the effect of liquid viscosity on the wings of the Rayleigh line, on higher-orbit field equations, and on spin-orbit coupling of two nucleons, but his main work is on quadrupole moments. I am quite competent in these matters.”

“Is he working on quadrupole moments now?” I tried not to bat an eye, and I think I succeeded.

“Yes—in a way.” He almost sneered, “He may be getting to the experimental stage finally. He’s spent most of his life, it seems, working out the mathematical consequences of a special theory of his own.”

“Like this,” and I tossed a sheet of foolscap at him. That sheet was one of those in the safe in Tywood’s office. The chances, of course, were that the bundle meant nothing, if only because it was a professor’s safe. That is, things are sometimes put in at the spur of the moment because the logical drawer was filled with unmarked exam papers. And, of course, nothing is ever taken out. We had found in that safe dusty little vials of yellowish crystals with scarcely legible labels, some mimeographed booklets dating back to World War II and marked “Restricted,” a copy of an old college yearbook, and some correspondence concerning a possible position as Director of Research for American Electric, dated ten years back, and, of course, chemistry in Greek.

The foolscap was there, too. It was rolled up like a college diploma with a rubber band about it and had no label or descriptive title. Some twenty sheets were covered with ink marks, meticulous and small—

I had one sheet of that foolscap. I don’t think any one man in the world had more than one sheet. And I’m sure that no man in the world but one knew that the loss of his particular sheet and of his particular life would be as nearly simultaneous as the government could make it.

So I tossed the sheet at Keyser, as if it were something I’d found blowing about the campus.

He stared at it and then looked at the back side, which was blank. His eyes moved down from the top to the bottom, then jumped back to the top.

“I don’t know what this is about,” he said, and the words seemed sour to his own taste.

I didn’t say anything. Just folded the paper and shoved it back into the inside jacket pocket.

Keyser added petulantly: “It’s a fallacy you laymen have that scientists can look at an equation and say, ‘Ah, yes—’ and go on to write a book about it. Mathematics has no existence of its own. It is merely an arbitrary code devised to describe physical observations or philosophical concepts. Every man can adapt it to his own particular needs. For instance no one can look at a symbol and be sure of what it means. So far, science has used every letter in the alphabet, large, small and italic, each symbolizing many different things. They have used bold-faced letters, Gothic-type letters, Greek letters, both capital and small, subscripts, superscripts, asterisks, even Hebrew letters. Different scientists use different symbols for the same concept and the same symbol for different concepts. So if you show a disconnected page like this to any man, without information as to the subject being investigated or the particular symbology used, he could absolutely not make sense out of it.”

I interrupted: “But you said he was working on quadrupole moments. Does that make this sensible?” and I tapped the spot on my chest where the foolscap had been slowly scorching a hole in my jacket for two days.

“I can’t tell. I saw none of the standard relationships that I’d expect to be involved. At least I recognized none. But I obviously can’t commit myself.”

There was a short silence, then he said: “I’ll tell you. Why don’t you check with his students?”

I lifted my eyebrows: “You mean in his classes?”

He seemed annoyed: “No, for Heaven’s sake. His research students! His doctoral candidates! They’ve been working with him. They’ll know the details of that work better than I, or anyone in the faculty, could possibly know it.”

“It’s an idea,” I said, casually. It was, too. I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t have thought of it myself. I guess it’s because it’s only natural to think that any professor knows more than any student. Keyser latched onto a lapel as I rose to leave. “And, besides,” he said, “I think you’re on the wrong track. This is in confidence, you understand, and I wouldn’t say it except for the unusual circumstances, but Tywood is not thought of too highly in the profession. Oh, he’s an adequate teacher, I’ll admit, but his research papers have never commanded respect. There has always been a tendency towards vague theorizing, unsupported by experimental evidence. That paper of yours is probably more of it. No one could possibly want to… er, kidnap him because of it.”

“Is that so? I see. Any ideas, yourself, as to why he’s gone, or where he’s gone?”

“Nothing concrete,” he said pursing his lips, “but everyone knows he is a sick man. He had a stroke two years ago that kept him out of classes for a semester. He never did get well. His left side was paralyzed for a while and he still limps. Another stroke would kill him. It could come any time.”

“You think he’s dead, then?”

“It’s not impossible.”

“But where’s the body, then?”

“Well, really—That is your job, I think.”

It was, and I left.

I interviewed each one of Tywood’s four research students in a volume of chaos called a research laboratory. These student research laboratories usually have two hopefuls working therein, said two constituting a floating population, since every year or so they are alternately replaced. Consequently, the laboratory has its equipment stack in tiers. On the laboratory benches is the equipment immediately being used, and in three, or four of the handiest drawers are replacements or supplements which are likely to be used. In the farther drawers, in the shelves reaching up to the ceiling, in odd corners, are fading remnants of the past student generations—oddments never used and never discarded. It is claimed, in fact, that no research student ever knew all the contents of his laboratory. All four of Tywood’s students were worried. But three were worried mainly by their own status. That is, by the possible effect the absence of Tywood might have on the status of their “problem.” I dismissed those three—who all have their degrees now, I hope—and called back the fourth. He had the most haggard look of all, and had been least communicative—which I considered a hopeful sign.

He now sat stiffly in the straight-backed chair at the right of the desk, while I leaned back in a creaky old swivel-chair and pushed my hat off my forehead. His name was Edwin Howe and he did get his degree later on; I know that for sure, because he’s a big wheel in the Department of Science now. I said: “You do the same work the other boys do, I suppose?”

“It’s all nuclear work, in a way.”

“But it’s not all exactly the same?”

He shook his head slowly. “We take different angles. You have to have something clear-cut, you know, or you won’t be able to publish. We’ve got to get our degrees.”

He said it exactly the way you or I might say, “We’ve got to make a living.”

At that, maybe it’s the same thing for them.

I said: “All right. What’s your angle?”

He said: “I do the math. I mean, with Professor Tywood.”

“What kind of math?”

And he smiled a little, getting the same sort of atmosphere about him that I had noticed in Professor Keyser’s case that morning. A sort of,

“Do-you-really-think-I-can-explain-all-my-profound-thoughts-to-stupid-little-y ou?” sort of atmosphere.

All he said aloud, however, was: “That would be rather complicated to explain.”

“I’ll help you,” I said. “Is that anything like it?” And I tossed the foolscap sheet at him.

He didn’t give it any once-over. He just snatched it up and let out a thin wail: “Where’d you get this?”

“From Tywood’s safe.”

“Do you have the rest of it, too?”

“It’s safe,” I hedged.

He relaxed a little—just a little: “You didn’t show it to anybody, did you?”

“I showed it to Professor Keyser.”

Howe made an impolite sound with his lower lip and front teeth, “That jackass. What did he say?”

I turned the palms of my hands upward and Howe laughed. Then he said, in an offhand manner: “Well, that’s the sort of stuff I do.”

“And what’s it all about? Put it so I can understand it.”

There was distinct hesitation. He said: “Now, look. This is confidential stuff. Even Pop’s other students don’t know anything about it. I don’t even think I know all about it. This isn’t just a degree I’m after, you know. It’s Pop Tywood’s Nobel Prize, and it’s going to be an Assistant Professorship for me at Cal Tech. This has got to be published before it’s talked about.”

And I shook my head slowly and made my words very soft: “No, son. You have it twisted. You’ll have to talk about it before it’s published, because Tywood’s gone and maybe he’s dead and maybe he isn’t. And if he’s dead, maybe he’s murdered. And when the department has a suspicion of murder, everybody talks. Now, it will look bad for you, kid, if you try to keep some secrets.”

It worked. I knew it would, because everyone reads murder mysteries and knows all the clichés. He jumped out of his chair and rattled the words off as if he had a script in front of him.

“Surely,” he said, “you can’t suspect me of … of anything like that. Why… why, my career—”

I shoved him back into his chair with the beginnings of a sweat on his forehead. I went into the next line: “I don’t suspect anybody of anything yet. And you won’t be in any trouble, if you talk, chum.”

He was ready to talk. “Now this is all in strict confidence.”

Poor guy. He didn’t know the meaning of the word “strict.” He was never out of eyeshot of an operator from that moment till the government decided to bury the whole case with the one final comment of “?” Quote. Unquote. (I’m not kidding. To this day, the case is neither opened nor closed. It’s just “?”) He said, dubiously, “You know what time travel is, I suppose?”

Sure I knew what time travel was. My oldest kid is twelve and he listens to the afternoon video programs till he swells up visibly with the junk he absorbs at the ears and eyes.

“What about time travel?” I said.

“In a sense, we can do it. Actually, it’s only what you might call micro-temporal-translation—“

I almost lost my temper. In fact, I think I did. It seemed obvious that the squirt was trying to diddle me; and without subtlety. I’m used to having people think I look dumb; but not that dumb.

I said through the back of my throat: “Are you going to tell me that Tywood is out somewhere in time—like Ace Rogers, the Lone Time Ranger?” (That was Junior’s favorite program—Ace Rogers was stopping Genghis Khan single-handed that week.)

But he looked as disgusted as I must have. “No,” he yelled. “I don’t know where Pop is. If you’d listen to me—I said micro-temporal-translation. Now, this isn’t a video show and it isn’t magic; this happens to be science. For instance, you know about matter-energy equivalence, I suppose.”

I nodded sourly. Everyone knows about that since Hiroshima in the last war but one.

“All right, then,” he went on, “that’s good for a start. Now, if you take a brown mass of matter and apply temporal translation to it—you know, send it back in time—you are, in effect, creating matter at the point in time to which you are sending it. To do that, you must use an amount of energy equivalent to the amount of matter you have created. In other words, to send a gram—or, say, an ounce—of anything back in time, you have to disintegrate an ounce of matter completely, to furnish the energy required.”

“Hm-m-m,” I said, “that’s to create the ounce of matter in the past. But aren’t you destroying an ounce of matter by removing it from the present?

Doesn’t that create the equivalent amount of energy?”

And he looked just about as annoyed as a fellow sitting on a bumblebee that wasn’t quite dead. Apparently laymen are never supposed to question scientists.

He said: “I was trying to simplify it so you would understand it. Actually, it’s more complicated. It would be very nice if we could use the energy of disappearance to cause it to appear, but that would be working in a circle, believe me. The requirements of entropy would forbid it. To put it more rigorously, the energy is required to overcome temporal inertia and it just works out so that the energy in ergs required to send back a mass, in grams, is equal to that mass times the square of the speed of light in centimeters per second. Which just happens to be the Einstein Mass-Energy Equivalence Equation. I can give you the mathematics, you know.”

“I know,” I waxed some of that misplaced eagerness back. “But was all this worked out experimentally? Or is it just on paper?”

Obviously, the thing was to keep him talking.

He had that queer light in his eye that every research student gets, I am told, when he is asked to discuss his problem. He’ll discuss it with anyone, even with a “dumb flatfoot”—which was convenient at the moment.

“You see,” he said like a man slipping you the inside dope on a shady business deal, “what started the whole thing was this neutrino business. They’ve been trying to find that neutrino since the late thirties and they haven’t succeeded. It’s a subatomic particle which has no charge and has a mass much less than even an electron. Naturally, it’s next to impossible to spot, and hasn’t been spotted yet. But they keep looking because, without assuming that a neutrino exists, the energetics of some nuclear reactions can’t be balanced. So Pop Tywood got the idea about twenty years ago that some energy was disappearing, in the form of matter, back into time. We got working on that—or he did—and I’m the first student he’s ever had tackle it along with him.

“Obviously, we had to work with tiny amounts of material and… well, it was just a stroke of genius on Pop’s part to think of using traces of artificial radioactive isotopes. You could work with just a few micrograms of it, you know, by following its activity with counters. The variation of activity with time should follow a very definite and simple law which has never been altered by any laboratory condition known.

“Well, we’d send a speck back fifteen minutes, say, and fifteen minutes before we did that—everything was arranged automatically, you see—the count jumped to nearly double what it should be, fell off normally, and then dropped sharply at the moment it was sent back below where it would have been normally. The material overlapped itself in time, you see, and for fifteen minutes we counted the doubled material—”

I interrupted: “You mean you had the same atoms existing in two places at the same time.”

“Yes,” he said, with mild surprise, “why not? That’s why we use so much energy—the equivalent of creating those atoms.” And then he rushed on, “Now I’ll tell you what my particular job is. If you send back the material fifteen minutes, it is apparently sent back to the same spot relative to the Earth despite the fact that in fifteen minutes, the Earth moved sixteen thousand miles around the Sun, and the Sun itself moves more thousand miles and so on. But there are certain tiny discrepancies which I’ve analyzed and which turn out to be due, possibly, to two causes.

“First, there is a frictional effect—if you can use such a term—so that matter does drift a little with respect to the Earth, depending on how far back in time it is sent, and on the nature of material. Then, too, some of the discrepancy can only be explained by the assumption that passage through time itself takes time.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“What I mean is that some of the radioactivity is evenly spread throughout the time of translation as if the material tested had been reacting during backward passage through time by a constant amount. My figures show that—well, if you were to be moved backward in time, you would age one day for every hundred years. Or, to put it another way, if you could watch a time dial which recorded the time outside a ‘time-machine,’ your watch would move forward twenty-four hours while the time dial moved back a hundred years. That’s a universal constant, I think, because the speed of light is a universal constant. Anyway, that’s my work.”

