"What was the point in having married her at all, if what you say is so?"

"My civil marriage to Bridgetta, whom, you must understand, I dearly love, is a mariage de convenance. I need an heir, someone who can inherit from me; for I have earned, from the government and through patent contracts, a fantabulous amount of money -- "

"Fantabulous -- how vulgar!" observed the double quietly.

"Yes, but how American ! And so I married Bridgetta, who had been my laboratory assistant, so that she might inherit from me. Otherwise it would go to the government, for whom I have no great love. Then, too, someone must carry on my legal battles in the courts after I'm dead -- "

"Against the Emergency Allocations Act, you know."

" I'm telling this, Bernard. And finally I need someone to talk to in this gloomy prison besides the secret service guards and brainwashed lab technicians they assign to me. I'm not allowed to hold private conversations with my colleagues from the university any more, because they're afraid I'll leak their secret weapon . . . which I invented! In just such a manner as this was Prometheus dealt with for giving man the gift of fire."

"Now, Bernard, don't overexcite yourself. Better give me the cap for a while now, and I'll straighten out matters with the captain. I think we can come to an understanding that will satisfy everyone -- "

But before this happy accord could be reached, they were interrupted by Bridgetta -- a fourth version, with black hair -- who entered through the door at the farther end of the room. Bridget, Jet, and Bridie followed closely after.

"She's going through," Bridie announced. And indeed it was so, for the new, black-haired Bridgetta walked on relentlessly toward and then through her husband, who seemed not at all perplexed by the experience.

"That was Bridgetta-Sub-One, of course," his double explained to Hansard. "Otherwise, you know, she wouldn't go around the house opening doors instead of, like any proper ghost, walking through them. Bridgetta Sub-One is leaving for Paris. Candide is at the Opéra Comique. It was in expectation of her departure that I wanted to speak to you down here instead of in my usual rooms upstairs, for that -- on the other side of the second door Bridgetta opened -- that is our manmitter-in-residence."

Bridgetta-Sub-One closed the door of what had seemed, to Hansard, no more than a closet behind her. The six people watched the closed door in perfect, unbreathing silence, and in a moment a hand appeared through the oak panel. One could sense in the startled gestures of that hand all the wonderment that must have been on the woman's face. Panofsky purred forward in his chair and lifted his own hand up to catch hold of hers, and how much relief and happiness there was in the answering clasp of her hand.

Now the woman who had lately been Bridgetta-Sub-One stepped through the door, smiling but with her eyes tight shut, an inescapable reaction to walking through one's first door.

She opened her eyes. "Why, then, it's true! You were right, Bernie!"

The two Panofskys chuckled indulgently, as though to say, "Aren't I always right?" but forbore to be more explicit. It was her birthday party, not his.

The new Bridgetta-Sub-Two regarded her three doubles with an amused and slightly fearful smile, then, for the first time, lifted her eyes to see the figure standing behind them. The smile disappeared, or if it did not quite disappear, it changed into a much more serious kind of smile.

"Who is he?" she whispered.

Hansard wasn't able to answer, and no one else seemed about to rescue him from his difficulty. Hansard and Bridgetta stood regarding each other in silence, smiling and not quite smiling, for a long time.

In the following days it became a matter of dispute between them (but the very gentlest of disputes) whether what had happened could be legitimately said to be, at least in Hansard's case, love at first sight.



After the curry dinner that Panofsky had prepared to welcome the new Bridgetta, after the last magnum of champagne had been emptied and the glasses tossed out through the closed windows, the two Panofskys took Hansard into a spacious library, in one corner of which a third Panofsky (Sub-One) was leafing through a handsome folio volume of neo-Mondrian equations.

"Oh, don't mind him ," Panofsky reassured Hansard. "He's really the easiest person in the world to live with. We ignore him, and he ignores us. I took you aside so that we might continue our discussion of this afternoon. You see, Mr. Hansard -- may I call you Nathan? -- we are living here under most precarious circumstances. Despite our sometimes luxuriousness, we have no resources but those which the Panofsky and Bridgetta of the Real World -- a nice phrase that, Nathan, I shall adopt it, with your permission, for my own -- can think to send us.

"We have a certain store of canned foods and smoked ham and such set aside for emergencies, but that is not a firm basis for faith in the future, is it? Have you much considered the future? Have you wondered what you'll do a year from now? Ten years? Because, as the book says, you can't go home again. The process by which we came into being here is as irreversible as entropy. In fact, in the largest sense, it is only another manifestation of the Second Law. In short, we're stuck here, Nathan."

"I suppose, in a case like that, sir, it's best not to think too much about the future. Just try and get along from day to day."

"Good concentration-camp philosophy, Nathan. Yes, we must try and endure. But I think, at the same time, you must admit that certain of the old rules of the game don't apply. You're not in the Army now."

"If you mean that matter about my scruples, sir, I've thought of a way my objection might be overcome. As a captain I have authority to perform marriages in some circumstances. It seems to me that I should have the authority to grant a divorce as well."

"A pity you had to go into the Army, Nathan. The Jesuits could have used a casuist like you."

"However, I must point out now that a divorce is no guarantee that a romance follows immediately after, though it may."

"You mean you'd like me to leave off matchmaking? You Americans always resent that kind of assistance, don't you? Very well, you're on your own, Nathan. Now, hop to it."

"And I also want it understood that I'm not promiscuous. Those four women out there may all have been one woman at one time, but now there are four of them. And only one of me."

"Your dilemma puts me in mind of a delightful story of Boccaccio's. However, I shall let you settle that matter with the lady, or ladies themselves."

At that moment three of the ladies in question entered the room. "We thought you'd want to know, Bernie," said Jet, "that Bridget is dead."

"What!" said Hansard.

"Nothing to become excited about, Nathan," Panofsky said soothingly. "These things have to happen."

"She committed suicide, you see," the new Bridgetta explained to Hansard, who had not seemed to be much comforted by Panofsky's bland assurance.

"But why ?" he asked.

"It's all in Malthus," said Bridie. "A limited food supply; an expanding population -- something's got to give."

"You mean that whenever. . . whenever a new person comes out of the transmitter, you just shoot somebody?"

"Goodness no!" said Jet. "They take poison and don't feel a thing. We drew lots for it, you see. Everyone but Bridie, because her experience makes her too valuable. Tonight Bridget got the short straw."

"I can't believe you. Don't you value your own life?"

"Of course, but, don't you see? -- " Bridgetta laid her hands on the shoulders of her two doubles. "I have more than one life. I can afford to throw away a few as long as I know there's still some of me left."

"It's immoral. It's just as immoral as joining those cannibals."

"Now, Nathan," Panofsky said soothingly, "don't start talking about morality until you know the facts . Remember what we said about the old rules of the game? Do you think I am an atheist that I would commit suicide just like that, one-two-three? Do you think I would so easily damn my immortal soul? No. But before we can talk about right and wrong, we must learn about true and false. I hope you will excuse me from making such expositions, however. I have never enjoyed the simplifications of popular science. Perhaps you would care to instruct the good captain in some first principles, my dear Bridie, and at the same time you could instruct Bridgetta in her new duties."

Bridie bowed her head in a slightly mocking gesture of submission.

"Yes, please," said Hansard. "Explain, explain, explain. From the beginning. In short, easy-to-understand words."

"Well," Bridie began, "it's like this."





TEN

MARS

I should never have joined the Justice-for-Eichmann Committee, he thought. That was my big mistake. If I hadn't joined the committee I could have been chief-of-staff today.

But was it, after all, such a terrible loss? Wasn't he happier here? Often as he might denigrate the barren landscape, he could not deny to himself that he gloried in these sharp rock spines, the chiaroscuro, the dust dunes of the crater floors, the bleeding sunsets. It is all so . . . what? What was the word he wanted?

It was all so dead .

Rock and dust, dust and rocks; the sifted, straining sunlight; the quiet; the strange, doubly-mooned heaven. Days and nights that bore no relation to the days and nights measured off by the earth-synchronized clocks within the station. Consequently there was a feeling of disjunction from the ordinary flow of time, a slight sense of floating, though that might be due to the lower gravity.

Five weeks left. He hoped . . . but he did not name his hope. It was a game he played with himself -- to come as near to the idea as he dared and then to scurry away, as a child on the beach scurries away from the frothing ribbons of the mounting tide.

He returned down the olive-drab corridors from the observatory to his office. He unlocked the drawers of his desk and removed a slim volume. He smiled, for if his membership on the ill-fated committee had cost him a promotion, what would happen if it became known that he -- Major-General Gamaliel Pittmann -- was the American translator of the controversial German poet Kaspar Maas? That the same hand that was now, in a manner of speaking, poised above the doomsday button had also written the famous invocation that opens Maas' Carbon 14:

Let us drop our bombs on Rome and cloud the fusing sun, at noon, with radium. . . .

Who was it had said that the soul of modern man, Mass Man, was so reduced in size and scope that its dry dust could be wetted only by the greatest art? Spengler? No, somebody after Spengler. All the other emotions were dead, along with God. It was true, at least, of his own soul. It had rotted through like a bad tooth, and he had filled the hollow shell with a little aesthetic silver and lead.

But it wasn't enough. Because the best art -- that is, the art to which he found himself most susceptible and which his rotting soul could endorse -- brought him only a little closer, and then still a little closer, to the awareness of what it was that underlay the nightingale's sweet tremolos and brought him nearer to naming his unnamed hope.

Fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do.

Yet what else was there? Outside of the silver filling there was only the hollow shell, his life of empty forms and clockwork motions. He was generally supposed to be a happily married man; that is, he had never had the energy to get a divorce. He was the father of three daughters, each of whom had made a good marriage.

Success? Quite a lot of success. And by acting occasionally as a consultant for certain corporations he had so supplemented his Army income that he had no cause to fear for the future. Because he could make agreeable conversation, he moved in the best circles of Washington society.

He was also personally acquainted with President Madigan, and had gone on hunting trips with him in his native Colorado. He had done valuable volunteer work for The Cancer Fund. His article, "The Folly of Appeasement," had appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and been commended by no less a personage than former Secretary of State Rusk. His pseudonymous translations of Maas and others of the Munich "Götterdämmerung school" had been widely praised for their finesse, if not always for their content. What else was there? He did not know.

He knew, he knew.

He dialed 49 on the phone, the number of Hansard's room. I'll play a game of Ping-pong, he thought. Pittmann was an extremely good Ping-pong player. Indeed, he excelled in almost any contest of wits or agility. He was a good horseman, and a passing-fair duelist. In his youth he had represented the United States and the Army in the Olympics Pentathlon.

Hansard was not in his room. Damn Hansard!

Pittmann went back out into the corridor. He looked into the library and game room, but it was empty. For some reason he had grown short of breath.

Darkling, I listen.

Ex-Sergeant Worsaw was outside the door of the control room. He came to attention and saluted smartly. Pittmann paid no attention to him. When he was alone inside the room he had to sit down. His legs trembled, and his chest rose and fell sharply. He let his mouth hang open.

As though of hemlock I had drunk, he thought.

He had never come into the control room like this, never quite so causelessly. Even now, he realized, there was time to turn back.

The control room was unlighted, except for the red ember of the stand-by lamp above the board, which was already set up for Plan B. Pittmann leaned forward and flicked on the television screen. A greatly-magnified color image of the earth, three-quarters dark, appeared.

Love never dies. It is a mistake to suppose that love can die. It only changes. But the pain is still the same.

He looked at the button, set immediately beneath the stand-by light.

Five weeks. Was it possible? Would this be the time? No, no, surely the countermand would come. And yet . . .

Tears welled to Pittmann's gray eyes, and at last he named his hope: "Oh, I want to, I want to. I want to push it now ."



Hansard had seldom disliked his work so intensely -- if it could be called work, for aside from the mock run-throughs of Plan B and the daily barracks inspections, "A" Company had been idle. How are you to keep twenty-five men busy in a small, sealed space that is so fully automated it performs its own maintenance? With isometrics? Pittmann was right: boredom was the great problem on Mars.

Strange, that they didn't rotate the men on shorter schedules. There was no reason they couldn't come here through the manmitter on eight-hour shifts. Apparently the brass who decided such questions were still living in a pretransmitter era in which Mars was fifty million miles away from earth, a distance that one does not, obviously, commute every day.

Hansard had tried to take Pittmann's advice and looked through the library for a long, dull, famous book. He had settled on Dombey and Son , though he knew nothing about it and had never before read anything by Dickens. Though he found the cold, proud figure of Dombey somewhat disquieting, Hansard became more and more engrossed with the story. But when, a quarter of the way through the book, Paul Dombey, the "Son" of the title, died, he was unable to continue reading the book. He realized then that it was just that irony in the title, the implied continuity of generations from father to son, that had drawn him to the book. With that promise betrayed, he found himself as bereft as the elder Dombey.



