MANNA

Peter Phillips (1921-)

Astounding Science Fiction, February

British newspaperman Peter Phillips (not to be confused with Rog Phillips, another good writer) returns—his incredible “Dreams are Sacred” is a very tough act to follow—with this fine story about other dimensions and religious beliefs. We know far less about Peter Phillips than we should, except that at his best he was very good indeed, and that like many (too many) other writers he seems to have only had one solid productive decade in his career, in this case 1948 to 1958. It is interesting to speculate on what kind of sf he would be writing if he began his career in 1978 instead of thirty years earlier.—M.H.G.

(It seems to me that science fiction writers tend to avoid religion. Surely, religion has permeated many societies at all times; all Western societies from ancient Sumeria on have had strong religious components. And yet—

Societies depicted in science fiction and fantasy often ignore religion. While the great Manichean battle of good and evil—God and Satan—seems to permeate Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” there is no religious ritual anywhere mentioned. In my own “Foundation” series, the only religious element found is a purely secular fake—and that was put in only at the insistence of John Campbell, to my own enormous unease.

Still, there are exceptions. Religion does appear sometimes, usually informs that appear [to me] to be somewhat Catholic in atmosphere, or else Fundamentalist. “Manna” by Peter Phillips is an example.—I.A.) Take best-quality synthetic protein. Bake it, break it up, steam it, steep it in sucrose, ferment it, add nut oil, piquant spices from the Indies, fruit juices, new flavors from the laboratory, homogenize it, hydrolize it, soak it in brine; pump in glutamic acid, balanced proportions of A, B1, B2, C, D, traces of calcium, copper and iron salts, an unadvertised drop of benzedrine; dehydrate, peptonize, irradiate, reheat in malt vapor under pressure compress, cut into mouth-sized chunks, pack in liquor from an earlier stage of process—

Miracle Meal.

Everything the Body Needs to Sustain Life and Bounding Vitality, in the Most DEEE LISHUSSS Food Ever Devised. It will Invigorate You, Build Muscle, Brain, Nerve. Better than the Banquets of Imperial Rome, Renaissance Italy, Eighteenth Century France—All in One Can. The Most Heavenly Taste Thrills You Have Ever Experienced. Gourmets’ Dream and Housewives’ Delight. You Can Live On It. Eat it for Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. You’ll Never Get Tired of MIRACLE

MEAL.

Ad cuts of Zeus contemptuously tossing a bowl of ambrosia over the edge of Mount Olympus and making a goggle-eyed grab for a can of Miracle Meal. Studio fake-ups of Lucretia Borgia dropping a phial of poison and crying piously: “It Would Be a Sin to Spoil Miracle Meal.”

Posters and night-signs of John Doe—or Bill Smith, or Henri Brun, or Hans Schmitt or Wei Lung—balancing precariously on a pyramided pile of empty M.M. cans, eyes closed, mouth pursed in slightly inane ecstasy as he finished the last mouthful of his hundred-thousandth can.

You could live on it, certainly.

The publicity co-ordinator of the Miracle Meal Corporation chose the victim himself—a young man named Arthur Adelaide from Greenwich Village. For a year, under the closest medical supervision and observation, Arthur ate nothing but Miracle Meal.

From this Miracle Meal Marathon, as it was tagged by video-print newssheets, he emerged smiling, twice the weight—publicity omitted to mention that he’d been half-starved to begin with—he’d been trying to live off pure art and was a bad artist—perfectly fit, and ten thousand dollars richer. He was also given a commercial art job with M.M., designing new labels for the cans.

His abrupt death at the end of an eighty story drop from his office window a week or two later received little attention.

It would be unreasonable to blame the cumulative effect of M.M., for Arthur was probably a little unbalanced to begin with, whereas M.M. was Perfectly Balanced—a Kitchen in a Can.

Maybe you could get tired of it. But not very quickly. The flavor was the secret. It was delicious yet strangely and tantalizingly indefinable. It seemed to react progressively on the taste-buds so that the tastes subtly changed with each mouthful.

One moment it might be omelette au fine herbes, the next, turkey and cranberry, then buckwheat and maple. You’d be through the can before you could make up your mind. So you’d buy another.

Even the can was an improvement on the usual plastic self-heater—shape of a small, shallow pie-dish, with a pre-impressed crystalline fracture in the plastic lid.

Press the inset button on the preheating unit at one side, and when the food was good and hot, a secondary chemical reaction in the unit released a fierce little plunger just inside the perimeter fracture. Slight steam pressure finished the job. The lip flipped off.

Come and get it. You eat right out of the can it comes in. Keep your fingers out, Johnny. Don’t you see the hygiplast spoon in its moisture-and heat-repellent wrapper fixed under the lid?

The Rev. Malachi Pennyhorse did not eat Miracle Meal. Nor was he impressed when Mr. Stephen Samson, Site Advisor to the Corporation, spoke in large dollar signs of the indirect benefits a factory would bring to the district.

“Why here? You already have one factory in England. Why not extend it?”

“It’s our policy, Reverend—”

“Not ‘Reverend’ young man. Call me Vicar. Or Mr. Pennyhorse. Or merely Pennyhorse—Go on.”

“It’s our policy, sir, to keep our factories comparatively small, site them in the countryside for the health of employees, and modify the buildings to harmonize with the prevailing architecture of the district. There is no interference with local amenities. All transport of employees, raw materials, finished product is by silent copter.”

Samson laid a triphoto on the vicar’s desk. “What would you say that was?”

Mr. Pennyhorse adjusted his pince-nez, looked closely. “Byzantine. Very fine. Around 500 a.d.”

“And this—”

“Moorish. Quite typical. Fifteenth century.”

Samson said: “They’re our factories at Istanbul and Tunis respectively. At Allahabad, India, we had to put up big notices saying: ‘This is not a temple or place of worship’ because natives kept wandering in and offering-up prayers to the processing machines.”

Mr. Pennyhorse glanced up quickly. Samson kept his face straight, added: “The report may have been exaggerated, but—you get the idea?”

The vicar said: “I do. What shape do you intend your factory to take in this village?”

“That’s why I came to you. The rural district council sug-gested that you might advise us.”

“My inclination, of course, is to advise you to go away and not return.”

The vicar looked out of his study window at the sleepy, sun-washed village street, gables of the ancient Corn Exchange, paved market-place, lichened spire of his own time-kissed church; and, beyond, rolling Wiltshire pastures cradling the peaceful community.

The vicar sighed: “We’ve held out here so long—I hoped we would remain inviolate in my time, at least. However, I suppose we must consider ourselves fortunate that your corporation has some respect for tradition and the feelings of the… uh… ‘natives.’ “

He pulled out a drawer in his desk. “It might help you to understand those feelings if I show you a passage from the very full diary of my predecessor here, who died fifty years ago at the age of ninety-five—we’re a long-lived tribe, we clergy. It’s an entry he made one hundred years ago—sitting at this very desk.”

Stephen Samson took the opened volume.

The century-old handwriting was as readable as typescript.

“May 3, 1943. Long, interesting discussion with young Ameri-can soldier, one of those who are billeted in the village. They term themselves G.I.’s. Told me countryside near his home in Pennsylvania not unlike our Wiltshire downs. Showed him round church. Said he was leaving soon, and added: ‘I love this place. Nothing like my home town in looks, but the atmosphere’s the same—old, and kind of comfortable. And I guess if I came back here a hundred years from now, it wouldn’t have changed one bit.’ An engaging young man. I trust he is right.”

Samson looked up. Mr. Pennyhorse said: “That young man may have been one of your ancestors.”

Samson gently replaced the old diary on the desk, “He wasn’t. My family’s Ohioan. But I see what you mean, and respect it. That’s why I want you to help us. You will?”

“Do you fish?” asked the vicar, suddenly and irrelevantly.

“Yes, sir. Very fond of the sport.”

“Thought so. You’re the type. That’s why I like you. Take a look at these flies. Seen anything like them? Make ‘em myself. One of the finest trout streams in the country just outside the village. Help you? Of course I will.”

“Presumption,” said Brother James. He eased himself through a graystone wall by twisting his subexistential plane slightly, and leaned reflectively against a moonbeam that slanted through the branches of an oak. A second habited and cowled figure materialized beside him. “Perhaps so. But it does my age-wearied heart a strange good to see those familiar walls again casting their shadows over the field.”

“A mockery, Brother Gregory. A mere shell that simulates the outlines of our beloved Priory. Think you that even the stones are of that good, gray granite that we built with? Nay! As this cursed simulacrum was a building, I warped two hands into the solid, laid hold of a mossy block, and by the saints, ‘twas of such inconsequential weight I might have hurled it skyward with a finger. And within, is there aught which we may recognize? No chapel, no cloisters, no refectory—only long, geometrical rooms. And what devilries and unholy rites may not be centered about those strange mechanisms, with which the rooms are filled?”

At the tirade, Brother Gregory sighed and thrust back his cowl to let the gracious moonbeams play on his tonsured head. “For an Untranslated One of some thousand years’ standing,” he said, “you exhibit a mulish ignorance, Brother James. You would deny men all advancement. I remember well your curses when first we saw horseless carriages and flying machines.”

“Idols!” James snapped. “Men worship them. Therefore are they evil.”

“You are so good, Brother James,” Gregory said, with the heaviest sarcasm. “So good, it is my constant wonderment that you have had to wait so long for Translation Upwards. Do you think that Dom Pennyhorse, the present incumbent of Selcor—a worthy man, with reverence for the past—would permit evil rites within his parish? You are a befuddled old anachronism, brother.”

“That,” said James, “is quite beyond sufferance. For you to speak thus of Translation, when it was your own self-indulgent pursuit of carnal pleasures that caused us to be bound here through the centuries!”

Brother Gregory said coldly: “It was not I who inveigled the daughter of Ronald the Wry-Neck into the kitchen garden, thus exposing the weak flesh of a brother to grievous temptation.”

There was silence for a while, save for the whisper of a midnight breeze through the branches of the oak, and the muted call of a nightbird from the far woods.

Gregory extended a tentative hand and lightly touched the sleeve of James’s habit. “The argument might proceed for yet another century and bring us no nearer Translation. Besides it is not such unbearable penance, my brother. Were we not both lovers of the earth, of this fair countryside?”

James shrugged. Another silence. Then he fingered his gaunt white cheeks.

“What we do, Brother Gregory? Shall we—appear to them?”

Gregory said: “I doubt whether common warp manifestation would be efficacious. As dusk fell tonight, I overheard a conversation between Dom Pennyhorse and a tall, young-featured man who has been concerned in the building of this simulacrum. The latter spoke in one of the dialects of the Americas; and it was mentioned that several of the men who will superintend the working of the machines within will also be from the United States—for a time at least. It is not prudent to haunt Americans in the normal fashion. Their attitude towards such matters is notoriously—unseemly.”

“We could polter,” suggested Brother James.

Gregory replaced his cowl. “Let us review the possibilities, then,” he said,

“remembering that our subetheric energy is limited.”

They walked slowly together over the meadow towards the resuscitated gray walls of the Selcor Prior. Blades of grass, positively charged by their passage, sprang suddenly upright, relaxed slowly into limpness as the charge leaked away.

They halted at the walls to adjust their planes of incidence and degree of tenuity, and passed inside.

The new Miracle Meal machines had had their first test run. The bearings on the dehydrator pumps were still warm as two black figures, who seemed to carry with them an air of vast and wistful loneliness, paced silently between rows of upright cylinders which shone dully in moonlight diffused through narrow windows.

“Here,” said Gregory, the taller of the two, softly, “did we once walk the cloisters in evening meditation.”

Brother James’s broad features showed signs of unease. He felt more than mere nostalgia.

“Power—what are they using? Something upsets my bones. I am queasy, as when a thunderstorm is about to break. Yet there is no static.”

Gregory stopped, looked at his hand. There was a faint blue aura at his fingertips. “Slight neutron escape,” he said. “They have a small thorium-into-233 pile somewhere. It needs better shielding.”

“You speak riddles.”

Gregory said, with a little impatience: “You have the entire science section of the village library at your disposal at nightfall for the effort of a trifling polter, yet for centuries you have read nothing but the Lives of the Saints. So, of course, I speak riddles—to you. You are even content to remain in ignorance of the basic principles of your own structure and functioning, doing everything by traditional thought-rote and rule of thumb. But I am not so content; and of my knowledge, I can assure you that the radiation will not harm you unless you warp to solid and sit atop the pile when it is in full operation.” Gregory smiled. “And then, dear brother, you would doubtless be so uncomfortable that you would dewarp before any harm could be done beyond the loss of a little energy that would be replaced in time. Let us proceed.”

They went through three departments before Brother Gregory divined the integrated purpose of the vats, driers, conveyor-tubes, belts and containers.

“The end product, I’m sure, is a food of sorts,” he said, “and by some quirk of fate, it is stored in approximately the position that was once occupied by our kitchen store—if my sense of orientation has not been bemused by these strange internal surroundings.”

The test run of the assembly had produced a few score cans of Miracle Food. They were stacked on metal shelves which would tilt and gravity-feed them into the shaft leading up to the crating machine. Crated, they would go from there to the copter-loading bay on the roof.

Brother James reached out to pick up a loose can. His hand went through it twice.

“Polt, you dolt!” said Brother Gregory. “Or are you trying to be miserly with your confounded energy? Here, let me do it.”

The telekineticized can sprang into his solid hands. He turned it about slightly increasing his infrared receptivity to read the label, since the storeroom was in darkness.

“Miracle Meal. Press here.”

He pressed, pressed again, and was closely examining the can when, after thirty seconds, the lid flipped off, narrowly missing his chin. Born, and living, in more enlightened times, Brother Gregory’s inquiring mind and insatiable appetite for facts would have made him a research worker. He did not drop the can. His hands were quite steady. He chuckled. He said:

“Ingenious, very ingenious. See—the food is hot.”

He warped his nose and back-palate into solid and delicately inhaled vapors. His eyes widened. He frowned, inhaled again. A beatific smile spread over his thin face.

“Brother James—warp your nose!”

The injunction, in other circumstances, might have been considered both impolite and unnecessary. Brother James was no beauty, and his big, blunt, snoutlike nose, which had been a flaring red in life, was the least prepossessing of his features.

But he warped it, and sniffed.

MM. Sales Leaflet Number 14: It Will Sell By Its Smell Alone. Gregory said hesitantly: “Do you think Brother James, that we might—”

James licked his lips, from side to side, slowly. “It would surely take a day’s accumulation of energy to hold digestive and alimentary in solid for a sufficient period. But—”

“Don’t be a miser,” said Gregory. “There’s a spoon beneath the lid. Get a can for yourself. And don’t bother with digestive. Teeth, palate and throat are sufficient. It would not digest in any case. It remains virtually unchanged. But going down—ah, bliss!”