After a few minutes, in which I chewed all this, I asked: “Where did you get the energy needed for your experiments?”

“They ran out a special line from the power plant. Pop’s a big shot there, and swung the deal.”

“Hm-m-m. What was the heaviest amount of material you sent into the past?”

“Oh”—he sent his eyes upwards—”I think we shot back one hundredth of a milligram once. That’s ten micrograms.”

“Ever try sending anything into the future?”

“That won’t work,” he put in quickly. “Impossible. You can’t change signs like that, because the energy required becomes more than infinite. It’s a one way proposition.”

I looked hard at my fingernails: “How much material could you send back in time if you fissioned about … oh, say, one hundred pounds of plutonium.”

Things, I thought, were becoming, if anything, too obvious. The answer came quickly: “In plutonium fission,” he said, “not more than one or two percent of the mass is converted into energy. Therefore, one hundred pounds of plutonium when completely used up would send a pound or two back into time.”

“Is that all? But could you handle all that energy? I mean, a hundred pounds of plutonium can make quite an explosion.”

“All relative,” he said, a bit pompously. “If you took all that energy and let it loose a little at a time, you could handle it. If you released it all at once, but used it just as fast as you released it, you could still handle it. In sending back material through time, energy can be used much faster than it can possibly be released even through fission. Theoretically, anyway.”

“But how do you get rid of it?”

“It’s spread through time, naturally. Of course, the minimum time through which material could be transferred would, therefore, depend on the mass of the material. Otherwise, you’re liable to have the energy density with time too high.”

“All right, kid,” I said. “I’m calling up headquarters, and they’ll send a man here to take you home. You’ll stay there a while.”

“But—What for?”

“It won’t be for long.”

It wasn’t—and it was made up to him afterwards.

I spent the evening at Headquarters. We had a library there—a very special kind of library. The very morning after the explosion, two or three operators had drifted quietly into the chemistry and physics libraries of the University. Experts in their way. They located every article Tywood had ever published in any scientific journal and had snapped each page. Nothing was disturbed otherwise.

Other men went through magazine files and through book lists. It ended with a room at Headquarters that represented a complete Tywoodana. Nor was there a definite purpose in doing this. It merely represented part of the thoroughness with which a problem of this sort is met.

I went through that library. Not the scientific papers. I knew there’d be nothing there that I wanted. But he had written a series of articles for a magazine twenty years back, and I read those. And I grabbed at every piece of private correspondence they had available.

After that, I just sat and thought—and got scared.

I got to bed about four in the morning and had nightmares. But I was in the Boss’ private office at nine in the morning just the same. He’s a big man, the Boss, with iron-gray hair slicked down tight. He doesn’t smoke, but he keeps a box of cigars on his desk and when he doesn’t want to say anything for a few seconds, he picks one up, rolls it about a little, smells it, then sticks it right into the middle of his mouth and lights it in a very careful way. By that time, he either has something to say or doesn’t have to say anything at all. Then he puts the cigar down and lets it burn to death.

He used up a box in about three weeks, and every Christmas, half his gift-wraps held boxes of cigars.

He wasn’t reaching for any cigars now, though. He just folded his big fists together on the desk and looked up at me from under a creased forehead.

“What’s boiling?”

I told him. Slowly, because micro-temporal-translation doesn’t sit well with anybody, especially when you call it time travel, which I did. It’s a sign of how serious things were that he only asked me once if I were crazy. Then I was finished and we stared at each other.

He said: “And you think he tried to send something back in time—something weighing a pound or two—and blew an entire plant doing it?”

“It fits in,” I said.

I let him go for a while. He was thinking and I wanted him to keep on thinking. I wanted him, if possible, to think of the same thing I was thinking, so that I wouldn’t have to tell him—

Because I hated to have to tell him—

Because it was nuts, for one thing. And too horrible, for another. So I kept quiet and he kept on thinking and every once in a while some of his thoughts came to the surface.

After a while, he said: “Assuming the student, Howe, to have told the truth—and you’d better check his notebooks, by the way, which I hope you’ve impounded—”

“The entire wing of that floor is out of bounds, sir. Edwards has the notebooks.”

He went on: “All right. Assuming he told us all the truth he knows, why did Tywood jump from less than a milligram to a pound?”

His eyes came down and they were hard: “Now you’re concentrating on the time-travel angle. To you, I gather, that is the crucial point, with the energy involved as incidental—purely incidental.”

“Yes, sir,” I said grimly. “I think exactly that.”

“Have you considered that you might be wrong? That you might have matters inverted?”

“I don’t quite get that.”

“Well, look. You say you’ve read up on Tywood. All right. He was one of that bunch of scientists after World War II that fought the atom bomb; wanted a world state—You know about that, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“He had a guilt complex,” the Boss said with energy. “He’d helped work out the bomb, and he couldn’t sleep nights thinking of what he’d done. He lived with that fear for years. And even though the bomb wasn’t used in World War III, can you imagine what every day of uncertainty must have meant to him? Can you imagine the shriveling horror in his soul as he waited for others to make the decision at every crucial moment till the final Compromise of Sixty-Five?

“We have a complete psychiatric analysis of Tywood and several others just like him, taken during the last war. Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s true. We let up after Sixty-Five, of course, because with the establishment of world control of atomic power, the scrapping of the atomic bomb stockpile in all countries, and the establishment of research liaison among the various spheres of influence on the planet, most of the ethical conflict in the scientific mind was removed.

“But the findings at the time were serious. In 1964, Tywood had a morbid subconscious hatred for the very concept of atomic power. He began to make mistakes, serious ones. Eventually, we were forced to take him off research of any kind. And several others as well, even though things were pretty bad at the time. We had just lost India, if you remember.”

Considering that I was in India at the time, I remembered. But I still wasn’t seeing his point.

“Now, what,” he continued, “if dregs of that attitude remained buried in Tywood to the very end? Don’t you see that this time-travel is a double-edged sword? Why throw a pound of anything into the past, anyway? For the sake of proving a point? He had proved his case just as much when he sent back a fraction of a milligram. That was good enough for the Nobel Prize, I suppose.

“But there was one thing he could do with a pound of matter that he couldn’t do with a milligram, and that was to drain a power plant. So that was what he must have been after. He had discovered a way of consuming inconceivable quantities of energy. By sending back eighty pounds of dirt, he could remove all the existing plutonium in the world. End atomic power for an indefinite period.”

I was completely unimpressed, but I tried not to make that too plain. I just said: “Do you think he could possibly have thought he could get away with it more than once?”

“This is all based on the fact that he wasn’t a normal man. How do I know what he could imagine he could do? Besides, there may be men behind him—with less science and more brains—who are quite ready to continue onwards from this point.”

“Have any of these men been found yet? Any evidence of such men?”

A little wait, and his hand reached for the cigar box. He stared at the cigar and turned it end for end. Just a little wait more. I was patient. Then he put it down decisively without lighting it.

“No,” he said.

He looked at me, and clear through me, and said: “Then, you still don’t go for that?”

I shrugged, “Well—it doesn’t sound right.”

“Do you have a notion of your own?”

“Yes. But I can’t bring myself to talk about it. If I’m wrong, I’m the wrongest man that ever was; but if I’m right, I’m the rightest.”

“I’ll listen,” he said, and he put his hand under the desk. That was the pay-off. The room was armored, sound-proof, and radiation-proof to anything short of a nuclear explosion. And with that little signal showing on his secretary’s desk, the President of the United States couldn’t have interrupted us.

I leaned back and said: “Chief, do you happen to remember how you met your wife? Was it a little thing?”

He must have thought it a non sequitur. What else could he have thought? But he was giving me my head now; having his own reasons, I suppose. He just smiled and said: “I sneezed and she turned around. It was at a street corner.”

“What made you be on that street corner just then? What made her be? Do you remember just why you sneezed? Where you caught the cold? Or where the speck of dust came from? Imagine how many factors had to intersect in just the right place at just the right time for you to meet your wife.”

“I suppose we would have met some other time, if not then?”

“But you can’t know that. How do you know whom you didn’t meet, because once when you might have turned around, you didn’t; because once when you might have been late, you weren’t. Your life forks at every instant, and you go down one of the forks almost at random, and so does everyone else. Start twenty years ago, and the forks diverge further and further with time.

“You sneezed, and met a girl, and not another. As a consequence, you made certain decisions, and so did the girl, and so did the girl you didn’t meet, and the man who did meet her, and the people you all met thereafter. And your family, her family, their family—and your children.

“Because you sneezed twenty years ago, five people, or fifty, or five hundred, might be dead now who would have been alive, or might be alive who would have been dead. Move it two hundred years ago: two thousand years ago, and a sneeze—even by someone no history ever heard of—might have meant that no one now alive would have been alive.”

The Boss rubbed the back of his head: “Widening ripples. I read a story once—”

“So did I. It’s not a new idea—but I want you to think about it for a while, because I want to read to you from an article by Professor Elmer Tywood in a magazine twenty years old. It was just before the last war.”

I had copies of the film in my pocket and the white wall made a beautiful screen, which was what it was meant to do. The Boss made a motion to turn about, but I waved him back.

“No, sir,” I said. “I want to read this to you. And I want you to listen to it.”

He leaned back.

“The article,” I went on, “is entitled: ‘Man’s First Great Failure!’ Remember, this was just before the war, when the bitter disappointment at the final failure of the United Nations was at its height. What I will read are some excerpts from the first part of the article. It goes like this:

“‘… That Man, with his technical perfection, has failed to solve the great sociological problems of today is only the second immense tragedy that has come to the race. The first, and perhaps the greater, was that, once, these same great sociological problems were solved; and yet these solutions were not permanent, because the technical perfection we have today did not then exist.

“‘It was a case of having bread without butter, or butter without bread. Never both together. …

“‘Consider the Hellenic world, from which our philosophy, our mathematics, our ethics, our art, our literature—our entire culture, in fact—stem … In the days of Pericles, Greece, like our own world in microcosm, was a surprisingly modern potpourri of conflicting ideologies and ways of life. But then Rome came, adopting the culture, but bestowing, and enforcing, peace. To be sure, the Pax Romana lasted only two hundred years, but no like period has existed since…

“‘War was abolished. Nationalism did not exist. The Roman citizen was Empire-wide. Paul of Tarsus and Flavius Josephus were Roman citizens. Spaniards, North Africans, Illyrians assumed the purple. Slavery existed, but it was an indiscriminate slavery, imposed as a punishment, incurred as the price of economic failure, brought on by the fortunes of war. No man was a natural slave—because of the color of his skin or the place of his birth.

“‘Religious toleration was complete. If an exception was made early in the case of the Christians, it was because they refused to accept the principle of toleration; because they insisted that only they themselves knew truth—a principle abhorrent to the civilized Roman…

“‘With all of Western culture under a single polis, with the cancer of religious and national particularism and exclusivism absent; with a high civilization in existence—why could not Man hold his gains?

“‘It was because, technologically, ancient Hellenism remained backward. It was because without a machine civilization, the price of leisure—and hence civilization and culture—for the few, was slavery for the many. Because the civilization could not find the means to bring comfort and ease to all the population.

“‘Therefore, the depressed classes turned to the other world, and to religions which spurned the material benefits of this world—so that science was made impossible in any true sense for over a millennium. And further, as the initial impetus of Hellenism waned, the Empire lacked the technological powers to beat back the barbarians. In fact, it was not till after 1500 A.D. that war became sufficiently a function of the industrial resources of a nation to enable the settled people to defeat invading tribesmen and nomads with ease…

“‘Imagine, then, if somehow the ancient Greeks had learned just a hint of modern chemistry and physics. Imagine if the growth of the Empire had been accompanied by the growth of science, technology and industry. Imagine an Empire in which machinery replaced slaves, in which all men had a decent share of the world’s goods, in which the legion became the armored column against which no barbarians could stand. Imagine an Empire which would therefore spread all over the world, without religious or national prejudices.

“‘An Empire of all men—all brothers—eventually all free…

“‘If history could be changed. If that first great failure could have been prevented—’”

And I stopped at that point.

“Well?” said the Boss.

“Well,” I said, “I think it isn’t difficult to connect all that with the fact that Tywood blew an entire power plant in his anxiety to send something back to the past, while in his office safe we found sections of a chemistry textbook translated into Greek.”

His face changed, while he considered.

Then he said heavily: “But nothing’s happened.”

“I know. But then I’ve been told by Tywood’s student that it takes a day to move back a century in time. Assuming that ancient Greece was the target area, we have twenty centuries, hence twenty days.”

“But can it be stopped?”

“I wouldn’t know. Tywood might, but he’s dead.”

The enormity of it all hit me at once, deeper than it had the night before—

All humanity was virtually under sentence of death. And while that was merely horrible abstraction, the fact that reduced it to a thoroughly unbearable reality was that I was, too. And my wife, and my kid. Further, it was a death without precedence. A ceasing to exist, and no more. The passing of a breath. The vanishing of a dream. The drift into eternal non-space and non-time of a shadow. I would not be dead at all, in fact. I would merely never have been born.

Or would I? Would I exist—my individuality—my ego—my soul, if you like?

Another life? Other circumstances?

I thought none of that in words then. But if a cold knot in the stomach could ever speak under the circumstances, it would sound like that, I think. The Boss moved in on my thoughts—hard.