A week had passed, and the order to bomb the nameless enemy had yet to be countermanded. It was too soon to worry, Pittmann had said; yet how could one not worry? Here on Mars, the earth was only the brightest star in the heavens, but that flicker in the void was the home of his wife and son. His ex-wife. Living in Washington, they would surely be among the first to die. Perhaps, for that very reason, they would be among the luckiest. The countermand would certainly be given; there was no need to worry. And yet, what if it were not? Would not Hansard then be, in some small degree, guilty of their deaths, the deaths of Nathan Junior and Marion? Or would he be somehow defending them?

It was of course misleading to consider two lives among the many millions affected. Strategy was global; the policy of optimum benefit was selected by a computer in possession of all the facts.

Guilt? A man may murder another man, or three or four, and be culpable; but who could assume the guilt of megadeaths? Ordinarily the answer would have been simply -- the enemy. But the enemy was so far away, and his guilt so ingrained in the confusions of history -- camouflaged, so to speak -- that sometimes Hansard doubted that the answer was so simple and so convenient for his own conscience.

Unwholesome, purposeless speculations. What had Pittmann said? "Conscience is a luxury for civilians."

Hansard ate his dinner alone, then went to his room and tried to listen to music. But tonight everything sounded like German beer-hall polkas. At last he took a mild barbiturate, standard issue for the men of the Mars Command Posts.

He was walking with Nathan Junior through a field of sere grass. The air was drowsy with the buzzing of flies. They were hunting deer. Nathan Junior carried the shotgun just as his father had shown him to. Hansard carried the lunch pail. Something terrible was going to happen. The color of the grass changed from yellow to brown, from brown to black. There was a loud buzzing in Hansard's ears.

He picked up the receiver of the phone. "Yes?"

"Ah, there you are, Nathan!"

"General Pittmann."

"I thought you might enjoy a game of Ping-pong."

"When?" Hansard asked.

"Right now?"

"That sounds like a good idea," said Hansard. And it did.





ELEVEN

THE NATURE OF THE WORLD

"You have to be very quick," said Bridie, "or it might happen that two objects will occupy the same place at the same time -- a highly undesirable condition. That's why we're so careful always to be here from two to three in the afternoon, when transmissions are made."

Hansard snatched away the can of pâté de foie gras that the small transmitter had just produced as an echo. The lab technician reached into the right-hand receiver and placed can[1] that he had just transmitted there into the right-hand transmitter. He pressed a button, transmitting can[1] to the left-hand receiver and at the same time producing can[2] which Hansard immediately removed from the transmitter. The pile of cans[2] that had been thus produced that afternoon filled a large basket at Hansard's feet.

"It seems to me," said Hansard judiciously, not interrupting his stockpiling, "that all this contradicts the laws of conservation. Where do these cans come from? How does a single can in the Real World produce a gross of cans here?"

"If you want an answer to your question, Nathan, we'll have to start with First Principles. Otherwise it would be like explaining a nuclear reactor to someone who believes in the indivisibility of the atom. In a sense, though, your question isn't far afield from what it was that gave Bernard the whole idea of subspecies of reality. He'd already built the first experimental model of the machine, and the press hadn't decided whether to treat him like God or like a maniac, when he realized that he'd overlooked the notorious fact that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

"But there seemed to be no reaction corresponding to the action of transmission -- nothing that could be measured. Of course it was there, in the mathematics, and Bernard busied himself with that. Are you familiar with topological transformations? No? But you do know that there are non-Euclidean geometries, and that these have the same validity as the common-sense varieties?

"Well, matter transmission is essentially a topological transformation from our world of common-sense spaces to . . . somewhere else, and then back again. It is just at the moment that the transmitted body reaches that 'somewhere else' that the reaction takes place that forms the 'echo.' Which tells you very little, I fear, that you haven't already figured out for yourself. But have patience; I will get to your question.

"The consequence, you see, of Bernard's ex post facto reasoning was an entirely new physics, a physics in which our universe is just a special case; indeed, a trivial case, as a point is a trivial case of the circle. There are, in this physics, progressive levels of reality, and matter can exist at each level. Now at the same time that there can be radical changes in the nature of the material world, there need not be corresponding changes in energic relationships."

"That is to say?" Hansard asked.

"That is to say that sub-two reality enjoys the same light of common day as sub-one reality, though that light issues from a sun composed of sub-one atoms; a fortunate consequence of the double nature of light, which seems to be both wave and particle -- and highly beneficial for us."

"Highly necessary, too. I can see that for myself. But how much energy spillover is there? Sound, for instance, doesn't carry over from the sub-one to the sub-two world."

"Because it is produced by the collision of sub-one particles and carried in a medium of sub-one gases. Similarly we can receive radiant heat from the sub-one universe, but not heat produced by conduction or convection. Magnetism and gravity still act on sublimated bodies, but Bernard has proved experimentally that the gravitational attraction isn't mutual. But we'd best not go into that. It's an embarrassing notion for someone like who wants to go on living in a comfortable old-fashioned Newtonian universe."

"And you receive radio and television broadcasts from the Real World. I've learned that much."

"Yes, if we possess a sub-two receiver."

"But in that case, why don't you communicate with the Real World by broadcasting to them? Tell them about your situation on short-wave radio."

"Have you ever tried shining a flashlight in the eyes of somebody in the Real World? No? Well, it's the same principle: We can see by their sunlight, but they're oblivious to light issuing from a light source constituted of secondary matter. The same would hold true of any radio broadcasts we might make. The Real World always remains real for us secondary creatures -- all too real. But for primary beings our secondary world might as well not exist, for all the difference it makes to them. No, there is no communication backwards.

"As Bernard pointed out, the sublimation of matter that the transmitter causes is irreversible -- another case of entropy, of the universal backsliding of all things. So, no matter how much paté we can pile up here, we must permanently remain second-class citizens."

"But in that case I don't understand why Panofsky -- Panofsky-Sub-One, that is, back there in the Real World -- keeps providing for you."

"Faith," said the new Bridgetta, who was helping Hansard to stack the cans in such a way that they did not become too heavy to keep on top of the floor, "it's all done on faith. We must be thankful that Bernard is a Catholic, and has lots of experience believing unlikely things. Oh, I'm sorry," she said, glancing at Bridie. "It's your story."

"You needn't practice being Bridget yet, darling. Not until you've been able to dye your hair. Besides, as it's been two years since I was in the Real World, you're the better qualified to tell about that."

"Once Bernard had figured out the theory behind it," Bridgetta began, "he tried to extrapolate the problems that a sublimated being would have to face in an unsublimated world. None of the necessities would be available naturally to him: no food, no water, not even air. But he would definitely exist and be alive for as long as one can stay alive under such conditions. The first problem was to provide a supply of sublimated air, and fortunately such a supply was at hand in the pumping station that was to be built to supply the Command Posts.

"Bernard invented all kinds of specious reasons for having that transmitter built here under the D.C. Dome instead of, as first planned, by Lake Superior. After only a month of transmitting, the dome would have been filled, and as long as the pumps keep pumping, the supply is more than adequate to compensate for what is lost through the traffic locks. Unfortunately the locations of the general cargo transmitters were specified in the rider to the Emergency Allocation Act, so we couldn't look forward to having all the initial advantages of Robinson Crusoe."

"Though you do have cannibals," Hansard observed.

"That was something else Bernard could do nothing about. He wanted to have the Camp Jackson manmitter built outside the dome, which would have solved our problem neatly."

"And mine too."

"Excuse me, that was a rather careless statement. But he was right: those men do pose a threat. The best we can hope for is that they don't discover us. Fortunately, one doesn't leave footprints here."

"There'd be no problem at all, if you just told the government about this. Then those men could be supplied with the food -- and officers -- that they need."

"Bernard looks on the government in a different light than you do, Captain," Bridie said rather coldly. "You forget that his relations with the government have not usually been of an agreeable nature. When it has not directly hindered his work, it expropriates and perverts it. No, don't try to argue about that with me, I'm only trying to explain Bernard's attitude. Furthermore, the government's scientists would not have understood the refinements of his theory, for they are still debating the validity of the mathematics on which the transmitter itself was based. Then, if the scientists could be convinced, try to imagine how you would go about explaining to an Army general that there are people just like you and me who are invisible, who can walk through walls and to whom we must send food, though it is probable that we will never, never be able to demonstrate -- in any tangible way -- that they exist."

"When you put it like that, I don't see how he's convinced himself ."

"Faith," Bridgetta said again, earnestly.

"Faith and reason," Bridie corrected. "Don't forget that Bernard has spent his life as a mathematician. A balanced equation is tangible proof for him . Though our existence is abstract at best, he can believe in us just as readily as in the Pythagorean theorem."

"And out of that kernel of belief has come . . . all this?" Hansard waved his hand at the goods lining the shelves of the room. "What possible reason does he give this lab assistant for carrying on this idiot work? It certainly can make no sense to him, if he's unaware that he's producing groceries for us."

"In the case of food, Bernard tells them that he's concerned about possible nutritional losses that might be caused by excessive and repeated transmissions. Preposterous, of course, but you must remember that the very idea of the machine is preposterous to most people. Remember too that the government will do all it can to humor Bernard, so long as he remains tame. The mattress, for instance. Have you heard the story of the mattress?"

Hansard shook his head.

"For a while," Bridgetta said, taking her cue from Bridie, "whenever I was transmitted anywhere, Bernard insisted that I wrap myself in a mattress. To keep myself from being bumped , he explained to the secret service guards. Of course, it was really to give us something besides a floor to sleep on. But it did make a spectacular entrance at the Paris Embassy. Madame Viandot thought it was a new fashion from New York and ordered three mattresses for herself the next day."

"And no one ever suspects? The things you transmit are so evidently survival items."

"No one has any reason to suspect that survival is a problem for us. The lab assistants, of course, are constantly complaining about the meaningless tasks that Bernard sets for them, and once Bazeley of NASA came around to ask what Bernard was up to. But he only has to hint that he's doing research on a receiverless transmitter, and they fall over themselves to be obliging. For all they know, Bernard's still good for another golden egg."

"Well, does that explain everything, Captain?" Bridie asked.

"Yes, thank you very much. I appreciate your giving me so much time."

Bridie smiled acidly. "But you've forgotten, you know, the biggest problem of all. You haven't learned how it is that you can walk."

"Christ, I've gone all this time without realizing it was a problem! How is it that I'm able to walk across the same floor I can swim through?"

"Don't feel dumb, Captain," said Bridgetta. "It's only natural to take for granted that things that you've always been able to do are possible. For Bernard, however, lacking any direct experience, this was the chief theoretical difficulty standing in the way of survival. He could never be certain that as soon as we arrive here we just don't start sinking into the ground. That's why I was so relieved when I arrived this morning -- because I found myself on terra firma. Firm enough, at least, if I don't wear heels."

"But how does it work? What keeps me from just sinking down, if gravity is acting on me, as you say?"

"Call it surface tension," said Bridie, "though actually it is a form of potential energy that is inherent in all matter at whatever level of reality. Like static electricity, it forms an equipotential surface over all objects -- a sort of 'skin' of energy. What keeps sublimated objects above the ground -- the cans on the shelves, for instance, or your feet -- is the small repellent force generated by the two surfaces; a force that decreases in proportion to the distance between the two realities.

"Thus a sub-four and, perhaps, a sub-three can would sink through a sub-one shell. But in two adjacent fields of reality the repellent force is quite sufficient for most purposes, though not so great that it cannot be overcome by an opposing force. And therefore second-degree matter can interpenetrate first-degree matter, and you can 'swim' through the floor. All this we've learned here.

"Panofsky-Sub-One has never been able to be sure, and so he keeps providing us with things we really don't need -- boards and linoleum rugs. When we try to spread the rugs, they just curl up into the floor. Still, we can be grateful that he errs on the side of caution."

"I am afraid that I am sinking deeper and deeper now, though. Sub-three and sub-four cans. I'd never even considered the possibility."

"Imagine what would happen if one of us were transmitted. A sub-two person going through a transmitter would leave behind a sub-three echo of himself. Surely you've been in caves and heard the echo of an echo? As a matter of fact, you've already described such a case. When that unpleasant sergeant donated his head to Mars, the transmission would have produced a sub-three head, though God only knows what's become of it. Sub-one water, as you may have found out, won't support sub-two bodies. A convenient rule-of-thumb is this: After sublimation, the solids of the unsublimated world appear to have the properties of liquids; liquids, the properties of gas, and gas the properties of that unfashionable commodity, an aether."

"But to return a moment to what became of Worsaw-Sub-Two: his head was taken off by a sub-one transmitter. How is that?"

"As I said earlier, energic relationships don't change as one descends the scale of reality. A sub-two transmitter, for instance, could not transmit a sub-one object, but a sub-two object, such as Worsaw's head, will be transmitted by a sub-one transmitter."

