MARS IS HEAVEN!

Ray Bradbury

The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain. The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket bad bloomed out great flowers of beat and cobs and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!

Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.

"Mars! Mars! Good old Mars, here we are!" cried Navigator Lustig.

"Good old Mars!" said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.

"Well," said Captain John Black.

The ship landed softly on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon the lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up the lawn, a tall brown Victorian house sat in the quiet sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze. At the top of the house was a cupola with diamond, leaded-glass windows, and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see an ancient piano with yellow keys and a piece of music titled Beautiful Ohio sitting on the music rest. Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring, There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them. The men in the rocket looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held on to each other's elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale and they blinked constantly, running from glass port to glass port of the ship.

"I'll be damned," whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers, his eyes wet. "I'll be damned, damned, damned."

"It can't be, it just can't be," said Samuel Hinkston.

"Lord," said Captain John Black.

There was a call from the chemist. "Sir, the atmosphere is fine for breathing, sir." Black turned slowly. "Are you sure?'

"No doubt of it, sir."

"Then we'll go. out," said Lustig.

"Lord, yes," said Samuel Hinkston.

"Hold on," said Captain John Black. "Just a moment, Nobody gave any orders."

"But, sir--"

"Sir, nothing. How do we know what this is?"

"We know what it is, sir," said the chemist. "It's a small town with good air in it, sir."

"And it's a small town the like of Earth towns," said Samuel Hinkston, the archaeologist. "Incredible. It can't be, but it is."

Captain John Black looked at him, idly. "Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?"

"I wouldn't have thought so, sir."

Captain Black stood by the port. "Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years of time it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like, a piano and probably is a piano; and, five, if you look closely, if a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, Beautiful Ohio. All of which means that we have an Ohio River here on Mars!"

"It is quite strange, sir."

"Strange, hell, it's absolutely impossible, and I suspect the whole bloody shooting setup. Something's wrong here, and I'm not leaving the ship until I know what it is."

"Oh, sir," said Lustig.

"Dammit," said Samuel Hinkston. "Sir, I want to investigate this at first hand. It may be that there are similar patterns of thought, movement, civilization on every planet in our system. We may be on the threshold of the great psychological and metaphysical discovery In our time, sir, don't you think?"

"I'm willing to wait a moment," said Captain John Black.

"It may be, sir, that we are looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of a God, sir."

"There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston."

"I'm one myself, sir. But certainly a thing like this, out there," said Hinkston, "could not occur without divine intervention, sir. It fills me with such terror and elation. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, sir."

"Do neither,. then, until we know what we're up against."

"Up against, sir?" inquired Lustig. "I see that we're up against nothing. It's a good quiet, green town, much like the one I was born in, and I like the looks of It."

"When were you born, Lustig?"

"In 1910, sir."

"That makes you fifty years old, now, doesn't it?"

"This being 1960, yes, sir."

"And you, Hinkston?"

"1920, sir. In Illinois. And this looks swell to me, sir."

"This couldn't be Heaven," said the captain, ironically. "Though, I must admit, it looks peaceful and cool, and pretty much like Green Bluff, where I was born, in 1915." He looked at the chemist. "The air's all right, is it?"

"Yes, sir."

‘Well, then, tell you what we'll do. Lustig, you and Hinkston and I will fetch ourselves out to look this town over. The other 14 men will stay aboard ship. If anything untoward happens, lift the Ship and get the hell out, do you hear what I say, Craner?"

"Yes, sir. The hell out we'll go, sir. Leaving you?",

"A loss of three men's better than a whole ship. If something bad happens get back to Earth and warn the next Rocket, that's Lingle's Rocket, I think, which will be completed and ready to take off some time around next Christmas, what he has to meet up with. If there's something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next expedition to be well armed."

"So are we, sir. We've got a regular arsenal with us."

"Tell the men to stand by the guns, then, as Lustig and Hinkston and I go out."

"Right, sir."

"Come along, Lustig, Hinkston."

The three men walked together, down through the levels of the ship.

It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin' In The Gloamin,' sung by Harry Lapder. The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready. Now the phonograph record being played was:

"Oh give me a June night

The moonlight and you—"

Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.

Hinkston's voice was so feeble and uneven that the captain had to ask him to repeat what he had said. "I said, sir, that I think I have solved this, all of this, sir!"

"And what is the solution, Hinkston?"

The soft wind blew. The sky was serene and quiet and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree-shadings of a ravine. Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.

"Sir, it must be, it has to be, this is the only solution! Rocket travel began to Mars in the years before the first World War, sir!" S

The captain stared at his archaeologist. "No!"

"But, yes, sir! You must admit, look at all of this! How else explain it, the houses, the lawns, the iron deer, the flowers, the pianos, the music!"

"Hinkston, Hinkston, oh," and the captain put his hand to his face, shaking his head, his hand shaking now, his lips blue.

"Sir, listen to me." Hinkston took his elbow persuasively and looked up into the captain's face, pleading. "Say that there were some people in the year 1905, perhaps, who hated wars and wanted to get away from Earth and they got together, some scientists, in secret, and built a rocket and came out here to Mars."

"No, no, Hinkston."

"Why not? The world was a different place in 1905, they could have kept it a secret much more easily."

"But the work, Hinkston, the work of building a complex thing like a rocket, oh, no, no." The captain looked at his shoes, looked at his hands, looked at the houses, and then at Hinkston.

"And they came up here, and naturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they brought the cultural architecture with them, and here it is!"

"And they've lived here all these years?" said the captain.

"In peace and quiet, sir, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped, for fear of being discovered. That's why the town seems so old-fashioned. I don't see a thing, myself, that is older than the year 1927, do you?"

"No, frankly, I don't, Hinkston."

"These are our people, sir. This is an American city; it's definitely not European!"

"That—that's right, too, Hinkston."

"Or maybe, just maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world hundreds of years ago, was discovered and kept secret by a small number of men, and they came to Mars, with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries."

"You make it sound almost reasonable."

"It is, sir. It has to be. We have the proof here before us, all we have to do now, is find some people and verify it!"

"You're right there, of course. We can't just stand here and talk. Did you bring your gun?"

"Yes, but we won't need it."

"We'll see about it. Come along, we'll ring that doorbell and see if anyone is home." Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. it smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had been in a small' town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.

Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked across the porch and stood before the screen door. Inside, they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfield Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris, Chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice rattling in a lemonade pitcher. In a distant kitchen, because of the day, someone was preparing a soft lemon pie. Captain John Black rang the bell.

Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hail and a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Beg your pardon," said Captain Black, uncertainly.

"But we're looking for, that is, could you help us, I mean." He stopped. She looked out at him with dark wondering eyes.

"If you're selling something," she said, "I'm much too busy and I haven't time." She turned to go.

"No, wait!," he cried bewilderedly. "What town is this?" She looked him up and down as if he were crazy.

"What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know what town it was?" The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. "I beg your pardon," he said,

"But we're strangers here. We're from Earth, and we want to know how this town got here and you got here."

"Are you census takers?" she asked.

"No," be said.

"What do you want then?" she demanded.

"Well," said the captain.

"Well?" she asked.

"How long has this town been here?" he wondered.

"It was built in 1868," she snapped at them. "Is this a game?"

"No, not a game," cried the captain. "Oh, God," he said. "Look here. We're from Earth!"

"From where?" she said.

"From Earth!" he said.

"Where's that?" she said.

"From Earth," he cried.

"Out of the ground, do you mean?"

"No, from the planet Earth!" he almost shouted.

"Here," he insisted, "come out on the porch and I'll show you."

"No," she said, "I won't come out there, you are all evidently quite mad from the sun." Lustig and Hinkston stood behind the captain. Hinkston now spoke up. "Mrs.," he said. ‘We came in a flying ship across space, among the stars. We came from the third planet from the sun, Earth, to this planet, which is Mars. Now do you understand, Mrs.?"

"Mad from the sun," she said, taking hold of the door. "Go away now, before I call my husband who's upstairs taking a nap, and he'll beat you all with his fists."

"But—" said Hinkston. "This is Mars, is it not?"

"This," explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, "is Green Lake, Wisconsin, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, on a place called the world, or sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-bye!"

She slammed the door.

The three men stood before the door with their hands up in the air toward it, as if pleading with her to open it once more.

They looked at one another.

"Let's knock the door down," said Lustig.

"We can't," sighed the captain.

"Why not?"

"She didn't do anything bad, did she? We're the strangers here. This is private property. Good God, Hinkston!" He went and sat down on the porchstep.

"What, sir?"

Did it ever strike you, that maybe we got ourselves, somehow, some way, fouled up. And, by accident, came back and landed on Earth!"

"Oh, sir, oh, sir, oh oh, sir." And Hinkston sat down numbly and thought about it. Lustig stood up in the sunlight. "How could we have done that?"

"I don't know, just let me think."

Hinkston said, "But we checked every mile of the way, and we saw Mars and our chronometers said so many miles gone, and we went past the moon and out into space and here we are, on Mars. I'm sure we're on Mars, sir."

Lustig said, "But, suppose that, by accident, in space, in time, or something, we landed on a planet in space, in another time. Suppose this is Earth, thirty or fifty years ago? Maybe we got lost in the dimensions, do you think?"

"Oh, go away, Lustig."

"Are the men in the ship keeping an eye on us, Hinkston?"

"At their guns, sir."

Lustig went to the door, rang the bell. When the door opened again, he asked, "What year is this?"

"1926, of, course!" cried the woman, furiously, and slammed the door again.

"Did you bear that?" Lustig ran back to them, wildly, "She said 1926! We - have gone back in time. This is Earth!"

Lustig sat down and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees. The wind blew, nodding the locks of hair on their heads. The captain stood up, brushing off his pants. "I never thought it would be like this. It scares the hell out of me. How can a thing like this happen?"

"Will anybody in the whole town believe us?" wondered Hinkston. "Are we playing around with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn't we just take off and go home?"

"No. We'll try another house."

They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree. "I like to be as logical as I can get," said the captain, He nodded at the town. "How does this sound to you, Hinkston? Suppose, as you said originally, that rocket travel occurred years ago. And when the Earth people had lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis. Then, threatened insanity. What would you do, as a psychiatrist, if faced with such a problem?"

Hinkston thought. "Well, I think I'd re-arrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road and every lake, and even an ocean, I would do so. Then I would, by some vast crowd hypnosis, theoretically anyway, convince everyone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all."

"Good enough, Hinkston. I think we're on the right track now. That woman in that house back there, just thinks she's living on Earth. It protects her sanity. She and all the others in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay your eyes on in your life."

"That's it, sir!" cried Lustig.

"Well," the captain sighed. "Now we're getting somewhere. I feel better. It all sounds a bit more logical now. This talk about time and going back and forth and traveling in time turns my stomach upside down. But, this way—" He actually smiled for the first time in a month. "Well. It looks as if we'll be fairly welcome here."

"Or, will we, sir?" said Lustig. "After all, like the Pilgrims, these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won't be too happy to see us, sir Maybe they'll try to drive us out or kill us?"

"We have superior weapons if that should happen. Anyway, all we can do is try. This next house now. Up we go."

But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming afternoon street. "Sir," he said.

"What is it, Lustig?" asked the captain.

"Oh, sir, sir, what I see, what I do see now before me, oh, oh—" said Lustig, and he began to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and trembling, and his face was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked down the street and he began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling, picking himself up, and running on. "Oh, God, God, thank you, God! Thank you!"

"Don't let him get away!" The captain broke into a run.

Now Lustig was running at full speed, shouting. He turned into a yard half way down the little shady side street and leaped up upon the porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof. He was beating upon the door, shouting and hollering and crying when Hinkston and the captain ran up and stood in the yard.

The door opened. Lustig yanked the screen wide and in a high wail of discovery and happiness, cried out, "Grandma! Grandpa!"

Two old people stood in the doorway, their faces lighting up.

"Albert!" Their voices piped and they rushed out to embrace and pat him on the back and move around him, "Albert, oh, Albert, it's been so many years! How you've grown, boy, how big you ate, boy, oh, Albert boy, how are you!"

"Grandma, Grandpa!" sobbed Albert Lustig. "Good to see you! You look fine, fine! Oh, fine." He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them, cried on them, held them out again, blinked at the little old people. The, sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass was green, the screen door stood open.

"Come in, lad, come in, there's lemonade for you, fresh, lots of it!"

"Grandma, Grandpa, good to see you! I've got friends down here! Here!" Lustig turned and waved wildly at the captain and Hinkston, who, all during the adventure on the porch, had stood in the shade of a tree, holding onto each other. "Captain, captain, come up, come up, I want you to meet my grandfolks!"

"Howdy," said the folks. "Any friend of Albert's is ours, too! Don't stand there with your mouths open! Come on!"

In the living room of the old house it was cool and a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern and antimacassars pinned to furniture, and lemonade in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue. "Here's to our health." Grandma tipped her glass to her porcelain teeth.

"How long you been here, Grandma?" said Lustig.

"A good many years," she said, tartly. "Ever since we died."

"Ever since you what?" asked Captain John Black, putting his drink down.

"Oh, yes," Lustig looked at his captain. "They've been dead thirty years."

"And you sit there, calmly!" cried the captain.

"Tush," said the old woman, and winked glitteringly at John Black. "Who are we to question what happens? Here we are. What's life, anyways? Who does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive again, and no questions asked. A second chance." She toddled over and held out her thin wrist to Captain John Black.

"Feel." He felt. "Solid, ain't I?" she asked. He nodded.

"You hear my voice, don't you?" she inquired. Yes, he did. "Well, then," she said in triumph, "why go around questioning?"

"Well," said the captain, "it's simply that we never thought we'd find a thing like this on Mars."

"And now you've found it. I dare say there's lots on every planet that'll show you God's infinite ways."

"Is this Heaven?" asked Hinkston.

"Nonsense, no. It's a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn't another before that one?"

"A good question," said the captain.

The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in an off-hand fashion. "We've got to be going. It's been nice. Thank you for the drinks."

He stopped. He turned and looked toward the door, startled.

Far away, in the sunlight, there was a sound of voices, a crowd, a shouting and a great hello.

"What's that?" asked Hinkston.

"We'll soon find out!" And Captain John Black was out the front door abruptly, jolting across the green lawn and into the street of the Martian town.

He stood looking at the ship. The ports were open and his crew were streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of people had gathered and in and through and among these people the members of the crew were running, talking, laughing, shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The rocket lay empty and abandoned.

A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, "Hooray!" And fat men passed around ten-cent cigars. The mayor of the town made a speech. Then, each member of the crew with a mother on one -arm, a father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street, into little cottages or big mansions and doors slammed shut. The wind rose in the clear spring sky and all was silent. The brass band had banged off around a corner leaving the rocket to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight.

"Abandoned!" cried the captain. "Abandoned the ship, they did! I'll have their skins; by God! They had orders!"

"Sir," said Lustig. "Don't be too hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends."

"That's no excuse!"

"Think how they felt, captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship!"

"I would have obeyed orders! I would have!" The captain's mouth remained open. Striding along the sidewalk under the Martian sun, tall, smiling, eyes blue, face tan, came a young man of some twenty-six years.

"John!" the man cried, and broke into a run.

"What?" said Captain John Black. He swayed.

"John, you old beggar, you!"

The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him on the back.

"It's you," said John Black.

"Of course, who'd you think it was!"

"Edward!" The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston, holding the stranger's hand. "This is my brother Edward. Ed, meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston, my brother!"

They tugged at each other's hands and arms and then finally embraced.

"Ed!"

"John, you old bum, you!"

"You're looking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what is this? You haven't changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were twenty-six, and I was nineteen, oh God, so many years ago, and here you are, and, Lord, what goes on, what goes on?"

Edward Black gave him a brotherly knock on the chin.

"Mom's waiting," he said.

"Mom?"

"And Dad, too."

"And Dad?" The captain almost fell to earth as if hit upon the chest with a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and awkwardly, out of coordination. He stuttered and whispered and talked only one or two words at a time.

"Mom alive? Dad? Where?"

"At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue."

"The old house." The captain stared in delighted amazement. "Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?"

"I know it's hard for you to believe."

"But alive. Real."

"Don't I feel real?" The strong arm, the firm grip, the white smile. The light, curling hair. Hinkston was gone. He had seen his own house down the street and was running for it. Lustig was grinning.

"Now you understand, sir, what happened to everybody on the ship. They couldn't help themselves."

"Yes. Yes," said the captain, eyes shut. "Yes." He put out his hand. "When I open my eyes, you'll be gone." He opened his eyes. "You're still here. God, Edward, you look fine!"

"Come along, lunch is waiting for you. I told Mom." Lustig said, "Sir, I'll be with my grandfolks if you want me."

"What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then."

Edward grabbed his arm and marched him. "You need support."

"I do. My knees, all funny. My stomach, loose. God."

"There's the house. Remember it?"

"Remember it? Hell! I bet I can beat you to the front porch!"

They ran. The wind roared over Captain John Black's ears. The earth roared under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw the house rush forward, the door open, the screen swing back. "Beat you!" cried Edward, bounding up the steps.

"I'm an old man," panted the captain "and you're still young. But, then, you always beat me, I remember!"

In the doorway, Mom, pink, and plump and bright. And behind her, pepper grey, Dad, with his pipe in his hand.

"Mom, Dad!"

He ran up the steps like a child, to meet them.

It was a fine long afternoon. They finished lunch and they sat in the living room and he told them all about his rocket and his being captain and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just the same, and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted it in his old fashion. Mom brought in some iced tea in the middle of the afternoon. Then, there was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing oil. When the drumsticks were sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain leaned back in his chair and exhaled his deep contentment. Dad poured him a small glass of dry sherry. It was seven-thirty in the evening. Night was in all the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of dim light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down the streets came sounds of music; pianos playing, laughter. Mom put a record on the victrola and she and Captain John Black had a dance. She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they danced lightly to the music.

"I'll wake in the morning," said the captain. "And I'll be in my rocket in space, and this will be gone."

"No, no, don't think that," she cried, softly, pleadingly, "We're here. Don't question. God is good to us. Let's be happy."

The record ended with a hissing.

"You're tired, son," said Dad. He waved his pipe. "You and Ed go on upstairs. Your old bedroom is waiting for you."

"The old one?"

"The brass bed and all," laughed Edward.

"But I should report my men in."

"Why?" Mother was logical.

"Why? Well, I don't know. No reason, I guess. No, none at all. What's the difference?" He shook his head. "I'm not being very logical these days."

"Good night, son." She kissed his cheek. "‘Night, Mom."

"Sleep tight, son." Dad shook his hand.

"Same to you, Pop."

"It's good to have you home."

"It's good to be home."

He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking with Edward. Edward pushed a door open and there was the yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college days and a very musty raccoon coat which he petted with strange, muted affection. "It's too much," he said faintly. "Like being in a thunder shower without an umbrella. I'm soaked to the skin with emotion. I'm numb. I'm tired."

"A night's sleep between cool clean sheets for you, my bucko." Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the pillows. Then he put up a window and let the night blooming jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant dancing and whispering.

"So this is Mars," said the captain undressing.

"So this is Mars." Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves, drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders and the good muscular neck.

The lights were out, they were into bed, side by side, as in the days, how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was nourished by the night wind pushing the lace curtains out upon the dark room air. Among the trees, upon a lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it was playing softly, "I'll be loving you, always, with a love that's true, always." The thought of Anna came to his mind. "Is Anna here?"

His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from the window, waited and then said, "Yes. She's out of town. But she'll be here in the morning."

The captain shut his eyes. "I want to see Anna very much?"

The room was square and quiet except for their breathing. "Good night, Ed." A pause. "Good night, John."

He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the first time the stress of the day was moved aside, all of the excitement was calmed. He could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the sight of familiar faces, the sick pounding of your heart. But now... How? He thought. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose? Out of the goodness of some kind God? Was God, then, really that fine and thoughtful of his children? How and why and what for?

He thought of the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind, as through a dark water, now, turning, throwing out dull flashes of white light. Mars. Earth. Mom. Dad Edward. Mars. Martians.

Who had lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been like this?

Martians. He repeated the word quietly, inwardly.

He laughed out loud, almost. He had the ridiculous theory, all of a sudden. It gave him a kind of chilled feeling. It was really nothing to think of, of course. Highly. improbable. Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous. But, he thought, Just suppose. Just suppose now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and saw us inside our ship and hated us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earthmen with atom weapons?