“Then, we have about two and a half weeks. No time to lose. Come on.”

I grinned with one side of my mouth: “What do we do? Chase the book?”

“No,” he replied coldly, “but there are two courses of action we must follow. First, you may be wrong—altogether. All of this circumstantial reasoning may still represent a false lead, perhaps deliberately thrown before us, to cover up the real truth. That must be checked.

“Secondly, you may be right—but there may be some way of stopping the book: other than chasing it in a time machine, I mean. If so, we must find out how.”

“I would just like to say, sir, if this is a false lead, only a madman would consider it a believable one. So suppose I’m right, and suppose there’s no way of stopping it?”

“Then, young fellow, I’m going to keep pretty busy for two and a half weeks, and I’d advise you to do the same. The time will pass more quickly that way.”

Of course he was right.

“Where do we start?” I asked.

“The first thing we need is a list of all men and women on the government payroll under Tywood.”

“Why?”

“Reasoning. Your specialty, you know. Tywood doesn’t know Greek, I think we can assume with fair safety, so someone else must have done the translating. It isn’t likely that anyone would do a job like that for nothing, and it isn’t likely that Tywood would pay out of his personal funds—not on a professor’s salary.”

“He might,” I pointed out, “have been interested in more secrecy than a government payroll affords.”

“Why? Where was the danger? Is it a crime to translate a chemistry textbook into Greek? Who would ever deduce from that a plot such as you’ve described?”

It took us half an hour to turn up the name of Mycroft James Boulder, listed as “Consultant,” and to find out that he was mentioned in the University Catalogue as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and to check by telephone that among his many accomplishments was a thorough knowledge of Attic Greek. Which was a coincidence—because with the Boss reaching for his hat, the interoffice teletype clicked away and it turned out that Mycroft James Boulder was in the anteroom, at the end of a two-hour continuing insistence that he see the Boss.

The Boss put his hat back and opened his office door. Professor Mycroft James Boulder was a gray man. His hair was gray and his eyes were gray. His suit was gray, too.

But most of all, his expression was gray; gray with a tension that seemed to twist at the lines in his thin face.

Boulder said, softly: “I’ve been trying for three days to get a hearing, sir, with a responsible man. I can get no higher than yourself.”

“I may be high enough,” said the Boss. “What’s on your mind?”

“It is quite important that I be granted an interview with Professor Tywood.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“I am quite certain that he is in government custody.”

“Why?”

“Because I know that he was planning an experiment which would entail the breaking of security regulations. Events since, as nearly as I can make them out, flow naturally from the supposition that security regulations have indeed been broken. I can presume, then, that the experiment has at least been attempted. I must discover whether it has been successfully concluded.”

“Professor Boulder,” said the Boss, “I believe you can read Greek.”

“Yes, I can,”—coolly.

“And have translated chemical texts for Professor Tywood on government money.”

“Yes—as a legally employed consultant.”

“Yet such translation, under the circumstances, constitutes a crime, since it makes you an accessory to Tywood’s crime.”

“You can establish a connection?”

“Can’t you? Or haven’t you heard of Tywood’s notions on time travel, or… what do you call it… micro-temporal-translation?”

“Ah?” and Boulder smiled a little. “He’s told you, then.”

“No, he hasn’t,” said the Boss, harshly. “Professor Tywood is dead.”

“What?” Then—“I don’t believe you.”

“He died of apoplexy. Look at this.”

He had one of the photographs taken that first night in his wall safe. Tywood’s face was distorted but recognizable—sprawled and dead. Boulder’s breath went in and out as if the gears were clogged. He stared at the picture for three full minutes by the electric clock on the wall. “Where is this place?” he asked.

“The Atomic Power Plant.”

“Had he finished his experiment?”

The Boss shrugged: “There’s no way of telling. He was dead when we found him.”

Boulder’s lips were pinched and colorless. “That must be determined, somehow. A commission of scientists must be established, and, if necessary, the experiment must be repeated—”

But the Boss just looked at him, and reached for a cigar. I’ve never seen him take longer—and when he put it down, curled in its unused smoke, he said:

“Tywood wrote an article for a magazine, twenty years ago—”

“Oh,” and the professor’s lips twisted, “is that what gave you your clue? You may ignore that. The man is only a physical scientist and knows nothing of either history or sociology. A schoolboy’s dreams and nothing more.”

“Then, you don’t think sending your translation back will inaugurate a Golden Age, do you?”

“Of course not. Do you think you can graft the developments of two thousand years of slow labor onto a child society not ready for it? Do you think a great invention or a great scientific principle is born full-grown in the mind of a genius divorced from his cultural milieu? Newton’s enunciation of the Law of Gravity was delayed for twenty years because the then-current figure for the Earth’s diameter was wrong by ten percent. Archimedes almost discovered calculus, but failed because Arabic numerals, invented by some nameless Hindu or group of Hindus, were unknown to him.

“For that matter, the mere existence of a slave society in ancient Greece and Rome meant that machines could scarcely attract much attention—slaves being so much cheaper and more adaptable. And men of true intellect could scarcely be expected to spend their energies on devices intended for manual labor. Even Archimedes, the greatest engineer of antiquity, refused to publish any of his practical inventions—only mathematic abstractions. And when a young man asked Plato of what use geometry was, he was forthwith expelled from the Academy as a man with a mean, unphilosophic soul.

“Science does not plunge forward—it inches along in the directions permitted by the greater forces that mold society and which are in turn molded by society. And no great man advances but on the shoulders of the society that surrounds him—”

The Boss interrupted him at that point. “Suppose you tell us what your part in Tywood’s work was, then. We’ll take your word for it that history cannot be changed.”

“Oh it can, but not purposefully—You see, when Tywood first requested my services in the matter of translating certain textbook passages into Greek, I agreed for the money involved. But he wanted the translation on parchment; he insisted on the use of ancient Greek terminology—the language of Plato, to use his words—regardless of how I had to twist the literal significance of passages, and he wanted it hand-written in rolls.

“I was curious. I, too, found his magazine article. It was difficult for me to jump to the obvious conclusion, since the achievements of modern science transcend the imaginings of philosophy in so many ways. But I learned the truth eventually, and it was at once obvious that Tywood’s theory of changing history was infantile. There are twenty million variables for every instant of time, and no system of mathematics—no mathematic psychohistory, to coin a phrase—has yet been developed to handle that ocean of varying functions.

“In short, any variation of events two thousand years ago would change all subsequent history, but in no predictable way.”

The Boss suggested, with a false quietness: “Like the pebble that starts the avalanche, right?”

“Exactly. You have some understanding of the situation, I see. I thought deeply for weeks before I proceeded, and then I realized how I must act—must act.”

There was a low roar. The Boss stood up and his chair went over backward. He swung around his desk, and he had a hand on Boulder’s throat. I was stepping out to stop him, but he waved me back—

He was only tightening the necktie a little. Boulder could still breathe. He had gone very white, and for all the time that the Boss talked, he restricted himself to just that—breathing.

And the Boss said: “Sure, I can see how you decided you must act. I know that some of you brain-sick philosophers think the world needs fixing. You want to throw the dice again and see what turns up. Maybe you don’t even care if you’re alive in the new setup—or that no one can possibly know what you’ve done. But you’re going to create, just the same. You’re going to give God another chance, so to speak.

“Maybe I just want to live—but the world could be worse. In twenty million different ways, it could be worse. A fellow named Wilder once wrote a play called The Skin of Our Teeth. Maybe you’ve read it. Its thesis was that Mankind survived by just that skin of their teeth. No, I’m not going to give you a speech about the Ice Age nearly wiping us out. I don’t know enough. I’m not even going to talk about the Greeks winning at Marathon; the Arabs being defeated at Tours; the Mongols turning back at the last minute without even being defeated—because I’m no historian.

“But take the Twentieth Century. The Germans were stopped at the Marne twice in World War I. Dunkirk happened in World War II, and somehow the Germans were stopped at Moscow and Stalingrad. We could have used the atom bomb in the last war and we didn’t, and just when it looked as if both sides would have to, the Great Compromise happened—just because General Bruce was delayed in taking off from the Ceylon airfield long enough to receive the message directly. One after the other, just like that, all through history—lucky breaks. For every

‘if’ that didn’t come true that would have made wonder-men of all of us if it had, there were twenty ‘ifs’ that didn’t come true that would have brought disaster to all of us if they had.

“You’re gambling on that one-in-twenty chance—gambling every life on Earth. And you’ve succeeded, too, because Tywood did send that text back.”

He ground out that last sentence, and opened his fist, so that Boulder could fall out and back into his chair.

And Boulder laughed.

“You fool,” he gasped, bitterly. “How close you can be and yet how widely you can miss the mark. Tywood did send his book back, then? You are sure of that?”

“No chemical textbook in Greek was found on the scene,” said the Boss, grimly,

“and millions of calories of energy had disappeared. Which doesn’t change the fact, however, that we have two and a half weeks in which to—make things interesting for you.”

“Oh, nonsense. No foolish dramatics, please. Just listen to me, and try to understand. There were Greek philosophers once, named Leucippus and Democritus, who evolved an atomic theory. All matter, they said, was composed of atoms. Varieties of atoms were distinct and changeless and by their different combinations with each other formed the various substances found in nature. That theory was not the result of experiment or observation. It came into being, somehow, full-grown.

“The didactic Roman poet Lucretius, in his ‘De Rerum Nature,’—’On the Nature of Things’—elaborated on that theory and throughout manages to sound startlingly modern.

“In Hellenistic times, Hero built a steam engine and weapons of war became almost mechanized. The period has been referred to as an abortive mechanical age, which came to nothing because, somehow, it neither grew out of nor fitted into its social and economic milieu. Alexandrian science was a queer and rather inexplicable phenomenon.

“Then one might mention the old Roman legend about the books of the Sibyl that contained mysterious information direct from the gods—

“In other words, gentlemen, while you are right that any change in the course of past events, however trifling, would have incalculable consequences, and while I also believe that you are right in supposing that any random change is much more likely to be for the worse than for the better, I must point out that you are nevertheless wrong in your final conclusions.

“Because this is the world in which the Greek chemistry text was sent back.

“This has been a Red Queen’s race, if you remember your ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ In the Red Queen’s country, one had to run as fast as one could merely to stay in the same place. And so it was in this case! Tywood may have thought he was creating a new world, but it was I who prepared the translations, and I took care that only such passages as would account for the queer scraps of knowledge the ancients apparently got from nowhere would be included.

“And my only intention, for all my racing, was to stay in the same place.”

Three weeks passed; three months; three years. Nothing happened. When nothing happens, you have no proof. We gave up trying to explain, and we ended, the Boss and I, by doubting it ourselves.

The case never ended. Boulder could not be considered a criminal without being considered a world savior as well, and vice versa. He was ignored. And in the end, the case was neither solved, nor closed out; merely put in a file all by itself, under the designation “?” and buried in the deepest vault in Washington.

The Boss is in Washington now; a big wheel. And I’m Regional Head of the Bureau.

Boulder is still assistant professor, though. Promotions are slow at the University.

FLAW

John D. MacDonald (1916-)

Startling Stories, January

John D. MacDonald returns (see his two excellent stories in our 1948 volume) with this interesting and unusual piece of speculative fiction. MacDonald was tremendously prolific in the late 1940s, working in almost every genre that still had magazine markets available, in what was the twilight of the pulp era. He got published because he was a wonderful storyteller, but also because he developed an excellent working knowledge of genres and their conventions. However, like all great writers, he could successfully defy genre conventions and get away with it, as in this story, which is blatantly pessimistic and questions the very possibility of going to the stars—an attitude and point of view that most late 1940s science fiction writers and their readers certainly did not share.—M.H.G.

(Science fiction can be at its most amusing [and most useful, perhaps] when it challenges our assumptions. And that is true of straightforward scientific speculation, also.

Even when the challenge is doomed to failure [and in my opinion the one in this story is so doomed] or when scientific advance actually demonstrates, within a few years, the challenge to be doomed, the story is likely to remain interesting.—Thus, I once wrote a story in which I speculated that the Moon was only a false front and that on the other side were merely wooden supports. Within a few years the other side of the Moon was photographed and our satellite proved not to be a false front after all. But who cares? Anyone who reads the story is not likely to forget the speculation. Read “Flaw,” then, and ask yourself: With the rockets and probes of the last three decades, has the thesis of this story yet been demonstrated to be false?

If so, how?—I.A.)

I rather imagine that I am quite mad. Nothing spectacular, you understand. Nothing calling for restraint, or shock therapy. I can live on, dangerous to no one but myself.

This beach house at La Jolla is comfortable. At night I sit on the rocks and watch the distant stars and think of Johnny. He probably wouldn’t like the way I look now. My fingernails are cracked and broken and there are streaks of gray in my blonde hair. I no longer use makeup. Last night I looked at myself in the mirror and my eyes were dead.

It was then that I decided that it might help me to write all this down. I have no idea what I’ll do with it.

You see, I shared Johnny’s dreams.

And now I know that those dreams are no longer possible. I wonder if he learned how impossible they were in the few seconds before his flaming death. There have always been people like Johnny and me. For a thousand years mankind has looked at the stars and thought of reaching them. The stars were to be the new frontier, the new worlds on which mankind could expand and find the full promise of the human soul.