It went down. Two cans.

“Do you remember, brother,” said James, in a weak, remi-niscing voice, “what joy it was to eat and be strengthened. And now to eat is to be weakened.”

Brother Gregory’s voice was faint but happy. “Had there been food of this character available before our First Translation, I doubt whether other desires of the flesh would have appealed to me. But what was our daily fare set on the refectory table: peas; lentils; cabbage soup; hard, tasteless cheese. Year after year—ugh!”

“Health-giving foods,” murmured Brother James, striving to be righteous even in his exhaustion. “Remember when we bribed the kitchener to get extra portions. Good trenchermen, we. Had we not died of the plague before our Priory became rich and powerful, then, by the Faith, our present bodies would be of greater girth.”

“Forms, not bodies,” said Gregory, insisting even in his exhaustion on scientific exactitudes. “Variable fields, consisting of open lattices of energy foci resolvable into charged particles—and thus solid matter—when they absorb energy beyond a certain stage. In other words, my dear ignorant brother, when we polt. The foci themselves—or rather the spaces between them—act as a limited-capacity storage battery for the slow accretion of this energy from cosmic sources, which may be controlled and concentrated in the foci by certain thought-patterns.”

Talking was an increasing effort in his energy-low state.

“When we polt,” he went on slowly, “we take up heat, air cools, live people get cold shivers; de-polt, give up heat, live people get clammy, cold-hot feeling; set up ‘lectrostatic field, live peoples’ hair stan’s on end”—his voice was trailing into deep, blurred inaudibility, like a mechanical phonograph running down, but James wasn’t listening anyway—”an’ then when we get Translated Up’ards by The Power That Is, all the energy goes back where it came from an’ we jus’ become thought. Thassall. Thought. Thought, thought, thought, thought—”

The phonograph ran down, stopped. There was silence in the transit storeroom of the Selcor Priory Factory branch of the Miracle Meal Corporation. For a while.

Then—

“THOUGHT!”

The shout brought Brother James from his uneasy, uncon-trolled repose at the nadir of an energy balance.

“What is it?” he grumbled. “I’m too weak to listen to any of your theorizing.”

“Theorizing! I have it!”

“Conserve your energies, brother, else will you be too weak even to twist yourself from this place.”

Both monks had permitted their forms to relax into a corner of the storeroom, supine, replete in disrepletion.

Brother Gregory sat up with an effort.

“Listen, you attenuated conserve of very nothingness, I have a way to thwart, bemuse, mystify and irritate these crass Philistines—and nothing so simple that a psychic investigator could put a thumb on us. What are we, Brother James?”

It was a rhetorical question, and Brother James had barely formulated his brief reply—”Ghosts”—before Brother Gregory, energized in a way beyond his own understanding by his own enthusiasm, went on: “Fields, in effect. Mere lines of force, in our un-polted state. What happens if we whirl? A star whirls. It has mass, rate of angular rotation, degree of compactness—therefore, gravity. Why? Because it has a field to start with. But we are our own fields. We need neither mass nor an excessive rate of rotation to achieve the same effect. Last week I grounded a high-flying wood-pigeon by whirling. It shot down to me through the air, and I’d have been buffeted by its pinions had I not stood aside. It hit the ground—not too heavily, by the grace of St. Barbara—recovered and flew away.”

The great nose of Brother James glowed pinkly for a moment. “You fuddle and further weaken me by your prating. Get to your point, if you have such. And explain how we may do anything in our present unenergized state, beyond removing ourselves to a nexus point for recuperation.”

Brother Gregory warped his own nose into solid in order to scratch its tip. He felt the need of this reversion to a life habit, which had once aided him in marshaling his thoughts.

“You think only of personal energy,” he said scornfully. “We do need that, to whirl. It is an accumulative process, yet we gain nothing, lose nothing. Matter is not the only thing we can warp. If you will only listen, you woof of unregenerate and forgotten flesh, I will try to explain without mathematics.”

He talked.

After a while, Brother James’s puzzled frown gave way to a faint smile.

“Perhaps I understand,” he said.

“Then forgive me for implying you were a moron,” said Gregory. “Stand up, Brother James.”

Calls on transatlantic tight-beam cost heavy. Anson Dewberry, Miracle Meal Overseas Division head, pointed this out to Mr. Stephen Samson three times during their conversation.

“Listen,” said Samson at last, desperately, “I’ll take no more delegation of authority. In my contract, it says I’m site adviser. That means I’m architect and negotiator, not detective or scientist or occulist. I offered to stay on here to supervise building because I happen to like the place. I like the pubs. I like the people. I like the fishing. But it wasn’t in my contract. And I’m now standing on that contract. Building is finished to schedule, plant installed—your tech men, incidentally, jetted out of here without waiting to catch snags after the first runoff—and now I’m through. The machines are running, the cans are coming off—and if the copters don’t collect, that’s for you and the London office to bat your brains out over. And the Lord forgive that mess of terminal propositions,” he added in lower voice. Samson was a purist in the matter of grammar.

Anson Dewberry jerked his chair nearer the scanner in his New York office. His pink, round face loomed in Samson’s screen like that of an avenging cherub.

“Don’t you have no gendarmes around that place?” Mr. Dewberry was no purist, in moments of stress. “Get guards on, hire some militia, check employees. Ten thousand cans of M.M. don’t just evaporate.”

“They do,” Samson replied sadly. “Maybe it’s the climate. And for the seventh time, I tell you I’ve done all that. I’ve had men packed so tightly around the place that even an orphan neutron couldn’t get by. This morning I had two men from Scotland Yard gumming around. They looked at the machines, followed the assembly through to the transit storeroom, examined the electrolocks and mauled their toe-caps trying to boot a dent in the door. Then the top one—that is, the one who only looked half-asleep—said, ‘Mr. Samson, sir, do you think it’s… uh… possible… that… uh… this machine of yours… uh… goes into reverse when your… uh… backs are turned and… uh… sucks the cans back again?’ “

Grating noises that might have been an incipient death rattle slid over the tight-beam from New York.

Samson nodded, a smirk of mock sympathy on his tanned, humor-wrinkled young face.

The noises ended with a gulp. The image of Dewberry thrust up a hesitant forefinger in interrogation. “Hey! Maybe there’s something to that, at that—would it be possible?”

Samson groaned a little. “I wouldn’t really know or overmuch care. But I have doubts. Meantime—”

“Right.” Dewberry receded on the screen. “I’ll jet a man over tonight. The best. From Research. Full powers. Hand over to him. Take some of your vacation. Design some more blamed mosques or tabernacles. Go fishing.”

“A sensible suggestion,” Samson said. “Just what I was about to do. It’s a glorious afternoon here, sun a little misted, grass green, stream flowing cool and deep, fish lazing in the pools where the willow-shadows fall—”

The screen blanked. Dewberry was no purist, and no poet cither. Samson made a schoolkid face. He switched off the fluor lamps that supplemented the illumination from a narrow window in the supervisor’s office—which, after studying the ground-plan of the original Selcor Priory, he had sited in the space that was occupied centuries before by the business sanctum of the Prior—got up from his desk and walked through a Norman archway into the sunlight.

He breathed the meadow-sweet air deeply, with appreciation. The Rev. Malachi Pennyhorse was squatting with loose-jointed ease against the wall. Two fishing rods in brown canvas covers lay across his lap. He was studying one of the trout-flies nicked into the band of his ancient hat. His balding, brown pate was bared to the sun. He looked up.

“What fortune, my dear Stephen?”

“I convinced him at last. He’s jetting a man over tonight. He told me to go fishing.”

“Injunction unnecessary, I should imagine. Let’s go. We shan’t touch a trout with the sky as clear as this, but I have some float tackle for lazier sport.”

They set off across a field. “Are you running the plant today?”

Samson nodded his head towards a faint hum. “Quarter-speed. That will give one copter-load for the seventeen hundred hours collection, and leave enough over to go in the transit store for the night and provide Dewberry’s man with some data. Or rather, lack of it.”

“Where do you think it’s going?”

“I’ve given up guessing.”

Mr. Pennyhorse paused astride a stile and looked back at the gray bulk of the Priory. “I could guess who’s responsible,” he said, and chuckled.

“Uh? Who?”

Mr. Pennyhorse shook his head. “Leave that to your investigator.”

A few moments later he murmured as if to himself: “What a haunt! Ingenious devils.”

But when Stephen Samson looked at him inquiringly, he added: “But I can’t guess where your cans have been put.”

And he would say nothing more on the subject.

Who would deny that the pure of heart are often simple-minded? (The obverse of the proposition need not be argued.) And that cause-effect relations are sometimes divined more readily by the intuition of simpletons than the logic of scholars?

Brother Simon Simplex—Simple Simon to later legends—looked open-mouthed at the array of strange objects on the stone shelves of the kitchen storeroom. He was not surprised—his mouth was always open, even in sleep. He took down one of the objects and examined it with mild curiosity. He shook it, turned it round, thrust a forefinger into a small depression. Something gave slightly, but there was no other aperture. He replaced it on the shelf. When his fellow-kitchener returned, he would ask him the purpose of the objects—if he could remember to do so. Simon’s memory was poor. Each time the rota brought him onto kitchen duty for a week, he had to be instructed afresh in the business of serving meals in the refectory: platter so, napkin thus, spoon here, finger bowls half-filled, three water pitchers, one before the Prior, one in the center, one at the foot of the table—”and when you serve, tread softly and do not breathe down the necks of the brothers.”

Even now could he hear the slight scrape of benches on stone as the monks, with bowed heads, freshly washed hands in the sleeves of their habits, filed slowly into the refectory and took their seats at the long, oak table. And still his fellow-kitchener had not returned from the errand. Food was prepared—dared he begin to serve alone?

It was a great problem for Simon, brother in the small House of Selcor, otherwise Selcor Priory, poor cell-relation to the rich monastery of the Cluniac Order at Battle, in the year 1139 a.d.

Steam pressure in the triggered can of Miracle Meal did its work. The lid flipped. The aroma issued.

Simon’s mouth nearly shut as he sniffed.

The calm and unquestioning acceptance of the impossible is another concomitant of simplicity and purity of heart. To the good and simple Simon the rising of the sun each morning and the singing of birds were recurrent miracles. Compared with these, a laboratory miracle of the year 2143 a.d. was as nothing.

Here was a new style of platter, filled with hot food, ready to serve. Wiser minds than his had undoubtedly arranged matters. His fellow-kitchener, knowing the task was thus simplified, had left him to serve alone. He had merely to remove the covers from these platters and carry them into the refectory. To remove the covers—cause—effect—the intuition of a simple mind. Simon carried fourteen of the platters to the kitchen table, pressed buttons and waited.

He was gravely tempted to sample the food himself, but all inclusive Benedictine rules forbade kitcheners to eat until their brothers had been served.

He carried a loaded tray into the refectory where the monks sat in patient silence except for the one voice of the Reader who stood at a raised lectern and intoned from the Lives of the Saints.

Pride that he had been thought fit to carry out the duty alone made Simon less clumsy than usual. He served the Prior, Dom Holland, first, almost deftly; then the other brothers, in two trips to the kitchen. A spicy, rich, titillating fragrance filled the refectory. The intoning of the Lives of the Saints faltered for a moment as the mouth of the Reader filled with saliva, then he grimly continued.

At Dom Holland’s signal, the monks ate.

The Prior spooned the last drops of gravy into his mouth. He sat back. A murmur arose. He raised a hand. The monks became quiet. The Reader closed his book.

Dom Holland was a man of faith; but he did not accept miracles or even the smallest departures from routine existence without questioning. He had sternly debated with himself whether he should question the new platters and the new food before or after eating. The aroma decided him. He ate first. Now he got up, beckoned to a senior monk to follow him, and paced with unhurried calmness to the kitchen.

Simon had succumbed. He was halfway through his second tin. He stood up, licking his fingers.

“Whence comes this food, my son?” asked Dom Holland, in sonorous Latin. Simon’s mouth opened wider. His knowledge of the tongue was confined to prayers.

Impatiently the Prior repeated the question in the English dialect of the district.

Simon pointed, and led them to the storeroom.

“I looked, and it was here,” he said simply. The words were to become famed. His fellow-kitchener was sought—he was found dozing in a warm corner of the kitchen garden—and questioned. He shook his head. The provisioner rather reluctantly disclaimed credit.

Dom Holland thought deeply, then gave instructions for a general assembly. The plastic “platters” and the hygiplast spoons were carefully examined. There were murmurs of wonderment at the workmanship. The discussion lasted two hours.

Simon’s only contribution was to repeat with pathetic insistence: “I looked and it was there.”

He realized dimly that he had become a person of some importance. His face became a mask of puzzlement when the Prior summed up:

“Our simple but blessed brother, Simon Simplex, it seems to me, has become an instrument or vessel of some thaumaturgical manifestation. It would be wise, however, to await further demonstration before the matter is referred to higher authorities.”

The storeroom was sealed and two monks were deputed as nightguards. Even with the possibility of a miracle on his hands, Dom Holland was not prepared to abrogate the Benedictine rule of only one main meal a day. The storeroom wasn’t opened until early afternoon of the following day. It was opened by Simon, in the presence of the Prior, a scribe, the provisioner, and two senior monks.

Released, a pile of Miracle Meal cans toppled forward like a crumbling cliff, slithering and clattering in noisy profusion around Simon’s legs, sliding over the floor of the kitchen.

Simon didn’t move. He was either too surprised or cunningly aware of the effectiveness of the scene. He stood calf-deep in cans, pointed at the jumbled stack inside the storeroom, sloping up nearly to the stone roof, and said his little piece:

“I look, and it is here.”

“Kneel, my sons,” said Dom Holland gravely, and knelt. Manna.

And at a time when the Priory was hard-pressed to maintain even its own low standard of subsistence, without helping the scores of dispossessed refugees encamped in wattle shacks near its protecting walls. The countryside was scourged by a combination of civil and foreign war. Stephen of Normandy against Matilda of Anjou for the British throne. Neither could control his own followers. When the Flemish mercenaries of King Stephen were not chasing Queen Matilda’s Angevins back over the borders of Wiltshire, they were plundering the lands and possessions of nominal supporters of Stephen. The Angevins and the barons who supported Matilda’s cause quite impartially did the same, then pillaged each other’s property, castle against castle, baron against baron.

It was anarchy and free-for-all—but nothing for the ignored serfs, bondmen, villeins and general peasantry, who fled from stricken homes and roamed the countryside in bands of starving thousands. Some built shacks in the inviolate shadow of churches and monasteries.

Selcor Priory had its quota of barefoot, raggedly men, women and children—twelfth century Displaced Persons.

They were a headache to the Prior, kindly Dom Holland—until Simple Simon’s Miracle.

