Finally Walter said, "Well?"

"A-bout wea-sel. You ad-vise same?"

Walter shrugged again. "Probably won't do any good. But sure, why not?" The Zan left.

Walter could hear his footsteps dying away outside. He grinned. "It might work, Martha," he said.

"Mar - My name is Grace, Mr Phelan. What might work?"

"My name is Walter, Grace. You might as well get used to it. You know, Grace, you do remind me a lot of Martha. She was my wife. She died a couple of years ago."

"I'm sorry," said Grace "But what might work? What were you talking about to the Zan?"

"We'll know tomorrow," Walter said. And she couldn't get another word out of him. That was the fourth day of the stay of the Zan.

The next was the last.

It was nearly noon when one of the Zan came. After the ritual, he stood in the doorway, looking more alien than ever. It would be interesting to describe him for you, but there aren't words. He said, "We go. Our coun-cil met and de-cid-ed,"

"Another of you died?"

"Last night This is pla-net of death "

Walter nodded. "You did your share. You're leaving two hundred and thirteen creatures alive, out of quite a few billion. Don't hurry back."

"Is there an-y-thing we can do?"

"Yes. You can hurry. And you can leave our door unlocked, but not the others. We'll take care of the others."

Something clicked on the door; the Zan left.

Grace Evans was standing, her eyes shining.

She asked, "What -? How -?"

"Wait," cautioned Walter. "Let's hear them blast off. It's a sound I want to remember." The sound came within minutes, and Walter Phelan, realizing how rigidly he'd been holding himself, relaxed in his chair.

"There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, too, Grace, and it got us in trouble," he said musingly.

"But this one made up for it. I mean the mate of the snake that died day before yesterday. It was a rattlesnake."

"You mean it killed the two Zan who died? But -"

Walter nodded, "They were babes in the woods here. When they took me to look at the first creatures who 'were asleep and wouldn't wake up,' and I saw that one of them was a rattler, I had an idea, Grace. Just maybe, I thought, poison creatures were a development peculiar to Earth and the Zan wouldn't know about them. And, too, maybe their metabolism was enough like ours so that the poison would kill them. Anyway, I had nothing to lose trying. And both maybes turned out to be right."

"How did you get the snake to -"

Walter Phelan grinned. He said, "I told them what affection was. They didn't know. They were interested, I found, in preserving the remaining one of each species as long as possible, to study the picture and record it before it died. I told them it would die immediately because of the loss of its mate, unless it had affection and petting - constantly. I showed them how with the duck. Luckily it was a tame one, and I held it against my chest and petted it a while to show them. Then I let them take over with it and the rattlesnake."

He stood up and stretched, and then sat down again more comfortably.

"Well, we've got a world to plan," he said. "We'll have to let the animals out of the ark, and that will take some thinking and deciding. The herbivorous wild ones we can let go right away. The domestic ones, we'll do better to keep and take charge of; we'll need them. But the carnovora - Well, we'll have to decide. But I'm afraid it's got to be thumbs down."

He looked at her. "And the human race. We've got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one."

Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yesterday; she sat rigidly in her chair.

"No!" she said.

He didn't seem to have heard her. "It's been a nice race, even if nobody won it," he said. "It'll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can -" He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married. He said, "Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back." The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but is no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back. He smiled a little. See? It wasn't horrible, really.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...

A pair of rabbits once were let loose in Australia—and overran the country in no time fiat. Now start with a whole planet of geniuses. . . .

Genius

Poul Anderson

"THE EXPERIMENT has been going on for almost fifteen hundred years," said Heym, "and it's just starting to get under way. You can't discontinue it now."

"Can and will," replied Goram, "if the situation seems to justify it. That's what I'm going to find out."

"But—one planet! One primitive planet! What sort of monsters do you think live here? I tell you, they're people, as human as I—" Heym paused. He had meant to add—"and you," but couldn't quite bring himself to it. Goram seemed less than human, an atavistic remnant of screaming past ages, an ape in uniform. "—as I am," finished Heym.

The hesitation seemed lost on Goram. The marshal stood regarding the psychologist out of sullen little black eyes, blocky form faintly stooped, long arms dangling, prognathous jaw thrust ahead of the broad flat-nosed countenance. The fluorotubes gleamed down on his shining shaven bullet skull. The black gold-braided uniform fitted him closely, a military neatness and precision that was in its way the most primitive characteristic of all.

He said in his hoarse bass: "So are the rebels. So are the barbarians and pirates. So are the serfs and slaves and criminals and insane. But it's necessary to suppress all of them. If Station Seventeen represents a menace, it must be suppressed."

"But what conceivable danger—one barbarian planet—under constant surveillance throughout its history! If that can menace an empire of a hundred thousand star systems, we're not safe from anything!"

"We aren't. For three thousand years of history, the Empire has been in danger. You have to live with it, as we soldiers do, to realize how ultimately unstable the stablest power in history really is. Oh, we can smash the peripheral barbarians. We can hold the Taranians and the Comi and Magellanics in check." The marshal's heavy-ridged eyes swept contemptuously up and down the scientist's long weedy form.

"I'm in no danger from you. I could break you with my bare hands. But a dozen viruses of Antaric plague, entering my body and multiplying, would paralyze me in agony and rot the flesh off my bones and probably empty this ship of life."

The office quivered, ever so faintly. The muffled throb of the great engines was vibrant in its walls and floor and ceiling, in the huge ribs and plates of the hull, in guns that could incinerate a continent and the nerves and bones of the two thousand men manning that planetoidal mass. Monstrously the ship drove through a night of mind-cracking empty distances, outpacing light in her furious subdimensional quasivelocity, impregnable and invincible and inhuman in her arrogance. And a dozen blind half-living protein molecules could kill her.

Heym nodded stiffly. "I know what you mean," he said. "After all"—deliberate snobbery edging his voice—"applied psychological science is the basis of the Empire. Military power is only one tool for—us."

"As you will. But I am not a researcher's tool, I belong to practical men, and they have decided this mission. If I report Station Seventeen potentially dangerous, they will order me to destroy it. If I decide it is already dangerous, I have the authority to order it destroyed myself." Heym kept his gaunt face impassive, but for a moment he felt physically ill. He looked across the sparsely furnished office at the marshal's squat simian form, he saw the barely suppressed triumph-smile in the heavy coarse visage, and a wave of sick revulsion swept over him.

He thought wearily: Fifteen hundred years . . . patience, work, worry, heartbreak, and triumph and a gathering dawn . . . generation after generation, watching from the skies, learning, pouring their whole lives into the mighty project—As if I didn't know the danger, the fear which is the foundation and the reason for the Empire . . . and here we have the first glimmerings of what may be a way out of the rattrap which history has become . . . and it's now all dependent on him! On the whim of a two-legged animal which will strike out in blind fear to destroy whatever it doesn't understand . . . or even understanding, will destroy just for the satisfaction of venting an inferiority complex, of watching better men squirm in pain.

Calmness came, a steadiness and an icy calculation. After all, he thought, he was a psychologist and Goram was a soldier. It should be possible for him to handle the creature, talk him over, deftly convince him that he himself wanted what Heym wanted and had in fact thought of it himself and had to argue the scientist into agreement.

Yet—slow, easy, careful. He, Sars Heym, was a research man, not a practicing psychotechnician. He wasn't necessarily able to handle the blind brutal irrationality of man, any more than a physicist was ordinarily capable of solving an engineering problem. And so much depended on the outcome that . . . that—

Briefly, he sagged beneath the burden of responsibility. The load seemed for a dizzying instant too much to bear—unfair, unfair, to load one man with the weight of all the future. For Station Seventeen was the key to the next phase of history—of that Heym was certain. The history of man, his evolution—the whole universe seemed to open vertiginously before him, and he stood alone with the cosmos blazing on his shoulders.

He shook himself, as if to get rid of a clinging burden, and with a convulsive effort forced coolness on himself. Detached argument—well, he had used that often enough at Sol without convincing anyone who mattered. He could still use it on Goram, but not for itself, only as a means of flattery by appealing to reason—among other means.