"Well, all this has convinced me of one thing."

"And that?" Bridgetta asked.

"I'm never going to be transmitted again."

"I don't understand," said Bridie.

"If I've been having a hell of a time surviving here, think what it would be like for Hansard-Sub-Three."

"Oh, you don't have to worry on that score. After all, if he didn't immediately begin to sink into the earth he would very soon die of suffocation, since he would lack a supply of sub-three air. No, at this point, Hansard-SubThree -- or Bridgetta-Sub-Three, for that matter -- is not a viable form."



Panofsky entered the room then, driving his wheel chair through the wall. "Have you justified our little euthanasia program, my love?" he asked cheerily.

"I was just getting to that," Bridie said.

"It won't really be necessary now," Hansard said. "I can appreciate the need for some sort of measure, so long as you keep being transmitted regularly. It seems to me that you keep the population at a lower level than need be, but no doubt there are reasons for that."

"There are," Panofsky assured him. "And the reason that we must keep going through the transmitter and replicating ourselves is that back there I can't be sure that the population is large enough. Not all our losses are voluntary, you know. On more than one occasion I've driven this chair and myself into the ground and drowned. Not I, strictly speaking, but the equivalent, me. So then, Nathan, you understand everything, eh?"

"There's only one thing I still don't understand, sir."

"And that?"

"You."

"Oh, but that's always the great mystery. Even Bridgetta cannot penetrate to the essential Panofsky, but keeps peeling off layers like an onion. Not my metaphor, of course -- Ibsen's. But what, particularly, puzzles you?"

"That you should try to do this all on your own. I'm sure if you spoke to someone in the government, though they might be skeptical at first, they would, eventually believe you and aid you."

"I'm just as sure of that, Nathan, and so I have said nothing. One of the few consolations of being here is that I am, for the first time in my life, a free man. I have at last found a way of escaping successfully. The government's first act of assistance would no doubt be to send a crew of men through the transmitters to supervise me here."

"If your luck turned, and Worsaw were to discover you, you'd be thankful for such supervision."

"That's the chance I take."

Hansard shook his head disapprovingly, but by the set of his jaw it was evident that he had decided not to pursue the argument.

"Consider, Nathan, what I have already suffered at the government's hands, and then think if I could gladly invite them here . They have taken my invention -- which could have made the world a paradise -- and turned it into a weapon, as though the world wants for new weapons. I should despair if I thought it were possible for my achievement to be suppressed forever. Happily, as Norbert Wiener observes, the greatest guarantee that a thing will be done is simply the knowledge that it is possible. So that in the long run, unless they prefer annihilation -- and they may, they may -- my work will not have been for nothing."

There was a long pause during which Hansard considered how most tactfully to protest against Panofsky's apolitical attitude. Didn't the man see the moral necessity of the war? Was he not himself a refugee from the tyranny of East Germany? But before he could formulate these objections clearly, Panofsky had resumed speaking, in a rather more wistful tone.

"Imagine what it might be like. Think what a source of power the transmitter represents. The mind staggers. Even my mind staggers."

"Of power?" Hansard asked.

"Instead of moving something laterally, suppose one were to transmit it upwards. Water, for instance. A circular waterfall could be created, which could power a dynamo, and only the smallest fraction of the dynamo's power would be needed to operate the transmitter itself. In effect, a perpetual motion machine."

"Then it does violate the laws of conservation!"

"At our level of reality, yes. But within the larger system, no. In other words, another universe somewhere is shortly going to experience a considerable power drain. Let us hope they have no means of plugging the hole, eh?"

"My God," said Hansard, who was still envisioning the circular waterfall. "It would change everything."

"Everything," Panofsky agreed. "And it will change our view of the universe as well. Not too long ago, in 1600, I regret to say that the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno as a heretic. The church will have to change its position now. The universe is infinite, after all; but there is no need for God to be embarrassed on that account. God can simply be more infinite. The bigger the universe, the vaster must be God's might. There are, just as Bruno envisioned them, worlds no telescope will ever see; worlds beyond those worlds, worlds still beyond infinities of worlds. Imagine, Nathan, if the earth itself were to be transmitted, and if Earth-Sub-Two were transmitted afterwards, then Earth-Sub-Three. . . . And not just once, but each a dozen, a hundred, numberless times, each transmission producing its own echo."

"Is it possible?"

"Much more is possible, though perhaps not just now. The solar system itself could be transported. We could take our sun with us as we journey about the galaxies. Is it possible? With a transmitter such as this, anything is possible. And what do you use it for? What is the only use the military mind can find for such a marvel? To dispense bombs with it!"

"Does the President know about that waterfall-machine you spoke of?"

"Of course he does. It was immediately evident to every scientist in the country that such a thing is possible now."

"Then why isn't it being built? Why, with a source of unlimited power, there never need be a war again -- or hunger, or poverty."

"You'll have to answer that question, Captain, for you represent the government, not I."

"You know," said Hansard, unhappily, "perhaps I don't."





TWELVE

THE NATURE OF THE SOUL

"Then you still don't want to tell him about it?" Bridie asked.

"To what end?" Panofsky said. "Why call him back from vacation when there's nothing he can do to alter the situation?"

"He might gather his roses a little more quickly, if he knew," Jet said.

"I think we might best consult the tastes of the lady most directly concerned," said Panofsky, turning to regard Bridgetta, who was now a blonde and no longer, in fact, Bridgetta, but merely Bridget. Her smile spoke for her: she was satisfied.

"Any more objections?" Panofsky asked.

"It's best so, of course," said Jet. "It was only selfishness that made me want to share my fear with him. But it becomes harder and harder, as the time advances, to pretend to be lighthearted."

"The effort will be good for both of us," Bridie said. "Pretending makes it so."

"Furthermore," said Panofsky, "we have every reason to suppose it will be called off. The day is fully a month away."

"Not quite that long," corrected his double.

"Well, very nearly a month. After all, it's not as though this were being decided by merely human wit. The best computers in the world are blowing fuses this very minute to do something about it. It's all game theory and bluffing. I, for one, am not worried about it. Not in the least." But when Panofsky's eyes looked across the room and met the eyes of his double, his gaze faltered and his assurance failed.

"Well," said the double somberly, "I, for another, am ."



Toward the end of Hansard's second week at Elba, and five days after the preceding conversation had taken place, our hero found himself doing something he had promised himself never to do again -- arguing with his host. Panofsky had made another passing reference to his "little euthanasia program," and Hansard had furrowed his brow just enough to show that he considered it a little murder program; but he steadfastly refused to discuss it.

"It's hardly fair, Nathan, for you to sit in judgment -- and Minos himself could not more prominently sit in judgment than you -- your face crinkles up like Saran Wrap -- and never allow the poor sinner a chance to justify himself, if he can."

"I'll allow that something of the sort has to be done, but . . ."

"But? But? Now, it really isn't fair to stop at that but , is it?"

"I was going to say that it seems a perfectly reasonable attitude, from the scientific point-of-view, but it seems strange in a Catholic."

"What a picture you must have of science, Nathan! You pronounce the word as though it were a euphemism for something unspeakable, as if science were the antithesis of the ethical -- as, since the bomb, it has in part become."

"I have nothing against the bomb," Hansard protested hastily.

Panofsky allowed this to pass with scarcely the raising of an eyebrow. "But it is curious that you should imagine an opposition between science and Catholicism which, I am sure, you regard as wholly irrational. No? Yes. A dismal prospect, if evil can only be opposed by unreason."

"Honestly, Dr. Panofsky, I don't follow you when you go off on figure-eights like that. What I had in mind was simply this: Catholics are supposed to believe in immortal souls, and that sort of thing. In fact you've already said that you do. But suicide is -- I don't know the technical term for it."

"A mortal sin. And so it is, but fortunately I cannot commit that sin at this level of reality. Only Panofsky-Sub-One can commit suicide, in the sense that it's a sin."

"Well, if you take poison and die from it, what else can you call it?"

"First, Nathan, I must explain to you the nature of the soul. At conception, when the soul is created, it is unique, only one, indivisible. God made it so. Do you think I can create souls? Of course not. No more can the transmitter, which I invented, create souls. So that the apparent multiplicity of my selves means nothing in God's eyes. I would not go so far as to maintain that I am a mere illusion . Rather let us say that I am an epiphenomenon."

"But physically your existence on this plane of reality is just as . . . as existent as it ever was. You breathe. You eat. You think ."

"Ah, but thinking is not a soul . Machines can think."

"Then you're no longer bound by any moral laws whatever?"

"On the contrary, natural law, the law derived from reason as opposed to that which is revealed to us divinely, has as binding a force here as in the Real World, just as the laws of physics work here . But natural law has always condoned suicide in certain circumstances: consider all those noble Romans throwing themselves on their swords. It is only in these Years of Grace that suicide has become an evil because it is in contradiction to the second supernatural virtue -- hope. It is not allowed for a Christian to despair."

"Then you've ceased to be a Christian?"

"I am a Christian perhaps, but not a man. That is to say, the fact that I no longer possess a soul does not prevent me from believing as I always have. I am the same Panofsky as ever, so far as you or I can see, for it is not given to us to see the soul. When Hoffmann sold his soul, he lost his shadow, or was it the other way around? In any case, it was a visible sign. But how much sadder to lose something which one cannot even be sure afterward of having ever possessed. Happily, I am prepared for this paradox by being a modern.

"Camus, you know, was troubled by a similar disparity between the strict atheism which he felt reason required, and his feeling that it was wrong to do evil. But why was it wrong? For no reason at all. But still one must have some basis for action, for choosing. So one just tries to do the best one can, from day to day, without examining the ethical dilemma too closely . . . which is more concentration-camp philosophy. I'm sorry I have nothing better to offer you."

"But if it's all meaningless -- and isn't that what a soul is all about, meaningfulness? -- then why does Panofsky-Sub-One keep providing for you? Why should he care?"

"That is a question that I hope he will never chance to ask himself. Happily, up to now he has devoted all his attention to our physical rather than our spiritual condition. If he were to convince himself that we are soulless, he might very well stop sending us supplies."

"I just can't believe that, Doctor."

"Only because you're not a Catholic."

"Look, if what you said that day in the transmitting room were to happen, if the whole damn world were to be transmitted -- what then? With all the people on it, the Pope, everyone?"

"Nathan, what a splendid question! I'd never thought of that. Of course the basic situation remains unaltered, but the magnitude of it! A whole world without shadows! Yes, and for a final paradox, what if such a transmission were to take place not tomorrow but two thousand years ago, and Christ himself . . . Nathan, you do have an instinct for these things. You may have changed my mind, which is an almost unheard-of thing at my age. I will certainly have to give a good deal of thought to the question. But now that I've shown you my soul, such as it is or isn't, would you like to show me yours?"

Hansard's brow furrowed more deeply this time. "I don't understand."

"Why is it, Nathan, that you wake up screaming in the middle of the night?"



And yet another week later.

"I'm sorry," Hansard said, "for flying off the handle with you like that."

"Not with me, I'm afraid," said Panofsky, "though Bernard did tell me about that incident. As a matter of fact, Nathan, I scolded him on your behalf. Your dreams are nobody's business but your own. I think Bernard's let himself become something of a snoop since he left the Real World. That happens to all of us to some degree, but he could confine his eavesdropping to that world and leave us alone."

Hansard laughed uneasily. "It's funny you should say that, because I'd just come to tell you -- to tell him -- that he was right. Or, perhaps, not exactly right, but . . ."

"But you were going to answer his question anyhow? Confession does ease the soul, as they say. Especially -- I've always observed -- the souls of Protestants, in which category I would include those of your stamp. It's because they're so severe with themselves that the fact of mercy overwhelms them."

"I'm not looking for mercy," Hansard said dourly.

"Precisely my point. You'll be all the more surprised to find it. Tell me, Nathan, did you fight in Viet Nam back in the Sixties?"

Hansard turned pale. "I was just about to tell you about that. How did you know?"

"It's nothing telepathic -- just a simple inference. If you're thirty-eight now, you would have come of age for the draft at the height of the whole mess. Some very nasty things happened in that war. We civilians with our heads in the sand probably got little idea of what went on, even though the newspapers were full of stories almost every day. Women and children?"

Hansard nodded. "It was a child, a little boy, he couldn't have been much older than five."

"You had to shoot him in self-defense?"

"I incinerated him in self-defense."

They were silent together a long while, though it was not, on Panofsky's part, an unsympathetic silence.

Then Hansard said, reaching for a tone of ordinariness, "But you knew it all before I even told you. You anticipated everything I had to tell you."