I never thought much about it until I met Johnny. Five years ago. My name is Carol Adlar. At that time I was a government clerk working in the offices at the rocket station in Arizona. It was 1959. The year before the atomic drive was perfected.

Johnny Pritchard. I figured him out, I thought. A good-looking boy with dark hair and a careless grin and a swagger. That’s all I saw in the beginning. The hot sun blazed down on the rocks and the evenings were cool and clear. There were a lot of boys like Johnny at the rocket station—transferred from Air Corps work. Volunteers. You couldn’t order a man off the surface of the earth in a rocket.

The heart is ever cautious. Johnny Pritchard began to hang around my desk, a warm look in his eyes. I was as cool as I could be. You don’t give your heart to a man who soars up at the tip of a comet plume. But I did. I told myself that I would go out with him one evening and I would be so cool to him that it would cure him and he would stop bothering me. I expected him to drive me to the city in his little car. Instead we drove only five miles from the compound, parked on the brow of a hill looking across the moon-silvered rock and sand.

At first I was defensive, until I found that all he wanted to do was talk. He talked about the stars. He talked in a low voice that was somehow tense with his visions. I found out that first evening that he wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t merely one of those young men with perfect coordination and high courage. Johnny had in him the blood of pioneers. And his frontier was the stars.

“You see, Carol,” he said, “I didn’t know a darn thing about the upstairs at the time of my transfer. I guess I don’t know much right now. Less, probably than the youngest astronomer or physicist on the base. But I’m learning. I spend every minute I can spare studying about it. Carol, I’m going upstairs some day. Right out into space. And I want to know about it. I want to know all about it.

“We’ve made a pretty general mess of this planet. I sort of figure that the powers-that-be planned it that way. They said, ‘We’ll give this puny little fella called man a chance to mess up one planet and mess it up good. But we’ll let him slowly learn how to travel to another. Then, by the time he can migrate, he will be smart enough to turn the next planet into the sort of a deal we wanted him to have in the beginning. A happy world with no wars, no disease, no starvation.’ “

I should have said something flip at that point, but the words weren’t in me. Like a fool, I asked him questions about the galaxies, about the distant stars. We drove slowly back. The next day he loaned me two of his books. Within a week I had caught his fervor, his sense of dedication. After that it was, of course, too late.

All persons in love have dreams. This was ours. Johnny would be at the controls of one of the first interplanetary rockets. He would return to me and then we would become one of the first couples to become colonists for the new world.

Silly, wasn’t it?

He told me of the problems that would be solved with that first interplanetary flight. They would take instruments far enough out into space so that triangulation could solve that tiresome bickering among the physicists and astronomers about the theory of the exploding universe as against the theory of “tired light” from the distant galaxies.

And now I am the only person in the world who can solve that problem. Oh, the others will find the answer soon enough. And then they, too, can go quietly mad.

They will find out that for years they have been in the position of the man at the table with his fingers almost touching the sugar bowl and who asks why there isn’t any sugar on the table.

That year was the most perfect year of my life.

“When are you going to marry me, Johnny?” I asked him.

“This is so sudden,” he said, laughing. Then he sobered. “Just as soon as I come back from the first one, honey. It isn’t fair any other way. Don’t you see?”

I saw with my mind, but not with my heart. We exchanged rings. All very sentimental. He gave me a diamond and I gave him my father’s ring, the one that was sent home to my mother and me when Dad was killed in Burma in World War II. It fit him and he liked it. It was a star ruby in a heavy silver setting. The star was perfect, but by looking closely into the stone you could see the flaws. Two dark little dots and a tiny curved line which together gave the look of a small and smiling face.

With his arm around me, with the cool night air of Arizona touching our faces, we looked up at the sky and talked of the home we would make millions of miles away.

Childish, wasn’t it?

Last night after looking in the mirror, I walked down to the rocks. The Government money was given to me when Johnny didn’t come back. It is enough. It will last until I die and I hope it will not be too long before I die. The sea, washing the rocks, asked me the soft, constant question. “Why? Why?

Why?” I looked at the sky. The answer was not there. Fourteen months after I met Johnny, a crew of two in the Destiny I made the famous circuit of the moon and landed safely. Johnny was not one of them. He had hoped to be.

“A test run,” he called it. The first step up the long flight of stairs. You certainly remember the headlines given that flight of Destiny I. Even the New York Times broke out a new and larger type face for the headlines. Korby and Sweeny became the heroes of the entire world.

The world was confident then. The intervening years have shaken that confidence. But the world does not know yet. I think some suspect, but they do not know. Only I know for a certainty. And I, of course, am quite mad. I know that now.

Call it a broken heart—or broken dreams.

Johnny was selected for Destiny II. After he told me and after the tears came, partly from fear, partly from the threat of loneliness, he held me tightly and kissed my eyes. I had not known that the flight of Destiny II, if successful, would take fourteen months. The fourteen months were to include a circuit of Mars and a return to the takeoff point. Fourteen months before I would see him again. Fourteen months before I would feel his arms around me. A crew of four. The famous Korby and Sweeny, plus Anthony Marinetta and my Johnny. Each morning when I went to work I could see the vast silver ship on the horizon, the early sun glinting on the blunt nose. Johnny’s ship. Those last five months before takeoff were like the five months of life ahead of a prisoner facing execution. And Johnny’s training was so intensified after his selection that I couldn’t see him as often as before. We were young and we were in love and we made our inevitable mistake. At least we called it a mistake. Now I know that it wasn’t, because Johnny didn’t come back.

With the usual sense of guilt we planned to be married, and then reverted to our original plan. I would wait for him. Nothing could go wrong. Takeoff was in the cold dawn of a February morning. I stood in the crowd beside a girl who worked in the same office. I held her arm. She carried the bruises for over a week.

The silver hull seemed to merge with the gray of the dawn. The crowd was silent. At last there was the blinding, blue-white flare of the jets, the stately lift into the air, the moment when Destiny II seemed to hang motionless fifty feet in the air, and then the accelerating blast that arrowed it up and up into the dark-gray sky where a few stars still shone. I walked on leaden legs back to the administration building and sat slumped at my desk, my mouth dry, my eyes hot and burning.

The last faint radio signal came in three hours later.

“All well. See you next year.”

From then on there would be fourteen months of silence. I suppose that in a way I became accustomed to it.

I was numb, apathetic, stupefied. They would probably have got rid of me had they not known how it was between Johnny and me. I wouldn’t have blamed them. Each morning I saw the silver form of Destiny III taking shape near where Destiny II had taken off. The brash young men made the same jokes, gave the office girls the same line of chatter.

But they didn’t bother me. Word had g ot around.

I found a friend. The young wife of Tony Marienetta. We spent hours telling each other in subtle ways that everything would come out all right. I remember one night when Marge grinned and said:

“Well anyway, Carol, nobody has ever had their men go quite so far away.”

There is something helpless about thinking of the distance between two people in the form of millions of miles.

After I listened to the sea last night, I walked slowly back up the steep path to this beach house. When I clicked the lights on Johnny looked at me out of the silver frame on my writing desk. His eyes are on me as I write this. They are happy and confident eyes. I am almost glad that he didn’t live to find out.

The fourteen months were like one single revolution of a gigantic Ferris wheel. You start at the top of the wheel, and through seven months the wheel carries you slowly down into the darkness and the fear. Then, after you are at your lowest point, the wheel slowly starts to carry you back up into the light.

Somewhere in space I knew that Johnny looked at the small screen built into the control panel and saw the small bright sphere of earth and thought of me. I knew all during that fourteen months that he wasn’t dead. If he had died, no matter how many million miles away from me, I would have known it in the instant of his dying.

The world forgets quickly. The world had pushed Destiny II off the surface of consciousness a few months after takeoff. Two months before the estimated date of return, it began to creep back into the papers and onto the telescreens of the world.

Work had stopped on Destiny III. The report of the four crewmen might give a clue to alterations in the interior.

It was odd the way I felt. As though I had been frozen under the transparent ice of a small lake. Spring was coming and the ice grew thinner. Each night I went to sleep thinking of Johnny driving down through the sky toward me at almost incalculable speed. Closer, closer, ever closer. It was five weeks before the date when they were due to return. I was asleep in the barracks-like building assigned to the unmarried women of the base. The great thud and jar woke me up and through the window I saw the night sky darkening in the afterglow of some brilliant light.

We gathered by the windows and talked for a long time about what it could have been. It was in all of our minds that it could have been the return of Destiny II, but we didn’t put it into words, because no safe landing could have resulted in that deathly thud.

With the lights out again, I tried to sleep. I reached out into the night sky with my heart, trying to contact Johnny.

And the sky was empty.

I sat up suddenly, my lips numb, my eyes staring. No. It was imagination. It was illusion. Johnny was still alive. Of course. But when I composed myself for sleep it was as though dirges were softly playing. In all the universe there was no living entity called Johnny Pritchard. Nowhere. The telescreens were busy the next morning and I saw the shape of fear. An alert operator had caught the fast shape as it had slammed flaming down through the atmosphere to land forty miles from the base in deserted country making a crater a half-mile across.

“It is believed that the object was a meteor,” the voice of the announcer said. “Radar screens picked up the image and it is now known that it was far too large to be the Destiny II arriving ahead of a schedule.”

It was then that I took a deep breath. But the relief was not real. I was only kidding myself. It was as though I was in the midst of a dream of terror and could not think of magic words to cause the spell to cease. After breakfast I was ill.

The meteor had hit with such impact that the heat generated had fused the sand. Scientific instruments proved that the mass of the meteor itself, nine hundred feet under the surface was largely metallic. The telescreens began to prattle about invaders from an alien planet. And the big telescopes scanned the heavens for the first signs of the returning Destiny II. The thought began as a small spot, glowing in some deep part of my mind. I knew that I had to cross the forty miles between the base and the crater. But I did not know why I had to cross it. I did not know why I had to stand at the lip of the crater and watch the recovery operations. I felt like a subject under posthypnotic influence—compelled to do something without knowing the reason. But compelled, nevertheless.

One of the physicists took me to the crater in one of the base helicopters after I had made the request of him in such a way that he could not refuse. Eleven days after the meteor had fallen, I stood on the lip of the crater and looked down into the heart of it to where the vast shaft had been sunk to the meteor itself. Dr. Rawlins handed me his binoculars and I watched the mouth of the shaft.

Men working down in the shaft had cut away large pieces of the body of the meteor and some of them had been hauled out and trucked away. They were blackened and misshapen masses of fused metal.

I watched the mouth of the shaft until my eyes ached and until the young physicist shifted restlessly and kept glancing at his watch and at the sun sinking toward the west. When he asked to borrow the binoculars, I gave them up reluctantly. I could hear the distant throb of the hoist motors. Something was coming up the shaft.

Dr. Rawlins made a sudden exclamation. I looked at the mouth of the shaft. The sun shone with red fire on something large. It dwarfed the men who stood near it.

Rudely I snatched the binoculars from Dr. Rawlins and looked, knowing even as I lifted them to my eyes what I would see.

Because at that moment I knew the answer to something that the astronomers and physicists had been bickering about for many years. There is no expanding universe. There is no tired light.

As I sit here at my writing desk, I can imagine how it was during those last few seconds. The earth looming up in the screen on the instrument panel, but not nearly large enough. Not large enough at all. Incredulity, then because of the error in size, the sudden application of the nose jets. Too late. Fire and oblivion and a thud that shook the earth for hundreds of miles. No one else knows what I know. Maybe soon they will guess. And then there will be an end to the proud dreams of migration to other worlds. We are trapped here. There will be no other worlds for us. We have made a mess of this planet, and it is something that we cannot leave behind us. We must stay here and clean it up as best we can.

Maybe a few of them already know. Maybe they have guessed. Maybe they guessed, as I did, on the basis of the single object that was brought up out of that shaft on that bright, cold afternoon.

Yes, I saw the sun shining on the six-pointed star. With the binoculars I looked into the heart of it and saw the two dots and a curved line that made the flaws look like a smiling face. A ruby the size of a bungalow. There is no expanding universe. There is no “tired light.”

There is only a Solar system that, due to an unknown influence, is constantly shrinking.

For a little time the Destiny II avoided that influence. That is why they arrived too soon, why they couldn’t avoid the crash, and why I am quite mad. The ruby was the size of a bungalow, but it was, of course, quite unchanged. It was I and my world that had shrunk.

If Johnny had landed safely, I would be able to walk about on the palm of his hand.

It is a good thing that he died.

And it will not be long before I die also.

The sea whispers softly against the rocks a hundred yards from the steps of my beach house.

And Destiny III has not yet returned.

It is due in three months.

PRIVATE EYE

“Lewis Padgett” (Henry Kuttner, 1914-1958 and C.L. Moore, 1911-; this story is generally believed to have been written by Kuttner) Astounding Science Fiction, January

The Kuttners were so prolific that they made extensive use of pen names—in addition to Kuttner and Moore, singly and listed together, they wrote as

“Lewis Padgett” and as “Lawrence O’Donnell,” producing important stories under both of these pseudonyms. The present selection is the first of three in this book—the late 1940s were tremendously productive for this wonderful writing team.

As Isaac points out, “Private Eye” is a classic blend of mystery and science fiction and fully deserves the title of “classic.” It is not now unusual for such combinations to see print; indeed, in the last twenty years dozens of stories in-corporating a murder mystery with sf have appeared, and many have been collected in such anthologies as Miriam Allen deFord’s Space, Time & Crime (1964), Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini’s wonderful Dark Sins, Dark Crimes (1978), and our own (along with Charles G. Waugh) The 13 Crimes of Science Fiction (1979).—M.H.G.