Intolerable, to have to play sycophant to this—atavist but there was too much at stake for pride to count. "I understand your position, of course," said Heym, "even if I do not agree. I am sure that a glance at our records will convince you there is no danger."

"I'm not interested in records," said the marshal. "I could have had all that transvised to me at Sol if I wanted to see it. But that's the psychologists' department. I want to make a personal inspection."

"Very well. Though we could just as well have transvised the scenes revealed on the spy devices from our headquarters to Sol."

"I'm not interested in telescreen images either. I want to land on the planet, see its people with my own eyes, hear them talk, watch them at work and play. There's a feel to a race you can only get by direct observation." Goram's bulldog face thrust aggressively forward. "Oh, I know your fancy theories don't include that—you just watch from afar and write it all down in mathematical symbols nobody can read without twenty years of study. But I'm a practical man, I've dealt with enough barbarians to have an instinct for them."

Superstition! thought Heym bitterly. Typical primitive mind reaction—magnifying his own ignorant guesses and impulses into an "instinct." No doubt he also believes hair turns gray from fear and drowned Men always float face down. Behold the "practical man"!

It was surprisingly hard to lie, after a lifetime's training in the honesty of science and the monastic community of observers at the station. But he said calmly enough: "Well, that's very interesting, Marshal Goram. We've often noticed curious talents—precognition, telepathy, telekinesis, and the rest, appearing sporadically among people who have some use for them, but we've never been able to pin them down. It's as if they were phenomena inaccessible to the ordinary scientific method. I see your point." And I flatter myself that's good flattery—not too obviously in agreement, but still hinting that he's some kind of superman.

"Haven't you ever landed at all?" asked Goram.

"Oh, yes, fairly often—usually invisible, of course. However, we can generally see quite enough through the strategically planted recording televisors and other spy devices."

"You think," grunted Goram. "But a planet is mighty big, I tell you. How do you know what they're cooking up in places your gadgets don't see?"

Heym was unable to keep all the weariness and disgust out of his voice. "Because history is a unity," he said. "The whole can be inferred from the part, since the part belongs to the whole. Why should the only unwarlike people in the Galaxy suddenly start building weapons?"

"Oh, we don't fear their military power—yet," replied Goram. "I should think you, as epsychologist, would know what sort of a danger Station Seventeen represents—a danger that can wreck civilization. They can become a disrupting factor—the worst in all history."

"Progress is disruption."

"Maybe. But the Empire is based on stasis. It's sacrificed progress for—survival."

"True—but here we may have a clue to controlled progress, safe advancement. Even stasis isn't safe, as we well know. It's a poor makeshift, intended to keep civilization alive while something else is worked out. Well—we're working it out at Station Seventeen."

Goram grunted again, but remained silent.

Valgor's Star lay a good hundred parsecs from Sol, not far from the Empire's border, though sufficiently within the garrisoned marches to be protected from barbarian raids. The early researchers, looking for an uninhabited Earth-like planet, had found the obscure GO-type sun far off the regular space lanes; an ancient planetographic expedition had stopped briefly there, recording that the third world was practically terrestrial, but this whole galactic sector was so isolated and unprofitable that there had been no further visits, and the old report lay for centuries in the Imperial files before the Psychotechnic Foundation resurrected it. The remoteness and unknownness were assets in any such project. At an easy cruising speed, the battleship used three days going from Sol to Valgor's Star. Sars Heym spent most of that time getting on the right side of Tamman Goram. It involved listening to endless dreary reminiscing of border warfare and the consummate ability required to rise from simple conscript to Imperial Marshal, but the price was small if it could save Station Seventeen.

"Nobody appreciates the border garrisons who hasn't served in them," declared Goram, "but I tell you, if it weren't for them the Empire wouldn't last a year. The barbarians would sweep in, the rival empires would gobble up all they could hold and go to war over the spoils. The Spirit alone knows what the Magellanics would do—but it wouldn't be pleasant—and the whole structure would disintegrate—three thousand years of stability might as well never have been!" A high official would be used to open flattery. Heym disagreed just enough to seem sincerely to agree on all important points. "We couldn't do without the border patrols," he said, "but it's like any organism, requiring all its part to live—we couldn't dispense with internal police either, and certainly not with the psychotechnicians who are the government."

"Spirit-damned bureaucrats," snorted Goram. "Theoreticians—what do they know of real life? Why, d'you know, I saw three stellar systems lost once to the barbarians because we didn't have enough power to stand them off. There was a horde of them, a dozen allied suns, and we had only three garrisoned planets. For months we begged—wrote to Antares and Sirius and Sol itself begging for a single Nova-class battleship. Just one, and we could have beaten off their fleet and carried the war to them. But no, it was 'under consideration' or 'deferred for more urgent use'—three suns and a hundred thousand men lost because some soft-bellied psychotechnician mislaid a file."

"Robot-checked files don't get mislaid," said Heym softly. "I have friends in administration, and I've seen them weep at some of the decisions they had to make. It isn't easy to abandon an army to its fate—and yet the power that could have saved them is needed elsewhere, to drive off a larger invasion or to impress the Taranians or to take a star cluster of strategic value. The Empire has sacrificed a lot for sheer survival. Humanness in government is only one thing lost.

"And it isn't only in the military field," argued Heym. "After all, you know the Empire isn't interested in further expansion. It wants to keep civilization alive on the planets where it exists, and keep the non-human imperia out. Ever since the Founder, our military policy has been basically defensive—because we can't handle more than we have. The border is always in a state of war and flux, but the Empire is at peace, inside the marches.

"Yet how long would the Empire last, even assuming no hostile powers outside, without the most rigid form of psychotechnocratic government? There are roughly three times ten to the fourteenth power humans in the Solarian Empire. The nonhuman aborigines have been pretty thoroughly exterminated, assimilated as helots, or otherwise rendered harmless, but there are still all those humans, with all the terrific variations and conflicting desires inherent in man and intensified by radically different planetary and consequently social environments. Can you imagine a situation where three hundred trillion humans went their own uncoordinated ways—with atomic energy, biotoxic weapons, and interstellar spaceships to back up their conflicting demands?"

"Yes, I can," said Goram, "because after all it has happened—for nearly a thousand years before the Empire, there was virtual anarchy. And"—he leaned forward, the hard black glitter of his eyes nailing Heym—"that's why we can't take chances, with this experiment of yours or anything else —anything at all. In the anarchic centuries, with a much smaller population, there was horror—many planets were blasted back to savagery, or wiped out altogether. Have you seen the dead worlds? Black cinders floating in space, some still radioactive, battlegrounds of the ancient wars. The human barbarians beyond the Imperial borders are remnants of that age—some of them have spaceships, even a technology matching our own, but they think only of destruction—if they ever got past the marches, they'd blast and loot and fight till nothing was left. Not to mention the nonhuman border barbarians, or the rival empires always watching their chance, or the Magellanics sweeping in every century or so with weapons such as we never imagined. Just let any disrupting factor shake the strength and unity of the Empire and see how long it could last."

"I realize that," said Heym coldly. "After all, I am a psychologist. I know fully what a desperate need the establishment of the Empire filled. But I also know that it's a dead end—its purpose of ultimate satisfied-stasis cannot be realized in a basically dynamic cosmos. Actually, Imperial totalitarianism is simply the result of Imperial ignorance of a better way. We can only find that better way through research, and the project at Station Seventeen is the most promising of all the Foundation's work. Unless we find some way out of our dilemma, the Empire is doomed—sooner or later, something will happen and we'll go under."

Goram's eyes narrowed. "That's near lese majeste," he murmured. Heym laughed, and gave the marshal a carefully gauged you-and-I-know-better-don't-we look, as he went over to the wall of the officers' lounge and touched a button. The telescreen sprang to life with a simulacrum of the outside view. An uncounted host of stars blazed against the infinite blackness, a swarming magnificent arrogance of unwinking hard jewels strewn across the impassive face of eternity. The Milky Way foamed around the sky, the misty nebulae and star clusters wheeled their remote godlike way around heaven, and the other galaxies flashed mysterious signals across the light-years and the centuries. As ever, the psychologist felt dwarfed and awed and numbed by the stupendous impact.