There were seventy recipients of the first hand-out of Miracle Meal cans from the small door in the Priory’s walled kitchen garden. The next day there were three hundred, and the day after that, four thousand. Good news doesn’t need radio to get around fast.

Fourteen monks worked eight-hour shifts for twenty-four hours, hauling stocks from the capacious storeroom, pressing buttons, handing out steaming platters to orderly lines of refugees.

Two monks, shifting the last few cans from the store, were suddenly buried almost to their necks by the arrival of a fresh consignment, which piled up out of thin air.

Providence, it seemed, did not depend solely upon the intervention of Simon Simplex. The Priory itself and all its inhabitants were evidently blessed. The Abbot of Battle, Dom Holland’s superior, a man of great girth and great learning visited the Priory. He confirmed the miracle—by studying the label on the can.

After several hours’ work in the Prior’s office, he announced to Dom Holland:

“The script presented the greatest difficulty. It is an extreme simplification of letter-forms at present in use by Anglo-Saxon scholars. The pertinent text is a corruption—if I may be pardoned the use of such a term in the circumstances—of the Latin ‘miraculum’ compounded with the word ‘maél from our own barbarous tongue—so, clearly, Miracle Meal!”

Dom Holland murmured his awe of this learning.

The Abbot added, half to himself: “Although why the nature of the manifestation should be thus advertised in repetitive engraving, when it is self-evident—” He shrugged. “The ways of Providence are passing strange.”

Brother Gregory, reclining in the starlight near his favorite oak, said:

“My only regret is that we cannot see the effect of our gift—the theoretical impact of a modern product—usually a weapon—on past ages is a well-tried topic of discussion and speculation among historians, scientists, economists and writers of fantasy.”

Brother James, hunched in vague adumbration on a wall behind, said: “You are none of those things, else might you explain why it is that, if these cans have reached the period tor which, according to your obtiusc calculations, they were destined an age in which we were both alive—we cannot remember such an event, or why it is not recorded in histories of the period.”

“It was a time of anarchy, dear brother. Many records were destroyed. And as for your memories—well, great paradoxes of time are involved. One might as profitably ask how many angels may dance on the point of a pin. Now if you should wish to know how many atoms might be accommodated in a like position—”

Brother Gregory was adroit at changing the subject. He didn’t wish to speculate aloud until he’d figured out all the paradox possibilities. He’d already discarded an infinity of time-streams as intellectually unsatisfying, and was toying with the concept of recurrent worlds—

“Dom Pennyhorse has guessed that it is our doing.”

“What’s that?”

Brother James repeated the information smugly.

Gregory said slowly: “Well, he is not—unsympathetic—to us.”

“Assuredly, brother, we have naught to fear from him, nor from the pleasant young man with whom he goes fishing. But this young man was today in consultation with his superior, and an investigator is being sent from America.”

“Psychic investigator, eh? Phooey. We’ll tie him in knots,” and Gregory complacently.

“I assume,” said Brother James, with a touch of self-righteousness, “that these vulgar colloquialisms to which you sometimes have recourse are another result of your nocturnal reading. They offend my ear. ‘Phooey,’ indeed—No, this investigator is one with whom you will undoubtedly find an affinity. I gather that he is from a laboratory—a scientist of sorts.”

Brother Gregory sat up and rubbed his tonsure thoughtfully. “That,” he admitted, “is different.” There was a curious mixture of alarm and eagerness in his voice. “There are means of detecting the field we employ.”

An elementary electroscope was one of the means. An ionization indicator and a thermometer were others. They were all bolted firmly on a bench just inside the storeroom. Wires led from them under the door to a jury-rigged panel outside.

Sandy-haired Sidney Meredith of M.M. Research sat in front of the panel on a folding stool, watching dials with intense blue eyes, chin propped in hands. Guards had been cleared from the factory. He was alone, on the advice of Mr. Pennyhorse, who had told him: “If, as I suspect, it’s the work of two of my…

uh… flock… two very ancient parishioners… they are more likely to play their tricks in the absence of a crowd.”

“I get it,” Meredith had said. “Should be interesting.”

It was.

He poured coffee from a thermos without taking his eyes from the panel. The thermometer reading was dropping slowly. Ionization was rising. From inside the store came the faint rasp of moving objects.

Meredith smiled, sighted a thumb-size camera, recorded the panel readings.

“This,” he said softly, “will make a top feature in the Journal: ‘The most intensive psychic and poltergeist phenomena ever recorded. M.M.’s top tech trouble-shooter spikes spooks.’ “

There was a faint snap beyond the door. Dials swooped back to Zero. Meredith quit smiling and daydreaming.

“Hey—play fair!” he called.

The whisper of a laugh answered him, and a soft, hollow whine, as of a wind cycloning into outer space.

He grabbed the door, pulled. It resisted. It was like trying to break a vacuum. He knelt, lit a cigarette, held it near the bottom of the nearly flush-fitting door. A thin streamer of smoke curled down and was drawn swiftly through the barely perceptible crack.

The soft whine continued for a few seconds, began to die away. Meredith yanked at the door again. It gave, to a slight ingush of air. He thrust his foot in the opening, said calmly into the empty blackness: “When you fellers have quite finished—I’m coming in. Don’t go away. Let’s talk.”

He slipped inside, closed the door, stood silent for a moment. He sniffed. Ozone. His scalp prickled. He scratched his head, felt the hairs standing upright. And it was cold.

He said: “Right. No point in playing dumb or covering-up, boys.” He felt curiously ashamed of the platitudes as he uttered them. “I must apologize for breaking in,” he added—and meant it. “But this has got to finish. And if you’re not willing to—cooperate—I think I know now how to finish it.”

Another whisper of a laugh. And two words, faint, gently mocking: “Do you?”

Meredith strained his eyes against the darkness. He saw only the nerve-patterns in his own eyes. He shrugged.

“If you won’t play—” He switched on a blaze of fluor lamps. The long steel shelves were empty. There was only one can of Miracle Meal left in the store. He felt it before he saw it. It dropped on his head, clattered to the plastocrete floor. When he’d retrieved his breath, he kicked it savagely to the far end of the store and turned to his instruments. The main input lead had been pulled away. The terminal had been loosened first.

He undamped a wide-angle infrared camera, waited impa-tiently for the developrinter to act, pulled out the print.

And laughed. It wasn’t a good line-caricature of himself, but it was recognizable, chiefly by the shock of unruly hair.

The lines were slightly blurred, as though written by a needlepoint of light directly on the film. There was a jumble of writing over and under it.

“Old English, I suppose,” he murmured. He looked closer. The writing above the caricature was a de Sitter version of the Reimann-Christoffel tensor, followed in crabbed but readable modern English by the words: “Why reverse the sign? Do we act like anti-particles?”

Underneath the drawing was an energy tensor and a comment: “You will notice that magnetic momenta contribute a negative density and pressure.”

A string of symbols followed, ending with an equals sign and a query mark. And another comment: “You’ll need to take time out to balance this one.”

Meredith read the symbols, then sat down heavily on the edge of the instrument bench and groaned. Time out. But Time was already out, and there was neither matter nor radiation in a de Sitter universe.

Unless—

He pulled out a notebook, started to scribble.

An hour later Mr. Pennyhorse and Stephen Samson came in. Mr. Pennyhorse said: “My dear young fellow, we were quite concerned. We thought—”

He stopped. Meredith’s blue eyes were slightly out of focus. There were beads of sweat on his brow despite the coolness of the storeroom. Leaves from his notebook and cigarette stubs littered the floor around his feet. He jumped like a pricked frog when the vicar gently tapped his shoulder, and uttered a vehement cuss-word that startled even the broad-minded cleric. Samson tutted.

Meredith muttered: “Sorry, sir. But I think I nearly had it.”

“What, my son?”

Meredith looked like a ruffle-haired schoolboy. His eyes came back into focus.

“A crossword puzzle clue,” he said. “Set by a spook with a super-I.Q. Two quite irreconcilable systems of mathematics lumped together, the signs in an extended energy tensor reversed, merry hell played with a temporal factor—and yet it was beginning to make sense.”

He smiled wryly. “A ghost who unscrews terminals before he breaks connections and who can make my brain boil is a ghost worth meeting.”

Mr. Pennyhorse eased his pince-nez. “Uh… yes. Now, don’t you think it’s time you came to bed? It’s four a.m. My housekeeper has made up a comfortable place on the divan in the sitting room.” He took Meredith’s arm and steered him from the store.

As they walked across the dewy meadows towards the vicarage, with the first pale streaks of dawn showing in the sky, Samson said: “How about the cans?”

“Time,” replied Meredith vaguely, “will tell.”

“And the guards?”

“Pay them off. Send them away. Keep the plant rolling. Fill the transit store tonight. And I want a freighter copter to take me to London University this afternoon.”

Back in the transit store, the discarded leaves from Meredith’s notebook fluttered gently upwards in the still air and disappeared. Brother James said: “He is alone again.”

They looked down on the sandy head of Sidney Meredith from the vantage point of a dehydrating tower.

“So I perceive. And I fear this may be our last uh… consignment to our erstwhile brothers,” said Gregory thoughtfully.

“Why?”

“You will see. In giving him the clue to what we were doing, I gave him the clue to what we are, essentially.”

They drifted down towards the transit store.

“After you, Brother James,” said Brother Gregory with excessive politeness. James adjusted his plane of incidence, started through the wall, and—

Shot backwards with a voiceless scream of agony.

Brother Gregory laughed. “I’m sorry. But that’s why it will be our last consignment. Heterodyning is painful. He is a very intelligent fellow. The next time, he will take care to screen both his ultra-short generator and controls so that I cannot touch them.”

Brother James recovered. “You… you use me as a confounded guinea pig! By the saints, you appear to have more sympathy with the man than with me!”

“Not more sympathy, my beloved brother, but certainly much more in common,”

Brother Gregory replied frankly. “Wait.”

He drifted behind Meredith’s back and poltered the tip of one finger to flick a lightly soldered wire from a terminal behind a switch. Meredith felt his scalp tingle. A pilot light on his panel blinked out. Meredith got up from his stool, stretched lazily, grinned into the empty air. He said aloud: “Right. Help yourselves. But I warn you—once you’re in, you don’t come out until you agree to talk. I have a duplicate set and a built-in circuit-tester. The only way you can spike them is by busting tubes. And I’ve a hunch you wouldn’t do that.”

“No,” James muttered. “You wouldn’t. Let us go.”

“No,” Gregory answered. “Inside quickly—and whirl. Afterwards I shall speak with him. He is a youth of acute sensibilities and gentleness, whose word is his bond.”

Gregory urged his fellow-monk to the wall. They passed within. Meredith heard nothing, until a faint whine began in the store. He waited until it died away, then knocked on the door. It seemed, crazily, the correct thing to do.

He went into the darkness. “You there?”

A low and pleasant voice, directionless: “Yes. Why didn’t you switch on your duplicate generator?”

Meredith breathed deep. “I didn’t think it would be necessary. I feel we understand each other. My name is Sidney Meredith.”

“Mine is Gregory of Ramsbury.”

“And your—friend?”

“James Brasenose. I may say that he disapproves highly of this conversation.”

“I can understand that. It is unusual. But then, you’re a very unusual… um—”

“‘Ghost’ is the common term, Mr. Meredith. Rather inade-quate, I think, for supranormal phenomena which are, nevertheless, subject to known laws. Most Untranslated spirits remain quite ignorant of their own powers before final Translation. It was only by intensive reading and thought that I determined the principles and potentialities of my construction.”

“Anti-particles?”

“According to de Sitter,” said Brother Gregory, “that is what we. should be. But we are not mere mathematical expressions. I prefer the term ‘energy foci.’

From a perusal of the notes you left behind yesterday morning—and, of course, from your use of ultra-short waves tonight—it seems you struck the correct train of deduction immediately. Incidentally, where did you obtain the apparatus at such short notice?”

“London University.”

Brother Gregory sighed. “I should like to visit their laboratories. But we are bound to this area by a form of moral compulsion that I cannot define or overcome. Only vicariously, through the achievements of others, may I experience the thrill of research.”

“You don’t do so badly,” Meredith said. He was mildly surprised that he felt quite so sane and at ease, except for the darkness. “Would you mind if we had a light?”

“I must be semipolted—or warped—to speak with you. It’s not a pleasant sight—floating lungs, larynx, palate, tongue and lips. I’d feel uncomfortable for you. We might appear for you later, if you wish.”

“Right. But keep talking. Give me the how and the why. I want this for my professional journal.”

“Will you see that the issue containing your paper is placed in the local library?”

“Surely,” Meredith said. “Two copies.”

“Brother James is not interested. Brother James, will you kindly stop whispering nonsense and remove yourself to a nexus point for a while. I intend to converse with Mr. Meredith. Thank you.”

The voice of Brother Gregory came nearer, took on a slightly professorial tone. “Any massive and rotating body assumes the qualities of magnetism—or rather, gravitic, one-way flux—by virtue of its rotation, and the two quantities of magnetic momentum and angular momentum are always proportional to one another, as you doubtless know.”

Meredith smiled inwardly. A lecture on elementary physics from a ghost. Well—maybe not so elementary. He remembered the figures that he’d sweated over. But he could almost envisage the voice of Brother Gregory emanating from a black-gowned instructor in front of a classroom board.

“Take a star,” the voice continued. “Say 78 Virginis—from whose flaming promontories the effect was first deduced a hundred years ago—and put her against a counter-whirling star of similar mass. What happens? Energy warp, of the kind we use every time we polt. But something else happens—did you infer it from my incomplete expression?”

Meredith grinned. He said: “Yes. Temporal warp.”

“Oh.” There was a trace of disappointment in the voice. Meredith added quickly: “But it certainly gave me a headache figuring it out.”

Gregory was evidently mollified by the admission. “Solids through time,” he went on. “Some weeks ago, calculating that my inherent field was as great in certain respects as that of 78 Virginis, I whirled against a longitudinal line, and forced a stone back a few days—the nearest I could get to laboratory confirmation. Knowing there would be a logical extension of the effect if I whirled against a field as strong as my own, I persuaded Brother James to co-operate with me—and you know the result.”

“How far back?”

“According to my mathematics, the twelfth century, at a time when we were—alive. I would appreciate your views on the paradoxes involved.”

Meredith said: “Certainly. Let’s go over your math together first. If it fits in with what I’ve already figured, perhaps I’ll have a suggestion to make. You appreciate, of course, that I can’t let you have any more cans?”

“Quite. I must congratulate your company on manufacturing a most delicious comestible. If you will hand me the roll of infrared film from your camera, I can make my calculations visible to you on the emulsion in the darkness. Thank you. It is a pity,” Gregory murmured, “that we could not see with our own eyes what disposal they made of your product in the days of our Priory.”