"We sinners are never as unique as we suppose ourselves to be. When a boy of thirteen goes into the confessional with his nails bitten to the quick, the priest will not be surprised to learn that he has committed sins of impurity. When a grown man, an Army captain, who usually evidences the most strait-laced moral code, wakes up screaming in the night, one looks for a cause commensurable to the pain. Also, Nathan, your case is not unique. There have been a dozen novels written about that war by other men who woke up screaming. But why is it, after all this time, you wanted to speak about it?"

"I haven't been able to tell Bridgetta. I tried to, and I couldn't. I thought perhaps I'd be able to, if I told you about it first."

"And why were you anxious to tell her?"

"I've always thought that one of the reasons my first marriage never worked was because I didn't tell Marion about that boy. She wouldn't let me, the one time I tried. This time I won't make that mistake."

"This is news! You're marrying the girl then?"

"In another week. There's going to be a big society wedding at Grace Episcopal, and we thought we'd just sneak in and make it a double wedding. I hope you'll be able to be there to give the bride away."

But before Panofsky could commit himself, Bridie came into the room unannounced and wearing a look of grave concern. "You'd better come and see this, Bernard. We have them on the screen now, and it's just as we feared."

Hansard followed Bridie and Panofsky into the sitting room adjoining Bridgetta's bedchamber. There Bridgetta-Sub-One, in a terrycloth bathrobe and her hair wound up in a towel, was standing a few feet back from the 12-inch screen of the videophone. The Sub-Two residents of Elba were crowded close about another receiver, apparently on an extension line from the first.

The image on the screen that Bridgetta-Sub-One was watching was of Panofsky, but on the other screen there were two Panofskys, the second of them with what appeared to be a cloud of cellophane wreathing his head. With the two Panofskys crowded before the screen and the others pictured on it, there were a total of four functioning Panofskys visible to Hansard in a single glance. It was too much, by at least one.

"What in hell is -- " he began, but Bridie silenced him with a peremptory gesture.

No sound came from either videophone, but this did not seem to dampen the interest of the spectators. While he waited for this strange charade to end, Hansard reasoned. He reasoned that (1) the videophone that Bridgetta-Sub-One was watching belonged to the Real World (which was confirmable by sticking a finger into it); that (2) the Panofsky pictured upon it must therefore be Panofsky-Sub-One (and hadn't there been talk lately of his having gone off for the Bolshoi's spring season?), and that (3) the second Panofsky, visible on the screen of the other videophone (which was tangible to Hans ard's touch), must be a sublimated Panofsky.

When the call was concluded and the image had shrunk to a small dot of light, Panofsky congratulated Hansard on his reasoning. "One of our knottiest problems," the old man went on, "was establishing communications with the others of us around the world. You see, I've made as much provision as I can for the Sub-Two Panofskys produced by the transmissions from Paris or Moscow back to Washington. There is a gas mask and oxygen supply stored beneath the seat of my wheel chair at all times. It gives me -- or him, whichever way you choose to regard it -- more or less twenty-four hours' time; enough for one last night at the Bolshoi and sometimes a visit to the Kremlin.

"But of what use is it to be a perfect spy, if one can't communicate what one has unearthed? The method that had to be employed was soon obvious to us, but we had to wait for Panofsky-Sub-One to think of it, and sometimes that man can be almost military in his thinking. But at last the solution occurred to him. What we do now is this: At a predetermined time, to be indicated on my desk calendar, Bridgetta-Sub-One receives a call here at Elba from Panofsky-Sub-One who is in another city. Today it was Moscow. Once the connection has been established, it is a simple matter for the Panofsky-Sub-Two then in Moscow to be on hand and give his report at the same time.

"It requires a bit of hithering and thithering on Panofsky-Sub-One's part. Usually he goes from Moscow, after the curtain falls at the Bolshoi, to Paris for supper, and returns to Moscow next day for another performance -- and to make the phone call. The sublimated Panofsky does not, of course, appear on the screen of Bridgetta's receiver, but on this one, which has itself been sublimated, he does appear. There is no sound, for the Panofsky-Sub-One on the other end has only the air he has brought with him. But we have learned to lip-read, so that is hunky-dory."

"Hunky-dory!" Jet whispered, with a shudder. "Not hunky-dory!"

While the first Panofsky sat back to savor his Americanism, the other sighed. "I wish there were some simpler way. This method is so wasteful of lives. There are none of the resources in those other cities that we have here at Elba. It is hard to bring everything one requires for even a short visit. The breathing equipment is bulky, and the secret service guards think it strange that Panofsky-Sub-One should always insist on bringing it along."

"Fortunately," the first Panofsky interrupted (they were neither wearing the skull cap at the moment), "he has a reputation for eccentricity. He has invented a delightfully paranoid theory concerning foreign germs."

The two Panofskys smiled in ironic appreciation of this theory.

"But there are compensations," said the second.

"Oh, yes. There is usually time to see one last performance, and from a vantage better even than the conductor's. Since being sublimated I have seen nothing, less than nothing. Here we are in one of the chief cities of the world, the capital of the most affluent culture on earth, and have you ever seen what is called ballet here? It is vomit! I protest against it vehemently. But in Moscow . . . ah! Tonight, for instance, we were told that Malinova was extraordinary in the second act of Giselle ."

The second Panofsky sighed more deeply. "Now more than ever does it seem rich to die. For him , that is."

"Exactly. We shall both be dead inside of two weeks. And we will never have seen that Giselle . I'd willingly give two weeks of my life to see that."

"Two weeks?" Hansard asked.

"Oh, Bernard!" Bridgetta cried out. "You promised not to say anything."

"My dear, excuse me. It just slipped out."

"Why should you be dead in two weeks?" asked Hansard. "There's something you've been keeping back from me. I've felt it in the air ever since I came here."

"May I tell him?" Panofsky inquired of Bridgetta.

"What choice is there now? Nathan, don't look like that. I didn't want you to know, because . . . because we were so happy."

"In two weeks, Captain Hansard, all hell breaks loose. To be precise, on the first of June. My double in Moscow just informed us that the Kremlin is being as foolishly resolute and resolutely foolish as Washington."

"I find that hard to believe," said Hansard.

"Nevertheless, it is so. Bridgetta, may I show him the letter?"

"Try to understand, Mr. Hansard," Bridie said (for Bridgetta, in tears now, was able to do no more than nod her head yes), "that when Bridget followed you that day and took this out of its hiding place in the Monument, she was only concerned to find out who you were. We had no way of knowing if we could trust you. We weren't expecting anything of this sort."

"You mean to say you opened that attaché case? But it was Priority-A!"

Panofsky removed a folded paper from his coat pocket and handed it to Hansard. "The case contained only this letter, Nathan. And since this letter was signed, a month ago, nothing has altered."

After he had digested the President's written order, after he had convinced himself of its authenticity, Hansard said, "But the diplomats . . . Or the United Nations . . ."

"No," said Jet dismally. "I've been watching them here in Washington every day. The President, the Secretary of Defense, the Russian ambassador -- none of them will unbend. Because CASS-9 won't. They've become the slaves of that computer. And now the President and the Cabinet and all the important officers of the Pentagon have gone into hiding. They've been away for a week. It bodes no good."

"I simply can't believe that if nobody wants the war -- "

"Has anybody ever wanted the war? But it was bound to happen, you know. The whole effectiveness of our arsenal as a deterrent force was based on the possibility of it being used. Now that possibility will be realized."

"But there's been no aggression, no provocation . . ."

"CASS-9, apparently, does not need to be provoked. I'll confess that, with respect to game theory, I am naďve."

The second Panofsky, who had been listening intently the while, hit the arm of his wheel chair with his fist and swore.

"He is so especially distressed," his double explained, "because he knows he could stop it. If only there were a way for him to speak to Panofsky-Sub-One."

"If all that you say is true, though," Hansard said, deliberately, "it seems to be too late for the explanations of men of good will."

"You mistake my meaning, Nathan. He, Bernard Panofsky, singlehanded, could stop the war -- snap! like that. It is all written out on vellum; a splendid, magnificent, preposterous plan. But it cannot be carried through by any of us, only by someone of the Real World. And so it is all no good, a failure . . ."

"Singlehanded?" Hansard asked, with a note of proessional incredulity.

"Alas, yes," said both Panofskys in chorus.

Then one of them removed the skull cap from his pocket and put it on his head. "If you please, Bernard -- I will tell him how."





THIRTEEN

MARS

Here there were no usual measures of time. The Camp lived on a twenty-four -hour earth-day; but a complete rotation of Mars took thirty-six minutes longer, so that only once in forty days was the high noon of the sun in perfect agreement with the high noon dictated by the clocks on the wall.

Five weeks of anxious waiting had slipped by in a twinkling. Five weeks in a limbo of inactivity and the ritual gesturing of the run-throughs and inspections. Five weeks going up and down the olive-drab corridors, eating tinfoil dinners, swilling hot coffee, thinking the same well-worn thoughts which, through repetition (just as the food seemed to lose its flavor day by day), grew wearisome and were set aside.

Like a spring brook in the dry season of the year, conversation subsided to a trickle. The enlisted men passed the long hours with endless poker games. General Pittmann kept more and more to himself, and so, perforce, did Captain Hansard.

A strange condition, a condition difficult to describe except in negatives. Life was reduced to a minimum of automatic processes -- waking, sleeping, eating, walking here and there, watching the time slip by, listening to silences. The Camp's narrow world of rooms and corridors came to seem somehow . . . unreal.

Or was it himself that seemed so? He had read a story once, or seen a movie, of a man who sold his shadow -- or perhaps it was his reflection in a mirror. Hansard felt like that now -- as though at the moment of the Mars jump five weeks before, he had lost some essential, if intangible, part of himself. A soul perhaps, though he didn't exactly believe he had one.

He wished that the countermand to the President's order would come, but he wished even more that be might be called back to the fuller reality of earth. Yet these were neither very strong wishes, for the reservoirs of all desire were drying up within him. He wished mainly for an ending, any ending, an event to accent this drear, uninflected, trickling time.

So perhaps there had been a sort of wisdom behind the decision to keep the men at the Mars Command Posts two months at a stretch, even though there was no technical necessity for it, the same wisdom that is at the root of all the compulsory dullness of military life. For boredom makes a soldier that much more able and that much more willing to perform the task that it is especially given a soldier to perform.



Ex-Sergeant John Worsaw sat in the guard bay before the door to the control room reading a tattered personalized novel. Because of his reading habits, Worsaw had a reputation around Camp Jackson/Mars as an intellectual. This was an exaggeration, of course. But, as he liked to point out in his more ponderous moments (after about two beers), you couldn't get anywhere in the year 1990 without brains, and brains wouldn't do you much good either -- without an education. (Worsaw had earned a College Equivalent Diploma in Technics.) Take Wolf Smith, for example, the Army chief of staff. That was a man who had more facts at his command than a CASS-9 computer. For a man like Smith, facts were like ammunition.

Facts. Worsaw had nothing but contempt for people who couldn't face hard facts. Like that fairy Pittmann in the control room now, worrying about the bombs probably, and afraid of the button. No one had told Worsaw of the President's order, but he knew what was in the air by the looks on the two officers' faces. What were they scared about, as long as they were here on Mars? It was the sons of bitches back on earth who had to worry!

Thinking something to this effect, though rather more hazily, Worsaw found that he had read down a quarter of a page of the novel without taking any of it in. With a more concentrated effort, he returned to the last passage he remembered:

Worsaw lobbed another grenade in the bunker entrance and threw himself flat, pressing his face into the jungle dirt. Thunder rent the air, and thick yellow smoke belched from the crumbling structure.

"That oughta do it, Snooky!" yelled the corporal, thumbing the safety off his M-14. "Let's mop up now." And Corporal O'Grady leaped to his feet.

"Look out, Lucky!" Even as Worsaw screamed, it was too late. The sniper bullets had caught O'Grady in a vicious cross-fire, spinning him and flinging him mudward, a dead man.

"The yellow-belly sons of bitches," Worsaw muttered. "They'll pay for this!"

A few feet away the blood of Lucky O'Grady seeped out into the jungle soil. The man who had been Worsaw's best friend had run out of luck at last.

Strangely moved by this last paragraph, Worsaw laid his book aside. He had heard someone coming down the corridor, and it was likely, at this hour of the day, with the men playing cards in their barracks, to be Hansard. The captain spent a lot of his time roaming about in the corridors.

"General Pittmann?"

"Yes, he's inside, sir."

Hansard went into the control room, closing the door after him. Worsaw cursed him softly; but there was in that quiet obscenity a trace of respect, even affection. Despite the pressure to restore his rank that Worsaw had put on him through Ives (who owed Worsaw more than a few favors and could be counted on to pay his debt), Hansard wasn't backing down. Which showed guts. Worsaw admired guts.