(John Campbell, the greatest of all science fiction editors, was one of the most prescient people I have ever met—and yet he was given to peculiar blind spots. For instance, during the 1940’s he frequently maintained that science fiction mysteries were impossible, because it was so easy to use futuristic gimmicks to help the detective crack his case.

I eventually showed, in 1953, that a classic mystery could be combined with science fiction if one simply set up the boundary conditions at the start and stuck to them. I resolutely allowed no futuristic gimmicks to appear suddenly and give the detective an unfair advantage.

In “Private Eye” however, Henry Kuttner [preceding me by four years] took the harder task of allowing a futuristic gimmick—one that would seem to make it impossible to get away with murder—and then labored to produce an honest murder mystery anyway. The result was an undoubted classic—I.A.) The forensic sociologist looked closely at the image on the wall screen. Two figures were frozen there, one in the act of stabbing the other through the heart with an antique letter cutter, once used at Johns Hopkins for surgery. That was before the ultra-microtome, of course.

“As tricky a case as I’ve ever seen,” the sociologist remarked. “If we can make a homicide charge stick on Sam Clay, I’ll be a little surprised.”

The tracer engineer twirled a dial and watched the figures on the screen repeat their actions. One—Sam Clay—snatched the letter cutter from a desk and plunged it into the other man’s heart. The victim fell down dead. Clay started back in apparent horror. Then he dropped to his knees beside the twitching body and said wildly that he didn’t mean it. The body drummed its heels upon the rug and was still.

“That last touch was nice,” the engineer said.

“Well, I’ve got to make the preliminary survey,” the sociologist sighed, settling in his dictachair and placing his fingers on the keyboard. “I doubt if I’ll find any evidence. However, the analysis can come later. Where’s Clay now?”

“His mouthpiece put in a habeas mens.”

“I didn’t think we’d be able to hold him. But it was worth trying. Imagine, just one shot of scop and he’d have told the truth. Ah, well. We’ll do it the hard way, as usual. Start the tracer, will you? It won’t make sense till we run it chronologically, but one must start somewhere. Good old Blackstone,”

the sociologist said, as, on the screen, Clay stood up, watching the corpse revive and arise, and then pulled the miraculously clean paper cutter out of its heart, all in reverse.

“Good old Blackstone,” he repeated. “On the other hand, sometimes I wish I’d lived in Jeffreys’ time. In those days, homicide was homicide.”

Telepathy never came to much. Perhaps the developing faculty went underground in response to a familiar natural law after the new science appeared omniscience. It wasn’t really that, of course. It was a device for looking into the past. And it was limited to a fifty-year span; no chance of seeing the arrows at Agincourt or the homunculi of Bacon. It was sensitive enough to pick up the “fingerprints” of light and sound waves imprinted on matter, descramble and screen them, and reproduce the image of what had happened. After all, a man’s shadow can be photographed on concrete, if he’s unlucky enough to be caught in an atomic blast. Which is something. The shadow’s about all here is left.

However, opening the past like a book didn’t solve all problems. It took generations for the maze of complexities to iron itself out, though finally a tentative check-and-balance was reached. The right to kill has been sturdily defended by mankind since Cain rose up against Abel. A good many idealists quoted, “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground,” but that didn’t stop the lobbyists and the pressure groups. Magna Carta was quoted in reply. The right to privacy was defended desperately. And the curious upshot of this imbalance came when the act of homicide was declared nonpunishable, unless intent and forethought could be proved. Of course, it was considered at least naughty to fly in a rage and murder someone on impulse, and there was a nominal punishment—imprisonment, for example—but in practice this never worked, because so many defenses were possible. Temporary insanity. Undue provocation. Self-defense. Manslaughter, second-degree homicide, third degree, fourth degree—it went on like that. It was up to the State to prove that the killer had planned his killing in advance; only then would a jury convict. And the jury, of course, had to waive immunity and take a scop test, to prove the box hadn’t been packed. But no defendant ever waived immunity.

A man’s home wasn’t his castle—not with the Eye able to enter it at will and scan his past. The device couldn’t interpret, and it couldn’t read his mind; it could only see and listen. Consequently the sole remaining fortress of privacy was defended to the last ditch. No truth-serum, no hypnoanalysis, no third-degree, no leading questions.

If, by viewing the prisoner’s past actions, the prosecution could prove forethought and intent, O.K.

Otherwise, Sam Clay would go scot-free. Superficially, it appeared as though Andrew Vanderman had, during a quarrel, struck Clay across the face with a stingaree whip. Anyone who has been stung by a Portuguese man-of-war can understand that, at this point, Clay could plead temporary insanity and self-defense, as well as undue provocation and possible justification. Only the curious cult of the Alaskan Flagellantes, who make the stingaree whips for their ceremonials, know how to endure the pain. The Flagellantes even like it, the pre-ritual drug they swallow transmutes pain into pleasure. Not having swallowed this drug, Sam Clay very naturally took steps to protect himself—irrational steps, perhaps, but quite logical and defensible ones. Nobody but Clay knew that he had intended to kill Vanderman all along. That was the trouble. Clay couldn’t understand why he felt so let down. The screen flickered. It went dark. The engineer chuckled.

“My, my. Locked up in a dark closet at the age of four. What one of those old-time psychiatrists would have made of that. Or do I mean obimen? Shamans?

I forget. They interpreted dreams, anyway.”

“You’re confused. It—”

“Astrologers! No, it wasn’t either. The ones I mean went in for symbolism. They used to spin prayer wheels and say ‘A rose is a rose is a rose,’ didn’t they? To free the unconscious mind?”

“You’ve got the typical layman’s attitude toward antique psychiatric treatments.”

“Well, maybe they had something, at that. Look at quinine and digitalis. The United Amazon natives used those long before science discovered them. But why use eye of newt and toe of frog? To impress the patient?”

“No, to convince themselves,” the Sociologist said. “In those days the study of mental aberrations drew potential psychotics, so naturally there was unnecessary mumbo-jumbo. Those medicos were trying to fix their own mental imbalance while they treated their patients. But it’s a science today, not a religion. We’ve found out how to allow for individual psychotic deviation in the psychiatrist himself, so we’ve got a better chance of finding true north. However, let’s get on with this. Try ultraviolet. Oh, never mind. Somebody’s letting him out of that closet. The devil with it. I think we’ve cut back far enough. Even if he was frightened by a thunderstorm at the age of three months, that can be filed under Gestalt and ignored. Let’s run through this chronologically. Give it the screening for… let’s see. Incidents involving these persons: Vanderman, Mrs. Vanderman, Josephine Wells—and these places: the office, Vanderman’s apartment. Clay’s place—”

“Got it.”

“Later we can recheck for complicating factors. Right now we’ll run the superficial survey. Verdict first, evidence later,” he added, with a grin.

“All we need is a motive—”

“What about this?”

A girl was talking to Sam Clay. The background was an apartment, grade B-2.

“I’m sorry, Sam. It’s just that… well, these things happen.”

“Yeah. Vanderman’s got something I haven’t got, apparently.”

“I’m in love with him.”

“Funny. I thought all along you were in love with me.”

“So did I … for a while.”

“Well, forget it. No, I’m not angry, Bea. I’ll even wish you luck. But you must have been pretty certain how I’d react to this.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Come to think of it, I’ve always let you call the shots. Always.”

Secretly—and this the screen could not show—he thought: Let her? I wanted it that way. It was so much easier to leave the decisions up to her. Sure, she’s dominant, but I guess I’m just the opposite. And now it’s happened again. It always happens. I was loaded with weight-cloths from the start. And I always felt I had to toe the line, or else. Vanderman—that cocky, arrogant air of his. Reminds me of somebody. I was locked up in a dark place, I couldn’t breathe. I forget. What… who … my father. No, I don’t remember. But my life’s been like that. He always watched me, and I always thought some day I’d do what I wanted!—but I never did. Too late now. He’s been dead quite a while. He was always so sure I’d knuckle under. If I’d only defied him once—

Somebody’s always pushing me in and closing the door. So I can’t use my abilities. I can’t prove I’m competent. Prove it to myself, to my father, to Bea, to the whole world. If only I could—I’d like to push Vanderman into a dark place and lock the door. A dark place, like a coffin. It would be satisfying to surprise him that way. It would be fine if I killed Andrew Vanderman.

“Well, that’s the beginning of a motive,” the sociologist said. “Still, lots of people get jilted and don’t turn homicidal. Carry on.”

“In my opinion, Bea attracted him because he wanted to be bossed,” the engineer remarked. “He’d given up.”

“Protective passivity.”

The wire taps spun through the screening apparatus. A new scene showed on the oblong panel. It was the Paradise Bar.

Anywhere you sat in the Paradise Bar, a competent robot analyzer instantly studied your complexion and facial angles, and switched on lights, in varying tints and intensities, that showed you off to best advantage. The joint was popular for business deals. A swindler could look like an honest man there. It was also popular with women and slightly passé teleo talent. Sam Clay looked rather like an ascetic young saint. Andrew Vanderman looked noble, in a grim way, like Richard Coeur-de-Lion offering Saladin his freedom, though he knew it wasn’t really a bright thing to do. Noblesse oblige, his firm jaw seemed to say, as he picked up the silver decanter and poured. In ordinary light, Vanderman looked slightly more like a handsome bulldog. Also, away from the Paradise Bar, he was redder around the chops, a choleric man.

“As to that deal we were discussing,” Clay said, “you can go to—”

The censoring juke box blared out a covering bar or two. Vanderman’s reply was unheard as the music got briefly louder, and the lights shifted rapidly to keep pace with his sudden flush.

“It’s perfectly easy to outwit these censors,” Clay said. “They’re keyed to familiar terms of profane abuse, not to circumlocutions. If I said that the arrangement of your chromosomes would have surprised your father… you see?” He was right. The music stayed soft.

Vanderman swallowed nothing. “Take it easy,” he said. “I can see why you’re upset. Let me say first of all—”

“Hijo—”

But the censor was proficient in Spanish dialects. Vanderman was spared hearing another insult.

“—that I offered you a job because I think you’re a very capable man. You have potentialities. It’s not a bribe. Our personal affairs should be kept out of this.”

“All the same, Bea was engaged to me.”

“Clay, are you drunk?”

“Yes,” Clay said, and threw his drink into Vanderman’s face. The music began to play Wagner very, very loudly. A few minutes later, when the waiters interfered. Clay was supine and bloody, with a mashed nose and a bruised check. Vanderman had skinned his knuckles.

“That’s a motive,” the engineer said.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it? But why did Clay wait a year and a half? And remember what happened later. I wonder if the murder itself was just a symbol? If Vanderman represented, say, what Clay considered the tyrannical and oppressive force of society in general—synthesized in the representative image… oh, nonsense. Obviously Clay was trying to prove something to himself though. Suppose you cut forward now. I want to see this in normal chronology, not backwards. What’s the next selection?”

“Very suspicious. Clay got his nose fixed up and then went to a murder trial.”

He thought: I can’t breathe. Too crowded in here. Shut up in a box, a closet, a coffin, ignored by the spectators and the vested authority on the bench. What would I do if I were in the dock, like that chap? Suppose they convicted?

That would spoil it all. Another dark place—If I’d inherited the right genes, I’d have been strong enough to beat up Vanderman. But I’ve been pushed around too long.

I keep remembering that song.

Stray in the herd and the boss said kill it,

So I shot him in the rump with the handle of a skillet. A deadly weapon that’s in normal usage wouldn’t appear dangerous. But if it could be used homicidally—No, the Eye could check on that. All you can conceal these days is motive. But couldn’t the trick be reversed. Suppose I got Vanderman to attack me with what he thought was the handle of a skillet, but which I knew was a deadly weapon—

The trial Sam Clay was watching was fairly routine. One man had killed another. Counsel for the defense contended that the homicide had been a matter of impulse, and that, as a matter of fact, only assault and battery plus culpable negligence, at worst, could be proved, and the latter was canceled by an Act of God. The fact that the defendant inherited the decedent’s fortune, in Martial oil, made no difference. Temporary insanity was the plea. The prosecuting attorney showed films of what had happened before the fact. True, the victim hadn’t been killed by the blow, merely stunned. But the affair had occurred on an isolated beach, and when the tide came in—

Act of God, the defense repeated hastily.

The screen showed the defendant, some days before his crime, looking up the tide-table in a news tape. He also, it appeared, visited the site and asked a passing stranger if the beach was often crowded. “Nope,” the stranger said,

“it ain’t crowded after sundown. Gits too cold. Won’t do you no good, though. Too cold to swim then.”

One side matched Actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea—“The act does not make a man guilty, unless the mind be also guilty”—against Acta exteriora indicant interiora secreta—”By the outward acts we are to judge of the inward thoughts.” Latin legal basics were still valid, up to a point. A man’s past remained sacrosanct, provided—and here was the joker—that he possessed the right of citizenship. And anyone accused of a capital crime was automatically suspended from citizenship until his innocence had been established. Also, no past-tracing evidence could be introduced into a trial unless it could be proved that it had direct connection with the crime. The average citizen did have a right of privacy against tracing. Only if accused of a serious crime was that forfeit, and even then evidence uncovered could be used only in correlation with the immediate charge. There were various loopholes, of course, but theoretically a man was safe from espionage as long as he stayed within the law.