When, on the morning of a certain bright summer day in 1139, the daily consignment of Miracle Meal failed to arrive at Selcor Priory, thousands of disappointed refugees went hungry.

The Prior, Dom Holland—who, fortunately for his sanity or at least his peace of mind, was not in a position to separate cause from effect—attributed the failure of supply to the lamentable departure from grace and moral standards of two of the monks.

By disgracing themselves in the kitchen garden with a female refugee, he said, they had obviously rendered the Priory unfit to receive any further miraculous bounty.

The abject monks, Brother Gregory and Brother James, were severely chastised and warned in drastic theological terms that it would probably be many centuries before they had sufficiently expiated their sins to attain blessedness.

On the morning of another bright summer day, the Rev. Malachi Pennyhorse and Stephen Samson were waiting for Sidney Meredith in the vicar’s comfortable study.

Meredith came in, sank into a century-old leather easy-chair, stretched his shoes, damp with dew from the meadow grass, towards the flames. He accepted a glass of whiskey gratefully, sipped it.

He said: “The cans are there. And from now on, they stay in the transit store until the copters collect.”

There was an odd note of regret in his voice.

Samson said: “Fine. Now maybe you’ll tell us what happened yesterday.”

Mt. Pennyhorse said: “You… uh… liked my parishioners, then?”

Meredith combined a smile and a sigh. “I surely did. That Brother Gregory had the most intense and dispassionate intellectual curiosity of anyone I ever met. He nearly grounded me on some aspects of energy mathematics. I could have used him in my department. He’d have made a great research man. Brother James wasn’t a bad old guy, either. They appeared for me—”

“How did you get rid of them?” Samson interrupted.

“They got rid of themselves. Gregory told me how, by whirling against each other with gravitic fields cutting, they drew the cans into a vortex of negated time that threw them way back to the twelfth century. After we’d been through his math, I suggested they whirl together.”

“What—and throw the cans ahead?”

“No. Themselves, in a sense, since they precipitated a future, hoped-for state. Gregory had an idea what would happen. So did I. He’d only discovered the effect recently. Curiosity got the better of him. He had to try it out straight away. They whirled together. The fields reinforced, instead of negated. Enough ingoing energy was generated to whoop their own charges well above capacity and equilibrium. They just—went. As Gregory would put it—they were Translated.”

“Upwards, I trust,” said Mr. Pennyhorse gently.

“Amen to that,” said Samson.

Upwards—

Pure thought, unbound, Earth-rid, roaming free amid the wild bright stars—

Thought to Thought, over galactic vastness, wordless, yet swift and clear, before egos faded—

“Why didn’t I think of this before? We might have Translated ourselves centuries ago.”

“But then we would never have tasted Miracle Meal.”

“That is a consideration,” agreed the Thought that had been Brother Gregory.

“Remember our third can?” came the Thought that had been Brother James. But there was no reply. Something of far greater urgency and interest than memories of Miracle Meal had occurred to the Thought that had been Brother Gregory.

With eager curiosity, it was spiraling down into the heart of a star to observe the integration of helium at first hand.

THE PRISONER IN THE SKULL

by “Lewis Padgett” (Henry Kuttner, 1914-1958 and C.L. Moore, 1911-) Astounding Science Fiction, February

The dream of every anthologist is to discover a major story that has never been reprinted. This is particularly difficult in science fiction because there have been more than 800 sf reprint anthologies published to date, the majority edited by men and women who were themselves central to the field and tremendously knowledgeable. We would therefore love to take credit for finding

“The Prisoner in the Skull” and bringing it to your attention but alas, we cannot. Barry N. Malzberg (himself an excellent anthologist) brought it to us and deserves the honor. Thanks, Barry.—M.H.G.

(There are certain irrepressible yearnings in the human heart which are universal and which are, therefore, obvious material for stories that will hit home. Don’t we all long, in the midst of confusion and frustration, for someone supremely competent to come in and take over?

Is not this why the typical “woman’s romance” so often features the Prince Charming figure, the knight on the white horse; and why Westerns so often feature the tall, silent stranger who rides into town, defeats the desperados and then rides away? Or, for that matter, is it not why Bertie Wooster has Jeeves?

It is in fantasy that this reaches its peak, and that peak is surely “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp.” Who of us has not at some time in his life longed for the services of just such an all-powerful and utterly subservient genie, whose response to all requests, however unreasonable, is a calm, “I hear and obey”?

If science fiction is too disciplined to allow itself the utter chaos of omnipotence, neither is it forced to restrict itself to something as dull and straightforward as a man with a gun and a fast draw. In “The Prisoner in the Skull,” then, we have a science fictional Lamp, with its limits, its pity, and its irony.—I.A.)

He felt cold and weak, strangely, intolerably, inhumanly weak with a weakness of the blood and bone, of the mind and soul. He saw his surroundings dimly, but he saw—other things—with a swimming clarity that had no meaning to him. He saw causes and effects as tangible before him as he had once seen trees and grass. But remote, indifferent, part of another world. Somehow there was a door before him. He reached vaguely—It was almost wholly a reflex gesture that moved his finger toward the doorbell. The chimes played three soft notes.

John Fowler was staring at a toggle switch. He felt baffled. The thing had suddenly spat at him and died. Ten minutes ago he had thrown the main switch, unscrewed the wall plate and made hopeful gestures with a screwdriver, but the only result was a growing suspicion that this switch would never work again. Like the house itself, it was architecturally extreme, and the wires were sealed in so that the whole unit had to be replaced if it went bad. Minor irritations bothered Fowler unreasonably today. He wanted the house in perfect running order for the guest he was expecting. He had been chasing Veronica Wood for a long time, and he had an idea this particular argument might tip the balance in the right direction.

He made a note to keep a supply of spare toggle switches handy. The chimes were still echoing softly as Fowler went into the hall and opened the front door, preparing a smile. But it wasn’t Veronica Wood on the doorstep. It was a blank man.

That was Fowler’s curious impression, and it was to recur to him often in the year to come. Now he stood staring at the strange emptiness of the face that returned his stare without really seeming to see him. The man’s features were so typical they might have been a matrix, without the variations that combine to make up the recognizable individual. But Fowler thought that even if he had known those features, it would be hard to recognize a man behind such utter emptiness. You can’t recognise a man who isn’t there. And there was nothing here. Some erasure, some expunging, had wiped out all trace of character and personality. Empty.

And empty of strength, too—for the visitant lurched forward and fell into Fowler’s arms.

Fowler caught him automatically, rather horrified at the lightness of the body he found himself supporting. “Hey,” he said, and, realizing the inadequacy of that remark, added a few pertinent questions. But there was no answer. Syncope had taken over.

Fowler grimaced and looked hopefully up and down the road. He saw nobody. So he lifted his guest across the threshold and carried him easily to a couch. Fine, he thought. Veronica due any minute, and this paperweight barging in. Brandy seemed to help. It brought no color to the pale cheeks, but it pried the eyelids open to show a blank, wondering look.

“O.K. now?” Fowler asked, wanting to add, “Then go home.”

There was only the questioning stare. Fowler stood up with some vague intention of calling a doctor, and then remembered that the televisor instrument hadn’t yet been delivered. For this was a day when artificial shortages had begun to supplant real ones, when raw material was plentiful but consumers were wary, and were, therefore, put on a starvation diet to build their appetites and loosen their purse strings. The televisor would be delivered when the company thought Fowler had waited long enough. Luckily he was versatile. As long as the electricity was on he could jury-rig anything else he needed, including facilities for first aid. He gave his patient the routine treatment, with satisfying results. Until, that is, the brandy suddenly hit certain nerve centers and emesis resulted. Fowler lugged his guest back from the bathroom and left him on the bed in the room with the broken light switch to recuperate. Convalescence was rapid. Soon the man sat up, but all he did was look at Fowler hopefully. Questions brought no answers.

Ten minutes later the blank man was still sitting there, looking blank. The door chimes sang again. Fowler, assured that his guest wasn’t in articulo mortis, began to feel irritation. Why the devil did the guy have to barge in now, at this particular crucial moment? In fact, where had he come from? It was a mile to the nearest highway, along a dirt road, and there was no dust on the man’s shoes. Moreover, there was something indefinably disturbing about the lack in his appearance. There was no other word that fitted so neatly. Village idiots are popularly termed “wanting,” and, while there was no question of idiocy here, the man did seem—

What?

For no reason at all Fowler shivered. The door chimes reminded him of Veronica. He said: “Wait here. You’ll be all right. Just wait. I’ll be back—”

There was a question in the soulless eyes.

Fowler looked around. “There’re some books on the shelf. Or fix this—” He pointed to the wall switch. “If you want anything, call me.” On that note of haphazard solicitude he went out, carefully closing the door. After all, he wasn’t his brother’s keeper. And he hadn’t spent days getting the new house in shape to have his demonstration go haywire because of an unforseen interruption.

Veronica was waiting on the threshold. “Hello,” Fowler said. “Have any trouble finding the place? Come in.”

“It sticks up like a sore thumb,” she informed him. “Hello. So this is the dream house, is it?”

“Right. After I figure out the right method of dream-analysis, it’ll be perfect.” He took her coat, led her into the livingroom, which was shaped like a fat comma and walled with triple-seal glass, and decided not to kiss her. Veronica seemed withdrawn. That was regrettable. He suggested a drink.

“Perhaps I’d better have one,” she said, “before I look the joint over.”

Fowler began battling with a functional bar. It should have poured and mixed drinks at the spin of a dial, but instead there came a tinkle of breaking glass. Fowler finally gave up and went back to the old-fashioned method.

“Highball? Well, theoretically, this is a perfect machine for living. But the architect wasn’t as perfect as his theoretical ideas. Methods of construction have to catch up with ideas, you know.”

“This room’s nice,” Veronica acknowledged, relaxing on airfoam. With a glass in her hand, she seemed more cheerful. “Almost everything’s curved, isn’t it?

And I like the windows.”

“It’s the little things that go wrong. If a fuse blows, a whole unit goes out. The windows—I insisted on those.”

“Not much of a view.”

“Unimproved. Building restrictions, you know. I wanted to build on the top of a hill a few miles away, but the township laws wouldn’t allow it. This house is unorthodox. Not very, but enough. I might as well have tried to put up a Wright house in Williamsburg. This place is functional and convenient—”

“Except when you want a drink?”

“Trivia,” Fowler said airily. “A house is complicated. You expect a few things to go wrong at first. I’ll fix ‘em as they come up. I’m a jerk of all trades. Want to look around?”

“Why not?” Veronica said. It wasn’t quite the enthusiastic reaction for which Fowler had hoped, but he made the best of it. He showed her the house. It was larger than it had seemed from the outside. There was nothing super about it, but it was—theoretically—a functional unit, breaking away completely from the hidebound traditions that had made attics, cellars, and conventional bathrooms and kitchens as vestigially unfunctional as the vermiform appendix. “Anyway,”

Fowler said, “statistics show most accidents happen in kitchens and bathrooms. They can’t happen here.”

“What’s this?” Veronica asked, opening a door. Fowler grimaced.

“The guest room,” he said. “That was the single mistake. I’ll use it for storage or something. The room hasn’t any windows.”

“The light doesn’t work—”

“Oh, I forgot. I turned off the main switch. Be right back.” He hurried to the closet that held the house controls, flipped the switch, and returned. Veronica was looking into a room that was pleasantly furnished as a bedroom, and, with tinted, concealed fluorescents, seemed light and airy despite the lack of windows.

“I called you,” she said. “Didn’t you hear me?”

Fowler smiled and touched a wall. “Sound-absorbent. The whole house is that way. The architect did a good job, but this room—”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing—unless you’re inside and the door should get stuck. I’ve a touch of claustrophobia.”

“You should face these fears,” said Veronica, who had read it somewhere. Fowler repressed a slight irritation. There were times when he had felt an impulse to slap Veronica across the chops, but her gorgeousness entirely outweighted any weakness she might have in other directions.

“Air conditioning, too,” he said, touching another switch. “Fresh as spring breeze. Which reminds me. Does your drink want freshening?”

“Yes,” Veronica said, and they turned to the comma-shaped room. It was appreciably darker. The girl went to the window and stared through the immense, wall-long pane.

“Storm coming up,” she said. “The car radio said it’ll be a bad one. I’d better go, Johnny.”

“Must you? You just got here.”

“I have a date. Anyway, I’ve got to work early tomorrow.” She was a Korys model, much in demand.

Fowler turned from the recalcitrant bar and reached for her hand.

“I wanted to ask you to marry me,” he said.

There was silence, while leaden grayness pressed down beyond the window, and yellow hills rippled under the gusts of unfelt wind. Veronica met his gaze steadily.

“I know you did. I mean—I’ve been expecting you to.”

“Well?”

She moved her shoulders uneasily.

“Not now.”

“But—Veronica. Why not? We’ve known each other for a couple of years—’’

“The truth is—I’m not sure about you, Johnny. Sometimes I think I love you. But sometimes I’m not sure I even like you.”

He frowned. “I don’t get that.”

“Well, I can’t explain it. It’s just that I think you could be either a very nice guy or a very nasty one. And I’d like to be quite certain first. Now I’ve got to go. It’s starting to rain.”

On that note she went out, leaving Fowler with a sour taste in his mouth. He mixed himself another drink and wandered over to his drawing board, where some sketches were sheafed up on a disorderly fashion. Nuts. He was making good dough at commercial art, he’d even got himself a rather special house—

One of the drawings caught his eye. It was a background detail, intended for incorporation later in a larger picture. It showed a gargoyle, drawn with painstaking care, and a certain quality of vivid precision that was very faintly unpleasant. Veronica—

Fowler suddenly remembered his guest and hastily set down his drink. He had avoided that room during the tour of inspection, managing to put the man completely out of his mind. That was too bad. He could have asked Veronica to send out a doctor from the village.

But the guest didn’t seem to need a doctor. He was working on the wall-switch, at some danger, Fowler thought, of electrocuting himself. “Look out!” Fowler said sharply. “It’s hot!” But the man merely gave him a mild, blank stare and passed his hand downward before the panel.

The light went out.

It came on again, to show the man finishing an upward gesture. No toggle switch stub protruded from the slot in the center of the plate. Fowler blinked. “What—?” he said.

Gesture. Blackout. Another gesture.

“What did you do to that?” Fowler asked, but there was no audible reply. Fowler drove south through the storm, muttering about ham electricians. Beside him the guest sat, smiling vacantly. The one thing Fowler wanted was to get the guy off his hands. A doctor, or a cop, in the village, would solve that particular problem. Or, rather, that would have been the solution, if a minor landslide hadn’t covered the road at a crucial point. With difficulty Fowler turned the car around and drove back home, cursing gently.

The blank man sat obediently at his side.