"It was a great dream," he whispered. "There never was a higher dream than man's conquest of the universe—and yet like so many visions, it overleaped itself and shattered to bits on the rocks of reality—in this case, simple arithmetic defeated us. How reconcile and coordinate a hundred thousand stars except by absolutism, by deliberate statism—by chaining ourselves to our own achievements? What other answer is there?"

He turned around to Goram. The soldier sat unmoving, face stone-hard, like a primitive idol. "We're looking for anew way," said Heym. "We think we're finding it, at Station Seventeen. It's the first hope in four thousand years."

The planet might almost have been Earth, a great blue spheroid swinging majestically against the incredible spatial sky with a softly shining moon for companion. Auroras wavered over the ice-capped poles, and cloud masses blurred the greenish-brown continents. They were storms, those clouds, snow and rain and wind blowing out of a living heaven over broad fair fields and haughty mountains; and looking down from the sterile steel environment of the ship, remembering the world city sprawling over Earth and the cold hard mechanized pattern of all Imperial life, Heym felt a brief wistfulness. All at once, he envied his experimental animals, down there on the green young planet. Even if they were to be destroyed, they had been more fortunate than their masters.

But they wouldn't be destroyed. They mustn't be. "Where is your observation post?" asked Goram.

"On an asteroid well away from here and rendered invisible."

"Why not on the satellite? It'd be a lot closer."

"Yes, but distance doesn't mean anything to a transvisor. Also, if—when—the colonists learn the means of interplanetary travel, we'd have had to move off the Moon, while we can remain hidden indefinitely on the invisible planetoid."

"I'd say 'if' rather than 'when'," amended Goram grimly. "It was your report that the inhabitants were experimenting with rockets that alarmed the rulers enough to order me here to see if it weren't best simply to sterilize the planet."

"I've told you before, there's no need for alarm," protested Heym. "What if the people do have a few rocketships? They have no reason to do more than visit the other worlds of this system, which aren't habitable—certainly no reason to colonize, with their own planet still practically uninhabited. The present population is estimated at only some eight hundred million."

"Nevertheless, as soon as they have a whole system to move about in they'll be dangerous. It'll no longer be possible to keep track of everything of importance they may do. They'll be stimulated by this success to perfect an interstellar drive—and even you will agree that that cannot be permitted. That engine may be developed without our knowledge, on some remote world of this system—and once even a few of them are running loose between the stars we'll have no further control—and the results may well be catastrophic! Imagine a pure-bred line of geniuses allied with the barbarians!"

"I tell you, they're not warlike. They haven't had a single war in all their history."

"Well, then they'll try to innovate within the Empire, which would be just as bad if not worse. Certainly they won't be satisfied with the status quo—yet that status quo means survival to us."

"They can be co-ordinated. Good Spirit, we have plenty of geniuses in the Galaxy today! We couldn't do without them. They are the very ones who run the Empire. Advancement is on a strict merit basis simply because we must have the best brains of mankind for the gigantic job of maintaining the social order."

"Sure—everyone's strictly brought up to accept the Empire, to identify its survival with his own. We have plenty of tame geniuses. But these are wild—a planetful of undomesticated intellects! If they can't be tamed, they must be killed."

"They can be," insisted Heym. "Rather, they can become the leaders to get us out of status quo safely—if not directly, then indirectly through knowledge gained by observing them. Already administrative techniques have been improved, within the last five hundred or so years, because by watching unhampered intellect at work we have been able to derive more accurate psychomathematical expressions for the action of logic as a factor in society. A group in the Psychotechnic Foundation is working out a new theory of cerebration which may become the basis of a system of mind training doubling the efficiency of logical processes—just as semantic training has already increased mind power by applying it more effectively. But in order to develop and test that theory, as well as every other psychological research project, we must have empirical data such as the observation stations, above all Seventeen, furnish us. Without such new basic information, science comes to a standstill."

"I've heard it all before," said Goram wearily. "Now I want to go down there and look."

"Very well. I'll come along, of course. Do you wish to take anyone else?"

"Do I need to?"

"No, it's perfectly safe."

"Then I won't. Meet me at Lifeboat Forty in half an hour." Goram tramped off to give such orders as might be needed.

Heym stood for a while, chain smoking and looking out the visiplate at the silently rolling planet. Like an ominous moon, the warship swung in an orbit just beyond the atmosphere. For all its titanic mass, it was insignificant against the bulk of a world. Yet in guns and bombs and death-mists, gravitational beams and long-range disintegrators and mass-conversion torpedoes, in coagulative radiations and colloid-resonant generators, in the thousand hells man had made through all his tormented existence, lay the power to rip life off that surface and blanket the shuddering continents in smoke and flame and leave the blackened planet one great tomb under the indifferent stars.

No—no, that was wrong. The power did not lie in the ship, it was inert metal and will-less electronic intellect, a cosmic splinter that without man would spin darkly into eternity. The will, and hence the power, to destroy lay in men—in one man. One gorilla in uniform. One caveman holding a marshal's baton. One pulsing mass of colloidal tissue, ultimately unstable, not even knowing its own desire. Heym scowled and drew heavily on his cigarette. Goram had been soothed into comparative geniality, but his frantic notion of death as panacea was as strong as ever. The creature wasn't even consistent—one moment talking philosophy of history as if he had brains, the next snarling his mindlessly destructive xenophobia. There was something wrong about Goram— Though it might only be my own ignorance of practical psychology, thought Heym. As a research man, I'm used to dealing with only one factor at a time. A situation in life is really too complex for me—I don't have enough rules of thumb. I wish I'd brought a practicing technician along, say Kharva or Lunn—they'd soon analyze the mental mechanism of our marshal and push the appropriate buttons. The old sickening fear fell anew on him. What if, after all, he should fail—what if fifteen hundred years of work were to be sponged out at the arbitrary whim of a superstition-ridden military moron? If I fail, the Empire fails with me—I know it. And it isn't fair! I should have been told what I was being recalled to Sol for. I should have had a chance to prepare my arguments better. I should have been allowed to take a practical psycho along—but no, they obviously couldn't permit me to do that or I'd have had everything my own way.

But couldn't they see? Can't they understand? Or has the worship of statism penetrated so deep that it's like an instinct, a blind need for which everything else must be sacrificed?

He turned and went heavily toward his cabin to make ready.

Screened by an invisibility field, the lifeboat spiraled down toward the surface. Goram let the robo-pilot handle the vessel, and spent most of his time peering through a field-penetrating visiscope.

"Not much sign of habitation," he said.

"No, I told you the population was still small," replied Heym. "After, all, only a few thousand were planted originally and the struggle for existence was as hard as with any savages for the first few centuries. Only lately has the population really begun growing."

"And you say they have cities now—machines—civilization? It's hard to believe."

"Yes, it is. The whole result has been a triumphant confirmation of the psychotechnic theory of history, but nevertheless the sheer spectacular character of the success has awed us. I can understand it's a little frightening. One naturally thinks a race which can go from naked savages to mechanized civilization in fifteen hundred years is somehow demonic. Yet they're humans, fully as human as anyone else in the Galaxy, the same old Earthly stock as all men. They've simply enjoyed the advantage of freedom from stupidity."

"How many stations are there?"

"About a hundred—planetary colonies, with colonists in ignorance of their own origin, where various special conditions are maintained. Different environments, for instance, or special human stocks. The progress of history is being observed on all of them, secretly, and invaluable data on mass-psychologic processes are thereby gained. But Seventeen has been by far the most fruitful." Goram wrinkled his low forehead. With concealed distaste, Heym thought how very like an ape he looked—throwback, atavist, cunning in his own narrow field but otherwise barely above moron level—typical militarist, the biped beast who had ridden mankind's back like some nightmarish vampire through all history—except on the one planet of Valgor's Star—

"I don't quite see the point," admitted the marshal. "Why spend all that time and money on creating artificial conditions that you'd never meet in real life?"