But the deeper motive of Worsaw's admiration was simply that he knew Hansard to be a veteran of Viet Nam, the last of the big fighting wars. Worsaw himself had been born four years too late to enlist for that war and so he had never, to his chagrin, undergone a soldier's baptism by fire. He had never known, and now perhaps he never would, what it was like to look at a man through the sights of a loaded rifle, squeeze the trigger and see that man fall dead. Life had cheated Worsaw of that supreme experience, and it had offered very little by way of compensation. Why else, after all, does a person go Army?

He fished the novel out of his back pocket and started to read again. He skipped ahead to the chapter he liked best, the burning of the village of Tam Chau. The anonymous author described it very well, with lots of convincing details. Worsaw liked a realistic-type novel that showed what life was like.





FOURTEEN

THE BRIDE

Love will intrude itself into places where it simply has no business to be -- into lives or stories that are just too occupied with other matters to give it its due. But somehow it can always be squeezed in. Marriage is an exemplary institution for this purpose, because conjugal love can usually "go without saying," whereas the more exotic forms of romance demand the stage all to themselves, scornful of the ordinary business of life. A married man can divide his life comfortably in half, into a private and a public sector which need never, so long as both run smoothly along, impinge upon each other.

Thus Hansard had fallen in love, paid court, proposed, been accepted, and now it is the very morning of the wedding -- and all these things have already taken place, as it were, in the wings. We should not suppose, because of this, that Hansard's was a milder sort of love than another man's, or that the romance was so ordinary and undistinguished as to be without interest for us -- or even, perhaps, for the principals involved. We need only point out the singular circumstance that the rivals of the beloved were essentially her exact doubles to dispel such a notion.

No, if there were time, it would be most interesting to linger over their month-long idyll, to document the days and nights, to smile at the follies, to record the quicksilver weathers of their growing love. For instance, notice how Hansard's expression has relaxed. There is a sparkle in his eyes that we have not seen there before. Or is it, perhaps, that they seem deeper? He smiles more often -- there can be no doubt of that; and even when he is not smiling there is something about his lips . . . what is it? Do they seem fuller now? See, too, how his jaw has relaxed, and when he turns his head how the tendons are less prominent. Small changes, but taken as a whole they give his face an altogether different stamp. Surely it is a change for the better.

Already it is May 26, the morning of the wedding. How quickly a month can go by! And is there no time left to tell how splendid a month it has been, or what has been happening back there in the wings? By all means, let us take the time, while the bride and her three bridesmaids (for Bridgetta-Sub-One had gone through the transmitter once more, increasing the Sub-Two population by one; and the newcomer immediately assumed the role of Bridget, for the bride would now be neither Bridie nor Jet nor yet Bridget, but Mrs. Hansard), the two Panofskys, and Hansard are walking down the May-morning streets to the church.

The month had gone by as though they'd been playing a game all the while. There had been such fun . Sometimes Hansard spent the day alone with "his" Bridgetta; at other times one or more of her doubles would come out with them to "swim" in the municipal police station or in the Senate buildings. He and Bridgetta had made love in heaps of flowers in a florist's window. They had taken picnic lunches to diplomatic dinners where, because there was no room for them around the table, they had sat on top and dangled their legs through the tablecloth.

They'd played tennis, singles and doubles, after spreading slices of the linoleum rugs about the court so that they wouldn't lose the tennis balls. The greatest lark, once Hansard got over his embarrassment at playing a child's game, had been Bridgetta's special version of hide-and-seek which they played in the most crowded streets and offices of the city while the sober workaday population milled about them.

They'd sneaked into the most expensive theatres and left during the first act if they found the play not to their liking -- left without any regret for the money wasted. (And, more often than not, the plays were boring because they had to be seen in dumb show.) At especially bad performances, Hansard and one or more Bridgettas would get up on the stage and ham it up themselves.

Such fun, and much, much more, too; gentler moments that might be only a word, a caress, a glance, forgotten as quickly as it happened. But what, if not the sum of such moments, is love? A moment, a month -- how quickly -- and here they are already on the way to the church!



The bride was wearing a makeshift gown sewn together from damask tablecloths and synthetic lace plundered from various articles of lingerie, no one back in the Real World having had the forethought, or the occasion, to provide for such a contingency as this today. If only fashion were considered, the bridesmaids might have been thought a good deal better dressed than the bride. But the bride was wrapped in the glory of a myth that quite out-tops all that fashion can do.

Both Panofskys were wearing formal clothes, because they had usually set off through the transmitters attired formally for the theatre. Hansard, however, had nothing better than his everyday uniform, for which the hat was still missing.

The church was crowded when they arrived, and there was no room for the invisible intruders except before the altar. Bridie put a tape of the Tannhäuser wedding march on the portable phonograph and let it play at medium volume. There was a stir in the waiting crowd, and heads turned to regard the bride advancing down the center aisle, her train borne up by three children. "A pity we couldn't get orange blossoms for you, my dear," Panofsky whispered to the bride-to-be, who was holding a bouquet of yesterday's wilted roses, the transmitters of Elba having provided nothing more appropriate for the day.

Bridgetta took three steps forward to stand behind the other bride, her feet planted squarely in the billowing train. The two grooms came out of the sacristy to take the hands of their betrotheds. The minister began to speak the silent words of the ceremony, which Panofsky, reading his lips, repeated after him.

Hansard had to dodge out of the way when the groom reached around to receive the ring from his best man. Panofsky handed Hansard the ring that Bridie had made from a costume-jewelry ring of her own by removing the stone and filing away the setting until there was only a thin gold band. Hansard placed the gold circlet on Bridgetta's finger.

He leaned forward to kiss her. When his lips were almost touching hers, she whispered, "Say it again," and he said, " I do, I do!" Then they kissed, man and wife now, till death should part them.

"I've written a small epithalamion for the occasion. Would anyone like to hear a small epithalamion?" Panofsky asked.

"Afterward. Epithalamions come with the dinner," Jet said.

The sub-one bride and groom turned around and, stepping to invisible music, descended from the altar and went out of the church. Bridie ran the tape ahead to the sprightlier Mendelssohn theme. Hansard and Bridgetta stopped kissing.

"Stand back, and let me look at you," he said, smiling broadly.

She stepped back, and then, when the shot rang out, stepped back again. Blood stained the makeshift bridal gown just beneath her heart. Her mouth dropped open, and the smile was vanished from her lips, from her eyes. He caught her in his arms. She was dead.

"That's one ," shouted a half-familiar voice. Hansard turned to see Worsaw standing in the midst of the wedding guests crowding into the aisle. "And this is two." The rifle fired again, but he missed Bridie, who had been his second target.

"Get down, out of sight!" Hansard shouted, though he did not think to take his own advice. Jet took hold of the wheel chair of one Panofsky and pushed him into the sacristy. Bridie and the new Bridget both dove into the floor. The other Panofsky had driven off under his own power and Hansard could not see him, though indeed he could see very little beyond the widening circle of blood staining the damask of the bridal dress. Forgotten, the tape recorder continued to play the Mendelssohn march tune.

"Beast!" Panofsky's voice shouted. "Monstrous, loveless beast!" He was driving his wheel chair through the crush of people in the center aisle. He aimed a revolver at Worsaw, but even from where he was Hansard could see the old man's aim was wide. A third and fourth shot rang out, the pistol and then the rifle, and Panofsky pitched forward in his chair. The wheels penetrated the surface of the floor, but the chair scarcely slowed in its headlong motion forward. Soon the wheel chair, bearing the crumpled body, had passed out of sight downward.

Hansard realized that the moment demanded action, but he was reluctant to let his bride's still-warm body sink to the floor.

Another rifle shot, and the tape recorder was silenced.

"That was dumb, Hansard," Worsaw called out. "Playing that music was plain dumb. I wouldn't of known you was in here without that."

Gently, Hansard lowered Bridgetta's body, keeping his eyes always on her murderer.

"Oh, you don't have to worry yourself yet, Captain. I won't touch you till I've wiped out your friends. I've got a score to settle with you. Remember?"

Hansard reached inside the jacket of his uniform for the pistol with which Panofsky had provided him. He did not move fast.

"Don't be stupid, Captain. How can you pull that out, when all I have to do is squeeze a trigger? Now put your hands up in the air, and tell those women and that other old man to come out from where they're hiding. If they're good-looking enough, I might not have to kill them after all. How about that?"

Hansard did not obey these commands, nor did he, by any deliberate action, disobey them. Indeed, his mind was too numb to produce the thoughts that would have led him to action.

Behind Worsaw a woman's voice let forth an incoherent cry; Worsaw spun to face the imagined danger, but it came not from behind him, as it first seemed, but from above. He had been standing at the back of the church, beneath the choir loft. When he turned, Panofsky's wheel chair dropped through the low-hanging ceiling on top of him. Hansard's wits thawed sufficiently for him to draw his pistol from its holster and empty it into Worsaw's back.

Jet dropped down from the choir loft and came running forward to Hansard. She spoke disjointedly. "I thought . . . are you hurt? . . . and then, around the outside of the church, and up the stairs to the choir . . . it was so heavy, and I could hear him. . . ." He allowed her to embrace him, but he did not return her embrace. His body was rigid, his jaw tense, his eyes glazed with a film of inexpressivity.

Once she'd released him he walked forward and turned over Worsaw's bleeding body. "Three times," he said. "First, inside the manmitter. Then, at the pumping station, and now here. I seem to spend all my time killing this one man."

Bridie and the new Bridget came in at the main door, where the last of the wedding guests were filing out. "Bernard is dead," Bridie announced. "We found him in the cellar. But where's the other Bernard?"

"In the sacristy," said Jet. "Hiding in the minister's clothes closet. It was his idea that I use his chair as a projectile. He felt that I would probably have just as poor aim with a pistol as his double had."

"I seem to spend all my life killing people," Hansard said aloud, though he seemed to be talking only to himself.

"Nathan, it isn't like that," Jet insisted earnestly. "What happened today could have happened any time, without your ever being around. It was an accident; a grotesque accident."

"Go away, please, all of you. I'd rather not see . . . your faces . . . when hers . . ." He turned away from the three women and walked back to the altar. There he took up the dead Bridgetta in his arms.

Jet would have protested again, but she was checked by Bridie. Instead she went with the empty wheel chair into the sacristy. Bridie and the new Bridget dragged the body of Worsaw out of the church. In five minutes Jet returned to ask when they would see him again.

"I want to spend the night here," Hansard said, "with my bride."

Jet went away. The cleaning people came into the church and began to sweep it out and mop up, though they did not see the blood-flecked book lying in the center aisle: The Private War of Sergeant Worsaw .

Afterward, the electric lights were turned off. In the semidarkness Hansard found himself able at last to cry. It had been many years since the tears had come from those eyes, and they did not, at first, flow freely.

Before the brute fact of death nothing can be said. It would be best if, like the three women, we leave Hansard to himself now. His grief, like his love, cannot take a very large part in our story -- which is not very far from ending.





FIFTEEN

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

And yet, what a curious, contradictory grief it was. For she who had died was not dead. She was alive; thrice over she was alive. Though no one of the Bridgettas proposed this consolation in so many words, still the daily and unavoidable fact of their presence -- of her presence -- could not but have its effect on Hansard. In one sense, it only made his loss more poignant by offering constant reminders of her whom he had lost. On the other hand he could not very well pretend that his loss was irreplaceable.

The surviving Panofsky and three Bridgettas, for their part, accepted what had happened with great equanimity. They were, after all, accustomed to the idea of their own expendability.

Then too there was the sobering consideration that in a week -- in six days -- in five days -- they would all be dead; Bridgetta, Panofsky, Hansard, and the whole populace of the Real World. Even in the depths of his grief Hansard was aware of the minutes slipping by, of the dreaded day creeping up on them like a fog bank rolling in from the river.

On the evening of the 27th, Panofsky called them all together. "The question arises, fellow citizens, how shall we pass the time? Bridgetta has a supply of LSD in our medicine cabinet, should anyone so desire."

Hansard shook his head no.

"Nor do I. However, we may change our mind. If anyone starts to panic, it's a good thing to remember. I understand it's especially helpful for terminal cancer patients, and somehow I've always associated cancer with the bomb. There are also any number of bottles of good brandy and Scotch in the cellar, should the need arise. What I would suggest, most seriously, is what a defrocked priest advised in a clandestine religion class in the labor camp of my youth -- that if one knows the Day of Judgment is at hand, one should just go about one's ordinary business. Any other course partakes of hypocrisy. For my own part, I intend to study the folio of equations that Bernard-Sub-One has just sent me through the transmitter."

Though it was sensible advice, Hansard had difficulty following it. With Bridgetta dead, the ordinary fabric of his life had dissolved. He might still continue to mourn her, but as the time advanced, the magnitude of the impending catastrophe seemed to mock at the smallness of his own sorrow. Perhaps it was exactly this that goaded him to find a solution to the catastrophe, and thereby restore a measure of dignity to his own mourning.

Or perhaps it was just luck.