They were marooned for three days. Luckily the larder was well-stocked, and the power lines, which ran underground, weren’t cut by the storm. The water-purifying unit turned the muddy stream from outside into crystalline nectar, the FM set wasn’t much bothered by atmospheric disturbances, and Fowler had plenty of assignments to keep him busy at his drawing board. But he did no drawing. He was exploring a fascinating, though unbelievable, development.

The light switch his guest had rigged was unique. Fowler discovered that when he took the gadget apart. The sealed plastic had been broken open, and a couple of wires had been rewound in an odd fashion. The wiring didn’t make much sense to Fowler. There was no photo-electric hookup that would have explained it. But the fact remained that he could turn on the lights in that room by moving his hand upward in front of the switch plate, and reverse the process with a downward gesture.

He made tests. It seemed as though an invisible fourteen-inch beam extended directly outward from the switch. At any rate, gestures, no matter how emphatic, made beyond that fourteen-inch distance had no effect on the lights at all.

Curious, he asked his guest to rig up another switch in the same fashion. Presently all the switches in the house were converted, but Fowler was no wiser. He could duplicate the hookup, but he didn’t understand the principle. He felt a little frightened.

Locked in the house for three days, he had time to wonder and worry. He led his guest who had forgotten the use of knife and fork, if he had ever known it—and he tried to make the man talk. Not too successfully. Once the man said: “Forgotten… forgotten—”

“You haven’t forgotten how to be an electrician. Where did you come from?”

The blank face turned to him. “Where?” A pause. And then—

“When? Time… time—”

Once he picked up a newspaper arid pointed questioningly at the date line—the year.

“That’s right,” Fowler said, his stomach crawling. “What year did you think it was?”

“Wrong—” the man said. “Forgotten—”

Fowler stared. On impulse, he got up to search his guest’s pockets. But there were no pockets. The suit was ordinary, though slightly strange in cut, but it had no pockets.

“What’s your name?”

No answer.

“Where did you come from? Another—time?”

Still no answer.

Fowler thought of robots. He thought of a soulless world of the future peopled by automatons. But he knew neither was the right answer. The man sitting before him was horribly normal. And empty, somehow—drained. Normal?

The norm? That non-existant, figurative symbol which would be monstrous if it actually appeared? The closer an individual approaches the norm, the more colorless he is. Just as a contracting line becomes a point, which has few, if any, distinguishing characteristics. One point is exactly like another point. As though humans, in some unpleasant age to come, had been reduced to the lowest common denominator.

The norm.

“All right,” Fowler said. “I’ll call you Norman, till you remember your right name. But you can’t be a… point. You’re no moron. You’ve got a talent for electricity, anyhow.”

Norman had other talents, too, as Fowler was to discover soon. He grew tired of looking through the window at the gray, pouring rain, pounding down over a drenched and dreary landscape, and when he tried to close the built-in Venetian shutters, of course they failed to work. “May that architect be forced to live in one of his own houses,” Fowler said, and, noticing Norman made explanatory gestures toward the window.

Norman smiled blankly.

“The view,” Fowler said. “I don’t like to see all that rain. The shutters won’t work. See if you can fix them. The view—” He explained patiently, and presently Norman went out to the unit nominally called a kitchen, though it was far more efficient. Fowler shrugged and sat down at his drawing board. He looked up, some while later, in time to see Norman finish up with a few swabs of cloth. Apparently he had been painting the window with water. Fowler snorted. “I didn’t ask you to wash it,” he remarked. “It was the shutters—”

Norman laid a nearly empty basin on a table and smiled expectantly. Fowler suffered a slight reorientation. “Time-traveling, ha,” he said. “You probably crashed out of some booby hatch. The sooner I can get you back there the better I’ll like it. If it’d only stop raining … I wonder if you could rig up the televisor? No, I forgot. We don’t even have one yet. And I suspect you couldn’t do it. That light switch business was a fluke.”

He looked out at the rain and thought of Veronica. Then she was there before him, dark and slender, smiling a little.

“Wha—” Fowler said throatily.

He blinked. Hallucinations? He looked again, and she was still there, three-dimensionally, outside the window—

Norman smiled and nodded. He pointed to the apparition.

“Do you see it too?” Fowler asked madly. “It can’t be. She’s outside. She’ll get wet. What in the name of—”

But it was only Fowler who got wet, dashing out bareheaded in the drenching rain. There was no one outside. He looked through the window and saw the familiar room, and Norman.

He came back. “Did you paint her on the window?” he asked. “But you’ve never seen Veronica. Besides, she’s moving—three-dimensional. Oh, it can’t be. My mind’s snapping. I need peace and quiet. A green thought in a green shade.” He focused on a green thought, and Veronica faded out slowly. A cool, quiet, woodland glade was visible through the window.

After a while Fowler figured it out. His window made thoughts visible. It wasn’t as simple as that, naturally. He had to experiment and brood for quite some time. Norman was no help. But the fact finally emerged that whenever Fowler looked at the window and visualized something with strong emphasis, an image of that thought appeared—a projective screen, so to speak. It was like throwing a stone into calm water. The ripples moved out for a while, and then slowly quieted. The woodland scene wasn’t static; there was a breeze there, and the leaves glittered and the branches swayed. Clouds moved softly across a blue sky. It was a scene Fowler finally recognized, a Vermont woodland he had seen years ago. Yet when did sequoias ever grow in Vermont?

A composite, then. And the original impetus of his thoughts set the scene into action along normal lines. When he visualized the forest, he had known that there would be a wind, and that the branches would move. So they moved. But slower and slower—though it took a long while for the action to run down. He tried again. This time Chicago’s lake shore. Cars rushed along the drive. He tried to make them run backwards, but got a sharp headache and a sense of watching a jerky film. Possibly he could reverse the normal course of events, but his mind wasn’t geared to handle film running backward. Then he thought hard and watched a seascape appear through the glass. This time he waited to see how long it would take the image to vanish. The action stopped in an hour, but the picture did not fade completely for another hour. Only then did the possibilities strike him with an impact as violent as lightning.

Considerable poetry has been written about what happens when love rejected turns to hate. Psychology could explain the cause as well as the effect—the mechanism of displacement. Energy has to go somewhere, and if one channel is blocked, another will be found. Not that Veronica had definitely rejected Fowler, and certainly his emotion for the girl had not suffered an alchemic transformation, unless one wishes to delve into the abysses of psychology in which love is merely the other face of hatred—but on those levels of semantic confusion you can easily prove anything.

Call it reorientation. Fowler had never quite let himself believe that Veronica wouldn’t fall into his arms. His ego was damaged. Consequently it had to find some other justification, some assurance—and it was unfortunate for Norman that the displacement had to occur when he was available as scapegoat. For the moment Fowler began to see the commercial possibilities of the magic windowpane, Norman was doomed.

Not at once; in the beginning, Fowler would have been shocked and horrified had he seen the end result of his plan. He was no villain, for there are no villains. There is a check-and-balance system, as inevitable in nature and mind as in politics, and the balance was beginning to tip when Fowler locked Norman in the windowless room for safekeeping and drove to New York to see a patent attorney. He was careful at first. He knew the formula for the telepathically-receptive window paint by now, but he merely arranged to patent the light-switch gadget that was operated by a gesture. Afterwards, he regretted his ignorance, for clever infringements appeared on the heels of his own device. He hadn’t known enough about the matter to protect himself thoroughly in the patent.

By a miracle, he had kept the secret of the telepathic paint to himself. All this took time, naturally, and meanwhile Norman, urged on by his host, had made little repairs and improvements around the house. Some of them were impractical, but others were decidedly worth using—short-cuts, conveniences, clever methods of bridging difficulties that would be worth money in the open market. Norman’s way of thinking seemed curiously alien. Given a problem, he could solve it, but he had no initiative on his own. He seemed satisfied to stay in the house—

Well, satisfied was scarcely the word. He was satisfied in the same sense that a jellyfish is satisfied to remain in its pool. If there were quivers of volition, slight directional stirrings, they were very feeble indeed. There were times when Fowler, studying his guest, decided that Norman was in a psychotic state—catatonic stupor seemed the most appropriate label. The man’s will was submerged, if, indeed, he had ever had any. No one has ever detailed the probable reactions of the man who owned the goose who laid the golden eggs. He brooded over a mystery, and presently took empirical steps, afterwards regretted. Fowler had a more analytical mind, and suspected that Norman might be poised at a precarious state of balance, during which—and only during which—he laid golden eggs. Metal can be pliable until pressure is used, after which it may become work-hardened and inflexible. Fowler was afraid of applying too much pressure. But he was equally afraid of not finding out all he could about the goose’s unusual oviparity. So he studied Norman. It was like watching a shadow. Norman seemed to have none of the higher reflexes; his activities were little more than tropism. Ego-consciousness was present, certainly, but—where had he come from? What sort of place or time had it been? Or was Norman simply a freak, a lunatic, a mutation? All that seemed certain was that part of his brain didn’t know its own function. Without conscious will or volition, it was useless. Fowler had to supply the volition; he had to give orders. Between orders, Norman simply sat, occasionally quivering slightly.

It was bewildering. It was fascinating.

Also, it might be a little dangerous. Fowler had no intention of letting his captive escape if he could help it, hut vague recollections of peonage disturbed him sometimes. Probably this was illegal. Norman ought to be in an institution, under medical care. But then, Norman had such unusual talents!

Fowler, to salve his uneasiness, ceased to lock the door of the windowless room. By now he had discovered it was unnecessary, anyhow. Norman was like a subject in deep hypnosis. He would obey when told not to leave the room. Fowler, with a layman’s knowledge of law, thought that probably gave him an out. He pictured himself in the dock blandly stating that Norman had never been a prisoner, had always been free to leave the house if he chose. Actually, only hunger would rouse Norman to disobey Fowler’s commands to stay in his room. He would have to be almost famished, even then, before he would go to the kitchen and eat whatever he found, without discrimination and apparently without taste.

Time went by. Fowler was reorienting, though he scarcely knew it yet, toward a whole new set of values. He let his illustrating dwindle away until he almost ceased to accept orders. This was after an abortive experiment with Norman in which he tried to work out on paper an equivalent of the telepathic pictures on glass. If he could simply sit and think his drawings onto bristol board—

That was, however, one of Norman’s failures.

It wasn’t easy to refrain from sharing this wonderful new secret with Veronica. Fowler found himself time and again shutting his lips over the information just in time. He didn’t invite her out to the house any more; Norman was too often working at odd jobs around the premises. Beautiful visions of the future were building up elaborately in Fowler’s mind—Veronica wrapped in mink and pearls, himself commanding financial empires all based on Norman’s extraordinary talents and Norman’s truly extraordinary willingness to obey.

That was because of his physical weakness, Fowler felt sure. It seemed to take so much of Norman’s energy simply to breathe and eat that nothing remained. And after the solution of a problem, a complete fatigue overcame him. He was useless for a day or two between jobs, recovering from the utter exhaustion that work seemed to induce. Fowler was quite willing to accept that. It made him even surer of his—guest. The worst thing that could happen, of course, would be Norman’s recovery, his return to normal—

Money began to come in very satisfactorily, although Fowler wasn’t really a good business man. In fact, he was a remarkably poor one. It didn’t matter much. There was always more where the first had come from. With some of the money Fowler started cautious inquiries about missing persons. He wanted to be sure no indignant relatives would turn up and demand an accounting of all this money. He questioned Norman futilely. Norman simply could not talk. His mind was too empty for coherence. He could produce words, but he could not connect them. And this was a thing that seemed to give him his only real trouble. For he wanted desperately sometimes to speak. There was something he seemed frantic to tell Fowler, in the intervals when his strength was at its peak.

Fowler didn’t want to know it. Usually when Norman reached this pitch he set him another exhausting problem. Fowler wondered for awhile just why he dreaded hearing the message. Presently he faced the answer.

Norman might be trying to explain how he could be cured. Eventually, Fowler had to face an even more unwelcome truth. Norman did seem in spite of everything to be growing stronger.

He was working one day on a vibratory headset gimmick later to be known as a Hed-D-Acher, when suddenly he threw down his tools and faced Fowler over the table with a look that bordered on animation—for Norman.

“Sick—” he said painfully. “I… know… work!” It was an anathema. He made a defiant gesture and pushed the tools away.

Fowler, with a sinking sensation, frowned at the rebellious nonentity.

“All right, Norman,” he said soothingly. “All right. You can rest when you finish this job. You must finish it first, though. You must finish this job, Norman. Do you understand that? You must finish—”

It was sheer accident, of course—or almost accident—that the job turned out to be much more complicated than Fowler had expected. Norman, obedient to the slow, repeated commands, worked very late and very hard. The end of the job found him so completely exhausted he couldn’t speak or move for three days

As a matter of fact it was the Hed-D-Acher that turned out to be an important milestone in Fowler’s process. He couldn’t recognize it at the time, but when he looked back, years later, he saw the occasion of his first serious mistake. His first, that is, unless you count the moment when he lifted Norman across his threshold at the very start of the thing.

Fowler had to go to Washington to defend himself in some question of patent infringement. A large firm had found out about the Hed-D-Acher and jumped in on the grounds of similar wiring—at least that was Fowler’s impression. He was no technician. The main point was that the Hed-D-Acher couldn’t be patented in its present form, and Fowler’s rivals were trying to squeeze through a similar—and stolen—Hed-D-Acher of their own.

Fowler phoned the Korys Agency. Long distance television was not on the market yet and he was not able to see Veronica’s face, but he knew what expression must be visible on it when he told her what he wanted.

“But I’m going out on a job, John. I can’t just drop every-thing and rush out to your house.”

“Listen, Veronica, there may be a hundred thousand bucks in it. I… there’s no one else I can trust.” He didn’t add his chief reason for trusting her—the fact that she wasn’t over-bright.

In the end, she went. Dramatic situations appealed to her, and he dropped dark hints of corporation espionage and bloody doings on Capitol Hill. He told her where to find the key and she hung up, leaving Fowler to gnaw his nails intermittently and try to limit himself to one whiskey-soda every half hour. He was paged, it seemed to him, some years later.

“Hello, Veronica?”

“Right. I’m at the house. The key was where you said. Now what?”

Fowler had had time to work out a plan. He put pencil and note pad on the jutting shelf before him and frowned slightly. This might be a risk, but—

But he intended to marry Veronica, so it was no great risk. And she wasn’t smart enough to figure out the real answers.

He told her about the windowless room. “That’s my house-boy‘s—Norman. He’s slightly half-witted, but a good boy on mechanical stuff. Only he’s a little deaf, and you’ve got to tell him a thing three times before he understands it.”

“I think I’d better get out of here,” Veronica remarked. “Next you’ll be telling me he’s a homicidal maniac.”

Fowler laughed heartily. “There’s a box in the kitchen—it’s in that red cupboard with the blue handle. It’s pretty heavy. But see if you can manage it. Take it in to Norman and tell him to make another Hed-D-Acher with a different wiring circuit.”