"It's the scientific method," said Heym, wondering at what elementary level he would have to begin his explanation. How stupid could one be and hold a marshal's position? "The real world is an interaction of uncounted factors, constantly changing in relation to themselves and each other, far too vast and complex to be understood in its entirety. In order to find casual relationships, the scientist has to perform experiments in which he varies only one factor at a time, observing its effect—and, of course, running control experiments at the same time. From these data he infers similar relationships in the real world. By means of theoretical analysis of observed facts he can proceed to predict new phenomena —if these predictions are borne out by further observation, the theory is probably—though never certainly—right, and can be used as a guide in understanding and controlling the events of the real world." In spite of himself, Heym was warming up to his subject. After all, it was his whole life.

"Hm-m-m." Goram looked out the visiscope. The boat was sweeping over a broad plain, yellow with ripening grain. A few primitive villages, houses built of stone and wood and brick, were scattered over the great landscape, a peaceful scene, reminiscent of civilization's dawn. "The planet looks backward enough," grunted Goram dubiously.

"It is," said Heym eagerly. "I assure you it is."

"Well . . . you were saying—" Goram didn't look at all sure of what Heym had been saying. "Get to the point."

"The early students of culture were struck by the similarity of development of different civilizations, as if man went along one inevitable historic path. And in a way he did—because one thing leads to another. The expanding units of a culture clash, there are ever fiercer wars, old fears and grudges intensify, economic breakdowns increase the misery, finally, and usually unwittingly and even unwillingly, one nation overcomes all others to protect itself and found a 'universal state' which brings a certain peace of exhaustion but eventually decays and collapses of its own weaknesses or under the impact of alien invaders. That's exactly what happened to mankind as a whole, when he exploded into the Galaxy—only this time the fearful scale and resources of the wars all but shattered the civilization; and the Solarian Empire, the passive rigidity solving the problems of the time of troubles by force, has lasted immensely longer than most preceding universal states, because its rulers have enough knowledge of mass-psychologic processes to have a certain control over them, and all the power of a hundred thousand planetary systems to back their decisions."

Goram looked a little dazed. "I still don't see what this has to do with the Foundation and its stations," he complained.

"Simply this," said Heym, "that though history is a natural process, like anything else, it is peculiarly hard to understand and hence almost impossible to control. This is not only because of the very complex character of the interactions but because we ourselves are concerned in it—the observer is part of the phenomenon. And also, it had long been impossible to conduct controlled experiments in history and thus separate out causal factors and observe their unhindered working. On the basis of thousands of years of history as revealed—usually quite incompletely—by records and by archeology, and of extrapolations from individual and mob psychological knowledge, and whatever other data were available, the scientists of the period preceding the Empire worked out a semi-mathematical theory of history which gave some idea of the nature of the processes involved causal factors and the manner of their action. This theory made possible qualitative predictions of the behavior of masses of men under certain conditions. Thus the early emperors knew what factors to vary in order to control their provinces. They could tell whether a certain measure might, say, precipitate a revolt, or just what phrasing to use in proclamations for the desired effect. If you want a man to do something for you, you don't usually slap him in the face—it's much more effective to appeal to his vanity or his prejudices, best of all to convince him it's what he himself wants to do. But once in a while, a face slapping becomes necessary. Why, even today the barbarians are held at bay more by subtle psychological and economic pressures dividing them against each other and putting them in awe of us than by actual military might." An ocean rolled beneath the boat, gray and green, showing white mane on the restless horizon.

"Swing northeast," said Heym. "The planet's greatest city lies that way, on a large island."

"Good. A city's a good place to observe a people. Can we go around incognito?"

"Naturally. I know the language well enough to pass for a traveler from some other part of the world. There's a lot of intercourse between continents. The cities are quite cosmopolitan."

"Well—go on. You've still not explained why the station and all this rigmarole of secrecy."

"I was laying the background," said Heym, unable to keep all the tiredness out of his voice. Can I really talk this moron over? Can anyone? Reason is wasted on an ape. "It's really very simple. The crude psychotechnology available made it possible for the early emperors to conquer most of the human-inhabited Galaxy, hold it together, and reach an uneasy truce with the Taranian and Comi Empires. Our military might can hold off the barbarians and the Magellanic raiders, and have sufficient power left over to police the three hundred trillion citizens.

"Yet our science is primitive. On that vast scale, it can only deal with the simplest possible situations. It's all we can do to keep the Empire stable. If it should develop, on the colossal scale of which it is capable and with all the unpredictable erraticness of the free human mind, it would simply run away from us. We have trouble enough keeping industry and commerce flowing smoothly when we know exactly how it should work. If we permitted free invention and progress, there'd be an industrial revolution every year—there is never a large proportion of discoverers, but with the present population the number would be immense. Our carefully evolved techniques of control would become obsolete; there'd be economic anarchy, conflict, suffering, individuals rising to power outside the present social framework and threatening the co-ordinating authority—with planet-smashing power to back both sides and all our enemies on the watch for a moment's instability.

"That's only one example. It applies to any field. Science, philosophy—we can control known religions, channel the impulses to safe directions—but a new religion, rousing discontent, containing unknown elements—a billion fanatics going to war—No! We have to keep status quo, which we understand, at the cost of an uncontrollable advance into the unknown.

"The Empire really exists only to simplify the psychotechnic problem of co-ordination. Enforcement of population stability—good, we don't have to worry about controlling trillions of new births; there's no land hunger. Stable industry, ossified physical science, state religion, totalitarian control of the entire life span—good, we know exactly what we're dealing with and our decisions will be obeyed—imagine the situation if three hundred trillion people were free to do exactly as they pleased in the Galaxy!" Heym shrugged. "Why go on? You know as well as I do that the Empire is only an answer to a problem of survival—not a good answer, but the best our limited knowledge can make."

"Hah!" Goram's exclamation was triumphant. "And you want to turn a world of unpredictable geniuses loose in that!"

"If I thought for an instant there was any danger of this people's becoming a disrupting factor, I'd be the very first to advocate sterilization," said Heym. "After all, I want to live, too. But there's nothing to fear. Instead, there is—hope."

"What hope?" snorted Goram. "Personally, I can't see what you want, anyway. For three thousand years, we've kept man satisfied. Who'd want to change it?"

Heym bit back his temper. "Aside from the fact that the contentment is like death," he said, "history shows that universal states don't endure forever. Sooner or later, we'll face something that will overwhelm us. Unless we've evolved ourselves. But safe evolution is only possible when we know enough psychotechnics to keep the process orderly and peaceful—when our science is really quantitative. The Stations, and especially Seventeen, are giving us the information we must have to develop such a science."

The island lay a few kilometers north of the great northern continent. A warm stream in the ocean made the climate equable, so that the land lay green in the gray immensity of sea, but polar air swept south with fog and rain and snow, storms roaring over the horizon and the sun stabbing bright lances down through a mightily stooping sky of restless clouds and galloping winds. Heym thought that the stimulating weather had as much to do as the favorable location along the northern trade routes with the islanders' leadership in the planet's civilization.

Many villages lay in the fields and valleys and on the edges of the forest that still filled the interior, but there was only one city, on an estuary not far from the southern coast. From the air, it was not impressive to one who had seen the world cities of Sol and Sirius and Antares, a sprawling collection of primitive, often thatch-roofed dwellings that could hardly have housed more than a million, the narrow cobbled streets crowded with pedestrians and animal-drawn vehicles, the harbor where a few steam-or oil-driven vessels were all but lost in the throng of wind-powered ships, the almost prehistoric airport—but the place had the character, subtle and unmistakable, of a city, a community knowing of more than its own horizon inclosed and influencing events beyond the bounds of sight.

"Can we land without being detected?" inquired Goram.