The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination.

Suppose all these houses weren't real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis by the Martians.

Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions?

What better way to fool a man, by his own emotions.

And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and father at all. But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time?

And that brass band, today? What a clever plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then fool Hinkston, then gather a crowd around the rocket ship and wave. And all the men in the ship, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts dead ten, twenty years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, would rush out and abandon the ship. What more natural? What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A man doesn't ask too many questions when his mother is suddenly brought back to life; he's much too happy. And the brass band played and everybody was taken off to private homes. And here we all are, tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn't it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us. Some time during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed, will change form, melt, shift, and become a one-eyed, green and yellow-toothed Martian. It would be very simple for him just to turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking out knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth.

His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold. Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid. He lifted himself in bed and listened. The night was very quiet. The music had stopped. The wind had died. His brother (?) lay sleeping beside him.

Very carefully he lifted the sheets, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother's voice said, "Where are you going?"

"What?"

His brother's voice was quite cold. "I said, where do you think you're going?"

"For a drink of water."

"But you're not thirsty."

"Yes, yes, I am."

"No, you're not."

Captain John Black broke and ran across the room.

He screamed. He screamed twice. He never reached the door.

In the morning, the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes and along the sun-filled street, weeping and changing, came the grandmas and grandfathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, walking to the churchyard, where there were open holes dug freshly and new tombstones installed. Seventeen holes in all, and seventeen tombstones. Three of the tombstones said, CAPTAIN JOHN BLACK, ALBERT LUSTIG, and SAMUEL HINKSTON.

The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes looking like the mayor, sometimes looking like something else.

Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward, and they cried, their faces melting now from a familiar face into something else.

Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping their faces also shifting like wax, shivering as a thing does in waves of heat on a summer day.

The coffins were lowered. Somebody murmured about

"the unexpected and sudden deaths of seventeen fine men during the night—" Earth was shoveled in on the coffin tops.

After the funeral the brass band slammed and banged into town and the crowd stood around and waved and shouted as the rocket was torn to pieces and strewn about and blown up.

Ex Machina

Lewis Padgett

I got the idea out of a bottle labeled 'DRINK ME,'" Gallegher said wanly. "I'm no technician, except when I'm drunk. I don't know the difference between an electron and an electrode, except that one's invisible. At least I do know, sometimes, but they get mixed up. My trouble is semantics."

"Your trouble is you're a lush," said the transparent robot, crossing its legs with a faint crash. Gallegher winced.

"Not at all. I get along fine when I'm drinking. It's only during my periods of sobriety that I get confused. I have a technological hangover. The aqueous humor in my eyeballs is coming out by osmosis. Does that make sense?"

"No," said the robot, whose name was Joe. "You're crying, that's all. Did you turn me on just to have an audience? I'm busy at the moment."

"Busy with what?"

"I'm analyzing philosophy, per se. Hideous as you humans are, you sometimes get bright ideas. The clear, intellectual logic of pure philosophy is a revelation to me." Gallegher said something about a hard, gemlike flame. He still wept sporadically, which reminded him of the bottle labeled "DRINK ME," which reminded him of the liquor-organ beside the couch. Gallegher stiffly moved his long body across the laboratory, detouring around three bulky objects which might have been the dynamos, Monstro and Bubbles, except for the fact that there were three of them. This realization flickered only dimly through Gallegher's mind. Since one of the dynamos was looking at him, he hurriedly averted his gaze, sank down on the couch, and manipulated several buttons. When no liquor flowed through the tube into his parched mouth, he removed the mouthpiece, blinked at it hopelessly, and ordered Joe to bring beer.

The glass was brimming as he raised it to his lips. But it was empty before he drank.

"That's very strange," Gallegher said. "I feel like Tantalus."

"Somebody's drinking your beer," Joe explained. "Now do leave me alone. I've an idea I'll be able to appreciate my baroque beauty even more after I've mastered the essentials of philosophy."

"No doubt," Gallegher said. "Come away from that mirror. Who's drinking my beer? A little green man?"

"A little brown animal," Joe explained cryptically, and turned to the mirror again, leaving Gallegher to glare at him hatefully. There were times when Mr. Galloway Gallegher yearned to bind Joe securely under a steady drip of hydrochloric. Instead, he tried another beer, with equal ill luck. In a sudden fury, Gallegher rose and procured soda water. The little brown animal had even less taste for such fluids than Gallegher himself; at any rate, the water didn't mysteriously vanish. Less thirsty but more confused than ever, Gallegher circled the third dynamo with the bright blue eyes and morosely examined the equipment littering his workbench. There were bottles filled with ambiguous liquids, obviously nonalcoholic, but the labels meant little or nothing. Gallegher's subconscious self, liberated by liquor last night, had marked them for easy reference. Since Gallegher Plus, though a top-flight technician, saw the world through thoroughly distorted lenses, the labels were not helpful. One said "RABBITS

ONLY." Another inquired "WHY NOT?" A third said "CHRISTMAS NIGHT." There was also a complicated affair of wheels, gears, tubes, sprockets and light tubes plugged into an electric outlet.

"Cogito, ergo sum," Joe murmured softly. "When there's no one around on the quad. No. Hm-m-m."

"What about this little brown animal?" Gallegher wanted to know. "Is it real or merely a figment?"

"What is reality?" Joe inquired, thus confusing the issue still further. "I haven't resolved that yet to my own satisfaction."

"Your satisfaction!" Gallegher said. "I wake up with a tenth-power hangover and you can't get a drink. You tell me fairy stories about little brown animals stealing my liquor. Then you quote moldy philosophical concepts at me. If I pick up that crowbar over there, you'll neither be nor think, in very short order."

Joe gave ground gracefully. "It's a small creature that moves remarkably fast. So fast it can't be seen."

"How come you see it?"

"I don't. I varish it," said Joe, who had more than the five senses normal to humans.

"Where is it now?"

"It went out a while ago."

"Well—" Gallegher sought inconclusively for words. "Something must have happened last night."

"Naturally," Joe agreed. "But you turned me off after the ugly man with the ears came in."

"I remember that. You were beating your plastic gums .. .what man?"

"The ugly one. You told your grandfather to take a walk, too, but you couldn't pry him loose from his bottle."

"Grandpa. Uh. Oh. Where's he?"

"Maybe he went back to Maine," Joe suggested. "He kept threatening to do that."

"He never leaves till he's drunk out the cellar," Gallegher said. He tuned in the audio system and called every room in the house. There was no response. Presently Gallegher got up and made a search. There was no trace of Grandpa.

He came back to the laboratory, trying to ignore the third dynamo with the big blue eyes, and hopelessly studied the workbench again. Joe, posturing before the mirror, said he thought he believed in the basic philosophy of intellectualism. Still, he added, since obviously Gallegher's intellect was in abeyance, it might pay to hook up the projector and find out what had happened last night.

'This made sense. Some time before, realizing that Gallegher sober never remembered the adventures of Gallegher tight, he had installed a visio-audio gadget in the laboratory, cleverly adjusted to turn itself on whenever circumstances warranted it. How the thing worked Gallegher wasn't quite sure anymore, except that it could run off miraculous blood-alcohol tests on its creator and start recording when the percentage was sufficiently high. At the moment the machine was shrouded in a blanket. Gallegher whipped this off, wheeled over a screen, and watched and listened to what had happened last night. Joe stood in a corner, turned off, probably cogitating.

Grandpa, a wizened little man with a brown face like a bad-tempered nutcracker, sat on a stool cuddling a bottle. Gallegher was removing the liquor-organ mouthpiece from between his lips, having just taken on enough of a load to start the recorder working.

A slim, middle-aged man with large ears and an eager expression jittered on the edge of his relaxer, watching Gallegher.

"Claptrap," Grandpa said in a squeaky voice. "When I was a kid we went out and killed grizzlies with our hands. None of these new-fangled ideas—"

"Grandpa," Gallegher said, "shut up. You're not that old. And you're a liar anyway."

"Reminds me of the time I was out in the woods and a grizzly came at me. I didn't have a gun. Well, I'll tell you. I just reached down his mouth—"

"Your bottle's empty," Gallegher said cleverly, and there was a pause while Grandpa, startled, investigated. It wasn't.

"You were highly recommended," said the eager man. "I do hope you can help me. My partner and I are about at the end of our rope."

Gallegher looked at him dazedly. "You have a partner? Who's he? For that matter, who are you?" Dead silence fell while the eager man fought with his bafflement. Grandpa lowered his bottle and said:

"It wasn't empty, but it is now, Where's another?"

The eager man blinked. "Mr. Gallegher," he said faintly. "I don't understand. We've been discussing—"

Gallegher said, "I know. I'm sorry. It's just that I'm no good on technical problems unless I'm...ah...stimulated. Then I'm a genius. But I'm awfully absent-minded. I'm sure I can solve your problem, but the fact is I've forgotten what it is. I suggest you start from the beginning. Who are you and have you given me any money yet?"

"I'm Jonas Harding," the eager man said. "I've got fifty thousand credits in my pocket, but we haven't come to any terms yet."

"Then give me the dough and we'll come to terms," Gallegher said with ill-concealed greed. "I need money."

"You certainly do," Grandpa put in, searching for a bottle. "You're so overdrawn at the bank that they lock the doors when they see you coming. I want a drink."

"Try the organ," Gallegher suggested. "Now, Mr. Harding—"

"I want a bottle. I don't trust that dohinkus of yours."

Harding, for all his eagerness, could not quite conceal a growing skepticism. "As for the credits," he said, "I think perhaps we'd better talk a little first. You were very highly recommended, but perhaps this is one of your off days."

"Not at all. Still—"

"Why should I give you the money before we come to terms?" Harding pointed out. "Especially since you've forgotten who I am and what I wanted."

Gallegher sighed and gave up. "All right. Tell me what you are and who you want. I mean—"

"I'll go back home," Grandpa threatened. "Where's a bottle?" Harding said desperately, "Look, Mr. Gallegher, there's a limit. I come in here and that robot of yours insults me. Your grandfather insists I have a drink with him. I'm nearly poisoned—"

"I was weaned on corn likker," Grandpa muttered. "Young whippersnappers can't take it."

"Then let's get down to business," Gallegher said brightly. "I'm beginning to feel good. I'll just relax here on the couch and you can tell me everything." He relaxed and sucked idly at the organ's mouthpiece, which trickled a gin buck. Grandpa cursed.

"Now," Gallegher said, "the whole thing, from the beginning." Harding gave a little sigh. "Well—I'm half partner in Adrenals, Incorporated. We run a service. A luxury service, keyed to this day and age. As I told you—"

"I've forgotten it all," Gallegher murmured. "You should have made a carbon copy. What is it you do? I've got a mad picture of you building tiny prefabricated houses on top of kidneys, but I know I must be wrong."

"You are," Harding said shortly. "Here's your carbon copy. We're in the adrenal-rousing business. Today man lives a quiet, safe life—"

"Ha.!" Gallegher interjected bitterly.

"—what with safety controls and devices, medical advances, and the general structure of social living. Now the adrenal glands serve a vital functional purpose, necessary to the health of the normal man." Harding had apparently launched into a familiar sales talk. "Ages ago we lived in caves, and when a sabertooth burst out of the jungle, our adrenals, or suprarenals, went into instant action, flooding our systems with adrenalin. There was an immediate explosion of action, either toward fight or flight, and such periodic flooding of the blood stream gave tone to the whole system. Not to mention the psychological advantages. Man is a competitive animal. He's losing that instinct, but it can be roused by artificial stimulation of the adrenals."

"A drink?" Grandpa said hopefully, though he understood practically nothing of Harding's explanation.

Harding's face became shrewder. He leaned forward confidentially.

"Glamour," he said. "That's the answer. We offer adventure. Safe, thrilling, dramatic, exciting, glamorous adventure to the jaded modern man or woman. Not the vicarious, unsatisfactory excitement of television; the real article. Adrenals, Incorporated, will give you adventure plus, and at the same time improve your health physically and mentally. You must have seen our ads: 'Are you in a rut? Are you jaded? Take a Hunt—and return refreshed, happy, and healthy, ready to lick the world!'"

"A Hunt?"

"That's our mest popular service," Harding said, relapsing into more businesslike tones. "It's not new, really. A long time ago travel bureaus were advertising thrilling tiger hunts in Mexico—"

"Ain't no tigers in Mexico," Grandpa said. "I been there. I warn you, if you don't find me a bottle, I'm going right back to Maine."

But Gallegher was concentrating on the problem. "I don't see why you need me, then. I can't supply tigers for you."

"The Mexican tiger was really a member of me cat family. Puma, I think. We've got special reservations all over the world—expensive to set up and maintain—and there we have our Hunts, with every detail carefully planned in advance. The danger must be minimized—in fact, eliminated. But there must be an illusion of danger or there's no thrill for the customer. We've tried conditioning animals so they'll stop short of hurting anyone, but... ah... that isn't too successful. We lost several customers, I'm sorry to say. This is an enormous investment, and we've got to recoup. But we've found we can't use tigers, or, in fact, any of the large carnivora. It simply isn't safe. But there must be that illusion of danger!

The trouble is, we're degenerating into a trapshooting club. And there's no personal danger involved in trapshooting."

Grandpa said: "Want some fun, eh? Come on up to Maine with me and I'll show you some real hunting. We still got bear back in the mountains."

Gallegher said: "I'm beginning to see. But that personal angle—I wonder! What is the definition of danger, anyhow?"

"Danger's when something's trying to git you," Grandpa pointed out.

"The unknown—the strange—is dangerous too, simply because we don't understand it. That's why ghost stories have always been popular. A roar in the dark is more frightening than a tiger in the daylight." Harding nodded. "I see your point. But there's another factor. The game mustn't be made too easy. It's a cinch to outwit a rabbit. And, naturally, we have to supply our customers with the most modern weapons."

"Why?"

"Safety precautions. The trouble is, with those weapons and scanners and scent-analyzers, any fool can track down and kill an animal. There's no thrill involved unless the animal's a man-eating tiger, and that's a little too thrilling for our underwriters!"

"So what do you want?"

"I'm not sure," Harding said slowly. "A new animal, perhaps. One that fulfills the requirements of Adrenals, Incorporated. But I'm not sure what the answer is, or I wouldn't be asking you." Gallegher said: "You don't make new animals out of thin air."

"Where do you get them?"

"I wonder. Other planets? Other time-sectors? Other probability-worlds? I got hold of some funny animals once—Lybblas—by tuning in on a future time-era on Mars, but they wouldn't have filled the bill."

"Other planets, then?"

Gallegher got up and strolled to his workbench. He began to piece together stray cogs and tubes.

"I'm getting a thought. The latent factors inherent in the human brain— My latent factors are rousing to life. Let me see. Perhaps—"

Under his hands a gadget grew. Gallagher remained preoccupied. Presently he cursed, tossed the device aside, and settled back to the liquor-organ. Grandpa had already tried it, but choked on his first sip of a gin buck. He threatened to go back home and take Harding with him and show him some real hunting.

Gallegher pushed the old gentleman off the couch. "Now look, Mr. Harding," he said. "I'll have this for you tomorrow. I've got some thinking to do—"

"Drinking, you mean," Harding said, taking out a bundle of credits. "I've heard a lot about you, Mr. Gallegher. You never work except under pressure. You've got to have a deadline, or you won't do a thing. Well—do you see this? Fifty thousand credits." He glanced at his wrist watch. "I'm giving you one hour. If you don't solve my problem by then, the deal's off."

Gallegher started up from the couch as though he had been bitten. "That's ridiculous. An hour isn't time enough—"

Harding said obdurately: "I'm a methodical man. I know enough about you to realize that you're not. I can find other specialists and technicians, you know. One hour! Or I go out that door and take these fifty thousand credits with me!"

Gallegher eyed the money greedily. He took a quick drink, cursed quietly, and went back to his gadget. This time he kept working on it.

After a while a light shot up from the worktable and hit Gallegher in the eye. He staggered back, yelping.

"Are you all right?" Harding asked, jumping up.

"Sure," Gallegher growled, cutting a switch. "I think I'm getting it. That light...ouch. I've sunburned my eyeballs." He blinked back tears. Then he went over to the liquor-organ. After a hearty swig, he nodded at Harding. "I'm getting on the trail of what you want. I don't know how long it will take, though." He winced. "Grandpa. Did you change the setting on this thing?"

"I dunno. I pushed some buttons."

"I thought so. This isn't a gin buck. Wheeooo!"

"Got a wallop, has it?" Grandpa said, getting interested and coming over to try the liquor-organ again.

"Not at all," Gallegher said, walking on his knees toward the audio-sonic recorder. "What's this? A spy, huh? We know how to deal with spies in this house, you dirty traitor." So saying, he rose to his feet, seized a blanket, and threw it over the projector.

At that point the screen, naturally enough, was blank.

"I cleverly outwit myself every time," Gallegher remarked, rising to switch off the projector. "I go to the trouble of building that recorder and then blindfold it just when matters get interesting. I know less than I did before, because there are more unknown factors now."

"Men can know the nature of things," Joe murmured.

"An important concept," Gallegher admitted. "The Greeks found it out quite a while ago, though. Pretty soon, if you keep on thinking hard, you'll come up with the bright discovery that two and two are four."

"Be quiet, you ugly man," Joe said. "I'm getting into abstractions now. Answer the door and leave me alone."

"The door? Why? The bell isn't singing."

"It will," Joe pointed out. "There it goes."

"Visitors at this time of the morning," Gallegher sighed."Maybe it's Grandpa, though." He pushed a button, studied the doorplate screen, and failed to recognize the lantern-jawed, bushy-browed face. "All right," he said. "Come in. Follow the guide-line." Then he turned to the liquor-organ thirstily before remembering his current Tantalus proclivities.

The lantern-jawed man came into the room. Gallegher said: "Hurry up. I'm being followed by a little brown animal that drinks all my liquor. I've several other troubles, too, but the little brown animal's the worst. If I don't get a drink, I'll die. So tell me what you want and leave me alone to work out my problems. I don't owe you money, do I?"

"That depends," said the newcomer, with a strong Scots accent. "My name is Murdoch Mackenzie, and I assume you're Mr. Gallegher. You look untrustworthy. Where is my partner and the fifty thousand credits he had with him?"

Gallegher pondered. "Your partner, eh? I wonder if you mean Jonas Harding?"

"That's the lad. My partner in Adrenals, Incorporated."

"I haven't seen him—"

With his usual felicity, Joe remarked, "The ugly man with the big ears. How hideous he was."

"Vurra true," Mackenzie nodded. "I note you're using the past tense, or rather that great clanking machine of yours is. Have you perhaps murdered my partner and disposed of his body with one of your scientific gadgets?"

"Now look—" Gallegher said. "What's the idea? Have I got the mark of Cain on my forehead or something? Why should you jump to a conclusion like that? You're crazy." Mackenzie rubbed his long jaw and studied Gallegher from under his bushy gray brows. "It would be no great loss, I know," he admitted. "Jonas is little help in the business. Too methodical. But he had fifty thousand credits on his person when he came here last night. There is also the question of the body. The insurance is perfectly enormous. Between ourselves, Mr. Gallegher, I would not hold it against you if you had murdered my unfortunate partner and pocketed the fifty thousand. In fact, I would be willing to consider letting you escape with... say... ten thousand, provided you gave me the rest. But not unless you provided me with legal evidence of Jonas's death, so my underwriters would be satisfied."

"Logic," Joe said admiringly. "Beautiful logic. It's amazing that such logic should come from such an opaque horror."

"I would look far more horrible, my friend, if I had a transparent skin like you," Mackenzie" said, "if the anatomy charts are accurate. But we were discussing the matter of my partner's body." Gallegher said wildly: "This is fantastic. You're probably laying yourself open to compounding a felony or something."

"Then you admit the charge."

"Of course not! You're entirely too sure of yourself, Mr. Mackenzie. I'll bet you killed Harding yourself and you're trying to frame me for it. How do you know he's dead?"

"Now that calls for some explanation, I admit," Mackenzie said. "Jonas was a methodical man. Vurra. I have never known him to miss an appointment for any reason whatsoever. He had appointments last night, and more this morning. One with me. Moreover, he had fifty thousand credits on him when he came here to see you last night."

"How do you know he got here?"

"I brought him, in my aircab. I let him out at your door. I saw him go in."

"Well, you didn't see him go out, but he did," Gallegher said.