“Are you drunk?”

Fowler repressed an impulse to bite the mouthpiece off the telephone. His nerves were crawling under his skin. “This isn’t a gag, Veronica. I told you how important it is. A hundred thousand bucks isn’t funny. Look, got a pencil?

Write this down.” He dictated some technical instructions he had gleaned by asking the right questions. “Tell that to Norman. He’ll find all the materials and tools he needs in the box.”

“If this is a gag—” Veronica said, and there was a pause. “Well, hang on.”

Silence drew on. Fowler tried to hear what was happening so many miles away. He caught a few vague sounds, but they were meaningless. Then voices rose in loud debate.

“Veronica!” Fowler shouted. “Veronica!” There was no answer. After that, voices again, but softer. And presently:

“Johnny,” Veronica said, “if you ever pull a trick like that on me again—”

“What happened?”

“Hiding a gibbering idiot in your house—” She was breathing fast.

“He’s… what did he do? What happened?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Except when I opened the door your houseboy walked out and began running around the house like a… a bat. He was trying to talk—Johnny, he scared me!” She was plaintive.

“Where is he now?”

“Back in his room. I … I was afraid of him. But I was trying not to show it. I thought if I could get him back in and lock the door—I spoke to him, and he swung around at me so fast I guess I let out a yell. And then he kept trying to say something—”

“What?”

“How should I know? He’s in his room, but I couldn’t find a key to it. I’m not staying here a minute longer. I… here he comes!”

“Veronica! Tell him to go back to his room. Loud and—like you mean it!”

She obeyed. Fowler could hear her saying it. She said it several times.

“It doesn’t work. He’s going out… ”

“Stop him!”

“I won’t! I had enough trouble coaxing him back the first time—“

“Let me talk to him,” Fowler said suddenly. “He’ll obey me. Hold the phone to his ear. Get him to listen to me.” He raised his voice to a shout. “Norman!

Come here! Listen to me!” Outside the booth people were turning to stare, but he ignored them.

He heard a faint mumble and recognized it.

“Norman,” he said, more quietly but with equal firmness. “Do exactly what I tell you to do. Don’t leave the house. Don’t leave the house. Don’t leave the house. Do you understand?”

Mumble. Then words: “Can’t get out… can’t—”

“Don’t leave the house. Build another Hed-D-Acher. Do it now. Get the equipment you need and build it in the living room, on the table where the telephone is. Do it now.”

A pause, and then Veronica said shakily: “He’s gone back to his room. Johnny, I… he’s coming back! With that box of stuff—”

“Let me talk to him again. Get yourself a drink. A couple of ‘em.” He needed Veronica as his interpreter, and the best way to keep her there would be with the aid of Dutch courage.

“Well—here he is.”

Norman mumbled.

Fowler referred to his notes. He gave firm, incisive, detailed directions. He told Norman exactly what he wanted. He repeated his orders several times. And it ended with Norman building a Hed-D-Acher, with a different type of circuit, while Veronica watched, made measurements as Fowler commanded, and relayed the information across the wire. By the time she got slightly high, matters were progressing more smoothly. There was the danger that she might make inaccurate measurements, but Fowler insisted on check and double-check of each detail.

Occasionally he spoke to Norman. Each time the man’s voice was weaker. The dangerous surge of initiative was passing as energy drained out of Norman while his swift fingers flew.

In the end, Fowler had his information, and Norman, com-pletely exhausted, was ordered back to his room. According to Veronica, he went there obediently and fell flat on the floor.

“I’ll buy you a mink coat,” Fowler said. “See you later.”

“But—”

“I’ve got to hurry. Tell you all about it when I see you.”

He got the patent, by the skin of his teeth. There was instant litigation, which was why he didn’t clean up on the gadget immediately. He was willing to wait. The goose still laid golden eggs.

But he was fully aware of the danger now. He had to keep Norman busy. For unless the man’s strength remained at a minimum, initiative would return. And there would be nothing to stop Norman from walking out of the house, or—

Or even worse. For Fowler could, after all, keep the doors locked. But he knew that locks wouldn’t imprison Norman long once the man discovered how to pose a problem to himself. Once Norman thought: Problem how to escape—then his clever hands would construct a wall-melter or a matter-transmitter, and that would be the end for Fowler.

Norman had one specialized talent. To keep that operating efficiently—for Fowler’s purpose—all Norman’s other faculties had to be cut down to minimum operation speed.

The rosy light in the high-backed booth fell flatteringly upon Veronica’s face. She twirled her martini glass on the table and said: “But John, I don’t think I want to marry you.” The martini glass shot pinpoints of soft light in his face as she turned it. She looked remarkably pretty, even for a Korys model. Fowler felt like strangling her.

“Why not?” he demanded.

She shrugged. She had been blowing hot and cold, so far as Fowler was concerned, ever since the day she had seen Norman. Fowler had been able to buy her back, at intervals, with gifts or moods that appealed to her, but the general drift had been toward estrangement. She wasn’t intelligent, but she did have sensitivity of a sort, and it served its purpose. It was stopping her from marrying John Fowler.

“Maybe we’re too much alike, Johnny,” she said reflectively. “I don’t know. I…

how’s that miserable house-boy of yours?”

“Is that still bothering you?” His voice was impatient. She had been showing too much concern over Norman. It had probably been a mistake to call her in at all, but what else could he have done? “I wish you’d forget about Norman. He’s all right.”

“Johnny, I honestly do think he ought to be under a doctor’s care. He didn’t look at all well that day. Are you sure—”

“Of course I’m sure! What do you take me for? As a matter of fact, he is under a doctor’s care. Norman’s just feeble-minded. “I’ve told you that a dozen times, Veronica. I wish you’d take my word for it. He… he sees a doctor regularly. It was just having you there that upset him. Strangers throw him off his balance. He’s fine now. Let’s forget about Norman. We were talking about getting married, remember?”

“You were. Not me. No, Johnny, I’m afraid it wouldn’t work.” She looked at him in the soft light, her face clouded with doubt and—was it suspicion? With a woman of Veronica’s mentality, you never knew just where you stood. Fowler could reason her out of every objection she offered to him, but because reason meant so little to her, the solid substratum of her convictions remained unchanged.

“You’ll marry me,” he said, his voice confident.

“No.” She gave him an uneasy look and then drew a deep breath and said: “You may as well know this now, Johnny—I’ve just about decided to marry somebody else.”

“Who?” He wanted to shout the question, but he forced himself to be calm.

“No one you know. Ray Barnaby. I… I’ve pretty well made up my mind about it, John.”

“I don’t know the man,” Fowler told her evenly, “but I’ll make it my business to find out all I can.”

“Now John, let’s not quarrel. I—”

“You’re going to marry me or nobody, Veronica.” Fowler was astonished at the sudden violence of his own reaction. “Do you understand that?”

“Don’t be silly, John. You don’t own me.”

“I’m not being silly! I’m just telling you.”

“John, I’ll do exactly as I please. Now, let’s not quarrel about it.”

Until now, until this moment of icy rage, he had never quite realized what an obsession Veronica had become. Fowler had got out of the habit of being thwarted. His absolute power over one individual and one unchanging situation was giving him a taste for tyranny. He sat looking at Veronica in the pink dimness of the booth, grinding his teeth together in an effort not to shout at her.

“If you go through with this, Veronica, I’ll make it my business to see you regret it as long as you live,” he told her in a harsh, low voice. She pushed her half-emptied glass aside with sudden violence that matched his.

“Don’t get me started, John Fowler!” she said angrily. “I’ve got a temper, too! I’ve always known there was something I didn’t like about you.”

“There’ll be a lot more you don’t like if you—”

“That’s enough, John!” She got up abruptly, clutching at her slipping handbag. Even in this soft light he could see the sudden hardening of her face, the lines of anger pinching downward along her nose and mouth. A perverse triumph filled him because at this moment she was ugly in her rage, but it did not swerve his determination.

“You’re going to marry me,” he told her harshly. “Sit down. You’re going to marry me if I have to—” He paused.

“To what?” Her voice was goading. He shook his head. He couldn’t finish the threat aloud.

Norman will help me, he was thinking in cold triumph. Norman will find a way. He smiled thinly after her as she stalked in a fury out of the bar. For a week Fowler heard no more from her. He made inquiries about the man Barnaby and was not surprised to learn that Veronica’s intended—if she had really been serious about the fellow, after all—was a young broker of adequate income and average stupidity. A nonentity. Fowler told himself savagely that they were two of a kind and no doubt deserved each other. But his obsession still ruled him, and he was determined that no one but himself should marry Veronica.

Short of hypnosis, there seemed no immediate way to change her mind. But perhaps he could change Barnaby’s. He believed he could, given enough time. Norman was at work on a rather ingenious little device involving the use of a trick lighting system. Fowler had been impressed, on consideration, by the effect of a rosy light in the bar on Veronica’s appearance. Another week passed, with no news about Veronica. Fowler told himself he could afford to remain aloof. He had the means to control her very nearly within his grasp. He would watch her, and wait his time in patience. He was very busy, too, with other things. Two more devices were ready for patenting—the Magic Latch keyed to fingerprint patterns, and the Haircut Helmet that could be set for any sort of hair trimming and would probably wreak havoc among barbers. But litigation on the Hed-D-Acher was threatening to be expensive, and Fowler had learned already to live beyond his means. Far beyond. It seemed ridiculous to spend only what he took in each day, when such fortunes in royalties were just around the corner.

Twice he had to take Norman off the lighting device to perform small tasks in other directions. And Norman was in himself a problem. The work exhausted him. It had to exhaust him. That was necessary. An unpleasant necessity, of course, but there it was. Sometimes the exhaustion in Norman’s eyes made one uncomfortable. Certainly Norman suffered. But because he was seldom able to show it plainly, Fowler could tell himself that perhaps he imagined the worst part of it. Casuistry, used to good purpose, helped him to ignore what he preferred not to see.

By the end of the second week, Fowler decided not to wait on Veronica any longer. He bought a dazzling solitaire diamond whose cost faintly alarmed even himself, and a wedding band that was a full circle of emerald-cut diamonds to complement it. With ten thousand dollars worth of jewelry in his pocket, he went into the city to pay her a call.

Barnaby answered the door.

Stupidly Fowler heard himself saying: “Miss Wood here?”

Barnaby, grinning, shook his head and started to answer. Fowler knew perfectly well what he was about to say. The fatuous grin would have told him even if some accurate sixth sense had not already made it clear. But he wouldn’t let Barnaby say it. He thrust the startled bridegroom aside and shouldered angrily into the apartment, calling: “Veronica! Veronica, where are you?”

She came out of the kitchen in a ruffled apron, apprehension and defiance on her face.

“You can just get right out of here, John Fowler,” she said firmly. Barnaby came up from behind him and began a blustering remonstrance, but she slipped past Fowler and linked her arm with Barnaby’s, quieting him with a touch.

“We were married day before yesterday, John,” she said. Fowler was astonished to discover that the cliché about a red swimming maze of rage was perfectly true. The room and the bridal couple shimmered before him for an instant. He could hardly breathe in the suffocating fury that swam in his brain.

He took out the white velvet box, snapped it open and waved it under Veronica’s nose. Liquid fire quivered in the myriad cut surfaces of the jewels and for an instant pure greed made Veronica’s face as hard as the diamonds. Barnaby said: “I think you’d better go, Fowler.”

In silence, Fowler went.

The little light-device wouldn’t do now. He would need something more powerful for his revenge. Norman put the completed gadget aside and began to work on something new. There would be a use for the thing later. Already plans were spinning themselves out in Fowler’s mind.

They would be expensive plans. Fowler took council with himself and decided that the moment had come to put the magic window on the market. Until now he had held this in reserve. Perhaps he had even been a little afraid of possible repercussions. He was artist enough to know that a whole new art-form might result from a practical telepathic projector. There were so many possibilities—

But the magic window failed.

Not wholly, of course. It was a miracle, and men always will buy miracles. But it wasn’t the instant, overwhelming financial success Fowler had felt certain it would be. For one thing, perhaps this was too much of a miracle. Inventions can’t become popular until the culture is ready for them. Talking films were made in Paris by Méliès around 1890, but perhaps because that was a double miracle, nobody took to the idea. As for a telepathic screen—

It was a specialized luxury item. And it wasn’t as easy or as safe to enjoy as one might suppose. For one thing, few minds turned out to be disciplined enough to maintain a picture they deliberately set out to evoke. As a mass entertaining medium it suffered from the same faults as family motion pictures—other peoples’ memories and dreams are notoriously boring unless one sees oneself in them.

Besides, this was too close to pure telepathy to be safe. Fowler had lived alone too long to remember the perils of exposing one’s thoughts to a group. Whatever he wanted to project on his private window, he projected. But in the average family it wouldn’t do. It simply wouldn’t do. Some Hollywood companies and some millionaires leased windows—Fowler refused to sell them outright. A film studio photographed a batch of projected ideations and cut them into a dream sequence for a modern Cinderella story. But trick photography had already done work so similar that it made no sensation whatever. Even Disney had done some of the stuff better. Until trained imaginative projective artists could be developed, the windows were simply not going to be a commercial success.

One ethnological group tried to use a window to project the memories of oldsters in an attempt to recapture everyday living customs of the recent past, but the results were blurred and inaccurate, full of anachronisms. They all had to be winnowed and checked so completely that little of value remained. The fact stood out that the ordinary mind is too undisciplined to be worth anything as a projector. Except as a toy, the window was useless. It was useless commercially. But for Fowler it had one intrinsic usefulness more valuable than money—

One of the wedding presents Veronica and Barnaby received was a telepathic window. It came anonymously. Their suspicions should have been roused. Perhaps they were, but they kept the window. After all, in her modeling work Veronica had met many wealthy people, and Barnaby also had moneyed friends, any of whom might in a generous mood have taken a window-lease for them as a goodwill gesture. Also, possession of a magic window was a social distinction. They did not allow themselves to look the gift-horse too closely in the mouth. They kept the window.

They could not have known—though they might have guessed—that this was a rather special sort of window. Norman had been at work on it through long, exhausting hours, while Fowler stood over him with the goading repetitious commands that kept him at his labor.

Fowler was not too disappointed at the commercial failure of the thing. There were other ways of making money. So long as Norman remained his to command the natural laws of supply and demand did not really affect him. He had by now almost entirely ceased to think in terms of the conventional mores. Why should he? They no longer applied to him. His supply of money and resources was limitless. He never really had to suffer for a failure. It would always be Norman, not Fowler, who suffered.

There was unfortunately no immediate way in which he could check how well his magic window was working. To do that you would have to be an invisible third person in the honeymoon apartment. But Fowler, knowing Veronica as he did, could guess.