Heym laughed. "An odd question for a military man to ask. This boat is so well screened that the finest instruments of the Imperial navy would have trouble locating us. Oh, yes, we observers have been landing from time to time all through the station's history."

"I must say the place looks backward enough," said Goram dubiously. "The existence of cities is certainly evidence of crude transportation."

"Well"—honesty forced Heym to argue—"not necessarily. The city, that is, the multi-purpose community, is one criterion of whether a society is civilized or merely barbaric, in the technical anthropological sense. It's true that cities as definite centers disappeared on Earth after the Atomic Revolution, but that was simply because such closely spaced buildings were no longer necessary. In the sense of close relation to the rest of mankind and of resultant co-ordination, Earth's people kept right on having cities. And today the older planets of the Empire have become so heavily populated that the crowded structures are reappearing—in effect, the whole world becomes one vast city. But I will agree that the particular stage of city evolution existing here on Seventeen is primitive." Goram set the boat down in a vacant field outside the community's limits. "What now?" he asked.

"Well, I suppose you'll want to spend a time just walking around the place." Heym fumbled in a bag.

"I brought the proper equipment, clothes and money of the local type. Planetary type, that is—since a universal coinage was established at the same time as a common language was adopted for international use, and nobody cares what sort of dress you wear." He unfolded the brief summer garments, shorts and sandals and tunic of bleached and woven plant fiber. "Funny thing," he mused, "how man has always made a virtue of necessity. The lands threatened with foreign invasion came to glorify militarism and war. The people who had to work hard considered idleness disgraceful. Dwellers in a northern climate, who had to wear clothes, made nudity immoral. But our colonists here are free of that need for compensation and self-justification. You can work, think, many, eat, dress, whatever you want to do, just as you please, and if you aren't stepping on someone else's toes too hard nobody cares. Which indicates that intolerance is characteristic of stupidity, while the true intellectual is naturally inclined to live and let live." Goram struggled awkwardly and distastefully into the archaic garments. "How about weapons?" he asked.

"No need to carry them. No one does, except in places where wild animals might be dangerous. In fact, arms are about the only thing in which the colonists' inventiveness has lagged. They never got past the bow and arrow. Aside from a few man-to-man duels in the early stages of their history, and now abandoned, they've never fought each other."

"Impossible! Man is a fighting animal."

Heym tried to find a reply which was not too obviously a slap at the whole military profession.

"There's been war on all our other colonies," he said slowly, "and, of course, through all human history—yet there's never been any real, logical reason for it. In fact, at one stage of prehistoric man, the late neolithic, war seems to have been unknown—at least, no weapons were found buried with the men of that time. And your whole professional aim today is to maintain peace within the Empire, isn't it?

"It takes only one to make a quarrel unless the other lacks all spirit to resist—and a people like these are obviously spirited, in fifteen hundred years they've explored their whole planet. But suppose neither side wants to fight. Whenever two tribes met, in the history of Station Seventeen, they were all too intelligent to suffer from xenophobia or other nonlogical motivations to murder, and certainly they had no logical reason to fight. So they didn't. It was as simple as that."

Goram snorted, whether in disbelief or contempt Heym didn't know. "Let's go," he said.

They stepped out of the boat and its invisibility screen into the field. Tall breeze-rippled grass tickled their bare legs, and the wind in their faces had the heady scent of green growing life brought over the many kilometers of field and forest across which it had rushed—incredible, that pulsing warm vitality after the tanked sterility of the ship, of the Empire. And up in the blue cloud-fleeced sky a bird was singing, rising higher and ever higher toward the sun, drunk with wind and light.

The two men walked across the field to a road that led cityward. It was a narrow rutted brown track in the earth, and Goram snorted again. They walked along it. On a hill to the right stood a farm, a solid substantial, contented-looking cluster of low tile-roofed stone buildings amid the open fields, and ahead of the horizon was the straggling misty line of the city. Otherwise they were alone.

"Are all your colonies this wild?" asked Goram.

"Just about," said Heym, "though the environments are often radically different—everything from a planet that's barely habitable desert to one that's all jungle and swamp. That way, we can isolate the effects of environment. We even have one world equipped with complex robot-run cities, to see how untutored humans will react. There are three control stations, Earth-like planets where ordinary human types were left, and from them we're getting valuable information on the path which terrestrial history actually took; we can test basic anthropological hypotheses and so on. Then there are a number of planets where different human types are planted —different races, different intelligence levels, and so on, to isolate the effects of heredity and see if there is any correlation of civilization with, say physiology. But only here on Seventeen, populated exclusively by geniuses, has progress been rapid. All the other colonies are still in the stone ages or even lower, though there have been some unique responses made to severe environmental stimuli."

"And you mean you just dumped your subjects down on all these worlds?"

"Crudely put, yes. For instance, before colonizing Seventeen we—that is, the Foundation—spent several generations breeding a pure genius strain of man. On Imperial orders, the Galaxy's best brains were bred, and genetic control and selection were applied, until a stock had been developed whose members had only genius in the intellectual part of their heredity. Barring mutation or accident, both negligible, the people here and their children can only be geniuses. Then the few thousand adult end-products, who had naturally not been told what was in store for them, were seized and put under the action of memory erasers which left them able to walk and eat and little else. Then a couple of hundred were planted in each climatic region of this planet, near strategically placed invisible spy devices, and the observers sat back on their asteroid to see what would happen. That was fifteen hundred-odd years ago, but even in the forty or so years I've been in charge the change here has been very noticeable. In fact, on choosing the proper psychomathematical quantities to represent the various types of progress and plotting them against time, almost perfect exponential curves were obtained." Goram scowled. "So on that exponential advance, you can expect them to work out interplanetary travel in a matter of years," he said. "They'll know the principles of the star drive in a few more generations, and invent a faster-than-light engine almost at once. No—they aren't safe!" It was strange to walk through the narrow twisting streets and among the high archaic facades of a city which belonged to the almost forgotten past. To Goram, who must have visited uncivilized planets often, it could not be as queer as to Heym, and, also, the military mind would be too unimaginative to appreciate the situation. But even though Heym had spent the better part of his life watching this culture, it never failed to waken in him a dim feeling of dreamlike unreality.

Mere picturesqueness counted for a little, though the place was colorful enough. Along those cobbled ways went the traffic of a world. There were fantastic-looking beasts, variations of the horned ungulate genus which the colonists had early tamed to ride and load with their burdens, and still more exotic pets; and steering cautiously between them came trucks and passenger vehicles which for all their crudeness of material and principle had a cleanness of design, all the taut inherent beauty of the machine, that only Imperial mechanisms matched. More significant were the people.

There was nothing marking them out as obviously different. Many physical types were in evidence here, from the tall fair islanders to the stocky arctic dwellers or the sun-burned southern folk; and costumes varied accordingly, though even strangers tended to wear some form of the light local summer dress. If perhaps a tendency toward higher foreheads and more clean-cut features than the Galactic average existed, it was not striking, and there was as wide deviation from it as could be found anywhere. The long hair of both sexes and the full beards worn by many men screened any intellectuality of appearance behind a hirsute veil associated with the peripheral barbarians. No—the difference from any other world in the Galaxy was real and unmistakable, but it wasn't physical. It was in the clear air of the city, where all chimneys were smokeless, and in the clean-swept streets. It was in the orderliness of traffic, easy movement without jostling and confusion. It was in the clean bodies and soft voices of the people, in the casually accepted equality of the sexes even at this primitive level of technology. It was negative, in the absence of slums and jails, and positive, in the presence of parks and schools and hospitals. There were no weapons or uniforms in sight, but many in the street carried books or wore chemical-stained smocks. There were no ranting orators, but a large group sat on the grass of one park and listened to a lecture on ornithology. Laughter was quiet, but there was more of it than Heym had heard elsewhere in the Empire.

Goram muttered once: "I seem to hear quite a few languages here."