Mackenzie, quite unruffled, went on checking points on his bony fingers.

"This morning I checked your record, Mr. Gallegher, and it is not a good one. Unstable, to say the least. You have been mixed up in some shady deals, and you have been accused of crimes in the past. Nothing was ever proved, but you're a sly one, I suspect. The police would agree."

"They can't prove a thing. Harding's probably home in bed."

"He is not. Fifty thousand credits is a lot of money. My partner's insurance amounts to much more than that. The business will be tied up sadly if Jonas remains vanished, and there will be litigation. Litigation costs money."

"I didn't kill your partner!" Gallegher cried.

"Ah," Mackenzie mused. "Still, if I can prove that you did, it will come to the same thing, and be reasonably profitable for me. You see your position, Mr. Gallegher. Why not admit it, tell me what you did with the body, and escape with five thousand credits."

"You said ten thousand a while ago."

"You're daft," Mackenzie said firmly. "I said nothing of the sort. At least, you canna prove that I did." Gallegher said: "Well, suppose we have a drink and talk it over." A new idea had struck him.

"An excellent suggestion."

Gallegher found two glasses and manipulated the liquor-organ. He offered one drink to Mackenzie, but the man shook his head and reached for the other glass. "Poison, perhaps," he said cryptically. "You have an untrustworthy face."

Gallegher ignored that. He was hoping that with two drinks available, the mysterious little brown animal would show its limitations. He tried to gulp the whisky fast, but only a tantalizing drop burned on his tongue. The glass was empty. He lowered it and stared at Mackenzie.

"A cheap trick," Mackenzie said, putting his own glass down on the workbench. "I did not ask for your whisky, you know. How did you make it disappear like that?"

Furious with disappointment, Gallegher snarled: "I'm a wizard. I've sold my soul to the devil. For two cents I'd make you disappear, too."

Mackenzie shrugged. "I am not worried. If you could, you'd have done it before this. As for wizardry, I am far from skeptical, after seeing that monster squatting over there." He indicated the third dynamo that wasn't a dynamo.

"What? You mean you see it, too?"

"I see more than you think, Mr. Gallegher," Mackenzie said darkly. "In fact, I am going to the police now."

"Wait a minute. You can't gain anything by that—"

"I can gain nothing by talking to you. Since you remain obdurate, I will try the police. If they can prove that Jonas is dead, I will at least collect his insurance."

Gallegher said: "Now wait a minute. Your partner did come here. He wanted me to solve a problem for him."

"Ah. And you solved it?"

"N-no. At least—"

"Then I can get no profit from you," Mackenzie said firmly, and turned to the door. "You will hear from me vurra soon."

He departed. Gallegher sank down miserably on the couch and brooded. Presently he lifted his eyes to stare at the third dynamo.

It was not, then, a hallucination, as he had first suspected. Nor was it a dynamo. It was a squat, shapeless object like a truncated pyramid that had begun to melt down, and two large blue eyes were watching him. Eyes, or agates, or painted metal. He couldn't be sure. It was about three feet high and three feet in diameter at the base.

"Joe," Gallegher said, "why didn't you tell me about that thing?"

"I thought you saw it," Joe explained.

"I did, but—what is it?"

"I haven't the slightest idea."

"Where could it have come from?"

"Your subconscious alone knows what you were up to last night," Joe said. "Perhaps Grandpa and Jonas Harding know, but they're not around, apparently."

Gallegher went to the teleview and put in a call to Maine. "Grandpa may have gone back home. It isn't likely he'd have taken Harding with him, but we can't miss any bets. I'll check on that. One thing, my eyes have stopped watering. What was that gadget I made last night?" He passed to the workbench and studied the cryptic assemblage. "I wonder why I put a shoehorn in that circuit?"

"If you'd keep a supply of materials available here, Gallegher Plus wouldn't have to depend on makeshifts," Joe said severely.

"Uh. I could get drunk and let my subconscious take over again.. .no, I can't. Joe, I can't drink anymore! I'm bound hand and foot to the water wagon!"

"I wonder if Dalton had the right idea after all?"

Gallegher snarled: "Do you have to extrude your eyes that way? I need help!"

"You won't get it from me," Joe said. "The problem's extremely simple, if you'd put your mind to it."

"Simple, is it? Then suppose you tell me the answer!"

"I want to be sure of a certain philosophical concept first."

"Take all the time you want. When I'm rotting in jail, you can spend your leisure hours pondering abstracts. Get me a beer! No, never mind. I couldn't drink it anyway. What does this little brown animal look like?"

"Oh, use your head," Joe said.

Gallegher growled; "I could use it for an anchor, the way it feels. You know all the answers. Why not tell me instead of babbling?"

"Men can know the nature of things," Joe said. "Today is the logical development of yesterday. Obviously you've solved the problem Adrenals, Incorporated, gave you."

"What? Oh. I see. Harding wanted a new animal or something."

"Well?"

"I've got two of 'em," Gallegher said. "That little brown invisible dipsomaniac and that blue-eyed critter sitting on the floor. Oh-ho! Where did I pick them up? Another dimension?"

"How should I know? You've got 'em."

"I'll say I have," Gallegher agreed. "Maybe I made a machine that scooped them off another world—and maybe Grandpa and Harding are on that world now! A sort of exchange of prisoners. I don't know. Harding wanted non-dangerous beasts elusive enough to give hunters a thrill—but where's the element of danger?" He gulped. "Conceivably the pure alienage of the critters provides that illusion. Anyway, I'm shivering."

"Flooding of the blood stream with adrenalin gives tone to the whole system," Joe said smugly.

"So I captured or got hold of those beasts somehow, apparently, to solve Harding's problem..

.mm-m." Gallegher went to stand in front of the shapeless blue-eyed creature. "Hey, you," he said. There was no response. The mild blue eyes continued to regard nothing. Gallegher poked a finger tentatively at one of them.

Nothing at all happened. The eye was immovable and hard as glass. Gallegher tried the thing's bluish, sleek skin. It felt like metal. Repressing his mild panic, he tried to lift the beast from the floor, but failed completely. It was either enormously heavy or it had sucking-disks on its bottom.

"Eyes," Gallegher said. "No other sensory organs, apparently. That isn't what Harding wanted."

"I think it clever of the turtle," Joe suggested.

"Turtle? Oh. Like the armadillo. That's right. It's a problem, isn't it? How can you kill or capture a...a beast like this? Its exoderm feels plenty hard, it's immovable— that's it, Joe. Quarry doesn't have to depend on flight or fight. The turtle doesn't. And a barracudo could go nuts trying to eat a turtle. This would be perfect quarry for the lazy intellectual who wants a thrill. But what about adrenalin?" Joe said nothing. Gallegher pondered, and presently seized upon some reagents and apparatus. He tried a diamond drill. He tried acids. He tried every way he could think of to rouse the blue-eyed beast. After an hour his furious curses were interrupted by a remark from the robot.

"Well, what about adrenalin?" Joe inquired ironically.

"Shut up!" Gallegher yelped. "That thing just sits there looking at me! Adren...what?"

"Anger as well as fear stimulates the suprarenals, you know. I suppose any human would become infuriated by continued passive resistance."

"That's right," said the sweating Gallegher, giving the creature a final kick. He turned to the couch.

"Increase the nuisance quotient enough and you can substitute anger for fear. But what about that little brown animal? I'm not mad at it."

"Have a drink," Joe suggested.

"All right, I am mad at the kleptomaniacal so-and-so!

You said it moved so fast I can't see it. How can I catch it?"

"There are undoubtedly methods."

"It's as elusive as the other critter is invulnerable. Could I immobilize it by gelling it drunk?"

"Metabolism."

"Burns up its fuel too fast to get drunk? Probably. But it must need a lot of food."

"Have you looked in the kitchen lately?" Joe asked.

Visions of a depleted larder filling his mind, Gallegher rose. He paused beside the blue-eyed object.

"This one hasn't got any metabolism to speak of. But it has to eat, I suppose. Still, eat what? Air? It's possible."

The doorbell sang. Gallegher moaned, "What now?" and admitted the guest. A man with a ruddy face and a belligerent expression came in, told Gallegher he was under tentative arrest, and called in the rest of his crew, who immediately began searching the house.

"Mackenzie sent you, I suppose?" Gallegher said.

"That's right. My name's Johnson. Department of Violence, Unproved. Do you want to call counsel?"

"Yes," said Gallegher, jumping at the opportunity. He used the visor to get an attorney he knew, and began outlining his troubles. But the lawyer interrupted him.

"Sorry. I'm not taking any jobs on spec. You know my rates."

"Who said anything about spec?"

"Your last check bounced yesterday. It's cash on the line this time, or no deal."

"I... Now wait! I've just finished a commissioned job that's paying off big. I can have the money for you—"

"When I see the color of your credits, I'll be your lawyer," the unsympathetic voice said, and the screen blanked. The detective, Johnson, tapped Gallegher on the shoulder.

"So you're overdrawn at the bank, eh? Needed money?"

"That's no secret. Besides, I'm not broke now, exactly. I finished a—"

"A job. Yeah, I heard that, too. So you're suddenly rich. How much did this job pay you? It wouldn't be fifty thousand credits, would it?"

Gallegher drew a deep breath. "I'm not saying a word," he said, and retreated to the couch, trying to ignore the Department men who were searching the lab. He needed a lawyer. He needed one bad. But he couldn't get one without money. Suppose he saw Mackenzie—

The visor put him in touch with the man. Mackenzie seemed cheerful.

"Hello," he said, "see, the police have arrived."

Gallegher said, "Listen, that job your partner gave me—I've solved your problem. I've got what you want."

" Jonas's body, you mean?" Mackenzie seemed pleased.

"No! The animals you wanted! The perfect quarry!"

"Oh. Well. Why didn't you say so sooner?"

"Get over here and call off the police!" Gallegher insisted. "I tell you, I've got your ideal Hunt animals for you!"

"I dinna ken if I can call off the bloodhounds," Mackenzie said, "but I'll be over directly. I will not pay vurra much, you understand?"

"Bah!" Gallegher snarled, and broke the connection. The visor buzzed at him. He touched the receiver, and a woman's face came in.

She said: "Mr. Gallegher, with reference to your call of inquiry regarding your grandfather, we report that investigation shows that he has not returned to our Maine sector. That is all." She vanished. Johnson said: "What's this? Your grandfather? Where's he at?”

"I ate him," Gallegher said, twitching. "Why don't you leave me alone?" Johnson made a note. "Your grandfather. I'll just check up a bit. Incidentally, what's that thing over there?" He pointed to the blue-eyed beast.

"I've been studying a curious case of degenerative osteomyelitis affecting a baroque cephalopod!"

"Oh, I see. Thanks. Fred, see about this guy's grandfather. What are you gaping at?" Fred said: "That screen. It's set up for projection."

Johnson moved to the audio-sonic recorder. "Better impound it. Probably not important, but—" He touched a switch. The screen turned blank, but Gallegher's voice said: "We know how to deal with spies in this house, you dirty traitor."

Johnson moved the switch again. He glanced at Gallegher, his ruddy face impassive, and in silence began to rewind the wire tape. Gallegher said: "Joe, get me a dull knife. I want to cut my throat, and I don't want to make it too easy for myself. I'm getting used to doing things the hard way." But Joe, pondering philosophy, refused to answer.

Johnson began to run off the recording. He took out a picture and compared it with what showed on the screen.

"That's Harding, all right," he said. "Thanks for keeping this for us, Mr. Gallegher."

"Don't mention it," Gallegher said. "I'll even show the hangman how to tie the knot around my neck."

"Ha-ha. Taking notes, Fred? Right."

The reel unrolled relentlessly. But, Gallegher tried to make himself believe, there was nothing really incriminating recorded.

He was disillusioned after the screen went blank, at the point when he had thrown a blanket over the recorder last night. Johnson held up his hand for silence. The screen still showed nothing, but after a moment or two voices were clearly audible.

"You have thirty-seven minutes to go, Mr. Gallegher."

"Just stay where you are. I'll have this in a minute. Besides, I want to get my hands on your fifty thousand credits."

"But-"

"Relax. I'm getting it. In a very short time your worries will be over."

"Did I say that?" Gallegher thought wildly. "What a fool I am! Why didn't I turn off the radio when I covered up the lens?"

Grandpa's voice said: "Trying to kill me by inches, eh, you young whippersnapper!"

"All the old so-and-so wanted was another bottle," Gallegher moaned to himself. "But try to make those flatfeet believe that! Still—" He brightened. "Maybe I can find out what really happened to Grandpa and Harding. If I shot them off to another world, there might be some clue—"

"Watch closely now," Gallegher's voice said from last night. " I’ll explain as I proceed. Oh-oh. Wait a minute. I'm going to patent this later, so I don't want any spies. I can trust you two not to talk, but that recorder's still turned on to audio. Tomorrow, if I played it back, I'd be saying to myself, 'Gallegher, you talk too much. There's only one way to keep a secret safe.' Off it goes!" Someone screamed. The shriek was cut off midway. The projector stopped humming. There was utter silence.

The door opened to admit Murdoch Mackenzie. He was rubbing his hands.

"I came right down," he said briskly. "So you've solved our problem, eh, Mr. Gallagher? Perhaps we can do business then. After all, there's no real evidence that you killed Jonas—and I'll be willing to drop the charges, if you've got what Adrenals, Incorporated, wants."

"Pass me those handcuffs, Fred." Johnson requested.

Gallegher protested, "You can't do this to me!"

"A fallacious theorem," Joe said, "which, I note, is now being disproved by the empirical method. How illogical all you ugly people are."

The social trend always lags behind the technological one. And while technology tended, in these days, toward simplification, the social pattern was immensely complicated, since it was partly an outgrowth of historical precedent and partly a result of the scientific advance of the era. Take jurisprudence. Cockburn and Blackwood and a score of others had established certain general and specific rules— say, regarding patents—but those rules could be made thoroughly impractical by a single gadget. The Integrators could solve problems no human brain could manage, so, as a governor, it was necessary to build various controls into those semimechanical colloids. Moreover, an electronic duplicator could infringe not only on patents but on property rights, and attorneys prepared voluminous briefs on such questions as whether "rarity rights" are real property, whether a gadget made on a duplicator is a "representation" or a copy, and whether mass-duplication of chinchillas is unfair competition to a chinchilla breeder who depended on old-fashioned biological principles. All of which added up to the fact that the world, slightly punch-drunk with technology, was trying desperately to walk a straight line. Eventually the confusion would settle down.

It hadn't settled down yet.

So legal machinery was a construction far more complicated than an Integrator. Precedent warred with abstract theory as lawyer warred with lawyer. It was all perfectly clear to the technicians, but they were much too impractical to be consulted; they were apt to remark wickedly, "So my gadget unstabilizes property rights? Well—why have property rights, then?"

And you can't do that!

Not to a world that had found security, of a sort, for thousands of years in rigid precedents of social intercourse. The ancient dyke of formal culture was beginning to leak in innumerable spots, and, had you noticed, you might have seen hundreds of thousands of frantic, small figures rushing from danger-spot to danger-spot, valorously plugging the leaks with their fingers, arms, or heads. Some day it would be discovered that there was no encroaching ocean beyond that dyke, but that day hadn't yet come. In a way, that was lucky for Gallegher. Public officials were chary about sticking their necks out. A simple suit for false arrest might lead to fantastic ramifications and big trouble. The hard-headed Murdoch Mackenzie took advantage of this situation to vise his own personal attorney and toss a monkey wrench in the legal wheels. The attorney spoke to Johnson.

There was no corpse. The audiosonic recording was not sufficient. Moreover, there were vital questions involving habeus corpus and search warrants. Johnson called Headquarters Jurisprudence and the argument raged over the heads of Gallegher and the imperturbable Mackenzie. It ended with Johnson leaving, with his crew—and the increasing recording—and threatening to return as soon as a judge could issue the appropriate writs and papers. Meanwhile, he said, there would be officers on guard outside the house. With a malignant glare for Mackenzie, he stamped out.

"And now to business," said Mackenzie, rubbing his hands. "Between ourselves"—he leaned forward confidentially—"I'm just as glad to get rid of that partner of mine. Whether or not you killed him, I hope he stays vanished. Now I can run the business my way, for a change."

"It's all right about that," Gallegher said, "but what about me? I'll be in custody again as soon as Johnson can wangle it."

"But not convicted," Mackenzie pointed out. "A clever lawyer can fix you up. There was a similar case in which the defendant got off with a defense of non esse— his attorney went into metaphysics and proved that the murdered man had never existed. Quite specious, but so far the murderer's gone free." Gallegher said: "I've searched the house, and Johnson's men did, too. There's simply no trace of Jonas Harding or my grandfather. And I'll tell you frankly, Mr. Mackenzie, I haven't the slightest idea what happened to them."

Mackenzie gestured airily. "We must be methodical. You mentioned you had solved a certain problem for Adrenals, Incorporated. Now, I'll admit, that interested me." Silently Gallegher pointed to the blue-eyed dynamo. Mackenzie studied the object thoughtfully.

"Well?" he said.

"That's it. The perfect quarry."

Mackenzie walked over to the thing, rapped its hide, and looked deeply into the mild azure eyes.

"How fast can it run?" he asked shrewdly.

Gallegher said: "It doesn't have to run. You see, it's invulnerable."

"Ha. Hum. Perhaps if you'd explain a wee bit more—"

But Mackenzie did not seem pleased with the explanation. "No," he said, "I don't see it. There would be no thrill to hunting a critter like that. You forget our customers demand excitement—adrenal stimulation."

"They'll get it. Anger has the same effect as rage—" Gallegher went into detail. But Mackenzie shook his head. "Both fear and anger give you excess energy you've got to use up. You can't, against a passive quarry. You'll just cause neuroses. We try to get rid of neuroses, not create them."

Gallegher, growing desperate, suddenly remembered the little brown beast and began to discuss that. Once, Mackenzie interrupted with a demand to see the creature. Gallegher slid around that one fast.

"Ha," Mackenzie said finally. "It isna canny. How can you hunt something that's invisible?"

"Oh—ultraviolet. Scent-analyzers. It's a test for ingenuity—"

"Our customers are not ingenious. They don't want to be. They want a change and a vacation from routine, hard work—or easy work, as the case may be—they want a rest. They don't want to beat their brains working out methods to catch a thing that moves faster than a pixy, nor do they want to chase a critter that's out of sight before it even gets there. You are a vurra clever man, Mr. Gallegher, but it begins to look as though Jonas's insurance is my best bet after all."

"Now wait—"

Mackenzie pursed his lips. "I'll admit the beasties may— I say may—have some possibilities. But what good is quarry that can't be caught? Perhaps if you'd work out a way to capture these other—worldly animals of yours, we might do business. At present, I willna buy a pig in a poke."

"I'll find a way," Gallegher promised wildly. "But I can't do it in jail."

"Ah. I am a little irritated with you, Mr. Gallegher. You tricked me into believing you had solved our problem. Which you havena done—yet. Consider the thought of jail. Your adrenalin may stimulate your brain into working out a way to trap these animals of yours. Though, even so, I can make no rash promises—"

Murdoch Mackenzie grinned at Gallegher and went out, closing the door softly behind him. Gallegher began to dine off his finger nails.

"Men can know the nature of things," Joe said, with an air of solid conviction. At that point matters were complicated even further by the appearance, on the televisor screen, of a gray-haired man who announced that one of Gallegher's checks had just bounced. Three hundred and fifty credits, the man said, and how about it?

Gallegher looked dazedly at the identification card on the screen. "You're with United Cultures?

What's that?"

The gray-haired man said silkily, "Biological and medical supplies and laboratories, Mr. Gallegher."

"What did I order from you?"

"We have a receipt for six hundred pounds of Vita-plasm, first grade. We made delivery within an hour."

"And when—"

The gray-haired man went into more detail. Finally Gallegher made a few lying promises and turned from the blanking screen. He looked wildly around the lab.

"Six hundred pounds of artificial protoplasm," he murmured. "Ordered by Gallegher Plus. He's got delusions of economic grandeur."

"It was delivered," Joe said. "You signed the receipt, the night Grandpa and Jonas Harding disappeared."

"But what could I do with the stuff? It's used for plastic surgery and for humano-prosthesis. Artificial limbs and stuff. It's cultured cellular tissue, this Vitaplasm. Did I use it to make some animals? That's biologically impossible. I think. How could I have molded Vitaplasm into a little brown animal that's invisible? What about the brain and the neural structure? Joe, six hundred pounds of Vitaplasm has simply disappeared. Where has it gone?" But Joe was silent.