The window was based on the principle that if you give a child a jackknife he’ll probably cut himself.

Fowler’s first thought had been to create a window on which he could project his own thoughts, disguised as those of the bride or groom. But he had realized almost immediately that a far more dangerous tool lay ready-made in the minds of the two whose marriage he meant to undermine.

“It isn’t as if they wouldn’t break up anyhow, in a year or two,” he told himself as he speculated on the possibilities of his magic window. He was not justifying his intent. He didn’t need to, any more. He was simply considering possibilities. “They’re both stupid, they’re both selfish. They’re not material you could make a good marriage of. This ought to be almost too easy—”

Every man, he reasoned, has a lawless devil in his head. What filters through the censor-band from the unconscious mind is controllable. But the lower levels of the brain are utterly without morals.

Norman produced a telepathic window that would at times project images from the unconscious mind.

It was remotely controlled, of course; most of the time it operated on the usual principles of the magic window. But whenever Fowler chose he could throw a switch that made the glass twenty miles away hypersensitive. Before he threw it for the first time, he televised Veronica. It was evening. When the picture dawned in the television he could see the magic window set up in its elegant frame within range of the televisor, so that everyone who called might be aware of the Barnaby’s distinction.

Luckily it was Veronica who answered, though Barnaby was visible in the background, turning toward the ‘visor an interested glance that darkened when Fowler’s face dawned upon the screen. Veronica’s politely expectant look turned sullen as she recognized the caller.

“Well?”

Fowler grinned. “Oh, nothing. Just wondered how you were getting along.”

“Beautifully, thanks. Is that all?”

Fowler shrugged. “If that’s the way you feel, yes.”

“Good-by,” Veronica said firmly, and flicked the switch. The screen before Fowler went blank. He grinned. All he had wanted to do was remind her of himself. He touched the stud that would activate that magic window he had just seen, and settled down to wait.

What would happen now he didn’t know. Something would. He hoped the sight of him had reminded Veronica of the dazzling jewelry he had carried when they last met. He hoped that upon the window now would be dawning a covetous image of those diamonds, clear as dark water and quivering with fiery light. The sight should be enough to rouse resentment in Barnaby’s mind, and when two people quarrel wholeheartedly, there are impulses toward mayhem in even the most civilized mind. It should shock the bride and groom to see on a window that reflected their innermost thoughts a picture of hatred and wishful violence. Would Veronica see herself being strangled in effigy in the big wall-frame? Would Barnaby see himself bleeding from the deep scratches his bride would be yearning to score across his face?

Fowler sat back comfortably, luxuriating in speculation. It might take a long time. It might take years. He was willing to wait. It took even longer than Fowler had expected. Slowly the poison built up in the Barnaby household, very slowly. And in that time a different sort of toxicity developed in Fowler’s. He scarcely realized it. He was too close. He never recognized the moment when his emotional balance shifted and he began actively to hate Norman.

The owner of the golden goose must have lived under considerable strain. Every day when he went out to look in the nest he must have felt a quaking wonder whether this time the egg would be white, and valuable only for omelets or hatching. Also, he must have had to stay very close to home, living daily with the nightmare of losing his treasure—

Norman was a prisoner—but a prisoner handcuffed to his jailer. Both men were chained. If Fowler left him alone for too long, Norman might recover. It was the inevitable menace that made travel impossible. Fowler could keep no servants; he lived alone with his prisoner. Occasionally he thought of Norman as a venomous snake whose poison fangs had to be removed each time they were renewed. He dared not cut out the poison sacs themselves, for there was no way to do that without killing the golden goose. The mixed metaphors were indicative of the state of Fowler’s mind by then.

And he was almost as much a prisoner in the house as Norman was. Constantly now he had to set Norman problems to solve simply as a safety measure, whether or not they had commercial value. For Norman was slowly regaining his strength. He was never completely coherent, but he could talk a little more, and he managed to put across quite definitely his tremendous urge to give Fowler certain obscure information.

Fowler knew, of course, what it probably was. The cure. And Norman seemed to have a strangely touching confidence that if he could only frame his message intelligibly, Fowler would make arrangements for the mysterious cure. Once Fowler might have been touched by the confidence. Not now. Because he was exploiting Norman so ruthlessly, he had to hate either Norman or himself. By a familiar process he was projecting his own fault upon his prisoner and punishing Norman for it. He no longer speculated upon Norman’s mysterious origin or the source of his equally mysterious powers. There was obviously something in that clouded mind that gave forth flashes of a certain peculiar genius. Fowler accepted the fact and used it.

There was probably some set of rules that would govern what Norman could and could not do, but Fowler did not discover—until it was too late—what the rules were. Norman could produce inconceivably intricate successes, and then fail dismally at the simplest tasks.

Curiously, he turned out to be an almost infallible finder of lost articles, so long as they were lost in the confines of the house. Fowler discovered this by accident, and was gratified to learn that for some reason that kind of search was the most exhausting task he could set for his prisoner. When all else failed, and Norman still seemed too coherent or too strong for safekeeping, Fowler had only to remember that he had misplaced his wristwatch or a book or screwdriver, and to send Norman after it. Then something very odd happened, and after that he stopped the practice, feeling bewildered and insecure. He had ordered Norman to find a lost folder of rather important papers. Norman had gone into his own room and closed the door. He was missing for a long time. Eventually Fowler’s impatience built up enough to make him call off the search, and he shouted to Norman to come out. There was no answer. When he had called a third time in vain, Fowler opened the door and looked in. The room was empty. There were no windows. The door was the only exit, and Fowler could have sworn Norman had not come out of it. In a rising panic he ransacked the room, calling futilely. He went through the rest of the house in a fury of haste and growing terror. Norman was not in the kitchen or the living room or the cellar or anywhere in sight outside. Fowler was on the verge of a nervous collapse when Norman’s door opened and the missing man emerged, staggering a little, his face white and blank with exhaustion, and the folder of papers in his hand.

He slept for three days afterward. And Fowler never again used that method of keeping his prisoner in check.

After six uneventful months had passed Fowler put Norman to work on a supplementary device that might augment the Barnaby magic window. He was receiving reports from a bribed daily maid, and he took pains to hear all the gossip mutual friends were happy to pass on. The Barnaby marriage appeared to suffer from a higher than normal percentage of spats and disagreements, but so far it still held. The magic window was not enough.

Norman turned out a little gadget that produced supersonics guaranteed to evoke irritability and nervous tension. The maid smuggled it into the apartment. Thereafter, the reports Fowler received were more satisfactory, from his point of view.

All in all, it took three years.

And the thing that finally turned the trick was the lighting gadget which Fowler had conceived in that bar interlude when Veronica first told him about Barnaby.

Norman worked on the fixtures for some time. They were subtle. The exact tinting involved a careful study of Veronica’s skin tones, the colors of the apartment, the window placement. Norman had a scale model of the rooms where the Barnabys were working out their squabbles toward divorce. He took a long time to choose just what angles of lighting he would need to produce the worst possible result. And of course it all had to be done with considerable care because the existing light fixtures couldn’t be changed noticeably. With the help of the maid, the job was finally done. And thereafter, Veronica in her own home was—ugly.

The lights made her look haggard. They brought out every line of fatigue and ill-nature that lurked anywhere in her face. They made her sallow. They caused Barnaby increasingly to wonder why he had ever thought the girl attractive.

“It’s your fault!” Veronica said hysterically. “It’s all your fault and you know it!”

“How could it be my fault?” Fowler demanded in a smug voice, trying hard to iron out the smile that kept pulling up the comers of his mouth. The television screen was between them like a window. Veronica leaned toward it, the cords in her neck standing out as she shouted at him. He had never seen that particular phenomenon before. Probably she had acquired much practice in angry shouting in the past three years. There were thin vertical creases between her brows that were new to him, too. He had seen her face to face only a few times in the years of her marriage. It had been safer and pleasanter to create her in the magic window when he felt the need of seeing her.

This was a different face, almost a different woman. He wondered briefly if he was watching the effect of his own disenchanting lighting system, but a glimpse beyond her head of a crowded drugstore assured him that he was not. This was real, not illusory. This was a Veronica he and Norman had, in effect, created.

“You did it!” Veronica said accusingly. “I don’t know how, but you did it.”

Fowler glanced down at the morning paper he had just been reading, folded back to the gossip column that announced last night’s spectacular public quarrel between a popular Korys model and her broker husband.

“What really happened?” Fowler asked mildly.

“None of your business,” Veronica told him with fine illogic. “You ought to know! You were behind it—you know you were! You and that half-wit of yours, that Norman. You think I don’t know? With all those fool inventions you two work out, I know perfectly well you must have done something—”

“Veronica, you’re raving.”

She was, of course. It was sheer hysteria, plus her normal conviction that no unpleasant thing that happened to her could possibly be her own fault. By pure accident she had hit upon the truth, but that was beside the point.

“Has he left you? Is that it?” Fowler demanded.

She gave him a look of hatred. But she nodded. “It’s your fault and you’ve got to help me. I need money. I—”

“All right, all right! You’re hysterical, but I’ll help you. Where are you?

I’ll pick you up and we’ll have a drink and talk things over. You’re better off than you know, baby. He never was the man for you. You haven’t got a thing to worry about. I’ll be there in half an hour and we can pick up where we left off three years ago.”

Part of what he implied was true enough, he reflected as he switched off the television screen. Curiously, he still meant to marry her. The changed face with its querulous lines and corded throat repelled him, but you don’t argue with an obsession. He had worked three years toward this moment, and he still meant to marry Veronica Barnaby as he had originally meant to marry Veronica Wood. Afterward—well, things might be different.

One thing frightened him. She was not quite, as stupid as he had gambled on that day years ago when he had been forced to call on her for help with Norman. She had seen too much, deduced too much—remembered much too much. She might be dangerous. He would have to find out just what she thought she knew about him and Norman.

It might be necessary to silence her, in one way or another. Norman said with painful distinctness: “Must tell you… must—’’

“No, Norman.” Fowler spoke hastily. “We have a job to do. There isn’t time now to discuss—”

“Can’t work,” Norman said. “No… must tell you—” He paused, lifted a shaking hand to his eyes, grimacing against his own palm with a look of terrible effort and entreaty. The strength mat was mysteriously returning to him at intervals now had made him almost a human being again. The blankness of his face flooded sometimes with almost recognizable individuality.

“Not yet, Norman!” Fowler heard the alarm in his own voice. “I need you. Later we’ll work out whatever it is you’re trying to say. Not now. I… look, we’ve got to reverse that lighting system we made for Veronica. I want a set of lights that will flatter her. I need it in a hurry, Norman. You’ll have to get to work on it right away.”

Norman looked at him with hollow eyes. Fowler didn’t like it. He would not meet the look. He focused on Norman’s forehead as he repeated his instructions in a patient voice.

Behind that colorless forehead the being that was Norman must be hammering against its prison walls of bone, striving hard to escape. Fowler shook off the fanciful idea in distaste; repeated his orders once more and left the house in some haste. Veronica would be waiting.

But the look in Norman’s eyes haunted him all the way into the city. Dark, hollow, desperate. The prisoner in the skull, shut into a claustrophobic cell out of which no sound could carry. He was getting dangerously strong, that prisoner. It would be a mercy in the long run if some task were set to exhaust him, throw him back into that catatonic state in which he no longer knew he was in prison.

Veronica was not there. He waited for an hour in the bar. Then he called her apartment, and got no answer. He tried his own house, and no one seemed to be there either. With unreasonably mounting uneasiness, he went home at last. She met him at the door.

“Veronica! I waited for an hour! What’s the idea?”

She only smiled at him. There was an almost frightening triumph in the smile, but she did not speak a word.

Fowler pushed past her, fighting his own sinking sensation of alarm. He called for Norman almost automatically, as if his unconscious mind recognized before the conscious knew just what the worst danger might be. For Veronica might be stupid but he had perhaps forgotten how cunning the stupid sometimes are. Veronica could put two and two together very well. She could reason from cause to effect quite efficiently, when her own welfare was at stake. She had reasoned extremely well today.

Norman lay on the bed in his windowless room, his face as blank as paper. Some effort of the mind and will had exhausted him out of all semblance to a rational being. Some new, some overwhelming task, set him by—Veronica? Not by Fowler. The job he had been working on an hour ago was no such killing job as this.

But would Norman obey anyone except Fowler? He had de-fied Veronica on that other occasion when she tried to give him orders. He had almost escaped before Fowler’s commanding voice ordered him back. Wait, though—she had coaxed him. Fowler remembered now. She could not command, but she had coaxed the blank creature into obedience. So there was a way. And she knew it. But what had the task been?

With long strides Fowler went back into the drop-shaped living room. Veronica stood in the doorway where he had left her. She was waiting.

“What did you do?” he demanded.

She smiled. She said nothing at all.

“What happened?” Fowler cried urgently. “Veronica, answer me! What did you do?”

“I talked to Norman,” she said. “I… got him to do a little job for me. That was all. Good-by, John.”

“Wait! You can’t leave like that. I’ve got to know what happened. I—”

“You’ll find out,” Veronica said. She gave him that thin smile again and then the door closed behind her. He heard her heels click once or twice on the walk and she was gone. There was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t know what she had accomplished. That was the terrifying thing. She had talked to Norman—And Norman had been in an almost coherent mood today. If she asked the right questions, she could have learned—almost anything. About the magic window and the supersonics and the lighting. About Norman himself. About—even about a weapon she could use against Fowler. Norman would make one if he were told to. He was an automaton. He could not reason; he could only comply.

Perhaps she had a weapon, then. But what? Fowler knew nothing at all of Veronica’s mind. He had no idea what sort of revenge she might take if she had a field as limitless as Norman’s talents offered her. Fowler had never been interested in Veronica’s mind at all. He had no idea what sort of being crouched there behind her forehead as the prisoner crouched behind Norman’s. He only knew that it would have a thin smile and that it hated him.

“You’ll find out,” Veronica had said. But it was several days before he did, and even then he could not be sure. So many things could have been accidental. Although he tried desperately he could not find Veronica anywhere in the city. But he kept thinking her eyes were on him, that if he could turn quickly enough he would catch her staring.

“That’s what makes voodoo magic work,” he told himself savagely. “A man can scare himself to death, once he knows he’s been threatened—”

Death, of course, had nothing to do with it. Clearly it was no part of her plan that her enemy should die—and escape her. She knew what Fowler would hate most—ridicule.

Perhaps the things that kept happening were accidents. The time he tripped over nothing and did a foolishly clownish fall for the amusement of a long line of people waiting before a ticket window. His ears burned whenever he remembered that. Or the time he had three embarrassing slips of the tongue in a row when he was trying to make a good impression on a congressman and his pompous wife in connection with a patent. Or the time in the Biltmore dining room when he dropped every dish or glass he touched, until the whole room was staring at him and the head-waiter was clearly of two minds about throwing him out.