"Oh, yes," replied Heym. "Each region naturally developed its own tongue and generally sticks to it for sentimental reasons and also because the thoughts of a people are best expressed in the speech they themselves developed. But as soon as contact between the lands became common, an international language was worked out and learned by all concerned. In fact, only about fifty years ago a completely new world language was adopted, one correct according to the newly established principles of semantics. That's more than the Empire has yet done. We can talk Terrestrial safely enough, it'll pass for some local dialect, and I can do the talking for both of us with the natives."

"Still"—Goram scowled—"I don't like it. Everybody here has a higher I. Q. than myself—that's not right for a bunch of barbarians. I feel as if everyone was looking at me."

"Most of them observe us, yes, geniuses being naturally observant," said Heym. "But we aren't conspicuous in any way. Our men have often been on the planet in person without attracting attention."

"Didn't you say you'd appeared openly?"

"Yes—a few times, some centuries back, we made the most awe-inspiring possible descents, coming down through the air on gravibeams in luminous clothes and performing seeming miracles. You see, even the primitive tribes had shown no signs of organized religion beyond the usual magic rites which they soon outgrew. We wanted to see if god-worship couldn't be induced." Heym smiled wryly. "But after the generation which had actually seen us, there was no sign of our manifestation. I suppose the young, being of independent mind, simply refused to believe their elders' wild stories. Not that the people are without religious sense. There is a high proportion of unbelievers, but there is also a large philosophical and even devotional literature. But nobody founds a school of thought, rather everybody reaches his own conclusions."

"I don't see how progress is possible then."

You wouldn't, thought Heym contemptuously, but he only smiled and said, "Apparently it is." An aircraft roared low overhead, and a wagon driver fought to control his suddenly panicky animals. Goram said: "The biggest paradox here is the anachronism. Sailships and oilburners docked side by side, animal power in the same street with chemical engines, stone and wood houses with efficient smoke precipitators—how come?"

"It's partly a matter of the extremely rapid progress," declared Heym. "A new invention appears before the economy has become geared to it. There won't be many machines until mass-production factories are set up to produce them in quantity, and that will have to wait till mechanical knowledge is sufficiently advanced to develop factories almost entirely automatic—for few if any geniuses could stand to work on an assembly line all day. Meanwhile, the people are in no hurry to advance their standard of living. Already they have sufficient food, clothing, and other necessities for all, as well as abundant free time—why strain themselves to go beyond that? This isn't the first time a brilliantly creative civilization has existed without interest in material progress; I might cite the Hellenistic phase of the ancient Classical culture on Earth as another case."

Goram, who had obviously heard nothing and cared less about Hellenic culture, was silent for a while, then at last a blurted protest: "But they're working on rockets!"

"Oh, yes—but there's a difference between exploration and exploitation. The social system here is unique, and doesn't lend itself to imperialism. The Empire doesn't have to fear Station Seventeen."

"I've told you before I'm not worried about their military power," snarled Goram.

Heym fell silent, for he felt the sudden sickening fear that the marshal might, without reason or provocation, decide to annihilate the colony—destroy it out of pure spite, pique with the psychologists and their dominion over the soldiers, vent for gathering wrath at the subconscious, frantically denied realization of his own basic inferiority to these barbarians. If he killed them, it would be proof, the militarist's twisted proof, that he was superior after all.

With a growing desperation, Heym looked around at the people—the fortunate children of an open sky, quiet, glad, urbane, and strong with the unconquerable strength of intelligence. Here was truly Homo sapiens, man the wise—man who had plucked fire from the mouth of a volcano, far back in the lost ages of the ice, and started on a long journey into darkness. He had come far since then, but he had ended in a blind alley. Only here, on this one insignificant world of the countless millions swarming around the stars, only here was the old quest being renewed, the path of hope being trodden. Elsewhere lay only the sorry road of empire and death. Where the path of Station Seventeen led, Heym could not imagine. Unguessably far it went, out beyond the glittering stars, his mind reeled at thought of the infinities open to mankind if he took the right turning.

The psychologist said, with desperation raw in his voice, "Goram—Marshal Goram—surely you can see the experiment is harmless. More than that, it's the most beneficial thing that has yet happened in all human history. Good Spirit, here's hope for the Empire! A race which can progress as this has done can show us the way."

"The Empire," said Goram tightly, "isn't interested in progress. It's only interested in survival."

"But—this is the way to survive. Every civilization—yes, every species—that quit advancing has become extinct."

"I'm a practical man," snapped Goram. "I'm not interested in crackpot schemes to save the universe."

"What's so practical about clinging to a system that in all history has consistently failed to work?" When the officer's face remained cold and shut, Heym said with forced persuasiveness, "After all, in physical science the planet is still centuries behind us. In fact, strangely enough, though their advance in that branch of knowledge has been as extremely rapid as you can see, they have shown a proportionately greater concentration on biological and sociological work. I don't know why, unless it is that genius is less afraid than mediocrity to study subjects which strike close to home. On Earth, astronomy, the most remote science, was the oldest, and psychiatry and sociology the youngest, but here all the sciences have got off to an even start. The mere absence of war is enough to show how far ahead of us these people are, and I could list any amount of supporting evidence. Their social system has achieved the miracle of combining progressiveness and stability. Just give the Foundation a chance to learn from them—or even, if they do work out an interstellar drive, give them a chance to teach us themselves. They're the most reasonable race in the universe—they'll be on the side of civilization, and even while overhauling it they'll be better able to preserve it than we ourselves."

"Let a bunch of barbarians take over the holy throne?" muttered Goram. Heym closed his mouth, and a gathering determination tightened his gaunt face. He looked around the pulsing city, and a vast tenderness and pity welled up in him—poor geniuses, poor helpless unwitting supermen—and answering it came a steely implacable resolve.

There was too much at stake to let his own personal fate matter. Certainly a mindlessly destructive atavist could not be allowed to block history. He would keep trying, he'd do his best to talk Goram over, because the alternative was fantastically risky for the station and against all his own training and principles—including elementary self-preservation.

But if he failed, if Goram remained obdurate, then he'd have to apply the same primitive methods as the soldier. Goram would have to die.

Rain clouds came out of the west with sunset, thunder rolling over the sky and a cool wet wind blowing from the sea. Goram and Heym finished a primitive but satisfying meal in a small restaurant and the psychologist said: "We'd better look for a place to stay tonight. Will you be in this city tomorrow?"

"Don't know," answered Goram curtly. He had been silent and withdrawn during the day's tour of the metropolis. "I have to think over what I've seen today. It may be enough basis for a decision, or I may want to see more of the planet."

"I'll pay the score," offered Heym. He fought to keep his voice and face blank. "And I'll ask the waiter to recommend a tavern."

He followed the man toward the kitchen. "Please," he said in the common tongue, "I wish to pay the check."

"Very well," answered the native. He was a tall young fellow with the faintly weary eyes of a scholar—probably a student, thought Heym, doing his stint here and getting his education free. He took the few coins casually.

"And—is there a place to stay overnight near here?"

"Right down the street. Stranger, I take it?"

"Yes. From Caralla on business. Oh—one other thing." It was a tremendous effort to meet that steady gaze. Heym was aware of his own clumsiness as he blurted the request:

“. . . uh . . . I've lost my knife and I need it to prepare some handicraft samples for display tomorrow. The stores are all closed now. I wonder if you have an extra one in the kitchen I could buy."

"Why—" The native paused. For an instant, Heym thought he was going to ask questions, and he braced himself as if to meet a physical impact. But on a world where crime was virtually unknown and lying hardly ever went beyond the usual polite social fibs, even so crude a fiction could get by. "Yes, I suppose we have," said the waiter. "Here, I'll get one."

"No . . . It come along . . . save you the trouble ... choose one for my purpose if . . . uh . . . if you have several you can spare." Heym stuck close to the waiter's heels. The kitchen was spotlessly clean, though it seemed incredible that cooking should still be done with fire. Heym chose a small sharp knife, wrapped it in a rag, and slipped it into his pocket. The waiter and chef refused his money. "Plenty where this one came from—a pleasure to help out a visitor."