However that may be, he found himself more and more driven to listen to music. At first he gave his attention to the more fulsomely elegiac selections from Panofsky's library of tapes: Das Lied von der Erde , Die Winterreise, the Missa Solemnis. He listened to the music with an urgency more intense than he had known even at the depth of his adolescent Sturm-und-Drang; as though some part of him already knew that the key he sought was concealed behind these silvery shifting tone-fabrics, hidden in the pattern but a part of it.

Gradually he found the Romantics, even Beethoven, too heavy for his taste. He would have liked to turn to Bach then, but Panofsky's library provided only the Sonatas for Unaccompanied Violin and the Well-Tempered Clavier. Here too, though still indistinctly, he felt the presence moving just beyond the veil; yet when he tried to touch it, to fix it firmly in apprehension, it eluded him as when, reaching into a pooi of water, the fish dart swiftly out of reach of the grasping hand. At last it was Mozart who gave it to him.

On the first play-through of the tape of Don Giovanni , he felt the veil tearing. It began during the trio of the three masquers at the end of the first act, and the rent widened steadily until the penultimate moment when Donna Elvira arrives to interrupt the Don at his carousal. He scorns her earnest warnings; she turns to go out the door . . . and screams; the great D-minor chord thunders in the orchestra, and the statue bursts into the hall to drag the unrepentant Don to hell.

Hansard stopped the tape, reversed the reel, and listened to the scene again from the moment of Donna Elvira's scream.

The veil parted.

"The chord ," he said. "Of course, the chord."



He tore himself away from the music to seek out Panofsky, but discovered the old man sitting only a few feet away, listening raptly to the opera.

"Doctor Panofsky, I -- "

"Please, the music! And no more of that foolish 'Doctor.'"

Hansard switched off the recorder during the height of the brief, electric scene between Don Giovanni and the statue.

"I'm sorry, but I must tell you now. It concerns the music, in a way -- but more than that, I've thought of how it can be done . . . what you said could not be . . . how to communicate with the Real World! Perhaps, just perhaps."

"The most awesome moment in all music, and you -- "

"I'll form a chord!"

"It is true," Panofsky replied, in a more moderate tone, "that Mozart can suggest to us a harmony embracing the world; but art, sadly, is not the same thing as reality. You are wrought up, Nathan. Calm yourself."

"No, no, truly -- this is the way ! You can talk to Panofsky-Sub-One by becoming part of him again, by restoring the unity that was disrupted. You'll mesh with his body -- and with his mind; probably when he's asleep."

A light began to glow in Panofsky's eyes. "I am a fool," he whispered, then paused, as though waiting for Hansard to contradict him -- or perhaps for his other self to agree. He went on: "An idiot. A chord -- yes, it is a fine analogy, though, mind you, nothing more . I can't be sure yet. There is a demonstrable relationship between a man of the Real World and his echo, a sort of proportion, but whether it is enough . . . I cannot, in the time we have left, develop a mathematical model . . ."

"There's no need to. Just do it!"

"But what a lovely analogy." Panofsky's eyes were closed, and his fingers moved in pantomime before him. "You sound middle C on the piano, and simultaneously the C an octave above. The ear can no longer sort out what it hears, and the overtones of the two notes resolve into a single chord."

"The fibers of the body would be the overtones," Hansard theorized eagerly. "The tone of the muscles, the memory traces of the brain, the blood type, the whole pattern of being. Place the two patterns together, and there'll be a sort of resonance between them, a knitting together."

"Yes, a kind of understanding, perhaps; a natural sympathy, a bond."

"A chord . . . And wouldn't communication be possible then?"

"Without evidence, Nathan, how can we know? But there's a chance, and I must try it. If it works -- why then, Nathan, you and I may have saved the world at its last minute. You frown! What now, Nathan? Is it that you misdoubt my plan? Well, well, Napoleon had his skeptics too, and see how far he went.

"No, I'm perfectly confident that once I've been able to communicate with Panofsky-Sub-One I can carry it off, grandiloquent as it must sound to you. But now I must find that gentleman out. And -- speak of the devil . . ."

For another Panofsky had just entered the library through the open door. "You might have been waiting outside the transmitter if you'd been expecting me. It wasn't very cheery coming into an empty house. Why are the two of you looking at me as though I were a ghost? And for that matter -- " turning to Hansard, "I don't believe we've been introduced."

"But you're not Panofsky-Sub-One," Hansard said.

"A sound induction. No, he just left for Moscow. Didn't you see where I'd noted it down on the memo calendar?"

"And Bridgetta?" his double asked.

"Went with him, of course."

"How long will they be gone?"

"Till June 2nd, when Malinova repeats her Giselle . Good heavens, Bernard, what's the matter? You look as though I'd just announced the end of the world."



But, a little later:

"You can't expect me to build it!" Hansard protested.

"Nonsense, Nathan, there's nothing to build. Just a trifle of rewiring. Surely there is a stock of spare elements at the Mars base. With the equipment as it exists, it shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes' work to convert those elements to what we'll need."

"But the elements for the Camp Jackson manmitter are so small!"

"Size is no consideration, Nathan, nor is distance. And you'll have all the power you need in a dry cell. No, my chief worry is not in your assembling the transmitter, but in your getting the co-ordinates down pat. I think we can afford a day of practice. Have you ever put together your own hi-fi?"

"When I was a kid."

"Then you should have no trouble. A hi-fi is more complicated. Let me show you what you must do. In the laboratory. Now. Quickly, quickly!"



At twilight on the 29th of May Hansard and Bridie stood once again on Gove Street and watched the men of Camp Jackson walking in and out of the wall about the pumping station. Their number had been much reduced: Hansard counted fewer than ten. It was necessary to use these transmitters, which were in continuous operation, rather than the manmitters within the camp proper, since there were no jumps scheduled to Camp Jackson/Mars for two more weeks. Had Panofsky possessed the co-ordinates for the Mars Command Post, Hansard might have foregone this sort of hitchhiking altogether.

Finally the last of the men they had seen go in came back out. They waited another half hour, then strolled down the street to the wall and through it, trundling an empty wheel chair before them. The door of the pumping house had been standing open during the day, and the great volume of sub-two water had spilled out, to run down the hill and form a shallow moat on the inside of the wall. There were only a few inches of water on the floor of the station, and the steady cascade pouring out of the transmitter -- the echo of the water that had just been transmitted to Mars. A chilly breeze stirred their clothing, originating in the transmitting chamber of the air pump.

"Now," Bridie said briskly, "we shall just have to hope that we can discover to which of the Posts they're transmitting at any given moment. Follow the technicians about and see what they do. Meanwhile, I'll look over the equipment."

Within five minutes they had found the switch mark CJ that controlled air transmissions. They observed two full cycles of transmission as the stream of air was routed to each of the Command Posts in turn; there was an interval between transmissions averaging five seconds. Only during this time would it be safe for Hansard to enter the transmitting chamber; a little earlier or a little later, and he would be transmitted piecemeal to Mars, as Worsaw had been.

"It's not enough time," Bridie said unhappily.

"It's enough time," Hansard said.

They took turns blowing up the air mattress that was to serve as his cushion inside the transmission chamber. The cushion was not for the sake of comfort but to prevent, as much as possible, any part of Hansard from projecting through the "floor" of the chamber and being left behind.

Hansard began to strap on the breathing equipment that had been stored on the underside of Panofsky's wheel chair. There would not be sub-two air on Mars, so he would have to bring his own supply. He pulled the flimsy-looking clear plastic mask down over his head, sealed it about his neck, and opened the valve controlling oxygen input.

"Ready or not," he said, "here I come." Only after the words had left his lips did he realize that they had been an unconscious echo of his games of hide-and-seek with Bridgetta.

Bridie said something, but with the mask sealed over his head he could not hear her. She stepped directly before him and repeated the words, with exaggerated movements of her lips and appropriate gestures: "We LoVe . . . You."

Hansard nodded curtly. "Ditto," he whispered.

Bridie stood on tiptoe so she might kiss him. Their lips pressed against each other's through the thin film of plastic.

"Be . . . LucKy . . . CoMe . . . BacK."

He positioned himself before the transmitting chamber, and Bridie watched over the shoulder of the technician throwing switches. She nodded to Hansard, who carefully laid the rubber mattress on the bottom of the chamber, then, sliding in through the thin metal wall, spread himself out flat on it in the darkness. In almost the same instant the mattress popped and the air rushed out. "Hell!" Hansard said aloud, but it was too late to turn back now. At almost any moment the switch would be thrown that would send him to Mars.

It was taking too long. He remembered the last time he had gone through a transmitter -- the long wait, the hand coming through the door of the vault. . . .

Then he realized that he was there, that the mattress had popped at the moment of transmission. Some part of it had been pushed down through the floor of the chamber, outside the field of transmission. It was fortunate for Hansard that it had been the mattress that had thus inadvertently punctured and not his gas mask.

He rose to his feet and walked forward in the darkness of the receiving chamber. He came to a wall, passed through it. There, not ten feet away, drinking coffee with General Pittmann, was Nathan Hansard, Captain in the United States Army. No man had ever seemed more strange to Hansard than he.



The mattress popped and the air rushed out. "Hell!" Hansard said aloud, but it was too late to turn back now. Then his sub-three flesh, too insubstantial to be supported by the "skin" of energy of the sub-one world (Mars, not earth, since this transmitter, unlike the Camp Jackson manmitter, transmitted continuously, re-echoing endlessly the echoes thrown back by transmission), began to sink slowly into the ground. Realizing the hopelessness of his situation, Hansard-Sub-Three turned off the oxygen input valve.

An infinite series of Nathan Hansards -- echoes of echoes -- made the same decision, and each died clinging to the same hope: "I hope he makes it."





SIXTEEN

THE CHORD

"You're not looking well, Nathan. Small wonder. I don't suppose I look very thriving myself."

As a matter of fact, though, that was just how one would have described General Pittmann at that moment: thriving. While Hansard had seemed to age a decade in these last weeks, the General's features had assumed a strange and unbecoming youthfulness, an effect exaggerated by an unaccustomed looseness in his manner.

His tie was knotted lopsidedly, and his collar unbuttoned. His hair needed trimming, and his shoes were scuffed. There was a lightness in his step, a nervousness in his gestures, a quickness in his speech, that had not been customary to him these many years. Just so, the weather of an October afternoon can sometimes be mistaken for spring.

Hansard looked down at the rainbow-banded swirls of oil coating his coffee. With great effort he moved his lips to say, "No, sir."

"Perhaps you're not getting enough vitamins. I notice that you've been missing meals. We should always take care of our health. Good health is our most precious possession."

Hansard couldn't decide if the General was taunting him with these banalities, or if he really did have so little sense of their inappropriateness.

"Now if I were Julius Caesar, I would be wary of someone with that 'lean and hungry look' of yours."

A joke seemed to be called for, so Hansard roused himself to make an attempt. "I'd lose that look fast enough, if you could get us something to eat besides these everlasting frozen dinners."

Pittmann's laughter was out of proportion to the joke. He indulged himself in a short diatribe against Army food. It was quite funny, and despite himself Hansard had to smile. Since it had become evident, two weeks before, that the orders were not going to be countermanded, neither man had mentioned the bombs.



Hansard[2] regarded himself with something approaching horror. That wan smile, those furtive eyes returning ever and again to the coffee cup, the pallor and inertness of his flesh and, overwhelmingly, his falseness . For though he could not understand what words Hansard[1] was speaking, he knew, beyond all doubt, that they were lies.

At twenty-one-hundred-thirty hours Hansard[1] finished his coffee and went out into the corridor, Hansard[2] following, where he strolled idly and ill-at-ease. Hansard[2] experienced another moment of uncanniness when on his way out of the toilet he passed Worsaw, who, when he saw that Hansard[1] could no more see him, sneered and muttered a silent obscenity that did not need a lip reader to interpret.

How strange it seemed that this man, resenting him as deeply as he did, should yet be subservient to him here. How had society so been ordered that all mankind should accept the invisible restraints of custom -- Hansard no less than Worsaw? For it was evident that Hansard[1], for no more compelling reason than because it was expected of him, was prepared to assist at the annihilation of humanity in violation of everything he knew to be moral. It was a paltry consolation to realize that a million others could have been found as pliable as he.

Eventually Hansard[1] went into his own small room which, despite some few shards of blond wool tentatively posing as furniture, seemed less a habitation than a branch of the corridor that came to a dead end here. Instead of preparing for sleep, Hansard[1] took a book from the wall locker and began to read.

It was the Bible. Hansard had not looked into a Bible since he'd prepared for Confirmation a quarter of a century before. This nervous, morose stranger seemed to bear less and less relationship with anyone Hansard[2] could recognize as himself.



It had seemed worth a try. Wasn't religion intended for just such times as this, when all reasonable hopes were daunted? "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death -- " and all that.