Hours later Gallegher was furiously busy. "The trick is," he explained to Joe, "to find out all I can about those critters. Then maybe I can tell where they came from and how I got 'em. Then perhaps I can discover where Grandpa and Harding went. Then—"

"Why not sit down and think about it?"

"That's the difference between us. You've got no instinct of self-preservation. You could sit down and think while a chain reaction took place in your toes and worked up, but not me. I'm too young to die. I keep thinking of Reading Gaol. I need a drink. If I could only get high, my demon subconscious could work out the whole problem for me. Is that little brown animal around?"

"No, "Joe said.

"Then maybe I can steal a drink." Gallegher exploded, after an abortive attempt that ended in utter failure: "Nobody can move that fast."

"Accelerated metabolism. It must have smelled alcohol. Or perhaps it has additional senses. Even I can scarcely varish it."

"If I mixed kerosene with the whisky, maybe the dipsomaniacal little monster wouldn't like it. Still, neither would I. Ah, well. Back to the mill," Gallegher said, as he tried reagent after reagent on the blue-eyed dynamo, without any effect at all.

"Men can know the nature of things." Joe said irritatingly.

"Shut up. I wonder if I could electroplate this creature? That would immobilize it, all right. But it's immobilized already. How does it eat?"

"Logically, I'd say osmosis."

"Very likely. Osmosis of what?"

Joe clicked irritatedly. "There are dozens of ways you could solve your problem. Instrumentalism. Determinism. Vitalism. Work from a posteriori to a priori. It's perfectly obvious to me that you've solved the problem Adrenals, Incorporated, set you."

"I have?"

"Certainly."

"How?"

"Very simple. Men can know the nature of things."

"Will you stop repeating that outmoded basic and try to be useful? You're wrong, anyway. Men can know the nature of things by experiment and reason combined!"

Joe said: "Ridiculous. Philosophical incompetence. If you can't prove your point by logic, you've failed. Anybody who has to depend on experiment is beneath contempt."

"Why should I sit here arguing philosophical concepts with a robot?" Gallegher demanded of no one in particular. "How would you like me to demonstrate the fact that ideation is dependent on your having a radioatomic brain that isn't scattered all over the floor?"

"Kill me, then," Joe said. "It's your loss and the world's. Earth will be a poorer place when I die. But coercion means nothing to me. I have no instinct of self-preservation."

"Now look," Gallegher said, trying a new tack, "if you know the answer, why not tell me?

Demonstrate that wonderful logic of yours. Convince me without having to depend on experiment. Use pure reason."

"Why should I want to convince you? I'm convinced. And I'm so beautiful and perfect that I can achieve no higher glory than to admire me."

"Narcissus," Gallegher snarled. "You're a combination of Narcissus and Nietzsche's Superman."

"Men can know the nature of things," Joe said.

The next development was a subpoena for the transparent robot. The legal machinery was beginning to move, an immensely complicated gadget that worked on a logic as apparently twisted as Joe's own. Gallegher himself, it seemed, was temporarily inviolate, through some odd interpretation of jurisprudence. But the State's principle was that the sum of the parts was equal to the whole. Joe was classified as one of the parts, the total of which equaled Gallegher. Thus the robot found itself in court, listening to a polemic with impassive scorn.

Gallegher, flanked by Murdoch Mackenzie and a corps of attorneys, was with Joe. This was an informal hearing. Gallegher didn't pay much attention; he was concentrating on finding a way to put the bite on the recalcitrant robot, who knew all the answers but wouldn't talk. He had been studying the philosophers, with an eye toward meeting Joe on his own ground, but so far had succeeded only in acquiring a headache and an almost unendurable longing for a drink. Even out of his laboratory, though, he remained Tantalus. The invisible little brown animal followed him around and stole his liquor. One of Mackenzie's lawyers jumped up. "I object," he said. There was a brief wrangle as to whether Joe should be classified as a witness or as Exhibit A. If the latter, the subpoena had been falsely served. The Justice pondered.

"As I see it," he declared, "the question is one of determinism versus voluntarism. If this... ah... robot has free will—"

"Ha!" Gallegher said, and was shushed by an attorney. He subsided rebelliously.

"—then it, or he, is a witness. But, on the other hand, there is the possibility that the robot, in acts of apparent choice, is the mechanical expression of heredity and past environment. For heredity read... ah... initial mechanical basics."

"Whether or not the robot is a rational being, Mr. Justice, is beside the point," the prosecutor put in.

"I do not agree. Law is based on res—"

Joe said: "Mr. Justice, may I speak?"

"Your ability to do so rather automatically gives you permission," the Justice said, studying the robot in a baffled way. "Go ahead."

Joe had seemingly found the connection between law, logic, and philosophy. He said happily: "I've figured it all out. A thinking robot is a rational being. I am a thinking robot—therefore I am a rational being."

"What a fool," Gallegher groaned, longing for the sane logics or electronics and chemistry. "The old Socratic syllogism. Even I could point out the flaw in that?"

"Quiet," Mackenzie whispered. "All the lawyers really depend on is tying up the case in such knots nobody can figure it out. Your robot is perhaps not such a fool as you think." An argument started as to whether thinking robots really were rational beings. Gallegher brooded. He couldn't see the point, really. Nor did it become clear until, from the maze of contradictions, there emerged the tentative decision that Joe was a rational being. This seemed to please the prosecutor immensely.

"Then," the prosecutor said triumphantly, "I wish to bring a charge of assault and battery against Mr. Gallegher. Since this robot has been tentatively classed as a rational being, any activity causing him, or it, to lose consciousness or the power of mobility is contra bonos mores, and may be classed as mayhem.”

Mackenzie's attorneys were ruffled. Gallegher said: "What does that mean?" A lawyer whispered: "They can hold you, and hold that robot as a witness." He stood up. "Mr. Justice. Our statements were in reply to purely theoretical questions." The prosecutor said: "But the robot's statement answered a non-theoretical question."

"The robot was not on oath."

"Easily remedied," said the prosecutor, while Gallegher saw his last hopes slipping rapidly away. He thought hard, while matters proceeded.

"Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?" Gallegher leaped to his feet. "Mr. Justice, I object."

"Indeed. To what?"

"To the validity of that oath."

Mackenzie said: "Ah- ha!"

The Justice was thoughtful. "Will you please elucidate, Mr. Gallegher? Why should the oath not be administered to this robot?"

"Such an oath is applicable to man only."

"And?"

"It presupposes the existence of the soul. At least it implies theism, a personal religion. Can a robot take an oath?"

The Justice eyed Joe. "It's a point, certainly. Ah... Joe. Do you believe in a personal deity?"

"I do."

"Mr. Justice," he announced, "we have learned that Mr. Galloway Gallegher two nights ago inactivated the robot before us now. Is this not true, Mr. Gallegher?" But Mackenzie's hand kept Gallegher in his seat. One of the defending attorneys rose to meet the question.

"We admit nothing," he said. "However, if you wish to pose a theoretical question, we will answer it." The query was posed theoretically.

"Then the theoretical answer is 'yes,' Mr. Prosecutor. A robot of this type can be turned on and off at will."

"Can the robot turn itself off?"

"Yes."

"But this did not occur? Mr. Gallegher inactivated the robot at the time Mr. Jonas Harding was with him in his laboratory two nights ago?"

"Theoretically, that is true. There was a temporary inactivation."

"Then," said the prosecutor, "we wish to question the robot, who has been classed as a rational being."

"The decision was tentative," the defense objected.

"Accepted. Mr. Justice—"

"All right," said the Justice, who was still staring at Joe, "you may ask your questions."

"Ah... ah—" The prosecutor, facing the robot, hesitated.

"Call me Joe," Joe said.

"Thank you. Ah... is this true? Did Mr. Gallegher inactivate you at the time and place stated?"

"Yes."

The prosecutor beamed. "Then we can proceed."

"Wait a minute," Murdoch Mackenzie said, rising. "May I ask a question, Mr. Justice?"

"Go ahead."

Mackenzie stared at the robot. "Well, now. Will you tell me, please, what this personal deity of yours is like?"

"Certainly," Joe said. "Just like me."

After a while it degenerated into a theological argument. Gallegher left the attorneys debating the apparently vital point of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and went home temporarily scot-free, with Joe. Until such points as the robot's religious basics were settled, nothing could be done. All the way, in the aircab, Mackenzie insisted on pointing out the merits of Calvinism to Joe. At the door Mackenzie made a mild threat. "I did not intend to give you so much rope, you understand. But you will work all the harder with the threat of prison hanging over your head. I don't know how long I can keep you a free man. If you can work out an answer quickly—"

"What sort of answer?"

"I am easily satisfied. Jonas's body, now—"

"Bah!" Gallegher said, and went into his laboratory and sat down morosely. He siphoned himself a drink before he remembered the little brown animal. Then he lay back, staring from the blue-eyed dynamo to Joe and back again.

Finally he said: "There's an old Chinese idea that the man who first stops arguing and starts swinging with his fists admits his intellectual defeat."

Joe said: "Naturally. Reason is sufficient; if you need experiment to prove your point, you're a lousy philosopher and logician."

Gallegher fell back on casuistry. "First step, animal. Fist-swinging. Second step, human. Pure logic. But what about the third step?"

"What third step?"

"Men can know the nature of things —but you're not a man. Your personal deity isn't an anthropomorphic one. Three steps: animal, man, and what we'll call for convenience, superman—though man doesn't necessarily enter into it. We've always attributed godlike traits to the theoretical superbeing. Suppose, just for the sake of having a label, we call this third-stage entity Joe."

"Why not?" Joe said.

"Then the two basic concepts of logic don't apply. Men can know the nature of things by pure reason, and also by experiment and reason. But such second-stage concepts are as elementary to Joe as Plato's ideas were to Aristotle." Gallegher crossed his fingers behind his back. "The question is, then, what's the third-stage operation for Joe?"

"Godlike?" the robot said.

"You've got special senses, you know. You can varish, whatever that is. Do you need ordinary logical methods? Suppose— "

"Yes," Joe said, "I can varish, all right. I can skren, too. Hm-m-m." Gallegher abruptly rose from the couch. "What a fool I am. 'DRINK ME'. That's the answer. Joe, shut up. Go off in a corner and varish."

"I'm skrenning," Joe said.

"Then skren. I've finally got an idea. When I woke up yesterday, I was thinking about a bottle labeled

'DRINK ME'. When Alice took a drink, she changed size, didn't she? Where's that reference book? I wish I knew more about technology. Vasoconstrictor...hemostatic. ..here it is— demonstrates the metabolic regulation mechanisms of the vegetative nervous system. Metabolism. I wonder now—" Gallegher rushed to the workbench and examined the bottles. "Vitalism. Life is the basic reality, of which everything else is a form or manifestation. Now, I had a problem to solve for Adrenals, Incorporated. Jonas Harding and Grandpa were here. Harding gave me an hour to fill the bill. The problem...a dangerous and harmless animal. Paradox. That isn't it. Harding's clients wanted thrills and safety at the same time. I've got no lab animals on tap at the moment... Joe!"

"Well?"

"Watch," Gallegher said. He poured a drink and watched the liquid vanish before he tasted it. "Now. What happened?"

"The little brown animal drank it."

"Is that little brown animal, by any chance— Grandpa?"

"That's right," Joe said.

Gallegher blistered the robot's transparent hide with sulphurous oaths. "Why didn't you tell me?

You—"

"I answered your question," the robot said smugly. "Grandpa's brown, isn't he? And he's an animal."

"But—little! I thought it was a critter about as big as a rabbit."

"The only standard of comparison is the majority of the species. That's the yardstick. Compared to the average height of humans, Grandpa is little. A little brown animal."

"So it's Grandpa, is it?" Gallegher said, returning to the workbench. "And he's simply speeded up. Accelerated metabolism. Adrenalin. Hm-m-m. Now I know what to look for, maybe—" He fell to. But it was sundown before Gallegher emptied a small vial into a glass, siphoned whisky into it, and watched the mixture disappear.

A flickering began. Something flashed from corner to corner of the room. Gradually it became visible as a streaking brownness that resolved itself, finally, into Grandpa. He stood before Gallegher, jittering like mad as the last traces of the accelerative formula wore off.

"Hello, Grandpa," Gallegher said placatingly.

Grandpa's nutcracker face wore an expression of malevolent fury. For the first time in his life, the old gentleman was drunk. Gallegher stared in utter amazement.

"I'm going back to Maine," Grandpa cried, and fell over backwards.

"Never seen such a lot of slow pokes in my life," Grandpa said, devouring a steak. "My, I'm hungry. Next time I let you stick a needle in me I'll know better. How many months have I been like this?"

"Two days," Gallegher said, carefully mixing up a formula. "It was a metabolic accelerator, Grandpa. You just lived faster, that's all."

"All! Bah. Couldn't eat nothing. Food was solid as a rock. Only thing I could get down my gullet was liquor."

"Oh?"

"Hard chewing. Even with my store teeth. Even whisky tasted hotter. As for a steak like this, I couldn't've managed it."

"You were living faster." Gallegher glanced at the robot, who was still quietly skrenning in a comer.

"Let me see. The antithesis of an accelerator is a decelerator— Grandpa, where's Jonas Harding?"

"In there," Grandpa said, pointing to the blue-eyed dynamo and thus confirming Gallegher's suspicion.

"Vitaplasm. So that was it. That's why I had a lot of Vitaplasm sent over a couple of nights ago. Hm-m-m." Gallegher examined the sleek, impermeable surface of the apparent dynamo. After a while he tried a hypodermic syringe. He couldn't penetrate the hard shell.

Instead, using a new mixture he had concocted from the bottles on his workbench, he dripped a drop of the liquid on the substance. Presently it softened. At that spot Gallegher made an injection, and was delighted to see a color-change spread out from the locus till the entire mass was pallid and plastic.

"Vitaplasm," he exulted. "Ordinary artificial protoplasm cells, that's all. No wonder it looked hard. I'd given it a decelerative treatment. An approach to molecular stasis. Anything metabolizing that slowly would seem hard as iron." He wadded up great bunches of the surrogate and dumped it into a convenient vat. Something began to form around the blue eyes—the shape of a cranium, broad shoulders, a torso—

Freed from the disguising mass of Vitaplasm, Jonas Harding was revealed crouching on the floor, silent as a statue.

His heart wasn't beating. He didn't breathe. The decelerator held him in an unbreakable grip of passivity.

Not quite unbreakable. Gallegher, about to apply the hypodermic, paused and looked from Joe to Grandpa. "Now why did I do that?" he demanded.

Then he answered his own question.

"The time limit. Harding gave me an hour to solve his problem. Time's relative—especially when your metabolism is slowed down. I must have given Harding a shot of the decelerator so he wouldn't realize how much time had passed. Let's see." Gallegher applied a drop to Harding's impermeable skin and watched the spot soften and change hue. "Uh-huh. With Harding frozen like that, I could take weeks to work on the problem, and when he woke up, he'd figure only a short time had passed. But why did I use the Vitaplasm on him?"

Grandpa downed a beer. "When you're drunk, you're apt to do anything," he contended, reaching for another steak.

"True, true. But Gallegher Plus is logical. A strange, eerie kind of logic, but logic nevertheless. Let me see. I shot the decelerator into Harding, and then—there he was. Rigid and stiff. I couldn't leave him kicking around the lab, could I?

If anybody came in they’d think I had a corpse on my hands!"

"You mean he ain't dead?" Grandpa demanded.

"Of course not. Merely decelerated. I know! I camouflaged Harding's body. I sent out for Vitaplasm, molded the stuff around his body, and then applied the decelerator to the Vitaplasm. It works on living cellular substance—slows it down. And slowed down to that extent, it's impermeable and immovable!"

"You're crazy," Grandpa said.

"I'm short-sighted," Gallegher admitted. "At least, Gallegher Plus is. Imagine leaving Harding's eyes visible, so I'd be reminded the guy was under that pile when I woke up from my binge! What did I construct that recorder for, anyhow? The logic Gallegher Plus uses is far more fantastic than Joe's."

"Don't bother me," Joe said. "I'm still skrenning."

Gallegher put the hypodermic needle into the soft spot on Harding's arm. He injected the accelerator, and within a moment or two Jonas Harding stirred, blinked his blue eyes, and got up from the floor.

"Ouch!" he said, rubbing his arm. "Did you stick me with something?"

"An accident," Gallegher said, watching the man warily. "Uh.. . this problem of yours—" Harding found a chair and sat down, yawning. "Solved it?"

"You gave me an hour."

"Oh. Yes, of course." Harding looked at his watch. "It's stopped. Well, what about it?"

"Just how long a time do you think has lapsed since you came into this laboratory?"

"Half an hour?" Harding hazarded.

"Two months," Grandpa snapped.

"You're both right," Gallegher said. "I'd have another answer, but I'd be right, too." Harding obviously thought that Gallegher was still drunk. He stayed doggedly on the subject.

"What about that specialized animal we need? You still have half an hour— "

"I don't need it," Gallegher said, a great white light dawning in his mind. "I've got your answer for you. But it isn't quite what you think it is." He relaxed on the couch and considered the liquor-organ. Now that he could drink again, he found he preferred to prolong the anticipation.

"I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst," he remarked.

"Claptrap," Grandpa said.

Gallegher said: "The clients of Adrenals, Incorporated, want to hunt animals. They want a thrill, so they need dangerous animals. They have to be safe, so they can't have dangerous animals. It seems paradoxical, but it isn't. The answer doesn't lie in the animal. It's in the hunter." Harding blinked. "Come again?"

"Tigers. Ferocious man-eating tigers. Lions. Jaguars. Water buffalo. The most vicious, carnivorous animals you can get. That's part of the answer."

"Listen—" Harding said. "Maybe you've got the wrong idea. The tigers aren't our customers. We don't supply clients to the animals, it's the other way round."

"I must make a few more tests," Gallegher said, "but the basic priciple's right here in my hand. An accelerator. A latent metabolic accelerator with a strong concentration of adrenalin as the catalyst. Like this— " He sketched a vivid verbal picture.

Armed with a rifle the client wandered through the artificial jungle, seeking quarry. He had already paid his fee to Adrenals, Incorporated, and got his intravenous shot of the latent accelerator. That substance permeated his blood stream, doing nothing as yet, waiting for the catalyst. The tiger launched itself from the underbrush. It shot toward the client like catapulted murder, fangs bared. As the claws neared the man's back, the suprarenals shot adrenalin into the blood stream in strong concentration.

That was the catalyst. The latent accelerative factor became active.

The client speeded up —tremendously.

He stepped away from the body of the tiger, apparently frozen in midair, and did what seemed best to him before the effect of the accelerator wore off. When it did, he returned to normal—and by that time he could be in the supply station of Adrenals, Incorporated, getting another intravenous shot— unless he'd decided to bag his tiger the easy way.

It was as simple as that.

"Ten thousand credits," Gallegher said, happily counting them. "The balance due as soon as I work out the catalytic angle. Which is a cinch. Any fourth-rate chemist could do it. What intrigues me is the forthcoming interview between Harding and Murdoch Mackenzie. When they compare the time element, it's going to be funny."

"I want a drink," Grandpa said. "Where's a bottle?"

"Even in court, I think I could prove I only took an hour or less to solve the problem. It was Harding's hour, of course, but time is relative. Entropy—metabolism—what a legal battle that would be!

Still, it won't happen. I know the formula for the accelerator and Harding doesn't. He'll pay the other forty thousand—and Mackenzie won't have any kicks. After all, I'm giving Adrenals, Incorporated, the success factor they needed."

"Well, I'm still going back to Maine," Grandpa contended. "Least you can do is give me a bottle."

"Go out and buy one," Gallegher said, tossing the old gentleman several credits. "Buy several. I often wonder what the vintners buy—"

"Eh?"

"—one-half so precious as the stuff they sell. No, I'm not tight. But I'm going to be." Gallegher clutched the liquor-organ's mouth-piece in a loving grip and began to play alcoholic arpeggios on the keyboard. Grandpa, with a parting sneer at such new-fangled contraptions, took his departure. Silence fell over the laboratory. Bubbles and Monstro, the two dynamos, sat quiescent. Neither of them had bright blue eyes. Gallegher experimented with cocktails and felt a warm, pleasant glow seep through his soul.