"What were you out there for?" asked Goram.

Heym licked stiff lips. "The waiter was new here himself and went to ask the cook about hotels."

The first raindrops were falling as the two came out into the street. Lightning forked vividly overhead. Goram shuddered in the raw damp chill. "Foul place," he muttered. "No weather control, not even a roof for the city—uncivilized."

Heym made no reply, though he tried to unlock his jaws. The blade in his pocket seemed to have the weight of a world. He looked down from his stringy height at the soldier's squat massiveness. I've never killed, he thought dully. I've never even fought, physically or mentally. I'm no match for him. It'll have to be a sneak thrust from behind.

They entered the hotel. The clerk was reading a journal whose pages seemed purely mathematical symbols. He was probably a scientist of some kind in his main job. There was, luckily for Goram, no register to sign; the clerk merely nodded them casually toward their room.

"No system here," muttered Goram. "How can they keep track of anybody without registry?"

"They don't," said Heym. "And they don't have to."

The room was large and airy and well furnished. "I've slept in worse places," said the soldier grudgingly. He flopped into a chair. "But it's the first place I've seen where the hired help reads technical journals."

"That's easy enough to explain. Even though no high-grade mind could be put to the myriad routine and menial tasks essential to running a civilization, everything from garbage collection to government, someone must do the work. The present set-up is a compromise, in which everyone puts in a small proportion of his time at those jobs. He can do manual work, or teach, or run a public-service enterprise like a farm or restaurant—whatever he wishes. And he can work steadily at it for a few years and then have all his needs taken care of for the vest of his life, or else put in a few hours a day, two or three, over a longer period of time. The result is that needs and a social surplus are available for all, as well as education, health services, entertainment, or whatever else is considered desirable. The planet could, in fact, do without money, but it's more convenient to pay in cash than fill out credit slips.

"Incidentally, that's probably one reason there's no great interest in providing more material goods for all—it would mean that everyone would have to put in more time in the mines and factories and less on his chosen work. Which is apparently a price that genius is unwilling to pay. I don't think there'll be any great progress in applied science until the research project established some time back perfects the robots it's set for a goal."

"Uh-huh," muttered Goram. "And just let them expand into the Galaxy and find we have such robots—left unproduced since the Imperial populace has to be kept busy—and see what they'll do. They'd be able to wreck the whole set-up, just by inventing and distribution, and they'll know it."

"Can't you credit them with being smart enough to see the reasons for maintaining the status quo?" asked Heym. "They don't want the barbarians on their necks any more than we do. They'll help us maintain the Empire until they have developed a way to change conditions safely."

"Maybe." Goram's mouth was tight. "Still, they'll hold the balance of power, which is something no group except the Imperium can be permitted to do. Spirit! How do you even know they'll be on our side? They may decide their best advantage lies with our rivals. Or they may be irritated with our having used them so cavalierly all these centuries."

"They won't hold grudges," said Heym. "A genius doesn't." "How do you know?" Goram sprang out of his chair and paced the floor. His voice rose almost to a shout. "You've said all along that the genius is naturally peaceful and tolerant and unselfish and every other of the milk-and-water virtues. Yet, your own history is against you all the way. Every great military leader has been a genius. There've been sadistic geniuses, and bigoted geniuses, and criminal geniuses—yes, insane geniuses! Why, every one of the, hundred billion or so important men in the Imperial government is a genius—on our side—and more than half the barbarian chiefs are known to have genius intellect." He swung a red and twisted face on the psychologist. "How do you know this is a planet of saints? Answer me that!" Heym took out a cigarette pack with fingers that shook. He held it out to Goram, who shook his heavy bullet head in angry refusal. The psychologist took time to bring one of the cylinders into his mouth and puff it into lighting. He drew smoke deeply into his lungs, fighting for steadiness. It was his last real chance to convince Goram. If this failed, he'd just have to try to murder the soldier. If that attempt miscarried—oh, Spirit, then Station Seventeen and the Empire were doomed. But if he succeeded, well, he might be able to convince the Imperial police that it had been an accident, a runaway animal or something of the sort, or they might send him to the disintegration chamber for murder. In any case, there would be a faint hope that the next inspector would be a reasonable man. He said slowly: "To explain the theory of historical progress, I'd have to give you a fairly long lecture."

Goram sprawled back into his chair, crude and strong and arrogant. His little black eyes were drills, boring into the psychologist's soul. "I'm listening," he snapped.

"Well"—Heym walked up and down the floor, hands clasped behind his back—"it's evident from a study of history that all progress is due to gifted individuals. Always, in every field, the talented or otherwise fortunate few have led and the mass has dumbly followed. A republic is the only form of state which even pretends to offer self-government, and as soon as the population becomes any size at all the people are again led by the nose, their rulers struggling for power with money and such means of mass hypnotism as news services and other propaganda machines. And all republics become dictatorships, in fact if not in name, within a few centuries at most. As for art and science and religion and the other creative fields, it is still more obviously the few who lead.

"The ordinary man is just plain stupid. Perhaps proper mind training could lift him above himself, but it's never been tried. Meanwhile he remains immensely conservative, only occasional outbreaks of mindless hysteria engineered by some special group stirring him out of his routine. He follows, or rather he accepts what the creative or dominant minority does, but it is haltingly and unwillingly.

"Yet it is society as a whole which does. History is a mass action process. Gifted individuals start it off, but it is the huge mass of the social group which actually accomplishes the process. A new invention or a new land to colonize or a new philosophy or any other innovation would have no significance unless everybody eventually adopted or exploited or otherwise made use of it. And society as a whole is conservative, or perhaps I should say preservative. Civilization is ninety-nine percent habit, the use of past discoveries or the influence of past events. Against the immense conservatism of mankind in the mass, and in comparison to the tremendous accumulation of past accomplishment, the achievement of the individual genius or the small group is almost insignificant. It is not surprising that progress is slow and irregular and liable to stagnation or violent setbacks. The surprising thing is really that any event of significance can happen at all."

Heym paused. Goram stirred impatiently. "What are you leading up to?" he muttered.

"Simply this." Heym's hand fell into his pocket and closed on the smooth hard handle of the knife. Goram slumped in his chair, head lowered, staring sullenly at the floor. If the blade were driven in now, right into that bull neck, a paralyzing blow and then a swift slash across the jugular—

The intensity of the hatred welling up in him shocked Heym. He should be above the brutal level of his enemy. Yet—to see the blood spurt!

Steady—steady— That move of desperation might not be necessary.

"Two factors control the individual in society," said Heym, and the detached calm of his voice was vaguely surprising to him. "They are only arbitrarily separable, being aspects of the same thing, but it's convenient to take them up in turn.

"There is first the simple weight of social pressure. We all want to be approved by our fellows, within reasonable limits at least. The mores of the society, whatever they may be, are those of the individual. Only a psychopath would disregard them completely. Not only does society apply force on the nonconformist, but mere disapproval can be devastating. It takes a really brave—and somewhat neurotic—individual to be different in any important respect. Many have paid with their lives for innovating. So a genius will be hampered in making original contributions, and they are adopted only slowly. It usually takes a new idea many generations to become accepted. The astonishing rate of growth of science, back in the days when free research was permitted and even encouraged, indicates how rapid progress can be when there are no barriers.

"And, of course, this social pressure usually forces conformity even on reluctant individuals. A scientist may be naturally peaceful, for instance, but he will hardly ever refuse to engage in war research when so directed.

"The second hold of the mass on the individual is subtler and more effective. It is the mental conditioning induced by growing up in a society where certain conditions of living and rules of thought are accepted. A 'born' pacifist, growing up in a Warlike culture, will generally accept war as part of the natural order of things. A man who might have been a complete skeptic in a science-based society will nearly always accept the gods of a theocracy if he has been brought up to believe in them. He may even become a priest and direct his logical talents toward elaborating the accepted theology —and help in the persecution of unbelievers. And so on. I needn't go into detail. The power of social conditioning is unbelievable—combined with social pressure, it is almost insuperable.