Now a defendant stood in the dock, his past opened. The prosecution showed recordings of a ginger blonde blackmailing him, and that clinched the motive and the verdict—guilty. The condemned man was led off in tears. Clay got up and walked out of the court. From his appearance, he seemed to be thinking. He was. He had decided that there was only one possible way in which he could kill Vanderman and get away with it. He couldn’t conceal the deed itself, nor the actions leading up to it, nor any written or spoken word. All he could hide were his own thoughts. And, without otherwise betraying himself, he’d have to kill Vanderman so that his act would appear justified. Which meant covering his tracks for yesterday as well as for tomorrow and tomorrow. Now, thought Clay, this much can be assumed; If I stand to lose by Vanderman’s death instead of gaining, that will help considerably. I must juggle that somehow. But I mustn’t forget that at present I have an obvious motive. First, he stole Bea. Second, he beat me up.

So I must make it seem as though he’s done me a favor—somehow. I must have an opportunity to study Vanderman carefully, and it must be a normal, logical, waterproof opportunity. Private secretary. Something like that. The Eye’s in the future now, after the fact, but it’s watching me—

I must remember that. It’s watching me now!

All right. Normally, I’d have thought of murder, at this point. That can’t and shouldn’t be disguised. I must work out of the mood gradually, but meanwhile—

He smiled.

Going off to buy a gun, he felt uncomfortable, as though that prescient Eye, years in the future, could with a wink summon the police. But it was separated from him by a barrier of time that only the natural processes could shorten. And, in fact, it had been watching him since his birth. You could look at it that way—

He could defy it. The Eye couldn’t read thoughts.

He bought the gun and lay in wait for Vanderman in a dark alley. But first he got thoroughly drunk. Drunk enough to satisfy the Eye. After that—

“Feel better now?” Vanderman asked, pouring another coffee. Clay buried his face in his hands.

“I was crazy,” he said, his voice muffled. “I must have been. You’d better t-turn me over to the police.”

“We can forget about that end of it, Clay. You were drunk, that’s all. And I…

well, I—”

“I pull a gun on you … try to kill you… and you bring me up to your place and—”

“You didn’t use that gun, Clay. Remember that. You’re no killer. All this has been my fault. I needn’t have been so blasted tough with you,” Vanderman said, looking like Coeur-de-Lion in spite of uncalculated amber fluorescence.

“I’m no good. I’m a failure. Every time I try to do something, a man like you comes along and does it better. I’m a second-rater.”

“Clay, stop talking like that. You’re just upset, that’s all. Listen to me. You’re going to straighten up. I’m going to see that you do. Starting tomorrow, we’ll work something out. Now drink your coffee.”

“You know,” Clay said, “you’re quite a guy.”

So the magnanimous idiot’s fallen for it, Clay thought, as he was drifting happily off to sleep. Fine. That begins to take care of the Eye. Moreover, it starts the ball rolling with Vanderman. Let a man do you a favor and he’s your pal. Well, Vanderman’s going to do me a lot more favors. In fact, before I’m through, I’ll have every motive for wanting to keep him alive. Every motive visible to the naked Eye.

Probably Clay had not heretofore applied his talents in the right direction, for there was nothing second-rate about the way he executed his homicide plan. In that, he proved very capable. He needed a suitable channel for his ability, and perhaps he needed a patron. Vanderman fulfilled that function; probably it salved his conscience for stealing Bea. Being the man he was, Vanderman needed to avoid even the appearance of ignobility. Naturally strong and ruthless, he told himself he was sentimental. His sentimentality never reached the point of actually inconveniencing him, and Clay knew enough to stay within the limits. Nevertheless it is nerve-racking to know you’re living under the scrutiny of an extratemporal Eye. As he walked into the lobby of the V Building a month later, Clay realized that light-vibrations reflected from his own body were driving irretrievably into the polished onyx walls and floor, photographing themselves there, waiting for a machine to unlock them, some day, some time, for some man perhaps in this very city, who as yet didn’t know even the name of Sam Clay. Then, sitting in his relaxer in the spiral lift moving swiftly up inside the walls, he knew that those walls were capturing his image, stealing it, like some superstition he remembered… ah?

Vanderman’s private secretary greeted him. Clay let his gaze wander freely across that young person’s neatly dressed figure and mildly attractive face. She said that Mr. Vanderman was out, and the appointment was for three, not two, wasn’t it? Clay referred to a notebook. He snapped his fingers.

“Three—you’re right, Miss Wells. I was so sure it was two I didn’t even bother to check up. Do you think he might be back sooner? I mean, is he out, or in conference?”

“He’s out, all right, Mr. Clay,” Miss Wells said. “I don’t think he’ll be back much sooner than three. I’m sorry.”

“Well, may I wait in here?”

She smiled at him efficiently. “Of course. There’s a stereo and the magazine spools are in that case.”

She went back to her work, and Clay skimmed through an article about the care and handling of lunar filchards. It gave him an opportunity to start a conversation by asking Miss Wells if she liked filchards. It turned out that she had no opinion whatso-ever of filchards but the ice had been broken. This is the cocktail acquaintance, Clay thought. I may have a broken heart, but, naturally, I’m lonesome.

The trick wasn’t to get engaged to Miss Wells so much as to fall in love with her convincingly. The Eye never slept. Clay was beginning to wake at night with a nervous start, and lie there looking up at the ceiling. But darkness was no shield.

“The question is,” said the sociologist at this point, “whether or not Clay was acting for an audience.”

“You mean us?”

“Exactly. It just occurred to me. Do you think he’s been behaving perfectly naturally?”

The engineer pondered.

“I’d say yes. A man doesn’t marry a girl only to carry out some other plan, does he? After all, he’d get himself involved in a whole new batch of responsibilities.”

“Clay hasn’t married Josephine Wells yet, however,” the sociologist countered.

“Besides, that responsibility angle might have applied a few hundred years ago, but not now.” He went off at random. “Imagine a society where, after divorce, a man was forced to support a perfectly healthy, competent woman! It was vestigial, I know—a throwback to the days when only males could earn a living—but imagine the sort of women who were willing to accept such support. That was reversion to infancy if I ever—”

The engineer coughed.

“Oh,” the sociologist said. “Oh… yes. The question is, would Clay have got himself engaged to a woman unless he really—’’

“Engagements can be broken.”

“This one hasn’t been broken yet, as far as we know. And we know.”

“A normal man wouldn’t plan on marrying a girl he didn’t care anything about, unless he had some stronger motive—I’ll go along that far.”

“But how normal is Clay?” the sociologist wondered. “Did he know in advance we’d check back on his past? Did you notice that he cheated at solitaire?”

“Proving?”

“There are all kinds of trivial things you don’t do if you think people are looking. Picking up a penny in the street, drinking soup out of the bowl, posing before a mirror—the sort of foolish or petty things everyone does when alone. Either Clay’s innocent, or he’s a very clever man—”

He was a very clever man. He never intended the engagement to get as far as marriage, though he knew that in one respect marriage would be a precaution. If a man talks in his sleep, his wife will certainly mention the fact. Clay considered gagging himself at night if the necessity should arise. Then he realized that if he talked in his sleep at all, there was no insurance against talking too much the very first time he had an auditor. He couldn’t risk such a break. But there was no necessity, after all. Clay’s problem, when he thought it over, was simply: How can I be sure I don’t talk in my sleep?

He solved that easily enough by renting a narcohypnotic supplementary course in common trade dialects. This involved studying while awake and getting the information repeated in his ear during slumber. As a necessary preparation for the course, he was instructed to set up a recorder and chart the depth of his sleep, so the narcohypnosis could be keyed to his individual rhythms. He did this several times, rechecked once a month thereafter, and was satisfied. There was no need to gag himself at night.

He was glad to sleep provided he didn’t dream. He had to take sedatives after a while. At night, there was relief from the knowledge that an Eye watched him always, an Eye that could bring him to justice, an Eye whose omnipotence he could not challenge in the open. But he dreamed about the Eye. Vanderman had given him a job in the organization, which was enormous. Clay was merely a cog, which suited him well enough, for the moment. He didn’t want any more favors yet. Not till he had found out the extent of Miss Wells’

duties—Josephine, her Christian name was. That took several months, but by that time friendship was ripening into affection. So Clay asked Vanderman for another job. He specified. It wasn’t obvious, but he was asking for work that would, presently, fit him for Miss Wells’ duties.

Vanderman probably still felt guilty about Bea; he’d married her and she was in Antarctica now, at the Casino. Vanderman was due to join her, so he scribbled a memorandum, wished Clay good luck, and went to Antarctica, bothered by no stray pangs of conscience. Clay improved the hour by courting Josephine ardently.

From what he had heard about the new Mrs. Vanderman, he felt secretly relieved. Not long ago, when he had been content to remain passive, the increasing dominance of Bea would have satisfied him, but no more. He was learning self reliance, and liked it. These days, Bea was behaving rather badly. Given all the money and freedom she could use, she had too much time on her hands. Once in a while Clay heard rumors that made him smile secretly. Vanderman wasn’t having an easy time of it. A dominant character, Bea—but Vanderman was no weakling himself.

After a while Clay told his employer he wanted to marry Josephine Wells. “I guess that makes us square,” he said. “You took Bea away from me and I’m taking Josie away from you.”

“Now wait a minute,” Vanderman said. “I hope you don’t—”

“My fiancée, your secretary. That’s all. The thing is, Josie and I are in love.” He poured it on, but carefully. It was easier to deceive Vanderman than the Eye, with its trained technicians and forensic sociologists looking through it. He thought, sometime, of those medieval pictures of an immense eye, and that reminded him of something vague and distressing, though he couldn’t isolate the memory.

After all, what could Vanderman do? He arranged to have Clay given a raise. Josphine, always conscientious, offered to keep on working for a while, till office routine was straightened out, but it never did get straightened out, somehow. Clay deftly saw to that by keeping Josephine busy. She didn’t have to bring work home to her apartment, but she brought it, and Clay gradually began to help her when he dropped by. His job, plus the narcohypnotic courses, had already trained him for this sort of tricky organizational work. Vanderman’s business was highly specialized—planet-wide exports and imports, and what with keeping track of specific groups, seasonal trends, sectarian holidays, and so forth, Josephine, as a sort of animated memorandum book for Vanderman, had a more than full-time job.

She and Clay postponed marriage for a time. Clay—naturally enough—began to appear mildly jealous of Josephine’s work, and she said she’d quit soon. But one night she stayed on at the office, and he went out in a pet and got drunk. It just happened to be raining that night, Clay got tight enough to walk unprotected through the drizzle, and to fall asleep at home in his wet clothes. He came down with influenza. As he was recovering, Josephine got it. Under the circumstances, Clay stepped in—purely a temporary job—and took over his fiancée’s duties. Office routine was extremely complicated that week, and only Clay knew the ins and outs of it. The arrangement saved Vanderman a certain amount of inconvenience, and, when the situation resolved itself, Josephine had a subsidiary job and Clay was Vanderman’s private secretary.

“I’d better know more about him,” Clay said to Josephine. “After all, there must be a lot of habits and foibles he’s got that need to be catered to. If he wants lunch ordered up, I don’t want to get smoked tongue and find out he’s allergic to it. What about his hobbies?”

But he was careful not to pump Josephine too hard, because of the Eye. He still needed sedatives to sleep.

The sociologist rubbed his forehead.

“Let’s take a break,” he suggested. “Why does a guy want to commit murder anyway?”

“For profit, one sort or another.”

“Only partly, I’d say. The other part is an unconscious desire to be punished—usually for something else. That’s why you get accident prones. Ever think about what happens to murderers who feel guilty and yet who aren’t punished by the Law? They must live a rotten sort of life—always stepping in front of speedsters, cutting themselves with an ax—accidentally; accidentally touching wires full of juice—“

“Conscience, eh?”

“A long time ago, people thought God sat in the sky with a telescope and watched everything they did. They really lived pretty carefully, in the Middle Ages—the first Middle Ages, I mean. Then there was the era of disbelief, where people had nothing to believe in very strongly—and finally we get this.” He nodded toward the screen. “A universal memory. By extension, it’s a universal social conscience, an externalized one. It’s exactly the same as the medieval concept of God—omniscience.”

“But not omnipotence.”

“Mm.”

All in all, Clay kept the Eye in mind for a year and a half. Before he said or did anything whatsoever, he reminded himself of the Eye, and made certain that he wasn’t revealing his motive to the judging future. Of course, there was—would be—an Ear, too, but that was a little too absurd. One couldn’t visualize a large, disembodied Ear decorating the wall like a plate in a plate holder. All the same, whatever he said would be as important evidence—some time—as what he did. So Sam Clay was very careful indeed, and behaved like Caesar’s wife. He wasn’t exactly defying authority, but he was certainly circumventing it.