Joe came out of his corner and stood before the mirror, admiring his gears.

"Finished skrenning?" Gallegher asked sardonically.

"Yes."

"Rational being, forsooth. You and your philosophy. Well, my fine robot, it turned out I didn't need your help after all. Pose away."

"How ungrateful you are," Joe said, "after I've given you the benefit of my superlogic."

"Your... what? You've slipped a gear. What super-logic?"

"The third-stage, of course. What we were talking about a while back. That's why I was skrenning. I hope you didn't think all your problems were solved by your feeble brain, in that opaque cranium of yours."

Gallegher sat up. "What are your talking about? Third-stage logic? You didn't— "

"I don't think I can describe it to you. It's more abstruse than the noumenon of Kant, which can't be perceived except by thought. You've got to be able to skren to understand it, but—well, it's the third stage. It's...let's see...demonstrating the nature of things by making things happen by themselves."

"Experiment?"

"No. By skrenning, I reduce all things from the material plane to the realm of pure thought, and figure out the logical concepts and solutions."

"But... wait. Things have been happening! I figured out about Grandpa and Harding and worked out the accelerator—"

"You think you did," Joe said. "I simply skrenned. Which is a purely super-intellectual process. After I'd done that, things couldn't help happening. But I hope you don't think they happened by themselves!" Gallegher said: "What's skrenning?"

"You'll never know."

"But…you're contending you're the First Cause... no, it's voluntarism... third-stage logic? No—" Gallegher fell back on the couch, staring. "Who do you think you are? Deus ex machina?" Joe glanced down at the conglomeration of gears in his torso.

"What else?" he asked smugly.

It seems only reasonable that the mental hospital should have done something for “John Kingman”. After all, he was there for 162 years…

The Strange Case of John Kingman

Murray Leinster

IT STARTED WHEN Dr. Braden took the trouble to look up John Kingman's case-history card. Meadeville Mental Hospital had a beautifully elaborate system of card indexes, because psychiatric research is stressed there. It is the oldest mental institution in the country, having been known as "New Bedlam" when it was founded some years before the Republic of the United States of America. The card index system was unbelievably perfect. But young Dr. Braden found John Kingman's card remarkably lacking in the usual data.

"Kingman, John," said the card. "White, male, 5'8", brown-black hair. Note: physical anomaly. Patient has six fingers on each hand, extra digits contaming apparently normal bones and being wholly functional. Age . . ." This was blank. "Race . . ." This, too, was blank. "Birthplace " Considering the other blanks, it was natural for this to be vacant, also. "Diagnosis: advanced typical paranoia with pronounced delusions of grandeur apparently unassociated with usual conviction of persecution." There was a comment here, too. "Patient apparently understands English very slightly if at all. Does not speak." Then three more spaces. "Nearest relative . . ." It was blank. "Case history . . ." It was blank. Then,

"Date of admission . . ." and it was blank.

The card was notably defective, for the index card of a patient at Meadeville Mental. A patient's age and race could be unknown if he'd simply been picked up in the street somewhere and never adequately identified. In such an event it was reasonable that his nearest relative and birthplace should be unknown, too. But there should have been some sort of case history, at least of the events leading to his committal to the institution. And certainly, positively, absolutely, the date of his admission should be on the card!

Young Dr. Braden was annoyed. This was at the time when the Jantzen euphoric-shock treatment was first introduced, and young Dr. Braden believed in it. It made sense. He was anxious to attempt it at Meadeville, of course on a patient with no other possible hope of improvement. He handed the card to the clerk in the records department and asked for further data on the case. Two hours later he smoked comfortably on a very foul pipe, stretched out on grassy sward by the Administration Building. There was a beautifully blue sky overhead, and the shadows of the live oaks reached out in an odd long pattern on the lawn. Young Dr. Braden read meditatively in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The article was "Reaction of Ten Paranoid Cases to Euphoric Shock." John Kingman sat in regal dignity on the steps nearby. He wore the nondescript garments of an indigent patient, not supplied with clothing by relatives. He gazed into the distance, to all appearances thinking consciously godlike thoughts and being infinitely superior to mere ordinary humans. He was of an indeterminate age which might be forty or might be sixty or might be anywhere in between. His six-fingered hands lay in studied gracefulness in his lap. He deiberately ignored all of mankind and mankind's doings.

Dr. Braden finished the article. He sucked thoughtfully on the burned-out pipe. Without seeming to do so, he regarded John Kingman again. Mental cases have unpredictable reactions, but as with children and will animals, much can be done if care is taken not to startle them. Presently young Dr. Braden said meditatively:

"John, I think something can be done for you"

The regal figure turned its eyes. They looked at the younger man. They were aloofly amused at the imperitinence of a mere human being addressing John Kingman, who was so much greater than a mere human being that he was not even annoyed at human impertinence. Then John Kingman looked away again.

"I imagine," said Braden, as meditatively as before, "that you're pretty bored. I'm going to see if something can't be done about it. In fact-"

Someone came across the grass toward him. It was the clerk of the records department. He looked very unhappy. He had the card Dr. Braden had turned in with a request for more complete information. Braden waited.

"Er . . .doctor," said the clerk miserably, "there's something wrong! Something terribly wrong! About the records, I mean."

The aloofness of John Kingman had multiplied with the coming of a second, low, human being into his ken. He gazed into the distance in divine indifference to such creatures.

"Well?" said Braden.

"There's no record of his admission!" said the clerk. "Every year there's a complete roster of the patients, you know. I thought I'd just glance back, find out what year his name first appeared, and look in the committal papers for that year. But I went back twenty years, and John Kingman is mentioned every year!"

"Look back thirty, then," said Braden.

"I . . . I did!" said the clerk painfully. "He was a patient here thirty years ago!"

"Forty?" asked Braden.

The clerk gulped.

"Dr. Braden," he said desperately, "I even went to the dead files, where records going back to 1850

are kept. And . . . doctor, he was a patient then!"

Braden got up from the grass and brushed himself off automatically.

"Nonsense!" he said. "That's ninety-eight years ago!" The clerk looked crushed. "I know, doctor. There's something terribly wrong! I've never had my records questioned before. I've been here twenty years."

"I'll come with you and look for myself," said Dr. Braden. "Send an attendant to come here and take him back to his ward."

"Y-yes, doctor," said the clerk, gulping again. "At... at once." He went away at a fast pace between a shuffle and a run. Dr. Braden scowled impatiently. Then he saw John Kingman looking at him again, and John Kingmàn was amused. Tolerantly, loftily amused. Amused with a patronizing condescension that would have been infuriating to anyone but a physician trained to regard behavior as symptomatic rather than personal.

"It's absurd," grunted Braden, matter of factly treating the patient, as a good psychiatrist does, like a perfectly normal human being. "You haven't been here for ninety-eight years!" One of the six-fingered hands stirred. While John Kingman regarded Braden with infinitely superior scorn, six fingers made a gesture as of writing. Then the hand reached out. Braden put a pencil in it. The other hand reached. Braden fumbled in his pockets and found a scrap of paper. He offered that.

John Kingman looked aloofly into the far distance, not even glancing at what his hands did. But the fingers sketched swiftly, with practiced ease. It took only seconds. Then, negligently, he reached out and returned pencil and paper to Braden. He returned to his godlike indifference to mere mortals. But there was now the faintest possible smile on his face. It was an expression of contemptuous triumph. Braden glanced at the sketch. There was design there. There was an unbelievable intricacy of relationship between this curved line and that, and between them and the formalized irregular pattern in the center. It was not the drawing of a lunatic. It was cryptic, but it was utterly rational. There is something essentially childish in the background of most forms of insanity. There was nothing childish about this. And it was obscurely, annoyingly familiar. Braden had seen something like it, somewhere, before. It was not in the line of psychiatry, but in some of the physical sciences diagrams like this were used in explanations.

An attendant came to return John Kingman to his ward. Braden folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

"It's not in my line, John," he told John Kingman. "I'll have a check-up made. I think I'm going to be able to do something for you."

John Kingman suffered himself to be led away. Rather, he grandly preceded the attendant, negligently preventing the man from touching him, as if such a touch Would be a sacrilege the man was too ignorant to realize.

Braden went to the record office. With the agitated clerk beside him, he traced John Kingman's name to the earliest of the file of dead records. Handwriting succeeded typewriting as he went back through the years. Paper yellowed. Handwriting grew Spencerian. It approached the copperplate. But, in ink turned brown, in yellowed rag paper in the ruled record, books of the Eastern Pennsylvania Asylum, which was Meadeville Mental in 1850, there were the records of a patient named John Kingman for every year. Twice Braden came upon notes alongside the name. One was in 1880. Some staff doctor, there were no psychiatrists in those days, had written, "High fever." There was nothing else. In 1853 a neat memo stood beside the name. "This man has six functioning fingers on each hand." The memo had been made ninety-five years before.

Dr. Braden looked at the agitated clerk. The record of John Kingman was patently impossible. The clerk read it as a sign of inefficiency in his office and possibly on his part. He would be upset and apprehensible until the source of the error had safely been traced to a predecessor.

"Someone," said Braden dryly, but he did not believe it even then, "forgot to make a note of the explanation. An unknown must have been admitted at some time as John Kingman. In time, he died. But somehow the name John Kingman had become a sort of stock name like John Doe, to signify an unidentified patient. Look in the death records for John Kingman. Evidently a John Kingman died, and that same year another unidentified patient was assigned the same name. That's it!" The clerk almost gasped with relief. He went happily to check. But Braden did not believe it. In 1853

someone had noted that John Kingman had six functioning fingers on each hand. The odds against two patients in one institution having six functioning fingers, even in the same century, would be enormous. Braden went doggedly to the museum. There the devices used in psychiatric treatments in the days of New Bedlam were preserved, but not displayed. Meadeville Mental had been established in 1776 as New Bedlam. It was the oldest mental institution in the United States, but it was not pleasant to think of the treatment given to patients, then termed "madmen", in the early days. The records remained. Calf-leather bindings. Thin rag paper. Beautifully shaded writing, done with quill pens. Year after year, Dr. Braden searched. He found John Kingman listed in 1820. In 1801. In 1795. In 1785 the name "John Kingthan" was absent from the annual list of patients. Braden found the record of his admission in 1786. On the 21st of May, 1786, ten years after New Bedlam was founded, one hundred and sixty-two years before the time of his search, there was a neat entry: A poore madman admitted this day has been assigned the name of John Kingman because of his absurdly royal manner and affected dignity. He is five feet eight inches tall, appears to speak no English or any other tongue known to any of the learned men here about, and has six fingers on each hand, the extra fingers being perfectly formed and functioning. Dr. San Forde observed that he seems to have a high fever. On his left shoulder, when stripped, there appears a curious design which is not tattooing according to any known fashion. His madness appears to be so strong a conviction of his greatness that he will not condescend to notice others as being so much his inferiors, so that if not committed hee would starve. But on three occasions, when being examined by physicians, he put out his hand imperiously for writing instruments, and drew very intricate designs which all agree have no significance. He was committed as a madman by a commission consisting of Drs. San Forde, Smyth, Hale, and Bode." Young Dr. Braden read the entry a second time. Then a third. He ran his hands through his hair. When the clerk came back to announce distressedly that not in all the long history of the institution had a patient named John Kingman died, Braden was not surprised.

"Quite right," said Braden to the almost hysterical clerk. "He didn't die. But I want John Kingman taken over to the hospital ward. We're going to look him over. He's been rather neglected. Apparently he's had actual medical attention only once in a hundred and sixty-two years. Get out his committal papers for me, will you? He was admitted here May 21st, 1786."

Then Braden left, leaving behind him a clerk practically prostrated with shock. The clerk wildly suspected that Dr. Braden had gone insane. But when he found the committal papers, he decided hysterically that it was he who would shortly hold in one of the wards.

John Kingman manifested amusement when he was taken into the hospital laboratory. For a good ten seeonds, Braden watched him narrowly, he glanced from one piece of apparatus to another. It was impossible to doubt that after one glance he understood the function and operation of every appliance in the ultramodern, super, scientifically, equipped laboratory of the hospital ward. Bnt he was amused. In particular, he looked at the big X-ray machine and smiled with such contempt that the X-ray technician bristled.

"No paranoid suspicion," said Braden. "Most paranoid patients suspect that they're going to be tortured or killed when they're brought to a place where there's stuff they don't understand." John Kingman turned his eyes to Braden. He put out his six-fingered hand and made the motion of writing. Braden handed him a pencil and a memo tablet. Negligently, contemptuously, he sketched. He sketched again. He handed the sketches to Braden and retreated into his enormous amused contempt for humanity.

Braden glanced at the scraps of paper. He jerked his bead, and the X-ray technician came to his side.

"This," said Braden dryly, "looks like a diagram of an X-ray tube. Is it?" The technician blinked.

"He don't use the regular symbols," he objected, "but . . . well . . yes. That's what he puts for the target and this's for the cathode. Hm-m-m. Yes." Then he said suddenly: "Say! That's not right." He studied the diagram. Then he said in abrupt excitement:

"Look! He's put in a field like in a electron microscope! That's an idea! Do that, and you'd get straightline electron flow and a narrower X-ray beam."

Braden said:

"I wonder! What's this second sketch? Another type of X-ray?"The X-ray technician studied the second sketch absorbedly. After a time he said dubiously:

"He don't use regular symbols. I don't know. Here's the same sign for the target and that for the cathode. This looks like something to . . . hm-m-m . . . accelerate the electrons. Like in a Coolidge tube. Only it's," He scratched his head. "I see what he's trying to put down. If something like this would work, you could work any tube at any voltage you wanted. Yeah! And all the high EMF would be inside the tube. No danger. Hey! You could work this off dry batteries! A doctor could carry a X-ray outfit in his handbag! And he could get million-volt stuff!"

The technician stared in mounting excitement. Presently he said urgently:

"This is crazy! But . . . look, Doe! Let me have this thing to study over! This is great stuff! This is. . . Gosh! Give me a chance to get this made up and try it out! I don't get it all yet, but. . ." Braden took back the sketch and put it in his pocket.

"John Kingman," he observed, "has been a patient here for a hundred and sixty-two years. I think we're going to get some more surprises. Let's get at the job on hand!" John Kingman was definitely amused. He was amenable, now. His air of pitying condescension, as of a god to imbeciles, under other circumstances would have been infuriating. He permitted himself to be X-rayed as one might allow children to use one as a part of their play. He glanced at the thermometer and smiled contemptuously. He permitted his body temperature to be taken from an armpit. The electrocardiograph aroused just such momentary interest as a child's unfamiliar plaything might cause. With an air of mirth he allowed the tattooed design on his shoulder, it was there, to be photographed. Throughout, he showed such condescending contempt as would explain his failure to be annoyed. But Braden grew pale as the tests went on. John Kingman's body temperature was 1050 F. A "high fever" had been observed in 1850, ninety-eight years before, and in 1786, well over a century and a half previously. But he still appeared to be somewhere between forty and sixty years old. John Kingman's pulse rate was one hundred fifty-seven beats per minute, and the electrocardiograph registered an absolutely preposterous pattern which had no meaning until Braden said curtly:

"If he had two hearts, it would look like that!"

When the X-ray plates came out of the fixing-bath, he looked at them with the grim air of someone expecting to see the impossible. And the impossible was there. When John Kingman was admitted to New Bedlam, there were no such things as X-rays on earth. It was natural that he had never been X-rayed before. He had two hearts. He had three extra ribs on each side. He had four more vertebrae than a normal human being. There were distinct oddities in his elbow joints. And his cranial capacity appeared to be something like twelve per cent above that of any but exceptional specimens of humanity. His teeth displayed distinct, consistent deviations from the norm in shape. He regarded Braden with contemptuous triumph when the tests were over. He did not speak. He drew dignity about himself like a garment. He allowed an attendant to dress him again while he looked into the distance, seemingly thinking godlike thoughts. When his toilet was complete he looked again at Braden, with vast condescension, and his six-fingered hands again made a gesture of writing. Braden grew, if possible, slightly paler as he handed over a pencil and pad.

John Kingman actually designed to glance, once, at the sheet on which he wrote. When he handed it back to Bradeñ and withdrew into magnificently amused aloofness, there were a dozen or more tiny sketches on the sheet. The first was an exact duplicate of the one he had handed Braden before the Administration Building. Beside it was another which was similar but not alike. The third was a specific variation of the two together. The rest carried on that variation in precise, exact steps until the last pair of sketches divided again into two, of which one, by a perfectly logical extension of the change, pattern, had returned to the original design, while the other was a bewilderingly complex pattern with its formalized central part in two closely-linked Sections.

Braden caught his breath. Just as the X-ray man had been puzzled at first by the use of unfamiliar symbols for familiar ideas, so Braden had been puzzled by untraceable familiarity in the first sketch of all. But the last diagram made everything clear. It resembled almost exactly the standard diagrams illustrating fissionable elements as atoms. Once it was granted that John Kingman was no ordinary lunatic, it became clear that here was a diagram of some physical process which began with normal and stable atoms and arrived at an unstable atom, with one of the original atoms returned to its original state. It was, in short, a process of physical catalysis which would produce atomic energy.

Braden raised his eyes to the contemptuous, amused eyes of John Kingman.

"I think you win," he said shakenly. "I still think you're crazy, but maybe we're crazier still."

The commitment papers on John Kiagman were a hundred and sixty-two years old. They were yellow and brittle and closely written. John Kingman, said the oddly spelled and sometimes curiously phrased document, was first seen on the morning of April 10, 1786, by a man named Thomas Hawkes, as he drove into Aurora, Pennsylvania, with a load of corn. John Kingman was then clad in very queer garments, not like those of ordinary men. The material looked like silk, save that it seemed also to be metallic. The man Hawkes was astounded, but thought perhaps some strolling player had got drunk and wandered off while wearing his costume for a play or pageant. He obligingly stopped his horse and allowed the stranger to climb in for a ride to town. The stranger was imperious, and scornfully silent. Hawkes asked who he was, and was contemptuously ignored. He asked, seemingly, all the world was talking of such matters then, at least the world about Aurora, Pennsylvania, if the stranger had seen the giant shooting stars of the night before. The stranger ignored him. Arrived in town, the stranger stood in the street with regal dignity, looking contemptuously at the people. A crowd gathered about him, but he seemed to feel too superior to notice it. Presently a grave and elderly man, Mr. Wycherly, appeared and the stranger fixed him with a gesture. He stooped and wrote strange designs in the dust at his feet. When the unintelligible design was meaningless to Mr. Wycherly, the stranger seemed to fly into a very passion of contempt. He spat at the crowd, and the crowd became unruly and constables took him into custody. Braden waited patiently until both the Director of Meadeville Mental and the man from Washington had finished reading the yellowed papers. Then Braden explained calmly:

"He's insane, of course. It's paranoia. He is as convinced of his superiority to us as, say, Napoleon or Edison would have been convinced of their superiority if they'd suddenly been dumped down among a tribe of Australian bushmen. As a matter of fact, John Kingman may have just as good reason as they would have had to feel his superiority. But if he were sane he would prove it. He would establish it. Instead, he has withdrawn into a remote contemplation of his own greatness. So he is a paranoid. One may surmise that he was insane when he first appeared. But he doesn't have a delusion of persecution because on the face of it no such theory is needed to account for his present situation." The Director said in a tolerantly shocked tone:

"Dr. Braden! You speak as if he were not a human being!"

"He isn't," said Braden. "His body temperature is a hundred and five. Human tissues simply would not survive that temperature. He has extra vertebrae and extra ribs. His joints are not quite like ours. He has two hearts. We were able to check his circulatory system just under the skin with infrared lamps, and it is not like ours. And I submit that he has been a patient in this asylum for one hundred and sixty-two years. If he is human, he is at least remarkable!"

The man from Washington said interestedly:

"Where do you think he comes from, Dr. Braden?"

Braden spread out his hands. He said doggedly:

"I make no guesses. But I sent photostats of the sketches he made to the Bureau of Standards. I said that they were made by a patient and appeared to be diagrams of atomic structure. I asked if they indicated aknowledge of physics. "You", he looked at the man from Washington, "turned up thirty-six hours later. I deduce that he has such knowledge."

"He has!" said the man from Washington, mildly, "The X-ray sketches were interesting enough, but the others. . . Apparently he has told us how to get controlled atomic energy out of silicon, which is one of earth's commonest elements. Where did he come from, Dr. Braden?"

Braden clantped his jaw.