It was like a perpetual time bomb. He never knew what would happen next, or when or where. And it was certainly sheer imagination that made him think he could hear Veronica’s clear, high, ironic laughter whenever his own body betrayed him into one of these ridiculous series of slips. He tried shaking the truth out of Norman.

“What did you do?” he demanded of the blank, speechless face. “What did she make you do? Is there something wrong with my synapses now? Did you rig up something that would throw me out of control whenever she wants me to? What did you do, Norman?”

But Norman could not tell him.

On the third day she televised the house. Fowler went limp with relief when he saw her features taking shape in the screen. But before he could speak she said sharply: “All right, John. I only have a minute to waste on you. I just wanted you to know I’m really going to start to work on you beginning next week. That’s all, John. Good-by.”

The screen would not make her face form again no matter how sharply he rapped on it, no matter how furiously he jabbed the buttons to call her back. After awhile he relaxed limply in his chair and sat staring blankly at the wall. And now he began to be afraid—

It had been a long time since Fowler faced a crisis in which he could not turn to Norman for help. And Norman was no use to him now. He could not or would not produce a device that Fowler could use as protection against the nameless threat. He could give him no inkling of what weapon he had put in Veronica’s hand.

It might be a bluff. Fowler could not risk it. He had changed a great deal in three years, far more than he had realized until this crisis arose. There had been a time when his mind was flexible enough to assess dangers coolly and resourceful enough to produce alternative measures to meet them. But not any more. He had depended too long on Norman to solve all his problems for him. Now he was helpless. Unless—

He glanced again at that stunning alternative and then glanced mentally away, impatient, knowing it for an impossibility. He had thought of it often in the past week, but of course it couldn’t be done. Of course—

He got up and went into the windowless room where Norman sat quietly, staring at nothing. He leaned against the door frame and looked at Norman. There in that shuttered skull lay a secret more precious than any miracle Norman had yet produced. The brain, the mind, the source. The mysterious quirk that brought forth golden eggs.

“There’s a part of your brain in use that normal brains don’t have,” Fowler said thoughtfully aloud. Norman did not stir. “Maybe you’re a freak. Maybe you’re a mutation. But there’s something like a thermostat in your head. When it’s activated, your mind’s activated, too. You don’t use the same brain-centers I do. You’re an idling motor. When the supercharger cuts in something begins to work along lines of logic I don’t understand. I see the result, but I don’t know what the method is. If I could know that—”

He paused and stared piercingly at the bent head. “If I could only get that secret out of you, Norman! It’s no good to you. But there isn’t any limit to what I could do with it if I had your secret and my own brain.”

If Norman heard he made no motion to show it. But some impulse suddenly goaded Fowler to action. “I’ll do it!” he declared. “I’ll try it! What have I got to lose, anyhow? I’m a prisoner here as long as this goes on, and Norman’s no good to me the way things stand. It’s worth a try.”

He shook the silent man by the shoulder. “Norman, wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Norman, do you hear me? Wake up, Norman, we have work to do.”

Slowly, out of infinite distances, the prisoner returned to his cell, crept forward in the bone cage of the skull and looked dully at Fowler out of deep sockets.

And Fowler was seized with a sudden, immense astonishment that until now he had never really considered this most obvious of courses. Norman could do it. He was quite confident of that, suddenly. Norman could and must do it. This was the point toward which they had both been moving ever since Norman first rang the doorbell years ago. It had taken Veronica and a crisis to make the thing real. But now was the time—time and past time for the final miracle. Fowler was going to become sufficient unto himself.

“You’re going to get a nice long rest, Norman,” he said kindly. “You’re going to help me learn to … to think the way you think. Do you understand, Norman?

Do you know what it is that makes your brain work the way it does? I want you to help my brain think that way, too. Afterward, you can rest, Norman. A nice, long rest. I won’t be needing you any more after that, Norman.”

Norman worked for twenty-four hours without a break. Watching him, forcing down the rising excitement in his mind, Fowler thought the blank man too seemed overwrought at this last and perhaps greatest of all his tasks. He mumbled a good deal over the intricate wiring of the thing he was twisting together. It looked rather like a tesseract, an open, interlocking framework which Norman handled with great care. From time to time he looked up and seemed to want to talk, to protest. Fowler ordered him sternly back to his task.

When it was finished it looked a little like the sort of turban a sultan might wear. It even had a jewel set in the front, like a headlight, except that this jewel really was light. All the wires came together there, and out of nowhere the bluish radiance sprang, shimmering softly in its little nest of wiring just above the forehead. It made Fowler think of an eye gently opening and closing. A thoughtful eye that looked up at him from between Norman’s hands. At the last moment Norman hesitated. His face was gray with exhaustion as he bent above Fowler, holding out the turban. Like Charlemagne, Fowler reached impatiently for the thing and set it on his own head. Norman bent reluctantly to adjust it.

There was a singing moment of anticipation—

The turban was feather-light on his head, but wherever it touched it made his scalp ache a bit, as if every hair had been pulled the wrong way. The aching grew. It wasn’t only the hair that was going the wrong way, he realized suddenly—

It wasn’t only his hair, but his mind—

It wasn’t only—

Out of the wrenching blur that swallowed up the room he saw Norman’s anxious face take shape, leaning close. He felt the crown of wire lifted from his head. Through a violent, blinding ache he watched Norman grimace with bewilderment.

“No,” Norman said. “No… wrong… you . . . wrong—”

“I’m wrong?” Fowler shook his head a little and the pain subsided, but not the feeling of singing anticipation, nor the impatient disappointment at this delay. Any moment now might bring some interruption, might even bring some new, unguessable threat from Veronica that could ruin everything.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, schooling himself to patience. “Me? How am I wrong, Norman? Didn’t anything happen?”

“No. Wrong… you—”

“Wait, now.” Fowler had had to help work out problems like this before. “O.K., I’m wrong. How?” He glanced around the room. “Wrong room?” he suggested at random. “Wrong chair? Wrong wiring? Do I have to co-operate somehow?” The last question seemed to strike a response. “Co-operate how? Do you need help with the wiring? Do I have to do something after the helmet’s on?”

“Think!” Norman said violently.

“I have to think?”

“No. Wrong, wrong. Think wrong.”

“I’m thinking wrong?”

Norman made a gesture of despair and turned away toward his room, carrying the wire turban with him.

Fowler, rubbing his forehead where the wires had pressed, wondered dizzily what had happened. Think wrong. It didn’t make sense. He looked at himself in the television screen, which was a mirror when not in use, fingered the red line of the turban’s pressure, and murmured, “Thinking, something to do with thinking. What?” Apparently the turban was designed to alter his patterns of thought, to open up some dazzling door through which he could perceive the new causalities that guided Norman’s mind.

He thought that in some way it was probably connected with that moment when the helmet had seemed to wrench first his hair and then his skull and then his innermost thoughts in the wrong direction. But he couldn’t work it out. He was too tired. All the emotional strain of the past days, the menace still hanging over him, the tremulous excitement of what lay in the immediate future—no, he couldn’t be expected to reason things through very clearly just now. It was Norman’s job. Norman would have to solve that problem for them both. Norman did. He came out of his room in a few minutes, carrying the turban, twisted now into a higher, rounder shape, the gem of light glowing bluer than before. He approached Fowler with a firm step.

“You… thinking wrong,” he said with great distinctness. “Too … too old. Can’t change. Think wrong!”

He stared anxiously at Fowler and Fowler stared back, searching the deep-set eyes for some clue to the meaning hidden in the locked chambers of the skull behind them.

“Thinking wrong.” Fowler echoed. “Too… old? I don’t understand. Or—do I? You mean my mind isn’t flexible enough any more?” He remembered the wrenching moment when every mental process had tried vainly to turn sidewise in his head. “But then it won’t work at all!”

“Oh, yes,” Norman said confidently.

“But if I’m too old—” It wasn’t age, really. Fowler was not old in years. But the grooves of his thinking had worn themselves deep in the past years since Norman came. He had fixed inflexibly in the paths of his own self-indulgence and now his mind could not accept the answer the wire turban offered. “I can’t change,” he told Norman despairingly. “If I’d only made you do this when you first came, before my mind set in its pattern—”

Norman held out the turban, reversed so that the blue light bathed his face in blinking radiance. “This—will work,” he said confidently. Belated caution made Fowler dodge back a little. “Now wait. I want to know more before we… how can it work? You can’t make me any younger, and I don’t want any random tampering with my brain. I—”

Norman was not listening. With a swift, sure gesture he pressed the wired wreath down on Fowler’s head.

There was the wrenching of hair and scalp, skull and brain. This first—and then very swiftly the shadows moved upon the floor, the sun gleamed for one moment through the eastern windows and the world darkened outside. The darkness winked and was purple, was dull red, was daylight—

Fowler could not stir. He tried furiously to snatch the turban from his head, but no impulse from his brain made any connection with the motionless limbs. He still stood facing the mirror, the blue light still winked thoughtfully back at him, but everything moved so fast he had no time to comprehend light or dark for what they were, or the blurred motions reflected in the glass, or what was happening to him.

This was yesterday, and the week before, and the year before, but he did not clearly know it. You can’t make me any younger. Very dimly he remembered having said that to Norman at some remote interval of time. His thoughts moved sluggishly somewhere at the very core of his brain, whose outer layers were being peeled off one by one, hour by hour, day by day. But Norman could make him younger. Norman was making him younger. Norman was whisking him back and back toward the moment when his brain would regain flexibility enough for the magical turban to open that door to genius.

Those blurs in the mirror were people moving at normal time-speed—himself, Norman, Veronica going forward in time as he slipped backward through it, neither perceiving the other. But twice he saw Norman moving through the room at a speed that matched his own, walking slowly and looking for something. He saw him search behind a chair-cushion and pull out a creased folder, legal size—the folder he had last sent Norman to find, on that day when he vanished from his closed room!

Norman, then, had traveled in time before. Norman’s powers must be more far-reaching, more dazzling, than he had ever guessed. As his own powers would be, when his mind cleared again and this blinding flicker stopped. Night and day went by like the flapping of a black wing. That was the way Wells had put it. That was the way it looked. A hypnotic flapping. It left him dazed and dull—

Norman, holding the folder, lifted his head and for one instant looked Fowler in the face in the glass. Then he turned and went away through time to another meeting in another interval that would lead backward again to this meeting, and on and on around a closing spiral which no mind could fully comprehend. It didn’t matter. Only one thing really mattered. Fowler stood there shocked for an instant into almost total wakefulness, staring at his own face in the mirror, remembering Norman’s face.

For one timeless moment, while night and day flapped around him, he stood helpless, motionless, staring appalled at his reflection in the gray that was the blending of time—and he knew who Norman was.

Then mercifully the hypnosis took over again and he knew nothing at all. There are centers in the brain never meant for man’s use today. Not until the race has evolved the strength to handle them. A man of today might learn the secret that would unlock those centers, and if he were a fool he might even turn the key that would let the door swing open.

But after that he would do nothing at all of his own volition. For modem man is still too weak to handle the terrible energy that must pour forth to activate those centers. The grossly overloaded physical and mental connections could hold for only a fraction of a second. Then the energy flooding into the newly unlocked brain-center never meant for use until perhaps a thousand more years have remodeled mankind, would collapse the channels, fuse the connections, make every synapse falter in the moment when the gates of the mind swing wide.

On Fowler’s head the turban of wires glowed incandescent and vanished. The thing that had once happened to Norman happened now to him. The dazzling revelation—the draining, the atrophy—

He had recognized Norman’s face reflected in the mirror beside his own, both white with exhaustion, both stunned and empty. He knew who Norman was, what motives moved him, what corroding irony had made his punishing of Norman just. But by the time he knew, it was already far too late to alter the future or the past.

Time flapped its wings more slowly. That moment of times gone swung round again as the circle came to its close. Memories flickered more and more dimly in Fowler’s mind, like day and night, like the vague, shapeless world which was all he could perceive now. He felt cold and weak, strangely, intolerably, inhumanly weak with a weakness of the blood and bone, of the mind and soul. He saw his surroundings dimly, but he saw—other things—with a swimming clarity that had no meaning to him. He saw causes and effects as tangible before him as he had once seen trees and grass. But remote, indifferent, part of an-other world.

Help was what he needed. There was something he must remember. Something of terrible import. He must find help, to focus his mind upon the things that would work his cure. Cure was possible; he knew it—he knew it. But he needed help.

Somehow there was a door before him. He reached vaguely, moving his hand almost by reflex toward his pocket. But he had no pocket. This was a suit of the new fashion, sleek in fabric, cut without pockets. He would have to knock, to ring. He remembered—

The face he had seen in the mirror. His own face? But even then it had been changing, as a cloud before the sun drains life and color and soul from a landscape. The expunging amnesia wiped across its mind had had its parallel physically, too; the traumatic shock of moving through time—the dark wing flapping—had sponged the recognizable characteristics from his face, leaving the matrix, the characterless basic. This was not his face. He had no face; he had no memory. He knew only that this familiar door before him was the door to the help he must have to save himself from a circling eternity. It was almost wholly a reflex gesture that moved his finger toward the doorbell. The last dregs of memory and initiative drained from him with the motion.

Again the chimes played three soft notes. Again the circle closed. Again the blank man waited for John Fowler to open the door.

ALIEN EARTH

by Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977)

Thrilling Wonder Stories, April

Isaac mentions that Edmond Hamilton was known as the “Universe-saver,” but he was also known to “wreck” a few in his day. Indeed, he was (and is, thank goodness) so well known for his space opera that his fine work in other areas of science fiction is not nearly as famous as it ought to be.

“Alien Earth” is an excellent example of this relative obscurity, a wonderful, moody story that is science fiction at its finest. Amazingly, it has only been reprinted twice—in The Best of Edmond Hamilton (1977) and in the anthology Alien Earth and Other Stories (1969). It is a pleasure to reprint it again.—M.H.G.

(There are “great dyings” in the course of biological evolution, periods when in a comparatively short interval of time, a large fraction of the species of living things on Earth die. The most recent example was the period at the end of the Cretaceous, 65,000,000 years ago.

I have often thought there are also “great dyings” in the history of science fiction, periods when large percentages of the established science fiction writers stopped appearing. The most dramatic example came in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding and introduced an entirely new stable of writers, replacing the old.

Some old-timers survived, of course (even as some species always survived the biological “great dyings”). To me, one of the most remarkable survivors was Edmond Hamilton. He was one of the great stars of the pre-Campbell era, so grandiose in his plots that he was known as the “Universe-saver.” And yet he was able to narrow his focus and survive, whereas many others who seemed to require a smaller re-adaptation could not do so. In “Alien Earth” there is no Universe being saved; there is only a close look at the world of plants.—I.A.)