Superficially Vanderman was more like Caesar, and his wife was not above reproach, these days. She had too much money to play with. And she was finding her husband too stony willed a person to be completely satisfactory. There was enough of the matriarch in Bea to make her feel rebellion against Andrew Vanderman, and there was a certain lack of romance. Vanderman had little time for her. He was busy these days, involved with a whole string of deals which demanded much of his time. Clay, of course, had something to do with that. His interest in his new work was most laudable. He stayed up nights plotting and planning as though expecting Vanderman to make him a full partner. In fact, he even suggested this possibility to Josephine. He wanted it on the record. The marriage date had been set, and Clay wanted to move before then; he had no intention of being drawn into a marriage of convenience after the necessity had been removed.

One thing he did, which had to be handled carefully, was to get the whip. Now Vanderman was a fingerer. He liked to have something in his hands while he talked. Usually it was a crystalline paper weight, with a miniature thunderstorm in it, complete with lightning, when it was shaken. Clay put this where Vanderman would be sure to knock it off and break it. Meanwhile, he had plugged one deal with Callisto Ranches for the sole purpose of getting a whip for Vanderman’s desk. The natives were proud of their leatherwork and their silversmithing, and a nominal makeweight always went with every deal they closed. Thus, presently, a handsome miniature whip, with Vanderman’s initials on it, lay on the desk, coiled into a loop, acting as a paperweight except when he picked it up and played with it while he talked. The other weapon Clay wanted was already there—an antique paper knife, once called a surgical scalpel. He never let his gaze rest on it too long, because of the Eye.

The other whip came. He absentmindedly put it in his desk and pretended to forget it. It was a sample of the whips made by the Alaskan Flagellantes for use in their ceremonies, and was wanted because of some research being made into the pain-neutralizing drugs the Flagellantes used. Clay, of course, had engineered this deal, too. There was nothing suspicious about that; the firm stood to make a sound profit. In fact, Vanderman had promised him a percentage bonus at the end of the year on every deal he triggered. It would be quite a lot. It was December, a year and a half had passed since Clay first recognized that the Eye would seek him out.

He felt fine. He was careful about the sedatives, and his nerves, though jangled, were nowhere near the snapping point. It had been a strain, but he had trained himself so that he would make no slips. He visualized the Eye in the walls, in the ceiling, in the sky, everywhere he went. It was the only way to play completely safe. And very soon now it would pay off. But he would have to do it soon; such a nervous strain could not be continued indefinitely. A few details remained. He carefully arranged matters—under the Eye’s very nose, so to speak—so that he was offered a well-paying position with another firm. He turned it down.

And one night an emergency happened to arise so that Clay, very logically, had to go to Vanderman’s apartment.

Vanderman wasn’t there; Bea was. She had quarreled violently with her husband. Moreover, she had been drinking. (This, too, he had expected.) If the situation had not worked out exactly as he wanted, he would have tried again—and again—but there was no need.

Clay was a little politer than necessary. Perhaps too polite, certainly Bea, that incipient matriarch, was led down the garden path, a direction she was not unwilling to take. After all, she had married Vanderman for his money, found him as dominant as herself, and now saw Clay as an exaggerated symbol of both romance and masculine submissiveness.

The camera eye hidden in the wall, in a decorative bas-relief, was grinding away busily, spooling up its wiretape in a way that indicated Vanderman was a suspicious as well as a jealous husband. But Clay knew about this gadget, too. At the suitable moment he stumbled against the wall in such a fashion that the device broke. Then, with only that other eye spying on him, he suddenly became so virtuous that it was a pity Vanderman couldn’t witness his volte face.

“Listen, Bea,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t understand. It’s no good. I’m not in love with you anymore. I was once, sure, but that was quite a while ago. There’s somebody else, and you ought to know it by now.”

“You still love me,” Bea said with intoxicated firmness. “We belong together.”

“Bea. Please. I hate to have to say this, but I’m grateful to Andrew Vanderman for marrying you, I… well, you got what you wanted, and I’m getting what I want. Let’s leave it at that.”

“I’m used to getting what I want, Sam. Opposition is something I don’t like. Especially when I know you really—”

She said a good deal more, and so did Clay—he was perhaps unnecessarily harsh. But he had to make the point, for the Eye, that he was no longer jealous of Vanderman.

He made the point.

The next morning he got to the office before Vanderman, cleaned up his desk, and discovered the stingaree whip still in its box. “Oops,” he said, snapping his fingers—the Eye watched, and this was the crucial period. Perhaps it would all be over within the hour. Every move from now on would have to be specially calculated in advance, and there could be no slightest deviation. The Eye was everywhere—literally everywhere.

He opened the box, took out the whip, and went into the inner sanctum. He tossed the whip on Vanderman’s desk, sp carelessly that a stylus rack toppled. Clay rearranged everything, leaving the stingaree whip near the edge of the desk, and placing the Callistan silver-leather whip at the back, half concealed behind the interoffice visor-box. He didn’t allow himself more than a casual sweeping glance to make sure the paper knife was still there. Then he went out for coffee.

Half an hour later he got back, picked up a few letters for signature from the rack, and walked into Vanderman’s office. Vanderman looked up from behind his desk. He had changed a little in a year and a half; he was looking older, less noble, more like an aging bulldog. Once, Clay thought coldly, this man stole my fiancée and beat me up.

Careful. Remember the Eye.

There was no need to do anything but follow the plan and let events take their course. Vanderman had seen the spy films, all right, up to the point where they had gone blank, when Clay fell against the wall. Obviously he hadn’t really expected Clay to show up this morning. But to see the louse grinning hello, walking across the room, putting some letters down on his desk—

Clay was counting on Vanderman’s short temper, which had not improved over the months. Obviously the man had been simply sitting there, thinking unpleasant thoughts, and just as Clay had known would happen, he’d picked up the whip and begun to finger it. But it was the stingaree whip this time.

“Morning,” Clay said cheerfully to his stunned employer. His smile became one-sided. “I’ve been waiting for you to check this letter to the Kirghiz kovar-breeders. Can we find a market for two thousand of those ornamental horns?”

It was at this point that Vanderman, bellowing, jumped to his feet, swung the whip, and sloshed Clay across the face. There is probably nothing more painful than the bite of a stingaree whip.

Clay staggered back. He had not known it would hurt so much. For an instant the shock of the blow knocked every other consideration out of his head, and blind anger was all that remained.

Remember the Eye!

He remembered it. There were dozens of trained men watching everything he did just now. Literally he stood on an open stage surrounded by intent observers who made notes on every expression of his face, every muscular flection, every breath he drew.

In a moment Vanderman would be dead—but Sam Clay would not be alone. An invisible audience from the future was fixing him with cold, calculating eyes. He had one more thing to do and the job would be over. Do it—carefully, carefully!—while they watched.

Time stopped for him. The job would be over.

It was very curious. He had rehearsed this series of actions so often in the privacy of his mind that his body was going through with it now, without further instructions. His body staggered back from the blow, recovered balance, glared at Vanderman in shocked fury, poised for a dive at that paper knife in plain sight on the desk.

That was what the outward and visible Sam Clay was doing. But the inward and spiritual Sam Clay went through quite a different series of actions. The job would be over.

And what was he going to do after that?

The inward and spiritual murderer stood fixed with dismay and surprise, staring at a perfectly empty future. He had never looked beyond this moment. He had made no plans for his life beyond the death of Vanderman. But now—he had no enemy but Vanderman. When Vanderman was dead, what would he fix upon to orient his life? What would he work at then? His job would be gone, too. And he liked his job.

Suddenly he knew how much he liked it. He was good at it. For the first time in his life, he had found a job he could do really well. You can’t live a year and a half in a new environment without acquiring new goals. The change had come imperceptibly. He was a good operator; he’d discovered that he could be successful. He didn’t have to kill Vanderman to prove that to himself. He’d proved it already without committing murder. In that time-stasis which had brought everything to a full stop he looked lit Vanderman’s red face and he thought of Bea, and of Vanderman as he had come to know him—and he didn’t want to be a murderer.

He didn’t want Vanderman dead. He didn’t want Bea. The thought of her made him feel a little sick. Perhaps that was because he himself had changed from passive to active. He no longer wanted or needed a dominant woman. He could make his own decisions. If he were choosing now, it would be someone more like Josephine—

Josephine. That image before his mind’s stilled eye was suddenly very pleasant. Josephine with her mild, calm prettiness, her admiration for Sam Clay the successful businessman, the rising young importer in Vanderman, Inc. Josephine whom he was going to marry—Of course he was going to marry her. He loved Josephine. He loved his job. All he wanted was the status quo, exactly as he had achieved it. Everything was perfect right now—as of maybe thirty seconds ago.

But that was a long time ago—thirty seconds. A lot can happen in a half a minute. A lot had happened. Vanderman was coming at him again, the whip raised. Clay’s nerves crawled at the anticipation’ of its burning impact across his face a second time. If he could get hold of Vanderman’s wrist before he struck again—if he could talk fast enough—

The crooked smile was still on his face. It was part of the pattern, in some dim way he did not quite understand. He was acting in response to conditioned reflexes set up over a period of many months of rigid self-training. His body was already in action. All that had taken place in his mind had happened so fast there was no physical hiatus at all. His body knew its job and it was doing the job. It was lunging forward toward the desk and the knife, and he could not stop it.

All this had happened before. It had happened in his mind, the only place where Sam Clay had known real freedom in the past year and a half. In all that time he had forced himself to realize that the Eye was watching every outward move he made. He had planned each action in advance and schooled himself to carry it through. Scarcely once had he let himself act purely on impulse. Only in following the plan exactly was there safety. He had indoctrinated himself too successfully.

Something was wrong. This wasn’t what he’d wanted. He was still afraid, weak, failing—

He lurched against the desk, clawed at the paper knife, and, knowing failure, drove it into Vanderman’s heart.

“It’s a tricky case,” the forensic sociologist said to the engineer. “Very tricky.”

“Want me to run it again?”

“No, not right now. I’d like to think it over. Clay… that firm that offered him another job. The offer’s withdrawn now, isn’t it? Yes, I remember—they’re fussy about the morals of their employees. It’s insurance or something, I don’t know. Motive. Motive, now.”

The sociologist looked at the engineer.

The engineer said: “A year and a half ago he had a motive. But a week ago he had everything to lose and nothing to gain. He’s lost his job and that bonus, he doesn’t want Mrs. Vanderman anymore, and as for that beating Vanderman once gave him… ah?”

“Well, he did try to shoot Vanderman once, and he couldn’t, remember? Even though he was full of Dutch courage. But—something’s wrong. Clay’s been avoiding even the appearance of evil a little too carefully. Only I can’t put my finger on anything, blast it.”

“What about tracing back his life further? We only got to his fourth year.”

“There couldn’t be anything useful that long ago. It’s obvious he was afraid of his father and hated him, too. Typical stuff, basic psych. The father symbolizes judgment to him. I’m very much afraid Sam Clay is going to get off scot-free.”

“But if you think there’s something haywire—”

“The burden of proof is up to us,” the sociologist said. The visor sang. A voice spoke softly.

“No, I haven’t got the answer yet. Now? All right. I’ll drop over.”

He stood up.

“The D.A. wants a consultation. I’m not hopeful, though. I’m afraid the State’s going to lose this case. That’s the trouble with the externalized conscience—”

He didn’t amplify. He went out, shaking his head, leaving the engineer staring speculatively at the screen. But within five minutes he was assigned to another job—the bureau was understaffed—and he didn’t have a chance to investigate on his own until a week later. Then it didn’t matter anymore. For, a week later, Sam Clay was walking out of the court an acquitted man. Bea Vanderman was waiting for him at the foot of the ramp. She wore black, but obviously her heart wasn’t in it.

“Sam,” she said.

He looked at her.

He felt a little dazed. It was all over. Everything had worked out exactly according to plan. And nobody was watching him now. The Eye had closed. The invisible audience had put on its hats and coats and left the theater of Sam Clay’s private life. From now on he could do and say precisely what he liked, with no censoring watcher’s omnipresence to check him. He could act on impulse again.

He had outwitted society. He had outwitted the Eye and all its minions in all their technological glory. He, Sam Clay, private citizen. It was a wonderful thing, and he could not understand why it left him feeling so flat. That had been a nonsensical moment, just before the murder. The moment of relenting. They say you get the same instant’s frantic rejection on the verge of a good many important decisions—just before you marry, for instance. Or—what was it? Some other common instance he’d often heard of. For a second it eluded him. Then he had it. The hour before marriage—and the instant after suicide. After you’ve pulled the trigger, or jumped off the bridge. The instant of wild revulsion when you’d give anything to undo the irrevocable. Only, you can’t. It’s too late. The thing is done.

Well, he’d been a fool. Luckily, it had been too late. His body took over and forced him to success he’d trained it for. About the job—it didn’t matter. He’d get another. He’d proved himself capable. If he could outwit the Eye itself, what job existed he couldn’t lick if he tried? Except—nobody knew exactly how good he was. How could he prove his capabilities? It was infuriating to achieve such phenomenal success after a lifetime of failures, and never to get the credit for it. How many men must have tried and failed where he had tried and succeeded? Rich men, successful men, brilliant men who had yet failed in the final test of all—the contest with the Eye, their own lives at stake. Only Sam Clay had passed that most important test in the world—and he could never claim credit for it.

“… knew they wouldn’t convict,” Bea’s complacent voice was saying. Clay blinked at her. “What?”

“I said I’m so glad you’re free, darling. I knew they wouldn’t convict you. I knew that from the very beginning.” She smiled at him, and for the first time it occurred to him that Bea looked a little like a bulldog. It was something about her lower jaw. He thought that when her teeth were closed together the lower set probably rested just outside the upper. He had an instant’s impulse to ask her about it. Then he decided he had better not.