"You noticed that the commitment papers referred to shooting stars then causing much local comment? I looked up the newspapers for about that date. They reported a large shooting star which was observed to descend to the earth. Then, various credible observers claimed that it shot back up to the sky again. Then, some hours afterward, various large shooting stars crossed the sky from horizon to horizon, without ever falling."

The Director of Meadeville Mental said humorously:

"It's a wonder that New Bedlam, as we were then, was not crowded after such statements!" The man from Washington did not smile.

"I think," he said meditatively, "that Dr. Braden suggests a spaceship landing to permit John Kingman to get out, and then going away again. And possible pursuit afterward." The Director laughed appreciatively at the assumed jest.

"If," said the man from Washington, "John Kingrnan is not human, and if he comes from somewhere where as much was known about atomic energy almost two centuries ago as he has showed us, and, if he were insane there, he might have seized some sort of vehicle and fled in it because of delusions of persecution. Which in a sense, if he were insane, might be justified. He would have been pursued. With pursuers close behind him he might have landed here."

"But the vehicle!" said the Director, humorously. "Our ancestors would have recorded finding a spaceship or an airplane."

"Suppose," said the man from Washington, "that his pursuers had something like . . . say . . . radar. Even we have that! A cunning lunatic would have sent off his vehicle under automatic control to lead his pursuers as long and merry a chase as possible. Perhaps he sent it to dive into the sun. The rising shooting star and the other cruising shooting stars would be accounted for. What do you say, Dr. Braden?"

Braden shrugged.

"There is no evidence. Now he is insane. If we were to cure him. . ."

"Just how," said the man from Washington, "would you cure him? I thought paranoia was practically hopeless."

"Not quite," Braden told him. "They've used shock treatment for dementia praecox and schizophrenia, with good results. Until last year there was nothing of comparable value for paranoia. Then Jantzen suggested euphoric shock. Basically, the idea is to dispel illusions by creating hallucinations." The Director fidgeted disapprovingly. The man from Washington waited.

"In euphoric shock," said Braden carefully, "the tensions and anxieties of insane patients are relieved by drugs which produce a sensation of euphoria, or well being. Jantzen combined hallucination-producing drugs with those. The combination seems to place the patient temporarily in a cosmos in which all delusions are satisfied and all tensions relieved. He has a rest from his struggle against reality. Also he has a sort of supercatharsis, in the convincing realization of all his desires. Quite often he comes out of the first euphoric shock temporarily sane. The percentage of final cures is satisfyingly high." The man from Washington said, "Body chemistry?"

Braden regarded him with new respect. He said, "I don't know. He's lived on human food for almost two centuries, and in any case it's been proved that the proteins will be identical on all planets under all suns. But I couldn't be sure about it. There might even be allergies. You say his drawings were very important. It might be wisest to find out everything possible from him before even euphoric shock was tried."

"Ah, yes!" said the Director, tolerantly. "If he has waited a hundred and sixty-two years, a few weeks or months will make no difference. And I would like to watch the experiment, but I am about to start on my vacation. . . "

"Hardly," said the man from Washington.

"I said, I am about to start on my vacation."

"John Kingman," said the man from Washington mildly, "has been trying for a hundred and sixty-two years to tell us how to have controlled atomic energy, and pocket X-ray machines, and God knows what all else. There may be, somewhere about this institution, drawings of antigravity apparatus, really efficient atomic bombs, spaceship drives or weapons which could depopulate the earth. I'm afraid nobody here is going to communicate with the outside world in any way until the place and all its personnel are gone over

. . . ah rather carefully."

"This," said the Director indignantly, "is preposterous!"

"Quite so. A thousand years of human advance locked in the skull of a lunatic. Nearly two hundred years more of progress and development wasted because he was locked up here. But it would be most preposterous of all to let his information loose to the other lunatics who aren't locked up because they're running governments! Sit down!"

The Director sat down. The man from Washington said:

"Now, Dr. Braden. . ."

John Kingman spent days on end in scornful, triumphant glee. Braden watched him somberly. Meadeville Mental Hospital was an anned camp with sentries everywhere, and especially about the building in which John Kingman gloated. There were hordes of suitably certified scientists and psychiatrists about him, now, and he was filled with blazing satisfaction. He sat in regal, triumphant aloofness. He was the greatest, the most important, the most consequential figure on this planet. The stupid creatures who inhabited it, they were only superficially like himself, had at last come to perceive his godliness. Now they clustercd about him. In their stupid language which it was beneath his dignity to learn, they addressed him. But they did not grovel. Even groveling would not be sufficiently respectful for such inferior beings when addressing John Kingman. He very probably devised in his own mind the exact etiquette these stupid creatures must practice before he would condescend to notice them.

They made elaborate tests. He ignored their actions. They tried with transparent cunning to trick him into further revelations of the powers he held. Once, in malicious amusement, he drew a sketch of a certain reaction which such inferior minds could not possibly understand. They were vastly excited, and he was enormously amused. When they tried that reaction and square miles turned to incandescent vapor, the survivors would realise that they could not trick or force him into giving them the riches of his godlike mind. They must devise the proper etiquette to appease him. They must abjectly and humbly plead with him and placate him and sacrifice to him. They must deny all other gods but John Kinginan. They would realize that he was all wisdom, all power, all greatness when the reaction he had sketched destroyed them by millions.

Braden prevented that from happening. When John Kingusan gave a sketch of a new atomic reaction in response to an elaborate trick one of the newcomers had devised, Braden protested grimly.

"The patient," he said doggedly, "is a paranoid. Suspicion and trickiness is inherent in his mental processes.At any moment, to demonstrate his greatness, he may try to produce unholy destruction. You absolutely cannot trust him! Be careful!"

He hammered the fact home, arguing the sheer fact that a paranoid will do absolutely anything to prove his grandeur.

The new reaction was tried with microscopic quantities of material, and it only destroyed everything within a fifty-yard radius. Which brought the final decision on John Kingman. He was insane. He knew more about one overwhelmingly important subject than all the generations of men. But it was not possible to obtain trustworthy data from him on that subject or any others. while he was insane. It was worth while to take the calculated risk of attempting to cure him.

Braden protested again:

"I urged the attempt to cure him," he said firmly, "before I knew he had given the United States severe centuries head-start in knowledge of atomic energy was thinking of him as a patient. For his own sake, any risk was proper. Since he is not human, withdraw my urging. I do not know what will happen. Anything could happen."

His refusal held up treatment for a week. Then a Presidential executive order resolved the matter. The attempt was to be made as a calculated risk. Dr. Braden would make the attempt. He did. He tested John Kingman for tolerance of euphoric drugs. No unfavorable reaction.He tested him for tolerance of drugs producing hallucination. No unf avorable reaction. Then he injected into one of John Kingman's veins a certain quantity of the combination of drugs which on human beings was most effective for euphoric shock, and whose separate constituents had been tested on John Kingman and found harmless. It was not a sufficient dose to produce the full required effect. Braden expected to have to make at least one and probably two additional injections before the requisite euphoria was produced. He was taking no single avoidable chance. He administered first a dosage which should have produced no more than a feeling of mild but definite exhilaration.

And John Kingman went into convulsions. Horrible ones.

There is such a thing as allergy and such a thing as synergy, and nobody understands either. Some patients collapse when given aspirin. Some break out in rashes from penicillin. Some drugs, taken atone, have one effect, and taken together quite another and drastic one. A drug producing euphoria was harmless to John Kingman. A drug producing hallucinations was harmless. But, synergy or allergy or whatever, the two taken together were deadly poison.

He was literally unconscious for three weeks, and in continuous convulsion for two days. He was kept alive by artificial nourishment, glucose, nasal feeding everything. But his coma was extreme. Four separate times he was believed dead.

But after three weeks he opened his eyes vaguely. In another week he was able to talk, From the first, his expression was bewildered. He was no longer proud. He began to learn English. He showed no paranoid symptoms. He was wholly sane. In fact, his I.Q., tested later, was ninety, which is well within the range of normal intelligence. He was not over-bright, but adequate. And he did not remember who he was. He did not remember anything at all about his life before rousing from coma in the Meadeville Mental Hospital. Not anything at all. It was apparently, either the price or the cause of his recovery. Braden considered that it was the means. He urged his views on the frustrated scientists who wanted now to try hypnotism and "truth serum" and other devices for picking the lock of John Kingman's brain.

"As a diagnosis," said Braden, moved past the tendency to be technical, "the poor devil smashed up on something we can't even guess at. His normal personality couldn't take it, whatever it was, so he fled into delusions, into insanity. He lived in that retreat over a century and a half, and then we found him out, And we wouldn't let him keep his beautiful delusions that he was great and godlike and all-powerful. We were merciless. We forced ourselves upon him. We questioned him. We tricked him. In the end, we nearly poisoned him! And his delusions couldn't stand up. He couldn't I admit that he was wrong, and he couldn't reconcile such experiences with his delusions. There was only one thing he could do, forget the whole thing in the most literal possible manner. What he's done is to go into what they used to call dementia praecox. Actually, it's infantilism. He's fled back to his childhood. That's why his I.Q. is only ninety, instead of the unholy figure it must have been when he was a normal adult of his race. He's mentally a child. He sleeps, right now, in the foetal position. Which is a warning! One more attempt to tamper with his brain, and he'll go into the only place that's left for him, into the absolute blankness that is the mind of the unborn child!"

He presented evidence. The evidence was overwhelming. In the end, reluctantly, John Kingman was left alone.

He gets along all right, though. He works in the records department of Meadeville Mental now, because there his six-fingered hands won't cause remark. He is remarkably accurate and perfectly happy. But be is carefully watched. The one question he can answer now is, how long he's going to live. A hundred and sixty-two years is only part of his lifetime. But if you didn't know, you'd swear he wasn't more than fifty.

A story of tomorrow's frontiers and the space-trails leading there.

Doughnut Jockey

Erik Fennel

FAINTLY THE unmistakable howl of a driver rocket drifted across the ten-mile-wide safety strip surrounding Mukilteo Spaceport. The new guard heard it, and frowned inquiringly. Mike Kelly cocked one ear, yanked the lever opening the main gate, then jerked the new man bodily into the low pillbox-like gatehouse. He kicked the heavy door shut.

"That's Doughnut Merrill turning off the highway," he lectured. "If the gate ain't open, he'd as soon drive that hell-wagon automobile right through it. He's got a miniature Haskell driver bolted into the back deck of that roadster. Fixed it himself. The cops would throw away the keys if they caught him using it on the roads, so he plays out here like he's flying low. Wild as a coot, that fellow."

"But won't he stop to check in?" The new man took his duties seriously. Kelly snorted. "He never does. And this morning he has a good excuse, for once."

"What's it all about, anyhow?"

Kelly looked serious. "Must be something bad wrong. Interplanet don't break schedule for fun."

Walter Merrill glanced toward the blast pits as he passed the perimeter fence. The squatty, ludicrous shape of Doughnut II was already on the supports. Fireball lay beside it in the retrieving cradle on which it had been dragged from Puget Sound after its last run, sleek and slender and, to anyone with an engineering brain, breathtakingly beautiful.

The three tall cranes were in position, their boom tips interlocked to form the stable tripod needed to set a Fire-class ship upright. They always made Merrill think of gawky long-necked geese whispering secrets.

Soon Fireball would be positioned in the hole of Doughnut, ready to go out. The scene was perfectly familiar, but this time it carried a special thrill. Merrill smiled happily. This was his big day. He cut the jet, tromped brakes, and from sheer exuberance made it a spectacular squealing stop—one that streaked hot rubber across the parking lot beside the administration building. He felt eager and well disposed toward all mankind as he headed for Jerry Slidell's office. The operations manager of Interplanet started to jump up, then remembered what long accelerations in the pre-Gravinol days had done to his heart valves, and rose more sedately. He was in his thirties, but his hair was white from radiation leakage, and his face was deeply lined.

"How long to blast-off?" Merrill began. "Tape ready? What's wrong at Mars Colony to need a special hop?" Slidell eased himself back into his chair.

"A pneumonia carrier—one of those people who have it in their systems without showing any symptoms—must have got through the medical check-up. And you know what high-level meson stuff and Rho shower-effect discharges from the hull plates do to viruses. This mutation is so damnably virulent it stands to wipe out the Colony."

Merrill whistled in dismay.

"Benson and his relief pilot were both coming down with it when they splashed Firefly in last night. But the doctors say this new serum should hold even a mutant virus—if we get it out there in time. We found a supply in Seattle—pure luck—and it's being loaded now to stand acceleration and shock.

"So Fireball goes out light, no load but the serum, no relief pilot even, and it'll be full boost, open throttle, and jets all the way."

"But—"

"I know, I know! She'll get in without enough fuel to come back, and there she sits out of action until the Marsport plant starts producing. It messes up the whole schedule, but there's nothing else to do." Merrill leaned forward, his hands gripping the edge of Slidell's desk.

"Jerry, I'll set you a speed record that will stand a long time," he declared. He had a disturbing thought then, but before he could put it into words, the operations manager looked him in the eye.

"Walter!" He avoided the nickname he knew Merrill detested. "Just a minute. Don't you think—" Instantly the smile was gone from Merrill's lean face. "Again?" he barked. Slidell sighed. "All right, I promised," he said resignedly. "You can take Fireball if you insist."

"But you want me to—"

"Use your head, Walter. We need all the boost Doughnut II will put out. Not bare escape velocity. And you know there hasn't been time to check her properly since you boosted Firestreak out last Thursday. You're the one who—"

"How about Bob Ord?"

"He could, under normal conditions. But this won't be standard pattern. Besides, we haven't been able to find him yet. This would happen between schedules, when everybody's scattered to hell and gone!"

"Now, listen here, Jerry. I don't intend to get pushed—" "Walter, I'm doing my best. I caught Wraxton vacationing in Los Angeles, and he should be here in a couple hours to see what he can do." Merrill grimaced. Wraxton of Chesapeake Spaceport was supposed to be a good boosterman, but Doughnut was touchy and Chesapeake used a different control system. The pleasant feeling of a few minutes earlier had evaporated completely.

Slidell's voice was suddenly crisp with authority. "Go get your shots. Thomas will take care of you. We'll settle later who takes what."

Merrill didn't argue, but if the door panel had been glass instead of plastic, it would have shattered as he slammed it. As he stomped toward the locker-room he had a rebellious suspicion that he was being had—again.

Haskell-Jenkins nuclear shift drivers had taken spaceflight out of the over-Niagara-in-a-barrel category, but they had the intrinsic drawback of critical mass limitation. Too much fuel, and a ship exploded spontaneously. Enough to stay under the e.c.m. and it could reach Mars—but on the return voyage it would run out of fuel before completing deceleration, and hit Earth's atmosphere fast enough to burn itself to powder.

The intricate equipment necessary made step-rockets, in which sections were jettisoned in space, fantastically uneconomical. So the great brains of Interplanet had conceived the Doughnut to boost its ships through the power-hogging lift from Earth.

Walter Merrill had been picked off the Luna experimental work for his uncanny power sense and delicate kinesthetic perceptions, for no auto-control had been devised capable of coping with all the variables of blast-off. He had become Interplanet's first and only boosterman. In many ways it was a dream job. One boost-out a month, with the rest of the time almost entirely his own. A salary rating of Senior Pilot "A," which easily financed such financed such impractical hobbies as putting jets on an automobile, as well as a house and sailboat and all the trimmings. A sense of importance, too, for the fate of each spaceship was in the hands of the boosterman during the most critical interval.

But dissatisfaction had set in. Boosting lacked the glamour of deep space. The line pilots and their relief men talked endlessly of the strange floating landings through the low .38 gravity of Mars, and of the remains of a vanished civilization there, and of the Colony that was beginning to grow at Marsport—and all he could do was keep his mouth shut.

He was a glorified elevator operator, missing out on the high adventure that lay out there, never getting much beyond Luna's orbit, and ending each flight with a hissing drop into Puget Sound beside the Mukilteo beacon, while his friends one after another had been given command of full-fledged space vessels.

Recently even men he had been forced to downcheck as potential boostermen had been taking ships through to the Colony. Here he was, stuck in a rut, and every time he had been promised a line run, something had gone sour!

He stripped and put on the buttonless one-piece knit garment he would wear beneath his circulation suit, then kicked his feet savagely into a pair of slippers and shuffled down the hall to the medical department. In the empty treatment-room he stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled shrilly. Bubsy Thomas emerged from the dispensary. She had auburn hair and green eyes; and her white stockings and starched nurse's uniform could not hide the fact she carried deluxe equipment throughout; but for once he was too disturbed to open the conversation with his customary suggestion of Matrimony.

"Limit dose," he told her. "And Neogravinol too. This hop will get rough." She looked at him questioningly. The boosterman ordinarily did not need the more prolonged action of Neogravinol in addition to the regular Gravinol shot.

"You had breakfast before the office caught you," she accused.

"Coffee and toast," he hedged.

"—and three eggs and a pound of bacon. I've seen you eat. Now get your teeth out."

"Aw, honey!" he protested.

Impatiently she tapped a toe against the waxed flooring.

His front uppers had been removable ever since one of the Luna experimentals had set in with a smash that broke his shock chair straps, but still he felt there was something comical and faintly disreputable about wearing falsies. Too much like those females who wore padding to remedy natural deficiencies—which Bubsy definitely did not.

Grimly she watched him, and finally he took them out.

She measured a brownish liquid into a small glass while he cursed the medical records for telling her about his teeth. They hardly helped make him a romantic figure.

"The basin is over there," she directed. "Now drink this." Two minutes later he had no further worries about gravity cramps from a full stomach. It was full no longer.

"Sometime you'll blast with that bridgework in, and get it knocked down your throat," she warned as she had often before.

"A lot you'd care," he growled, still retching.

"But I would," she declared sweetly. "You might wreck a ship." Before he could think of a suitable rejoinder, she had the hypos ready.

"I shot your left arm last time," she remembered, and he rolled back his right sleeve. Deftly she found the vein and pressed the plunger. Then, changing syringes, she began to inject the Neogravinol. "If you take—sit still, darn it!—who'll handle—"

His skin was prickling and itching, and a distinct rainbow aura was forming around every object in the room as the drugs took effect.

"Ord, maybe. Or Wraxton from Chesapeake. But I'm taking Fireball." For a moment her hands were unsteady.

"And why not?" he asked sharply. "I can straighten out any trajectory error they hand me."

"If it's not too bad," she corrected. "But what about Mars Colony if Fireball gets a sour boost and has to abort?"

Merrill didn't want to think about that. "But I don't intend to keep on—" Jerry Slidell banged through the door. His face was streaky pale from moving too violently, but his tongue was unimpaired.

"Wraxton was flying his own plane up," he told them at last with forced calmness. "At Medford some lard-headed student cut in on him during landing. He's got a fractured leg and concussion. Now what the hell?"

"Call Ord," Merrill snapped. He was in the depressive-irritant phase that followed a Gravinol injection. He started to get up, but the nurse pushed him back. He had to take it easy until the shots

"settled in."

Slidell glared. "Been trying, and still am. You think I got holes in my head?"

"Yes, if you think I'm going to—" Merrill growled sullenly.

"Shut up, both of you!" Bubsy interrupted. "Barking at each other won't help." Slidell's shoulders slumped, and his manner was almost pleading.

"You'll stay on call, Walter?"

"Yeah. I'll be around until you get me a boosterman."

A circulation suit was too heavy to put on until the last minute, so he had nothing to do but wait. It should have been pleasant, but the nurse ignored him while she cleaned up and put the hypodermics in the sterilizer. The few glances which she did cast his way were troubled, almost angry. He used her phone to get preliminary flight data from Calculations. Then he fidgeted.

"What's the idea of giving me the busy signal so much lately?" he asked at length. "You sore at me?

Or is it that Fred Morgan off Firesprite?"

The girl turned quickly, as though she had been waiting for that question.

"I've been afraid."

"Huh?"

"Not of you. Of myself. Afraid moonlight and biochemistry would gang up on me."

"And that would be wrong, because I'm a boosterman instead of a line pilot?" he demanded belligerently.

Her eyes misted unexpectedly. "You and I both know there's something real under all our kidding. But Walter, I want a husband who's emotionally mature, who understands responsibilities and accepts them instead of acting like a brat in a temper tantrum."

Merrill frowned.

Jerry Slidell's voice interrupted, rattling abruptly through the inter-office call-box. "We've found Bob Ord. Get ready to give him his shots."