But it wasn't working. For one thing, there was just so much of it, and none that he had found -- neither prophets nor apostles nor yet the faded image of Christ, who seemed to live, for Hansard, in a landscape of calendar art -- seemed quite to the purpose. Here on death's brink he found it as hard to believe in the Resurrection and the Life as he had at the age of fourteen when, for his parents' sake (and had they really cared so much themselves?), he had been confirmed.

No, he had found no consolation here, but he did -- as one will torment oneself by probing at a rotten tooth -- take a kind of perverse pleasure in reading just those passages in Job, in Ecclesiastes, in Jeremiah, that strengthened and confirmed his unbelief:

Then said I in my heart: As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.

For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.

Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me; for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

In sleep the complex melodies of conscious thought would be dampened; there would be only the simple C of Hansard[1]'s sleeping mind and, an octave below, the C of Hansard[2]. Such, at least, had been his hope. But he was impatient.

Now, he thought, it may be possible. . . .

Carefully he lowered his frame into the seated body of Hansard[1]. A curious and not quite pleasant sensation to feel his two legs, real and ghostly, slipping into alignment, to feel his breath stop for a moment and then return, synchronized with the breathing of Hansard[1]. His vision blurred, and then, when it was restored, he found his eyes moving over the printed page, not reading, only seeing the print skitter past.

He concentrated on the meaning of the text and tried to bend his mind to the emotional state that he supposed must be Hansard[1]'s. But though he could feel his larynx vibrating with the same subvocalized sound patterns, the two minds maintained their distinct identities. Sometimes he would feel a memory stirring with strange autonomy, or he would feel, fleetingly, the most inexpressible sadness. But it was with these moments, as with night-vision, that whenever lie tried to concentrate on them they would retire into the obscurity whence they had come.

Reluctantly he disengaged himself from Hansard[1]. It was no good. He would have to wait till he went to sleep.



Hansard could not sleep. Since he had made the Mars jump, he had been taking heavier and heavier dosages of barbiturates, but they no longer helped. He lay on his bunk in the darkness, remembering how, as a child, in another darkness, he had lain awake so, trying by sheer power of imagination to place himself outside his slum-suburban bedroom and far far off -- on Mars, perhaps -- whispering -- If I pretend hard enough it will come true .

And so it had; so it had.

Now where? Now what worlds could he wish himself away to? Madness, perhaps; such madness as seemed to have possessed Pittmann. Or sleep? But he remembered a line from Shakespeare: "To sleep, perchance to dream -- aye, there's the rub."

He elbowed himself out of bed, smoothed the wrinkles out of his shirt, and went out into the corridor. Now where?

In the observatory he looked at the dead rocks of Mars. In his youth, he had been so sure that Mars was teeming with life. Even when the first Mariner pictures came back (he had been thirteen) he refused to believe them. Nobody believes, at that age, that there can be such a thing as death.

Though the clocks inside the Command Post gave the time as only a bit after midnight it was a bright, chiaroscuro morning outside. It hurt one's eyes to look too long upon it.



Sleep, you bastard, sleep! Hansard[2] thought angrily. He did not dare cease pacing the floor of the observatory, for he was himself so tired (having kept himself awake throughout the previous night just so he would not be insomniac himself) as to be in danger of dropping off to sleep if he let himself sit down anywhere. Hansard[1], meanwhile, sat staring at the Mars noonday. What in that barren waste absorbed him so?

At length Hansard[1] returned to his room and lay down again, without undressing. In the utter darkness Hansard[2] had no way to know if his double had fallen asleep, except by entering his body.

This time Hansard[1]'s eyes were closed. His jaw relaxed, his mouth opened slightly, his lungs drew deeper breaths of air.

His fist unclenched, and he accepted the case of ammunition that was handed to him. They were going hunting. "For what?" he asked, but the grownups went on chattering in their shrill buzzsaw voices, ignoring him. He walked through fields of sharp black rocks, stirring up swarms of buzzing flies with every step. The ammunition case was so heavy, and he was so little, it wasn't fair! It was surprising how few people there were on Mars. He supposed they must all be locked up underground or somewhere. Why couldn't he carry the gun instead? But he was. He was all alone with the gun, in that burnt-over landscape. The ashes got into his eyes so that he almost had to cry.

He walked toward the flame that burned at the horizon, holding the rifle on the ready. The man was shooting fire from a plastic garden hose, burning the rice; so he planted the butt of the rifle into the ground, because he was too little to shoot it any other way. He looked at the man with the garden hose, in his strange uniform. No man had ever seemed more hateful to Hansard than this one. The man Hansard turned the flame thrower on the boy Hansard, and they woke, both of them, screaming a single scream.

"It wasn't right," he said, astonished that it had taken himself so long to learn what, as soon as it had been spoken, seemed so self-evident.

And then, from another and not quite familiar part of his mind (as though, waking, he continued to dream), "It isn't right."

He shook his head sadly. Right or wrong, there was nothing he could do about it.

"But there is," the dream-voice insisted. The voice was his own and not his own. He relaxed and let himself smile. It was such a relief to have gone mad. It would be interesting to see what he did now. "Listen . . ." said the voice -- his own and not his own -- and he listened. . . .





SEVENTEEN

THE CATACLYSM

"Good-morning, Nathan! You seem to have recovered your appetite."

"Yes, and then some. No matter how much I seem to eat this morning, my stomach still feels hollow as a drum. Can you beat that?"

"And your good humor too. Welcome back to civilization. We've missed you."

"Just in the nick of time, eh?"

Pittmann regarded his subordinate uncertainly. Had this been said in jest? He decided it had been, but limited his show of appreciation to the barest smile.

"And you already have the coffee perking."

"I'm afraid I made it a little strong."

General Pittmann poured himself a cupful from the electric percolator and sipped the hot coffee appraisingly. "Yes, just a bit." It was a choice between making do with this, and waiting for another pot. He made do.

"I've been thinking . . ." Hansard said.

"We try to discourage thinking in the Army," Pittmann said placidly, as he pried apart two slices of frozen bread and put them into the toaster.

". . . about what you said the day I arrived here. I think you were right."

"I wouldn't be surprised." He grimaced over a second mouthful of the coffee. "But you'll have to refresh my memory, Nathan. I say so many right things."

"That it's genocidal to use the bombs."

"Did I say that? Surely only in the most hypothetical way -- if I did. For my own part, I have little but contempt for people who warm their consciences over such words, and over that word especially. You can't win a war, you know, without making omelettes." Pleased with his timing, Pittmann cracked two eggs neatly into the electric skillet. "So I hope you're not taking such talk too seriously. At your age it isn't becoming to be that deadly earnest."

"But if the word has any meaning at all -- "

"Exactly, Nathan. It has none. It's a red flag to wave at Liberals."

"There is the classic example."

"Yes?" General Pittmann looked up, inviting -- or daring -- Hansard to continue. An impish grin played at the corner of his lips. "The example of Germany, you mean? Why do you bring up a subject if you then refuse to talk about it? Auschwitz was ill-advised, certainly. A terrible waste of manpower, not to mention the prejudice involved; that is what I find most offensive. But nowadays prejudice doesn't enter into it. The bomb is the most democratic weapon man has ever devised. It draws absolutely no distinctions . . . . You make lousy coffee, Nathan."

"You make filthy jokes, General."

"That borders on impertinence, you know. But I'll overlook it for the sake of having you making conversation again."

"Your coffee will taste better if you put milk and sugar in it."

"A barbaric custom," Pittmann complained, but he followed Hansard's advice.

"Since when have you let considerations like that stand in your way?"

Pittmann laughed in good earnest. "Better, much better. You see, it's all in having a delicate touch. Would you like a piece of toast? Isn't life . . ." he scarcely seemed to pay attention to the knife that slipped out of his fingers and clattered on the floor, ". . . a terrible waste of manpower?" He laughed weakly.

"Oh, put that gun away, Nathan! What do you think I'm going to do -- attack you with a butter knife? I'm too weak to . . . " he closed his eyes ". . . to finish sentences. It won't do you any good, Nathan, this noble gesture of yours. If you'd waited till the last minute, perhaps you might have prevented me. But then, this is only one post. What of the other? What of Russia? Foolish Nathan. . . .

"Why did you poison me?"

Hansard stared at the general coldly. Pittmann had very delicately balanced himself in the spindly tubular chair so that he could not fall out of it when he was unconscious.

"I always wondered, you know . . . I always wondered what it would be like to die. I like it." He fell asleep, smiling.

Hansard chuckled. He knew Pittmann would be mortified when he woke up next day. There had been nothing but Army-issue barbiturates in the coffee, which were guaranteed nonlethal in any quantity. Hansard left the officers' mess, locking the door behind him.

He returned to his cabin to work on what Panofsky had promised would be "a trifle of rewiring." The adjustments that had to be made in the standard transmitter elements that Hansard had rifled from storage taxed his manual abilities to the limit, but he had had the advantage of having performed the same task only hours before under Panofsky's supervision. It was exasperating just now, at the moment of highest crisis, to have to work electronic jigsaw puzzles. But it was possible. He needn't even feel rushed. Indeed, with so much at stake, he did not dare to.

When all the assemblies were put together and had been checked and rechecked, Hansard fitted them into two overnight bags -- all but the essential "fix." This he hid in the observatory ventilation shaft.

As fate would have it, it was Worsaw whom he found on duty before the entrance to the manmitter.

"Private Worsaw, the General asked me to tell you to report to him on the double in the observatory."

"Sir?" Worsaw looked doubtful. It was not likely Pittmann would be interested in seeing him .

"I shall stand duty for you here, of course. Better not keep him waiting. I suspect his request has something to do with those chevrons missing from your sleeves." Hansard winked, a friendly conspirator's wink.

Worsaw saluted briskly and took his leave. Poor fool, Hansard thought. He too walks out of my life smiling. He was happy that he had not been required once again, and this time definitively, to kill Worsaw. He never wanted to kill anyone again.

Hansard entered the manmitter with the key he had taken from Pittmann. After taking out the first of the devices he would need, he depressed the button that operated the manmitter. The letters stencilled on the steel wall flickered from MARS to EARTH. He was home again, but there was no time to kiss the terran ground. His arrival would not have been unannounced; neither would it be welcome.

He looked at his watch. Two-eighteen p.m. He had, he estimated, another three minutes. He had found that he could hold his breath no longer than that. He made the last connections in the receiverless transmitter just as the door of the receiver sprang open and the guards burst in.

They opened fire on the man who was no longer there.

"Receiverless transmitters?" Hansard had objected, when first Panofsky had outlined his plan. "But you've said yourself that such a thing isn't possible. And it doesn't make sense ."

"Sense!" Panofsky jeered. "What is sense? Does gravity make sense? Do wavicles? Does the Blessed Trinity? God glories in paradoxes more than in syllogisms. But I was quite sincere in what I told you. Strictly speaking, a receiverless transmitter isn't possible. But who says the receiver has to be where you want your bundles transmitted? Why not send it along with them?"

"Yes, and why don't I lift myself up by my boot straps?" Hansard replied sourly.

"The heart of the matter," Panofsky continued imperturbably, "lies in that word 'instantaneous.' If matter transmission is truly instantaneous and not just very very fast, like light, then, at the exact instant of transmission, where is the object we're transmitting? It is here , or is it there? And the answer, of course, is that it is both here and there . And thus -- the receiverless transmitter, socalled. We just attach a set of three transmitters and three receivers to the object, posit the transmitters as being here and the receivers as being there, press the button, and poof ! You see?"

Hansard shook his head glumly.

"But you've already seen it work! You traveled all over the house in it."

"Oh, I know it happened. But the state I'm in now, you could as easily convince me that it's magic that makes it work, as the laws of nature. That's what it is -- even down to the magic number three."

"Numbers are magic, of course, and none more so than three. But there is also a reason for that number. Three points establish a plane. It is the hypothetical plane that those three receivers define by which we can place the transmitted object at exactly that point in space where we wish it to be."

"Even I can call your bluff on that one, Doctor. It takes four points to define an object's position in space. Three will determine a plane, but for a solid body you need four. That's simple Eudidean geometry."

"And you'll get a good grade in that subject. In fact, there does have to be a fourth transmitter-receiver for the whole thing to work at all. And the fourth one doesn't travel along with the others. It stays behind and serves as the point of reference. The 'here' posit of the transmitter and the 'there' posit of the receiver can be considered to form two immense pyramids sharing a common apex at the 'fix' point."

"And where will my fix be?"

"On Mars, of course. Where else could it be?"



Naturally enough, the first point for which Panofsky had been able to obtain exact information concerning longitude, latitude, and altitude had been his own residence; and it was there, in the library, that Hansard came first after leaving Camp Jackson/Virginia. Panofsky and Bridgetta being away in Moscow, Hansard was conveniently alone. He placed the first transmitter-receiver at the agreed-upon location behind the uniform edition of Bulwer-Lytton. Then, taking up the two bags with the rest of the equipment he set off once again, a comfortable thirty seconds ahead of schedule.