“You knew, did you?” he said.

She squeezed his arm. What an ugly lower jaw that was. How odd he’d never noticed it before. And behind the heavy lashes, how small her eyes were. How mean.

“Let’s go where we can be alone,” Bea said, clinging to him. “There’s such a lot to talk about.”

“We are alone,” Clay said, diverted for an instant to his original thoughts.

“Nobody’s watching,” He glanced up at the sky and down at the mosaic pavement. He drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “Nobody,” he said.

“My speeder’s parked right over here. We can—”

“Sorry, Bea.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got business to attend to.”

“Forget business. Don’t you understand that we’re free now, both of us?”

He had a horrible feeling he knew what she meant.

“Wait a minute,” he said, because this seemed the quickest way to end it. “I killed your husband, Bea. Don’t forget that.”

“You were acquitted. It was self-defense. The court said so.”

“It—” He paused, glanced up quickly at the high wall of the Justice Building, and began a one-sided, mirthless smile. It was all right; there was no Eye now. There never would be, again. He was unwatched.

“You mustn’t feel guilty, even within yourself,” Bea said firmly. “It wasn’t your fault. It simply wasn’t. You’ve got to remember that. You couldn’t have killed Andrew except by accident, Sam, so—”

“What? What do you mean by that?”

“Well, after all. I know the prosecution kept trying to prove you’d planned to kill Andrew all along, but you mustn’t let what they said put any ideas in your head. I know you, Sam. I knew Andrew. You couldn’t have planned a thing like that, and even if you had, it wouldn’t have worked.”

The half-smile died.

“It wouldn’t?”

She looked at him steadily.

“Why, you couldn’t have managed it,” she said. “Andrew was the better man, and we both know it. He’d have been too clever to fall for anything—”

“Anything a second rater like me could dream up?” Clay swallowed. His lips tightened. “Even you. What’s the idea? What’s your angle now—that we second-raters ought to get together?”

“Come on,” she said, and slipped her arm through his. Clay hung back for a second. Then he scowled, looked back at the Justice Building, and followed Bea toward her speeder.

The engineer had a free period. He was finally able to investigate Sam Clay’s early childhood. It was purely academic now, but he liked to indulge his curiosity. He traced Clay back to the dark closet, when the boy was four, and used ultraviolet. Sam was huddled in a corner, crying silently, staring up with frightened eyes at a top shelf.

What was on that shelf the engineer could not see.

He kept the beam focused on the closet and cast back rapidly through time. The closet often opened and closed, and sometimes Sam Clay was locked in it as punishment, but the upper shelf held its mystery until—

It was in reverse. A woman reached to that shelf, took down an object, walked backward out of the closet to Sam Clay’s bedroom, and went to the wall by the door. This was unusual, for generally it was Sam’s father who was warden of the closet.

She hung up a framed picture of a single huge staring eye floating in space. There was a legend under it. The letters spelled out: THOU GOD SEEST ME. The engineer kept on tracing. After a while it was night. The child was in bed, sitting up wide-eyed, afraid. A man’s footsteps sounded on the stair. The scanner told all secrets but those of the inner mind. The man was Sam’s father, coming up to punish him for some childish crime committed earlier. Moonlight fell upon the wall beyond which the footsteps approached showing how the wall quivered a little to the vibrations of the feet, and the Eye in its frame quivered, too. The boy seemed to brace himself. A defiant half-smile showed on his mouth, crooked, unsteady.

This time he’d keep that smile, no matter what happened. When it was over he’d still have it, so his father could see it, and the Eye could see it and they’d know he hadn’t given in. He hadn’t… he—

The door opened.

He couldn’t help it. The smile faded and was gone.

“Well, what was eating him?” the engineer demanded.

The sociologist shrugged. “You could say he never did really grow up. It’s axiomatic that boys go through a phase of rivalry with their fathers. Usually that’s sublimated; the child grows up and wins, in one way or another. But Sam Clay didn’t. I suspect he developed an externalized conscience very early. Symbolizing partly his father, partly God, an Eye and society—which fulfills the role of protective, punishing parent, you know.”

“It still isn’t evidence.”

“We aren’t going to get any evidence on Sam Clay. But that doesn’t mean he’s got away with anything, you know. He’s always been afraid to assume the responsibilities of maturity. He never took on an optimum challenge. He was afraid to succeed at anything because that symbolic Eye of his might smack him down. When he was a kid, he might have solved his entire problem by kicking his old man in the shins. Sure, he’d have got a harder whaling, but he’d have made some move to assert his individuality. As it is, he waited too long. And then he defied the wrong thing, and it wasn’t really defiance, basically. Too late now. His formative years are past. The thing that might really solve Clay’s problem would be his conviction for murder—but he’s been acquitted. If he’d been convicted, then he could prove to the world that he’d hit back. He’d kicked his father in the shins, kept that defiant smile on his face, killed Andrew Vanderman. I think that’s what he actually has wanted all along—recognition. Proof of his own ability to assert himself. He had to work hard to cover his tracks—if he made any—but that was part of the game. By winning it he’s lost. The normal ways of escape are closed to him. He always had an Eye looking down at him.”

“Then the acquittal stands?”

“There’s still no evidence. The State’s lost its case. But I… I don’t think Sam Clay has won his. Something will happen.” He sighed. “It’s inevitable, I’m afraid. Sentence first, you see. Verdict afterward. The sentence was passed on Clay a long time ago.”

Sitting across from him in the Paradise Bar, behind a silver decanter of brandy in the center of the table, Bea looked lovely and hateful. It was the lights that made her lovely. They even managed to cast their shadows over that bulldog chin, and under her thick lashes the small, mean eyes acquired an illusion of beauty. But she still looked hateful. The lights could do nothing about that. They couldn’t cast shadows into Sam Clay’s private mind or distort the images there.

He thought of Josephine. He hadn’t made up his mind fully yet about that. But if he didn’t quite know what he wanted, there was no shadow of doubt about what he didn’t want no possible doubt whatever.

“You need me, Sam,” Bea told him over her brimming glass.

“I can stand on my own feet. I don’t need anybody.”

It was the indulgent way she looked at him. It was the smile that showed her teeth. He could see as clearly as if he had X-ray vision how the upper teeth would close down inside the lower when she shut her mouth. There would be a lot of strength in a jaw like that. He looked at her neck and saw the thickness of it, and thought how firmly she was getting her grip upon him, how she maneuvered for position and waited to lock her bulldog clamp deep into the fabric of his life again.

“I’m going to marry Josephine, you know,” he said.

“No, you’re not. You aren’t the man for Josephine. I know that girl, Sam. For a while you may have had her convinced you were a go-getter. But she’s bound to find out the truth. You’d be miserable together. You need me, Sam darling. You don’t know what you want. Look at the mess you got into when you tried to act on your own. Oh, Sam, why don’t you stop pretending? You know you never were a planner. You… what’s the matter, Sam?”

His sudden burst of laughter had startled both of them. He tried to answer her, but the laughter wouldn’t let him. He lay back in his chair and shook with it until he almost strangled. He had come so close, so desperately close to bursting out with a boast that would have been confession. Just to convince the woman. Just to shut her up. He must care more about her good opinion than he had realized until now. But that last absurdity was too much. It was only ridiculous now. Sam Clay, not a planner.

How good it was to let himself laugh, now. To let himself go, without having to think ahead. Acting on impulse again, after those long months of rigid repression. No audience from the future was clustering around this table, analyzing the quality of his laughter, observing that it verged on hysteria. Who cared? He deserved a little blow-off like this, after all he’d been through. He’d risked so much, and achieved so much—and in the end gained nothing, not even glory except in his own mind. He’d gained nothing, really, except the freedom to be hysterical if he felt like it. He laughed and laughed and laughed, hearing the shrill note of lost control in his own voice and not caring.

People were turning to stare. The bartender looked over at him uneasily, getting ready to move if this went on. Bea stood up, leaned across the table, shook him by the shoulder.

“Sam, what’s the matter? Sam, do get hold of yourself! You’re making a spectacle of me, Sam! What are you laughing at?”

With a tremendous effort he forced the laughter back in his throat. His breath still came heavily and little bursts of merriment kept bubbling up so that he could hardly speak, but he got the words out somehow. They were probably the first words he had spoken without rigid censorship since he first put his plan into operation. And the words were these.

“I’m laughing at the way I fooled you. I fooled everybody! You think I didn’t know what I was doing every minute of the time? You think I wasn’t planning, every step of the way? It took me eighteen months to do it, but I killed Andrew Vanderman with malice aforethought, and nobody can ever prove I did it.” He giggled foolishly. “I just wanted you to know,” he added in a mild voice.

And it wasn’t until he got his breath back and began to experience that feeling of incredible, delightful, incomparable relief that he knew what he had done.

She was looking at him without a flicker of expression on her face. Total blank was all that showed. There was a dead silence for a quarter of a minute. Clay had the feeling that his words must have rung from the roof, that in a moment the police would come in to hale him away. But the words had been quietly spoken. No one had heard but Bea.

And now, at last, Bea moved. She answered him, but not in words. The bulldog face convulsed suddenly and overflowed with laughter. As he listened, Clay felt all that flood of glorious relief ebbing away. For he saw that she did not believe him. And there was no way he could prove the truth.

“Oh, you silly little man,” Bea gasped when words came back to her. “You had me almost convinced for a minute. I almost believed you. I—” Laughter silenced her again, consciously silvery laughter that made heads turn. That conscious note in it warned him that she was up to something. Bea had had an idea. His own thoughts outran hers and he knew in an instant before she spoke exactly what the idea was and how she would apply it. He said: “I am going to marry Josephine,” in the very instant that Bea spoke,

“You’re going to marry me,” she said flatly. “You’ve got to. You don’t know your own mind, Sam. I know what’s best for you and I’ll see you do it. Do you understand me, Sam?”

“The police won’t realize that was only a silly boast,” she told him. “They’ll believe you. You wouldn’t want me to tell them what you just said, would you, Sam?”

He looked at her in silence, seeing no way out. This dilemma had sharper horns than anything he could have imagined. For Bea did not and would not believe him, no matter how he yearned to convince her, while the police undoubtedly would believe him, to the undoing of his whole investment in time, effort, and murder. He had said it. It was engraved upon the walls and in the echoing air, waiting for that invisible audience in the future to observe. No one was listening now, but a word from Bea could make them reopen the case. A word from Bea.

He looked at her, still in silence, but with a certain cool calculation beginning to dawn in the back of his mind.

For a moment Sam Clay felt very tired indeed. In that moment he encompassed a good deal of tentative future time. In his mind he said yes to Bea, married her, lived an indefinite period as her husband. And he saw what that life would be like. He saw the mean small eyes watching him, the relentlessly gripping jaw set, the tyranny that would emerge slowly or not slowly, depending on the degree of his subservience, until he was utterly at the mercy of the woman who had been Andrew Vanderman’s widow.

Sooner or later, he thought clearly to himself, I’d kill her. He’d have to kill. That sort of life, with that sort of woman, wasn’t a life Sam Clay could live, indefinitely. And he’d proved his ability to kill and go free.

But what about Andrew Vanderman’s death?

Because they’d have another case against him then. This time it had been qualitative; the next time, the balance would shift toward quantitative. If Sam Clay’s wife died, Sam Clay would be investigated no matter how she died. Once a suspect, always a suspect in the eyes of the law. The Eye of the law. They’d check back. They’d return to this moment, while he sat here revolving thoughts of death in his mind. And they’d return to five minutes ago, and listen to him boast that he had killed Vanderman.

A good lawyer might get him off. He could claim it wasn’t the truth. He could say he had been goaded to an idle boast by the things Bea said. He might get away with that, and he might not. Scop would be the only proof, and he couldn’t be compelled to take scop.

But—no. That wasn’t the answer. That wasn’t the way out. He could tell by the sick, sinking feeling inside him. There had been just one glorious moment of release, after he’d made his confession to Bea, and from then on everything seemed to run downhill again.

But that moment had been the goal he’d worked toward all this time. He didn’t know what it was, or why he wanted it. But he recognized the feeling when it came. He wanted it back.

This helpless feeling, this impotence—was this the total sum of what he had achieved? Then he’d failed, after all. Somehow, in some strange way he could only partly understand, he had failed; killing Vanderman hadn’t been the answer at all. He wasn’t a success. He was a second-rater, a passive, helpless worm whom Bea would manage and control and drive, eventually, to—

“What’s the matter, Sam?” Bea asked solicitously.

“You think I’m a second-rater, don’t you?” he said. “You’ll never believe I’m not. You think I couldn’t have killed Vanderman except by accident. You’ll never believe I could possibly have defied—”

“What?” she asked, when he did not go on.

There was a new note of surprise in his voice.

“But it wasn’t defiance,” he said slowly. “I just hid and dodged. Circumvented. I hung dark glasses on an Eye, because I was afraid of it. But—that wasn’t defiance. So—what I really was trying to prove—”

She gave him a startled, incredulous stare as he stood up.

“Sam! What are you doing?” Her voice cracked a little.

“Proving something,” Clay said, smiling crookedly, and glancing up from Bea to the ceiling. “Take a good look,” he said to the Eye as he smashed her skull with the decanter.