Instantly the nurse thrust personal matters aside.

Merrill felt better. Slidell wasn't giving him the runaround after all. But now he had a different worry. He had let Bob handle a few splits, those critical moments when Doughnut and boosted spaceship parted company; and although Bob looked more promising than any of the other men sent to him for training, he hadn't yet quite got the feel. This was going to be a tough boost; and it had to be good—or else. He only hoped Bob could hold the trajectory skew below the limit that meant aborting the flight. Slidell's voice came again, tinny through the speaker. "Walter, better get your suit on." Automatically Merrill answered. "On my way!"

He turned to the nurse as the connection snapped off. "How'd he know I was here?" he demanded. She smiled, half tenderly and half teasingly. "Everyone around here knows how long and painted and gray-furred your ears are. And since that front-office blonde—"

"She did not!" he retorted indignantly. "And I never made a pass at her, anyhow."

"Okay. So you didn't, and she didn't." Bubsy pulled that infuriating feminine trick of refusing to argue.

There were eighteen zippers and twenty-seven adjustment straps on the suit, and he checked each one personally while the two dressers made the suit-to-boots, suit-to-gloves, suit-to-helmet and helmet-to-face-mask hook-ups. Then he lumbered stiffly across the room and plugged in to the test modulator.

The over-all inflation went on, squeezing his body equally from all directions. He jiggled the manual control— in flight the pressure would compensate automatically with acceleration—and it responded perfectly.

He cut in the sectional controls, and felt the familiar yet eerie rippling sensations as a multitude of tiny compartments in the suit began rhythmic fluctuations in response to his body's needs as reported by built-in blood pressure and pulse and respiration meters. The suit's action had been patterned after the peristaltic movements of a digestive system, using the same idea of progressive, serially applied pressures, and his fingertips and toes tingled as the blood was hurried along. In tree-dwelling days the human race had developed a reflex response to short-duration, one-G falls. Veins and arteries constricted; blood pressure shot up; and major changes took place in the action of the heart valves. This automatic reaction had minimized the injuries of many a falling man, and it was still right for its original purpose.

But under the hours-long, multi-G strains of space-light, it became a peril instead of a protection, putting strains on the body that meant permanent damage. Gravinol short-circuited the reflex, but if used alone under heavy acceleration, it would bring blood circulation—and the pilot's life—to a dead stop. The answer, worked out at heavy cost in lives and health, was Gravinol plus a circulation suit. The suit felt right, almost as though it were alive and part of his body. He nodded okay, unplugged, then loosened his face-mask for comfort. Then he turned heavily at a sound behind him.

"Hiya, Bob," said Merrill friendly enough. This finagling wasn't Ord's fault. Ord squinted. He was having difficulty focusing his eyes. "Neo?" Merrill asked.

"Yeah. I still itch."

Merrill's lips tightened. Neogravinol for Ord meant that Slidell was still scheming.

"What'd Jerry tell you?" he demanded challengingly. "Nothing. Said get the dope from you." Merrill made a face. That smelled like an attempt to appeal to his "better nature." Nuts to that!

He was just a bit sick with disappointment. All the while he had handled the Doughnuts, he had dreamed of his first real command, dreamed the day of his first deep space blastoff up into quite an event. Now those dreams had gone bust, and he felt sour and blue, cheated of the exhilaration he had anticipated.

Slidell's voice buzzed through the speaker. "You pilots hurry up! We don't want to recalculate." Merrill was on his feet at once, anxious to give Slidell a hot earful and then climb into Fireball. After this flight, he'd see about a job with Chesapeake on the Venus run.

The pick-up car was waiting, the driver goosing his engine, and as Merrill climbed aboard, the operations manager thrust both autocontrol tapes into his gloved hands. There was no question which was which, for Doughnut's tape was much wider than Fireball's. Still, no tape could handle all the unpredictable variables. That was what made a pilot. Merrill skimmed the visual sheets and trajectory graphs, while Ord peered over his shoulder.

"What's the orders?" he asked truculently.

"Get it out hot and in line," Slidell said.

"But—"

"You know the situation and what's needed. I wash my hands of it." Slidell sounded thoroughly disgusted.

"But—"

Bubsy leaned across the car door and kissed him. "That's for luck," she whispered. Then she drew back. "Don't forget your teeth," she said aloud.

"Listen here, Jerry," Merrill began, ignoring the girl for more important matters. Slidell jerked a thumb at the driver, and in a second the car was streaking toward the blast pit.

"Damn him!" Merrill growled, handing Doughnut's graph sheets to his companion. Ord whistled, then looked pained.

"You don't have to rub it in," he said, still irritable from his shots.

"Huh?" Merrill's eyes widened. Bob had nothing to gripe about. Either way, this day's work would get him a Senior Pilot rating, and Interplanet never downgraded a man without very good cause.

"Damn! This break would have to come now, on an off-standard boost and before I was ready for it!" the junior pilot said bitterly.

"You mean you actually want—" Merrill demanded incredulously.

"Why the hell do you think I requested tryout assignment on Doughnut?" Ord snapped. Merrill took that idea for what it was worth.

"Well, okay. If you think you can boost me anywhere near trajectory, I'll take Fireball. Be glad to." Ord looked grateful but uncertain as the car began to slow, and Merrill wasn't entirely happy either. .

. .

Doughnut's jets were humming and the snoring nimble of Fireball's five big nozzles reverberated deep in the pit. The heat of the idling drivers sent a stinging breeze against Merrill's uncovered face. Doughnut was nothing but a huge power ring fitting snugly around the middle of Fireball, designed to feed a maximum of fuel through her drivers in a minimum time. Her range was short, but she had a theoretical acceleration, minus ship, of better than forty gravities—which Merrill had never been so suicidal as to test.

Her thirty-six jets were fixed-mounted four degrees radially outward to save the aft half of the boosted ship from blast effect, and three of them were movable plus or minus one degree annularly for rotation correction. There were no vane deflectors, no full-swing jets, no heavy axial stabilizing gyros, no extras whatsoever; and control was accomplished entirely with the fractional throttles. Even turnovers were made without sidethrust or braking rockets, and with the inherently unstable ring design of Doughnut, that took handling. She was an ugly and ungraceful machine, strictly functional, a tug rather than a ship; and with her tremendous power she could easily break the neck of any pilot who made a single wrong move.

The pick-up car stopped beside the ground trap, and within seconds the two warm-up mechanics emerged from the tunnel.

" Fireball's ready. Everything's normal," one reported. The other acted uneasy. "Two, five and eleven—" he began. "Tell Bob too," Merrill interrupted.

"Two, five and eleven overheating, eleven the worst. Seventeen running incomplete shift as far as I dared try her, but may clear at full throttle. Thirty-two still sputtering as if the nozzle field is out of phase." He turned back to Merrill. "That's the one you reported, sir. We were going to yank the tube, but didn't get time."

"It adds up how?" Merrill demanded.

"She'll be hell to balance."

"But she'll lift?"

"Yes. The dynes come up."

Merrill's face hardened. "Then we don't cancel. Well, Bob?"

Ord's face was pale. "That ties the ribbons on it," he said slowly. "Guess I'm plain scared. You're senior man; you call it."

But Merrill knew it was the thought of what a sour lift here would mean on Mars, rather than the chances of a crash, that had Bob Ord frightened. He sighed, feeling as harried as Jerry Slidell usually looked, but admiring Ord's honesty.

"Here's your tape, Bob," he said. "Luck!"

Together they ducked into the tunnel leading to the ships. The mechanics tugged the counterweighted trapdoor shut behind them, and ran for the car.

Around the spaceport perimeter the sirens shrieked their warning to take cover or take the consequences.

Merrill crowded clumsily into the pilot chair, plugged in his suit, cinched the safety straps, tightened his face-mask,then cursed petulantly as he had to loosen it again to remove his bridgework. He slipped the tape into the robot, threaded the end through the drive sprockets, clipped the visual sheets into the holder where they'd be in sight for reference. He swung his chair back until he lay supine with reference to blast axis, for sitting up during initial acceleration was how pilots got ruptured intervertebral cartilage disks and pinched spinal cords. The control panel on which everything was crowded within fingertip-reach swung with him.

" Ready?" he asked. The hull-to-hull contact phone carried his words.

"Set."

He cut in the master intercontrol, and after a momentary pause to run through his mental check-list, he thumbed the Big Red Button. Relays clacked, and the tape hooked in the timers. They were on the roller coaster now—unless they canceled immediately.

He heard a faint click as the external feed lines that had been replacing the fuel burned during warm-up disconnected and retracted.

"Last chance," Merrill announced quickly.

"Clear to lift," the answer came back.

Slidell pulled the cobalt glass screen down across the slanting blast-proof window of his office. Conversation was impossible through the uproar of the sirens, so he glanced at the chronometer, he tapped the nurse's shoulder and held up five fingers.

Involuntarily she winced. Then even through the heavy purple shield the glare filled the room with blistering radiance. Around the pit a flattened sphere of flame more deadly than the heat of any blast furnace ballooned and burst. A shrieking cyclone of superheated gas bombarded the low, solid building with dust and gravel.

A few seconds later a second sun was rapidly fading overhead. The din of the sirens lowered and died.

"Was it—" she asked.

"It was very, very smooth—so far."

"But was it—"

Slidell shrugged. He raised the shield and stared unseeingly at the thermal dust-devils still dancing over the field. "But which one?" she insisted.

Slidell turned impatiently. "Don't you think I want to know too?"

"Sorry, boss."

" Mr. Slidell? Radar Plot," the intercom rasped suddenly. Jerry gripped the speaker box as though to squeeze information from it. Haskell-Jenkins interference made direct radio contact impossible even on microwave, but three radar eyes were following the Doughnut-Fireball combination while a mechanical brain compared their findings with the theoretical flight path.

"How bad?" he demanded.

"Not too much deflection, sir, but a nasty gyration on the longitudinal axis."

"Power output?"

"Full."

Slidell exhaled gently. At least, the flight wasn't aborting —yet.

" Keep me posted," he ordered unnecessarily.

He slumped behind his desk, and from the workings of his face muscles the nurse knew that in spirit he was riding a control chair again, his body heavy under the acceleration stresses, watching the spots of light on the meter faces swing, and punching studs to steady them.

After a few minutes he snapped out of it and used his dictating machine to record a pungent memorandum on changes in medical procedure to prevent other virus carriers from getting aboard any spaceship.

Radar reports during the next hours were poor but maddeningly inconclusive. It was impossible to tell from them whether Doughnut was running well and being erratically piloted, or whether someone was really hand-riding a set of surging, unsteady jets. The data grew steadily less intelligible as the Earth turned, and the probing beams pierced the atmosphere at an increasingly oblique angle. Finally the intercom spoke again. " Below horizon. Contact broken." Honolulu would take over the tracking, and then Guam.

The nurse returned to the spaceport after a night of dream-haunted naps and headed directly for Slidell's office. He was already there, and the drawn, gray look on his face made it obvious he had slept no better than she. The current flight graphs were strewn across his desk. He shoved the power output chart toward her. It was full of irregular sawtoothed peaks and valleys, and although she was not an engineer, she knew they signified jet malfunction. But Slidell was smiling faintly.

"They're still pretty close to plotted trajectory," he told her. "We'll know soon now." The radiophone buzzed, and as Slidell snatched the handset, Bubsy leaned over to eavesdrop shamelessly.

"Guam? Reduced power on which unit?"

He listened a moment. "Damn your foul driver emission meters! Why don't you get something sensitive?"

The radio sputtered indignantly.

" Okay, okay. Yes. I'll see the directors about an appropriation to develop one," he promised, and broke contact. "They've split, but whether it's line-out or back-out we can't be certain until Doughnut and Fireball are far enough apart to read their power impulses separately," he explained. They waited what seemed like ages before Guam called again, and then Slidell picked up the phone as though it might bite.

"Continuing steady full? Good! Other on intermittent low bursts? Thanks!" That was Merrill's trademark, the signature of a smooth pilot, rocking Doughnut into turnover with minimum throttle settings to save his body and ship from the jarring shocks of suddenly applied power. Bubsy knew it as well as Slidell did, for more than once Walter had diagrammed it for her on restaurant tablecloths. She grinned, and the operations manager grinned back. Then, suddenly and irrationally, she wanted to cry. She knew the intensity of Merrill's desires, but with a mutant virus loose in Mars Colony, the surest way had been the only decent way. Bob Ord might have flown a successful full-power boost, but then Slidell looked years younger as he switched his interphone into the public address system.

"All hands! Fireball is lined out!" he announced. "Hot, straight and normal!" For a minute he leaned back and relaxed, then spoke. "Sit down, Miss Thomas." She jerked around, startled by the unaccustomed formality, then saw the twinkle in his eyes.

"Are you a sufficiently loyal employee to enter into a private conspiracy for the good of the company?" he asked seriously.

"Just what are you talking about?" she demanded.

"This is off the record yet, but I'm slated to get myself heavily doped and ride deadhead to Marsport for some special development work. The new operations manager here—I just picked him—has guts enough so once he's stuck with this job, he'll hang tight and ride it.

"But he's going to beef and yank and kick at the traces—unless someone helps keep him contented." Bubsy understood, and smiled as she nodded.

"But it's just for dear, old Interplanet, you understand." Slidell raised one eyebrow quizzically but said nothing. "Oh, you go to the devil!" she blurted, and blushed for the first time since her high-school days.

The yellow car actually paused at the gate.

"Checking out."

"Okay, Mr. Merrill, Miss Thomas."

It was one of those crystal nights that come occasionally to foggy Puget Sound, moonless and with a sky full of stars. South of the zenith, the faint pink dot of Mars twinkled invitingly. Merrill sighed. "That scheming fox! Eighteen months before I get another chance, but I'll get there yet—if Van Zwaluvenberg's new emission meters and Doughnut III plans don't land me in the nuthatch first."

The girl let one hand slide along his arm. This was no night for talking shop.

"But they should have some decent transient facilities ready by then, as well as the fuel plant," he continued. "Might even be a good spot for a honeymoon."

"Eighteen months? Second honeymoon," she corrected firmly.

Relativity applies—even among gods!

Thang

Martin Gardner

THE EARTH had completed another turn about the sun, whirling slowly and silently as it always whirled. The East had experienced a record breaking crop of yellow rice and yellow children, larger stockpiles of atomic weapons were accumulating in certain strategic centers, and the sages of the University of Chicago were uttering words of profound wisdom, when Thang reached down and picked up the Earth between his thumb and finger.

Thang had been sleeping. When he finally awoke and blinked his six opulent eyes at the blinding light (for the light of our stars when viewed in their totality is no thing of dimness) he had become uncomfortably aware of an empty feeling near the pit of his stomach. How long he had been sleeping even he did not know exactly, for in the mind of Thang time is a term of no significance. Although the ways of Thang are beyond the ways of men, and the thoughts of Thang scarcely conceivable by our thoughts; still—stating the matter roughly and in the language we know—the ways of Thang are this: When Thang is not asleep, he hungers.

After blinking his opulent eyes (in a specific consecutive order which had long been his habit) and stretching forth a long arm to sweep aside the closer suns, Thang squinted into the deep. The riper planets were near the center and usually could be recognized by surface texture; but frequently Thanghad had to thump them with his middle finger. It was some time until he found a piece that suited him. He picked it up with his right hand and shook off most of the adhering salty moisture. Other fingers scaled away thin flakes of bluish ice that had caked on opposite sides. Finally, he dried the ball completely by rubbing it on his chest.

He bit into it. It was soft and juicy, neither unpleasantly hot nor freezing to the tongue; and Thang, who always ate the entire planet, core and all, lay back contentedly, chewing slowly and permitting his thoughts to dwell idly on trivial matters, when he felt himself picked up suddenly by the back of the neck. He was jerked upward and backward by an arm of tremendous bulk (an arm covered with greyish hair and exuding a foul smell). Then he was lowered even more rapidly. He looked down in time to see an enormous mouth—red and gaping and watering around the edges—then the blackness closed over him with a slurp like a clap of thunder.

For there are other gods than Thang.

Do only "men" have human feelings?

Period Piece

J. J. Coupling

IT WAS at that particular party of Cordoban's that he began actually to have doubts—real doubts. Before, there had been puzzlement and some confusion. But now, among these splendid people, in this finely appointed apartment, he wondered who he was, and where he was.

After his friend—or, his keeper?—Gavin had introduced him to his host, there had been a brief conversation about the twentieth century. Cordoban, a graying man with both dignity and alertness, asked the usual questions, always addressing Smith with the antique title, Mister, which he seemed to relish as an oddity. To Smith it seemed that Cordoban received the answers with the sort of rapt attention a child might give to a clever mechanical toy.

"Tell me, Mr. Smith," Cordoban said, "some of the scientists of your day must have been philosophers as well, were they not?"

Smith could not remember having been asked just this question before. For a moment he could think of nothing. Then, suddenly, as always, the knowledge flooded into his mind. He found himself making a neat little three-minute speech almost automatically. The material seemed to arrange itself as he spoke, telling how Einstein forced an abandonment of the idea of simultaneity, of Eddington's idea that the known universe is merely what man is able to perceive and measure, of Milne's two time scales, and of the strange ideas of Rhine and Dunne concerning precognition. He had always been a clever speaker, ever since high school, he thought.

"Of course," he found himself concluding, "it was not until later in the century that Chandra Bhopal demonstrated the absurdity of time travel."

Cordoban stared at him queerly. For a moment Smith was scarcely conscious of what he had said. Then he formulated his thoughts.

"But time travel must be possible," he said, "for I'm a twentieth century man, and I'm here in the thirty-first century."

He looked about the pleasant room, softly lighted, with deep recesses of color, for assurance, and at the handsome people, grouped standing or sitting in glowing pools of pearly illumination.

"Of course you're here, fellow," Cordoban said, reassuringly.

The remark was so true and so banal that Smith scarcely heard it. His thoughts were groping. Slowly, he was piecing together an argument.

"But time travel is absurd," he said.

Cordoban looked a little annoyed and made a nod with his head which Smith did not quite follow.

"It was shown in the twentieth century to be absurd," Smith said. But, had it been shown in his part of the twentieth century, he wondered?

Cordoban glanced to his left.

"We know very little about the twentieth century," he said.

Gavin knows about the twentieth century, Smith thought.

Then, following Cordoban's glance, he saw that a young

woman had detached herself from a group and was moving toward them. A segment of the pearly illumination followed her, making her a radiant creature indeed.

"Myria," Cordoban said, smiling, "you particularly wanted to meet Mr. Smith." Myria smiled at Smith.

"Indeed, yes," she said. "I've always been curious about the twentieth century. And you must tell me about your music."

Cordoban bowed slightly and withdrew, the light which had been playing on him, seemingly from nowhere, detaching itself from the pool about Myria and Smith. And Smith's doubts fled to the back of his mind, crowded out, almost, by a flood of thoughts about music. And Myria was an enchanting creature.

Smith felt very chipper the next morning as he rose and bathed. The twentieth century had nothing like this to offer, he reflected. He knit his brows for a moment, trying to remember just what his room had been like, but at that moment the cupboard softly buzzed and he withdrew the glass of bland liquid which was his breakfast. His mind wandered while he sipped it. It wasn't until he walked down the corridor and sat in the office opposite Gavin that his doubts at Cordoban's returned to his mind. Gavin was droning out the schedule. "We have a pretty full day, Smith," he said. "First, a couple of hours at the Lollards' country estate. We can stop by the Primus's on the way back. Then, a full afternoon at a party given by the decorators' council. In the evening—"

"Gavin," Smith said, "why do we see all these people?"

"Why," Gavin answered, a little taken aback, "everyone wants to see a man from the twentieth century."

"But why these people?" Smith persisted. "They all ask the same questions. And I never see them again. I just go on repeating myself."

"Are we too frivolous by twentieth century standards?" Gavin asked, smiling and leaning back in his chair.

Smith smiled back. Then his thoughts troubled him again. Cordoban hadn't been frivolous.

"How much do you know about the twentieth century, Gavin?" he asked, keeping his tone light.

"Pretty much what you do," Gavin replied.

But this couldn't be! Gavin appeared to be a kind of social tutor and arranger of things. As far as Smith could remember, mostly, information had passed from Gavin to him, not from him to Gavin. He decided to pursue the matter further, and as Gavin learned forward to glance at the schedule again, Smith spoke once more.