It had been more difficult to find sufficiently detailed information concerning two other locations. The data on the Great Pyramid of Egypt Panofsky had discovered in a back number of The Journal of Theosophical Science .

Hansard arrived at the apex of the Great Pyramid at night. He had never seen a desert from such a height under moonlight before and, despite the urgency of his task, he had to pause to gaze down at the scene with awe. Someone, perhaps a tourist, glimpsed Hansard's silhouette against the moon and began shouting at him. The night wind carried his words off and Hansard caught only scattered wisps of sound, not enough even to tell what language the man was speaking -- much less his meaning. Hansard left the second of the transmitter-receivers atop the crumbling stone, and moved on to the third and last point of the triangulation.

He found himself in the midst of a vast concrete expanse from which there projected, at wide intervals, the small knobs of the headstones. This was the eighty acres of the Viet Nam War-Dead Memorial erected outside Canberra by the new Liberal Government that had taken Australia out of the war. With a magnanimity unparalleled in history, the government had here commemorated the enemy's dead in equal number with its own.

Hansard set the last receiver-transmitter upon one of the headstones. Only one minute twenty-three seconds had passed since he'd made the first jump from Camp Jackson/Virginia. There was time, some few seconds, for reverence.

"It was wrong," Hansard said with great definiteness.

And, though he did not go on to say so, the wrong was irretrievable. The boy was dead forever. This very headstone might mark his grave.

That was all the time he could allow for reverence. He pressed down the button of the third transmitter-receiver. A delayed-action mechanism provided him with fifteen seconds' grace. He unzipped the second of the two bags and took out the neutralizer. It had an effective range of six feet.

"You'd better go now," he said to himself. It was Hansard[2] who said this, but there was no reply from Hansard[1].

Only then did Hansard[2] realize that he had been deceived all this while; that in an inviolable part of his mind, Hansard[1] had formed his intention and kept it secret from his other self. It was too late to argue with him, for suddenly the ground under Hansard[2]'s feet became solid, and he knew that the earth had just been turned upside down on its axis and transmitted to the other side of the solar system.

"Impossible!" Hansard had said. "And if it could be done, it would be a madness worse than the bombs."

"Fudge, Nathan! Haven't you learned yet that I'm always right?"

"What will become of all the people in the Real World? You should think of their welfare before you consider ours."

"The chief immediate consequence for them will be that people in the northern hemisphere will suddenly see the constellations usual to southern skies. In consequence, there will probably be more than a' few shipwrecks on the night-side of earth. A small enough price to pay, considering the alternative."

"But how will this prevent the bombs? They'll be coming from Mars to their receiver-satellites, in any case."

"But the receiver satellites will lie outside the earth's field of transmission. Earth-Sub-One will cross the solar system and leave the satellites behind."

"So they can drop their bombs on Earth-Sub-Two?"

"You forget that for anything constituted of primary matter, secondary matter seems not to exist. From the point of view of those bombs, earth will seem to have disappeared. Moreover, they will cease to be satellites, since the echo of earth remaining behind has no gravitational grip on them. They'll fly off tangent to their orbits and eventually be dragged down into the sun." Panofsky grinned. "Imagine, though, what your people on Mars will think when the earth suddenly disappears from the sky! Will they blame it on the Russians?"

Hansard was not ready to make jokes on the subject. "But . . . the magnitude of it! The whole damn earth! "

"Is that meant to be an objection? Great magnitudes often simplify an operation. Clock towers were built before wrist watches, and the solar system has often been called a celestial timepiece. Consider that, in transmitting the earth, I waste none of its momentum. Placed properly and pointed in the right direction, it should proceed in its immemorial orbit about the sun without a hairbreath of wobble. I can't guarantee quite that exactitude, but my calculations show that nothing too terrible should result."

"And turning it upside down?"

"To conserve the order of the seasons which, as you certainly should know, are caused by the earth's position along its orbit about the sun. In effect, I am advancing the earth six months through time. Turning it topsy-turvy will compensate for that exactly."



There was no air for him to breathe.

You fool! Hansard[2] thought angrily. Why did you stay inside the field of neutralization? Why?

What difference, now? There was a sadness in the tone of the reply that Hansard[2] could not believe to be his own. The six weeks they had lived apart had, after all, made them different men.

Do you suppose you're even now? Do you think your lost life can make up for his? Fool!

Not for his sake, no.

Then why? why? What of Bridgetta?

Hansard[1] did not, or could not, reply. Perhaps, for him, there would not have been a Bridgetta. Reluctantly Hansard[2] disengaged his body from its sheath of fibers. The discarded and soon lifeless body did not sink to the ground (which was not ground for it) but slowly, ever so slowly, lifted into the air and drifted above the vast concrete field, like a helium balloon, withered, at the end of a long day. The gravitational pull of the newly-created earth[2] had no effect upon the primary matter of that body, and it was being pulled inexorably toward the Real Moon low in the West, hidden behind clouds.

The moon, in turn, had begun its slow plunge toward the sun. There was no longer any force to hold it in place.

A residue at the back of Hansard[2]'s mind told him why his sub-one self had gone willingly to his own death. He was ashamed of having, to his way of thinking, been guilty of that most heinous of crimes -- mutiny.

Hansard[2] removed the breathing equipment he had been wearing since the night before. He did not need it, for now he had a world of air to breathe again, a world of ground to walk upon, and a world of men to give meaning to his own manhood. This, the echo of a world, was his Real World now.

And there would not be a war to destroy it.





EIGHTEEN

THE HAPPY ENDING

Hansard's taxi came to a stop outside the New St. George, a hotel which in the ordinary scheme of things he would not have been able to afford. He asked the man at the desk the number of Panofsky's suite. It was, perhaps, not wholly by chance, the same that Hansard had occupied, invisibly, forty days before. He found the two Panofskys alone.

"Nathan! How good to see you, Nathan!" They drove their wheel chairs toward him with one accord, braking just short of a collision.

"I was afraid," said the Panofsky in the skullcap, "that I would have to leave without seeing you."

"He's off to Rome, you know," the other Panofsky explained, "to see the Pope. For the time being, anyone who travels via transmitter is under Vatican interdict; so Bernard will fly. You flew yourself, didn't you, Nathan?" Hansard nodded. "But it took you such a long time!"

"The Egyptian emigration authorities were just a little upset to find me in their country. And then, when the moon began to disappear . . ."

"Ooof, the moon! I am so stupid, I deserve not to live. A kick in the pants I deserve."

Hansard was skeptical. "You can't mean that you actually overlooked that this would happen? That you thought of everything but that?"

The two Panofskys exchanged a guilty look. "Such at least," the first said mildly, "we have given the government to believe."

"But let's not speak of it, for though the government is treating us a little more civilly now, this room is surely bugged. Tell me, Nathan, do you think the end justifies the means? Once in a while, perhaps? It is true that without the moon there will be no tides, either here or on Earth-Sub-One; the ocean currents will become confused, and there will be terrible disasters, yes -- disorders, tragedies. But on the other hand there has not been a war. Besides, I have a plan in readiness -- it is being explained now to the Russians -- for recovering the moon. But you had better explain it to Nathan, Bernard; I'm late for my plane. Is there anything I can do for you in Rome, Nathan? Arrange a wedding, perhaps, at St. John Lateran?"

"Off to His Holiness, busybody! You know the Captain dislikes to be nudged.

"The moon," he continued, when his double had departed, "is at this moment populated by a number of very perplexed, not to say frantic scientists -- Russians -- none of whom have an inkling of what is happening to the solar system. Similarly, on Earth-Sub-One, no one will have any notion of what's going on -- no one but myself, Panofsky-Sub-One, and even he may be upset to think that someone else has, all unknown to him, developed a receiverless transmitter and put it to such apocalyptic use.

"Here, meanwhile, I have been explaining -- to the President, to committees of every kind, finally even to the press -- what has been done and why. And though they are all very outraged, I think they are secretly glad -- like a matador waking up in a hospital, amazed at still being alive after his excesses of courage. They have listened to me, and a few have understood. Those who didn't understand believed.

"So, this is what is being done: A number of our military and scientific personnel have been transmitted to Earth-Sub-One, and there they will try to do what you did -- reintegrate with their sub-one selves. When any one of them has accomplished this, he will use a receiverless transmitter to travel to the moon, dealing with that body as you have dealt with the earth.

"The moon-sub-one will be returned to its proper orbit, leaving behind a sub-two echo which can then be returned to its proper orbit, leaving behind a sub-three moon which, sad to say, will have to fall into the sun . . . unless its sub-three inhabitants, still equipped with receiverless transmitters, decide to take it somewhere else. And why shouldn't they? While their stores last they can travel anywhere in the universe. Perhaps that moon will be the first interstellar voyager.

"It is all very complicated, isn't it? If you'd like to take' a bath, our suite has three huge bathtubs. I always find that a bath helps when things become too complicated."

"Thank you, not a bath. But I had hoped . . ."

"Of course, Nathan! Of course she is here. Enter! Enter, Bridgetta!"

She rode in on ripples of laughter. He did not know which Bridgetta she was, Bridie, Jet, Bridget, or any other. But it made no difference. They were all but a single woman whom he loved, and he embraced her, saying, "Darling," and they kissed, a kiss that was like laughing still.

"Professor Panofsky," said Hansard stiffly (though there was now a kind of grace in his stiffness that had not been there before), "I would like to ask for the hand of your wife Bridgetta in marriage."

"You have my blessings, both of you, but first you had better come to an understanding with your rivals."

"No," Hansard said, "this time it is for her to decide how she wants to dispose of me."

"Not Bridgetta's rivals, Nathan, yours." And with a flourish of laughter, of music, the two Nathan Hansards who had been waiting in the adjoining room entered, arm-in-arm with two more Bridgettas. They arranged themselves before him with the modest symmetry of a Mozart finale. He had known they would be here, he had known it these many days (since, after all, he was not the final, the Australian Hansard[2], but the penultimate Hansard[2] who had remained behind after the transmission to Canberra, an echo atop the Great Pyramid), and yet he had not till now believed it. He grasped each of their extended hands in his own, and they stood there so a little while, as though about to begin a children's ring-game.



And here we are, quite at the end of our story -- or very close to the end. Our hero is to be rewarded for his labors; the world is saved from annihilation; even the moon has been recovered, and Panofsky, for the first time in his life, is free. Now is the loveliest of June weather, though (it is true) one has to go outside the dome to appreciate the young summer in all its glory. Now is the perfect time to take a boat out on the river, or just go walking along country roads, though these (it is true) become harder and harder to find.

But perhaps for our hero it will not be hard at all. Love bathes all landscapes in a softening light. It is only ourselves, at our greater distance, with our cooler view, who may feel a little sad to think that the world's loveliness will not always and everywhere bear too close examination.

However, even that is changing! Even the world will change now and become a better world, milder and mightier, and more humane. There will be power, and power to spare, to do all the things that were so hard to do till now. There will be no more boundaries, but everywhere freedom and unconstraint. There will be no more war. There will be room to move about in, places to go, destinies -- all the universe, in fact. What a splendid world! What grand fun it would be to live there!

But it is too late, for we are now quite at the end of our story. The rest belongs to them.



It had been a wedding in the grand manner -- cascades of white lace, orange blossoms, organ music, a minister with the broadest, the stateliest, of A's. And now they stood -- Hansard and Bridgetta, and Hansard and Bridgetta, and Hansard and Bridgetta -- on the threshold of the transmitter. Each couple had chosen a different destination for their honeymoon; the first to Ceylon, the second a cruise up the Amazon, and the third . . .

"Are you ready?" Panofsky asked.

In reply Hansard lifted up his bride and carried her over the threshold. Panofsky pushed the button that would transmit them to the Vatican. Hansard had never before seen the Sistine Chapel. He gasped.

Hansard sighed. "It doesn't seem to be working, does it?'

Bridgetta laughed softly, without stopping to nibble at his ear.

He carried her back across the threshold, through the closed door. Hansard and Bridgetta, and Hansard and Bridgetta, were waiting for them outside the transmitter. They pointed to Panofsky, who was writing on a note pad on the worktable. Panofsky finished the note, turned and smiled, though it could not be said he smiled quite at them, and left the room.

Unthinkingly, Hansard tried to pick the piece of paper off the table. The tertiary flesh of his hand passed through the secondary matter.

It was now as it had been: The pumps that had been pumping air to Mars were pumping still, though they pumped air of second-degree reality, which left behind the echo of an echo, and this air the six lovers, themselves the echoes of their echoes, could breathe.

"What does it say?" asked Bridgetta, though she could read the note as well as Hansard. But she wanted to hear him say the words:

"Happy Honeymoon."