"By the way, Gavin," he asked, "who is Cordoban?" "Director of the Historical Institute, of course. I told you before we went there," Gavin replied.

"Who is Myria?" Smith asked.

"One of his secretaries," Gavin said. "A man of his position always has one on call."

"Cordoban said that not much was known about the twentieth century," Smith remarked mildly. Gavin started up as if he had been stung. Then he sank back and opened his mouth. It was a moment before he found the words.

"Directors—" he said, and waved his hand as if brushing the matter aside. Smith was really puzzled now. "Gavin," he said, "is time travel possible?"

If Gavin had been startled, he was at his ease now. "You're here," he said, "not in the twentieth century." Gavin spoke in so charming and persuasive a manner that Smith felt like a fool for a moment. His thoughts were slipping back toward the schedule when he realized, that wasn't an answer. It wasn't even couched as one. But this was silly, too. If it wasn't an answer, it was just what one would say. Still, he'd try again.

"Gavin," he said, "Cordoban—"

"Look," Gavin said with a smile, "you'll get used to us in time. We'll keep the Lollards and their guests waiting if we don't start now. It isn't asking too much of you to see them now, is it? And you'll like it. They have a lovely fifteenth-century Chinese garden, with a dragon in a cave." After all, Smith thought, he did owe his collective hosts of the thirty-first century something. And it was amusing.

The Lollards' garden was amusing, and so was the dragon, which breathed out smoke and roared. Primus's was dull, but the decorators' council had a most unusual display of fabrics which tinkled when they were touched, and of individual lighting in color. The evening was equally diverting, and delightful but strange people asked the same frivolous questions. Smith was diverted enough so that his doubts did not return until late that night.

But when Gavin left him at the door, Smith did not go to his bed and his usual dreamless sleep. Instead, he sat down in a chair, closed his eyes, and thought.

What did these people know about the twentieth century? Gavin had said, what he, Smith, knew. But that must be a great deal. An adult man, he, for instance, had a huge store of memories, accumulated over all his years. The human brain, he found himself thinking, has around ten billion nerve cells. If these were used to store words on a binary basis, they would hold some four hundred million words—a prodigious amount of learning. Tokayuki had, in 2117—

Strange, but he didn't remember talking with Gavin or anyone else about Tokayuki! And he could not have remembered about a man who had lived a century after his. But he could pursue this later. Getting back to the gist of the matter, Cordoban had said that he knew little about the twentieth century. Yet Cordoban had not seemed anxious to question him at length. A few words about the philosophy of science, a dry enough subject, and he had called his secretary Myria—yes, Smith now saw, Cordoban had called Myria to relieve himself of Smith's presence. Here was an obviously astute man, and an historian, foregoing an opportunity to learn about an era of which he professed ignorance. Well, I suppose one untrained man doesn't know much about an era, even his own, Smith thought. That is, not by thirty-first century standards. But, then, how do they know what I know? he wondered. Nobody has asked me any very searching questions.

Gavin and his schedules, now! All the occasions were purely social. That was strange! Most of the people weren't those likely to have much detailed interest in another era. Decorators, some, like the Lollards, apparently entirely idle-retired, perhaps. Anyway, the conversation was so much social chitchat. Cordoban, now, had been an historian, even though he hadn't been curious. But that, too, was a purely social occasion. And Gavin himself! Just a sort of guide to a man from another age. Certainly not a curious man. Why not? Were men of the twentieth century so common here? But certainly he would have been brought into contact with others. Besides, time traveling was absurd!

But that was getting off the track. He was here. He didn't need Cordoban or Gavin to assure him of that. Being here, he would expect serious questioning by a small group—not all these frivolous, if delightful, parties. Surely he could tell them a great deal they had not asked. Well, for instance, what could he tell them? His own personal experiences. What had happened day by day. But what had happened day by day? His schooling, for one thing. High school, in particular. As he thought about high schools, there quickly rose in his mind a sequence of facts about their organization and curriculum. It was as if he were reviewing a syllabus on the subject. The three-minute talks were getting him, he decided. He was so used to these impersonal summaries that they came to his mind automatically. Right now, he must be tired. He would spend more time thinking in the morning.

So Smith went to bed, thought about the events of the day a little, including the Lollards' amusing fire-breathing dragon, and was quickly asleep.

The following morning Smith did not feel chipper. He rose and bathed out of a sense of duty and routine. But then he sat down and ignored the buzzing of the cupboard which announced his breakfast. A pattern had crystallized in his mind over night. His thoughts in their uncertainty had paved the way for this, no doubt. But what was in his mind was no uncertain conclusion.

He, Smith, was no man of the twentieth century! He had carefully implanted memories, factual theses concerning his past, summaries of twentieth century history. But no real past! The little details that made a past were missing. Time travel was absurd. He was a fraud! An impostor!

But whom was he fooling? Not Gavin, he saw now. Not men like Cordoban. Was he fooling anyone? All of the people seemed eager to talk with him. Cordoban himself had been eager to talk with him. Cordoban had not been feigning. Cordoban had not been fooled. It seemed likely that Smith himself was the only one fooled.

But why? It was a stupid trick for people so obviously intelligent. What did they get out of this silly game? It could hardly be any personal quality of his—any charm. They were all so charming themselves. Myria, Cordoban's secretary, for instance. A lovely woman. Handsome, poised, beautifully dressed. Suddenly a little three-minute talk about women in the twentieth century formed in Smith's mind. In part of his mind, that is. In away, he watched it unfold. And with surprise.

He had thought of Myria as merely handsome and handsomely dressed. But even across the centuries—no, he must remember that he was not from the twentieth century. Across whatever gulf there was, there could have been more than this. Just how did he, Smith, differ from other men?

Well, what did he know of mankind? He reviewed matters in his mind, and went through little summaries on psychology, anthropology and physiology. It was in the midst of this last that he felt a horrible conviction which changed his course from thought to action.

His first action was to wind a small gold chain which was a part of his clothing tightly around the tip of his index finger. The tip remained smooth and brown.

Dropping the chain, he dug the sharp point of a writing instrument into his fingertip, ignoring the pain. The point passed into the rubbery flesh. There was no blood! But there was a little flash and a puff of vapor, and the finger went numb.

He was a cleverly constructed period piece, like the Lollards' dragon! Like a clockwork nightingale!

That was why these people admired him briefly, for what he was—a charming mechanical toy!

Smith scarcely thought. The little review of twentieth century psychology returned to his mind, and automatically he opened the door onto the balcony and stepped over the railing. Consistent to the last, he thought in dull pain as he fell toward the ground twenty stories below.

But it wasn't the last. There was a terrible wrenching shock, a clashing noise, and confusion. Afterwards, there were still vision and hearing. True, the world stood at an odd angle. He saw the building leaning crazily into the sky. From the brief synopsis of physiology he gleaned that his psycho-kinetic sense was gone. He no longer felt which way his head and eyes were turned. Other senses than sight and sound were gone as well, and when he tried he found that he could not move. Junk, lying here, he thought bitterly. Not even release! But now he could see Gavin bending over him, and another man who looked as if he might be a mechanic.

"Junk," the mechanic said. "It's lucky we couldn't put the brain in that, or it would be gone, too. Making a new body won't be so bad: he added.

"I suppose we'll have to turn off the brain and reform the patterns," Gavin mused.

"You'd have had to, anyway," the mechanic said. "You must have put in something inconsistent or we wouldn't have had this failure."

"It's a shame, though," Gavin said. "I got to like him. Silly, isn't it? But he seemed so nearly alive. We spent a lot of time together. Now everything that happened, everything he learned, will have to be wiped out."

"You know," the mechanic said, "it gives me the creeps, sometimes. I mean, thinking, if I were just a body, connected by a tight beam to a brain off somewhere. And if, when the body was destroyed, the brain—"

"Nonsense," said Gavin.

He gestured toward Smith's crumpled body, and then up toward the building where, presumably, was Smith's brain.

"You'll be thinking that that thing was conscious, next," he said. "Come on, let's turn the brain off." Smith stared numbly at the crazily leaning building, waiting for them to turn off his brain.

Who knocks on the door of the last man on earth?

Knock

Fredric Brown

There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..." Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn't in the two sentences at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.

But it wasn't horrible, really.

The last man on Earth - or in the universe, for that matter - sat alone in a room. It was a rather peculiar room. He'd just noticed how peculiar it was and he'd been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusions didn't horrify him, but it annoyed him.

Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the time two days ago when Nathan University had ceased to exist, was not a man who horrified easily. Not that Walter Phelan was a heroic figure, by any wild stretch of the imagination. He was slight of stature and mild of disposition. He wasn't much to look at, and he knew it.

Not that his appearance worried him now. Right now, in fact, there wasn't much feeling in him. Abstractedly, he knew that two days ago, within the space of an hour, the human race had been destroyed, except for him and, somewhere, a woman - one woman. And that was a fact which didn't concern Walter Phelan in the slightest degree. He'd probably never see her and didn't care too much if he didn't.

Women just hadn't been a factor in Walter's life since Martha had died a year and a half ago. Not that Martha hadn't been a good wife - albeit a bit on the bossy side. Yes, he'd loved Martha, in a deep, quiet way. He was only forty now, and he'd been only thirty-eight when Martha had died, but - well - he just hadn't thought about women since then. His life had been his books, the ones he read and the ones he wrote. Now there wasn't any point in writing books, but he had the rest of his life to spend in reading them.

True, company would be nice, but he'd get along without it. Maybe after a while, he'd get so he'd enjoy the occasional company of one of the Zan, although that was a bit difficult to imagine. Their thinking was so alien to his that there seemed no common ground for discussion, intelligent though they were, in a way.

An ant is intelligent, in a way, but no man ever established communication with an ant. He thought of the Zan, somehow, as super-ants, although they didn't look like ants, and he had a hunch that the Zan regarded the human race as the human race had regarded ordinary ants. Certainly what they'd done to Earth had been what men did to ant hills-and it had been done much more efficiently.

But they had given him plenty of books. They'd been nice about that, as soon as he had told them what he wanted, and he had told them that the moment he had learned that he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone in this room. The rest of his life, or as the Zan had quaintly expressed it, forever. Even a brilliant mind - and the Zan obviously had brilliant minds - has its idiosyncracies. The Zan had learned to speak Terrestrial English in a manner of hours but they persisted in separating syllables. But we disgress.

There was a knock on the door.

You've got it all now, except the three dots, the ellipsis, and I'm going to fill that in and show you that it wasn't horrible at all.

Walter Phelan called out, "Come in," and the door opened. It was of course, only a Zan. It looked exactly like the other Zan; if there was any way of telling one of them from another, Walter hadn't found it. It was about four feet tall and it looked like nothing on earth - nothing, that is, that had been on Earth until the Zan came there.

Walter said, "Hello, George." When he'd learned that none of them had names he decided to call them all George, and the Zan didn't seem to mind.

This one said, "Hel-lo, Wal-ter." That was ritual; the knock on the door and the greetings. Walter waited.

"Point one," said the Zan "You will please henceforth sit with your chair turned the other way." Walter said, "I thought so, George. That plain wall is transparent from the other side, isn't it?"

"It is trans-par-ent."

"Just what I thought. I'm in a zoo Right?"

"That is right."

Walter sighed. "I knew it. That plain, blank wall, without a single piece of furniture against it. And made of something different from the other walls. If I persist in sitting with my back to it, what then? You will kill me? - I ask hopefully."

"We will take a-way your books."

"You've got me there George. All right I'll face the other way when I sit and read. How many other animals besides me are in this zoo of yours?"

"Two hun-dred and six-teen."

Walter shook his head. "Not complete, George. Even a bush league zoo can beat that - could beat that, I mean, if there were any bush league zoos left. Did you just pick at random?"

"Ran-dom sam-ples yes All spe-cies would have been too man-y. Male and female each of one hun-dred and eight kinds,"

"What do you feed them? The carnivorous ones, I mean."

"We make food Syn-thet-ic."

"Smart," said Walter. "And the flora? You got a collection of that, too?"

"Flo-ra was not hurt by vi-bra-tions. It is all still grow-ing."

"Nice for the flora," said Walter. "You weren't as hard on it, then, as you were on the fauna, Well, George, you started out with 'point one.' I deduced there is a point two kicking around somewhere. What is it?"

"Some-thing we do not un-der-stand. Two of the oth-er a-nimals sleep and do not wake? They are cold."

"It happens in the best regulated zoos, George," Walter Phelan said. "Probably not a thing wrong with them except that they're dead."

"Dead? That means stopped. But nothing stopped them. Each was a-lone." Walter stared at the Zan. "Do you mean, George, you don't know what natural death is?"

"Death is when a be-ing is killed, stopped from liv-ing."

Walter Phelan blinked. "How old are you, George?" he asked.

"Six-teen-you would not know the word. Your pla-net went a-round your sun a-bout sev-en thou-sand times, I am still young."

Walter whistled softly. "A babe in arms," he said. He thought hard a moment. "Look, George," he said, "you've got something to learn about this planet you're on. There's a guy here who doesn't hang around where you come from. An old man with a beard and a scythe and an hour-glass. Your vibrations didn't kill him."

"What is he?"

"Call him the Grim Reaper, George. Old Man Death. Our people and animals live until somebody Old Man Death stops them ticking."

"He stopped the two crea-tures? He will stop more?"

Walter opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Something in the Zan's voice indicated that there would be a worried frown on his face, if he had had a face recognizable as such.

"How about taking me to these animals who won't wake up?" Walter asked. "Is that against the rules?"

"Come," said the Zan.

That had been the afternoon of the second day. It was the next morning that the Zan came back, several of them. They began to move Walter Phelan's books and furniture. When they'd finished that, they moved him. He found himself in a much larger room a hundred yards away. He sat and waited and this time, too, when there was a knock on the door, he knew what was coming and politely stood up. A Zan opened the door and stood aside. A woman entered. Walter bowed shghtly, "Walter Phelan," he said, "in case George didn't tell you my name. George tries to be polite, but he doesn't know all of our ways."

The woman seemed calm; he was glad to notice that. She said, "My name is Grace Evans, Mr. Phelan. What's this all about? Why did they bring me here?"

Walter was studying her as she talked. She was tall, fully as tall as he, and well-proportioned. She looked to be somewhere in her early thirties, about the age Martha had been. She had the same calm confidence about her that he'd always liked about Martha, even though it had contrasted with his own easygoing informality. In fact, he thought she looked quite a bit like Martha.

"I think I know why they brought you here but let's go back a bit," he said. "Do you know just what has happened otherwise?"

"You mean that they've killed everyone?"

"Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?" She sank into a comfortable chair nearby.

"No," she said, "I don't know just how. Not that it matters does it?"

"Not a lot. But here's the story - what I know of it from getting one of them to talk, and from piecing things together. There isn't a great number of them - here, anyway. I don't know how numerous a race they are where they came from and I don't know where that is, but I'd guess it's outside the Solar System. You've seen the space ship they came in?"

"Yes It's as big as a mountain."

"Almost. Well it has equipment for emitting some sort of a vibration - they call it that, in our language, but I imagine it's more like a radio wave than a sound vibration - that destroys all animal life. It - the ship itself - is insulated against the vibration. I don't know whether its range is big enough to kill off the whole planet at once, or whether they flew in circles around the earth, sending out the vibratory waves. But it killed everybody and everything instantly and, I hope, painlessly. The only reason we, and the other two-hundred-odd animals in this zoo, weren't killed was because we were inside the ship. We'd been picked up as specimens. You do know this is a zoo, don't you?"

"I - I suspected it."

"The front walls are transparent from the outside The Zan were pretty clever at fixing up the inside of each cubicle to match the natural habitat of the creature it contains. These cubicles, such as the one we're in, are of plastic, and they've got a machine that makes one in about ten minutes, If Earth had had a machine and a process like that, there wouldn't have been any housing shortage. Well, there isn't any housing shortage now, anyway. And I imagine that the human race - specifically you and I - can stop worrying about the A-bomb and the next war. The Zan certainly solved a lot of problems for us." Grace Evans smiled faintly. "Another case where the operation was successful, but the patient died. Things were in an awful mess. Do you remember being captured? I don't. I went to sleep one night and woke up in a cage on the space ship."

"I don't remember either " Walter said. "My hunch is that they used the vibratory waves at low intensity first, just enough to knock us all out. Then they cruised around, picking up samples more or less at random for their zoo. After they had as many as they wanted, or as many as they had space in the ship to hold, they turned on the juice all the way. And that was that. It wasn't until yesterday they knew they'd made a mistake and had underestimated us. They thought we were immortal, as they are."

"That we were - what?"

"They can be killed but they don't know what natural death is. They didn't anyway, until yesterday. Two of us died yesterday."

"Two of - Oh!"

"Yes, two of us animals in their zoo. One was a snake and one was a duck. Two species gone irrevocably. And by the Zan's way of figuring time, the remaining member of each species is going to live only a few minutes, anyway. They figured they had permanent specimens."

"You mean they didn't realize what short-lived creatures we are?"

"That's right," Walter said. "One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They're bi-sexual themselves, incidentally, but they probably breed once every ten thousand years or thereabouts. When they learned yesterday how ridiculously short a life expectancy we terrestrial animals have, they were probably shocked to the core - if they have cores. At any rate they decided to reorganize their zoo

- two by two instead of one by one. They figure we'll last longer collectively if not individually."

"Oh!" Grace Evans stood up and there was a taint flush on her face. "If you think - If they think -" She turned toward the door.

"It'll be locked," Walter Phelan said calmly "But don't worry. Maybe they think, but I don't think. You needn't even tell me you wouldn't have me if I was the last man on Earth; it would be corny under the circumstances."

"But are they going to keep us locked up together in this one little room?"

"It isn't so little; we'll get by. I can sleep quite comfortably in one of these overstuffed chairs. And don't think I don't agree with you perfectly, my dear. All personal considerations aside, the least favor we can do the human race is to let it end with us and not he perpetuated for exhibition in a zoo." She said "Thank you," almost inaudibly, and the flush receded from her checks. There was anger in her eyes, but Walter knew that is wasn't anger at him. With her eyes sparkling like that, she looked a lot like Martha, he thought.

He smiled at her and said, "Otherwise -'

She started out of her chair, and for an instant he thought she was going to come over and slap him. Then she sank back wearily. "If you were a man, you'd be thinking of some way to - They can be killed, you said?" Her voice was bitter.

"The Zan? Oh, certainly. I've been studying them. They look horribly different from us, but I think they have about the same metabolism we have, the same type of circulatory system, and probably the same type of digestive system. I think that anything that would kill one of us would kill one of them."

"But you said -"

"Oh, there are differences, of course. Whatever factor it is in man that ages him, they don't have. Or else they have some gland that man doesn't have, something that renews cells."

She had forgotten her anger now. She leaned forward eagerly. She said, "I think that's right. And I don't think they feel pain."

"I was hoping that. But what makes you think so, my dear?"

"I stretched a piece of wire that I found in the desk of my cubicle across the door so my Zan would fall over it. He did, and the wire cut his leg."

"Did he bleed red?"

"Yes but it didn't seem to annoy him. He didn't get mad about it; didn't even mention it. When he came back the next time, a few hours later, the cut was one. Well, almost gone. I could see just enough of a trace of it to be sure it was the same Zan."

Walter Phelan nodded slowly.

"He wouldn't get angry, of course," he said. "They're emotionless. Maybe, if we killed one, they wouldn’t even punish us. But it wouldn't do any good. They'd just give us our food through a trap door and treat us as men would have treated a zoo animal that had killed a keeper. They'd just see that he didn't have a crack at any more keepers.

"How many of them are there?" she asked.

"About two hundred, I think, in this particular space ship. But undoubtedly there are many more where they came from. I have a hunch this is just an advance guard, sent to clear off this planet and make it safe for Zan occupancy,"

"They did a good-"

There was a knock at the door, and Walter Phelan called out, "Come in." A Zan stood in the doorway.

"Hello George," said Walter.

"Hel-lo Wal-ter," said the Zan.

It may or may not have been the same Zan, but it was always the same ritual.

"What's on your mind?" Walter asked.

"An-oth-er crea-ture sleeps and will not wake. A small fur-ry one called a wea-sel." Walter shrugged.

"It happens, George. Old Man Death. I told you about him."

"And worse. A Zan has died. This morning."

"Is that worse?" Walter looked at him blandly. "Well, George, you'll have to get used to it, if you're going to stay around here."

The Zan said nothing. It stood there.