"And—this is the important point—the rules and assumptions of a society are accepted and enforced by the mass—the overwhelming majority, shortsighted, conservative, hating and fearing all that is new and strange, wishing only to remain in whatever basic condition it has known from birth. The genius is forced into the strait-jacket of the mediocre man's and the moron's mentality. That he can expand any distance at all beyond his prison is a tribute to the supreme power of the high intellect." Heym looked out at the empty street. Rain blew wildly across its darkened surface. "The Solarian Empire is nothing but the triumph of stupidity over intelligence. If every man could think for himself, we wouldn't need an empire."

"Watch yourself," muttered Goram. "The ruling class has a certain latitude of speech, but don't overstep it." And more loudly: "What does this mean in the case of Station Seventeen?"

"Why, it's a triumphant confirmation of the historical theory I was just explaining," said Heym. "We've isolated pure genius from mediocrity and left it free to work out its own destiny. The result has even exceeded our predictions.

"No doubt there are aggressive and conservative and selfish people born. But on this world the weight of social conditioning and social pressure is away from those tendencies, they don't get a chance to develop themselves.

"It seems"—Heym's voice rose over the whistle of wind—"that genius shows a qualitative distinction, due to quantitative differences, from mere human intelligence. The genius is basically a distinct type, just as the moron is on the other end of the scale. And here—on Seventeen—the new type has been set free."

He turned around from the window. Goram sat motionless, staring at the floor, and the slow seconds ticked away before he spoke.

"I don't know—" he murmured. "I don't know—"

Defeat and despair and a binding hatred rose into Heym's throat, tasting of vomit. You don't know!

His mind screamed the thought, it seemed incredible that Goram should sprawl there, not moving, not hearing. No, you don't know. Your sort never does, never has known anything but its own witless bestial desires, its own self-righteous rationalization of impulses that should have died with Smilodon. You'll destroy Seventeen, in spite of all reason, in sheer perversity—and you'll say you did it for the good of the Empire!

The knife seemed to spring of its own accord into his hand. He was lunging forward before he realized it. He saw the blade gleam down as if another man were wielding it. The blow shocked back into his muscles and for an instant his mind wavered, it wasn't real— what am I doing?

No time to lose. Goram twisted around in his seat, yelling, grabbing for Heym. The knife was deep in his neck. Heym yanked at it—pull it loose, stick it in the throat, kill—

Something struck him from behind. The world shattered in a burst of stars, he crashed to the floor and rolled over. Through a haze of dizzy pain he saw men bending over Goram—men of the planet, rescuers for the monster who would annihilate them.

Words tumbled from the hotel clerk, anxious, shaken: "Are you hurt? Did you—Still, lie still, here comes a doctor—"

Pain Burled Goram's lips back from his teeth, but he muttered a reply: "No . . . I'm all right . . . flesh wound—" The doctor bent over his bloody form. "Deep," he said, "but it missed the important veins. Here, I'll just pull it out—"

"Go ahead," whispered Goram. "I've taken worse than this, though . . . I never expected it here." Heym lay on the floor while they worked over the soldier. His ringing, whirling head throbbed toward steadiness, and slowly, with so tremendous an impact that it overloaded his nerves and entered his consciousness without emotional shock, the realization grew.

Goram had spoken to the natives—in their own language. A man bent over the psychologist. "Are you all right?" he asked. "I'm sorry I had to hit you so hard. Here—drink this." Heym forced the liquid down his throat. It coursed fierily through his veins, he sat up with an arm supporting him about his waist and held his head in his hands.

Someone else spoke, the voice seemed to come from across an abyss: "Did he hear?"

"I'm afraid so." Goram, his neck bandaged, spoke painfully. A rueful smile crossed his ugly face. "The excitement was too much for me, or I would have kept silent. This is going to be—inconvenient." The men of the planet helped Heym into a chair. He began to revive, and looked dazedly across at the man he had tried to kill. The others stood around the chairs, tall bearded men in barbaric dress, watching him with alertness and a strange pity.

"Yes," said Tamman Goram very quietly, "the assistant Grand Marshal of the Solarian Empire is a native of Station Seventeen."

"Who else?" whispered Heym. "How and why? I tried to kill you because I thought you meant to order the planet sterilized."

"It was an act," said Gomm. "I meant to concede at last that the station was harmless and could be safely left to the Foundation's observers. Coming from one who had apparently been strongly inclined to the opposite view, the statement would have been doubly convincing to Imperial officialdom. It was a powerful and suspicious minister who ordered the investigation, and I went to soothe his feelings. His successor will be one of our men, who will see that Station Seventeen drops into safe obscurity as an unimportant and generally unsuccessful experiment conducted by a few harmless cranks."

"But . . . aren't you . . . weren't you—"

"Oh, yes. My history is perfectly genuine. I was planted as an obscure recruit in the border guards many years ago, and since then my rise has been strictly in accord with Imperial principles. All our men in the Empire will bear the most searching investigation. Sometimes they come from families which have lived several generations on Imperial planets. Our program of replacing key personnel with our men is planned centuries ahead of time, and succeeds by the simple fact that on the average, over long periods of time, they are so much more capable than anyone else."

"How long—?"

"About five hundred years. You underestimated the capabilities of your experimental animals." Goram rested for a moment, then asked, "If human intelligence is qualitatively different from animal intelligence, and genius is different from ordinary reasoning power—then tell me, what about the equivalent of geniuses in a world where the average man is a genius by the usual standards?

"Pure genius strains kept right on evolving, more rapidly indeed than can be explained on any other basis than the existence of an orthogenetic factor in evolution. Supergenius —give it a different name, call it transcendence, since it is a different quality—has capabilities which the ordinary mind can no more comprehend than pure instinct can comprehend logic.

"Your spectacular god-revelations were not forgotten, they were treated discreetly. Later, when a theory of evolution was developed, it seemed strange that man, though obviously an animal, should have no apparent phylogenesis. The stories of the 'gods,' the theories of evolution and astronomy—we began to suspect the truth. With that suspicion, it was not hard for a transcendent to spot your masquerading psychologists. Kidnapping, questioning under drugs developed by psychiatry, and release of the prisoner with memory of his experience removed told us the rest. Later, disguised as other prisoners, with their knowledge, and his own intelligence to fill the gaps, one transcendent after another made his way to the observation asteroid—thence out into the Galaxy, where a little spying was sufficient to reveal the principles of the interstellar drive and the other mechanisms of the Empire." Heyni murmured: "The whole planet has been—acting?"

"Yes." Goram chuckled. "Rather fun for all concerned. You'd be surprised at the installations we have, out of spy-machine range. As soon as they are old enough to carry out the deception, our children are told the truth. It has actually made little difference to our lives except for those few million who are out in the Galaxy taking it over."

"Taking . . . it . . . over?" Heym's mind seemed to be turning over slowly, infinitely slowly and wearily.

"Of course." A strange blend of sternness and sympathy overlay Goram's harsh features. "One planet obviously cannot fight the Galaxy, nor do we wish to. Yet we cannot permit it to menace us. The only answer is—annexation."

"And . . . then?"

"I'm sorry." Goram's voice came slowly, implacably, "but I'm afraid you overrated the good intentions of the pure genius strain. After all, Homo intelligens can no more be expected to serve Homo sapiens than early man to serve the apes.

"We're taking over barbarians and Empire alike. After that, the Galaxy will do as we wish. Oh, we won't be hard masters.. Man may never know that he is being ruled from outside, and he will enter a period of peace and contentment such as he has never imagined.

"As for you—"

Heym realized with vague shock that he had not even wondered or cared what was to become of him personally.

"You are sympathetic to us—but your loyalty is to the Empire. You have thought of us only in relation to our usefulness to the Imperium. Perhaps we could trust you to keep our secret, perhaps not. We can't take the risk. You might even release the truth inadvertently. Nor can we erase your memory of this—it would leave traces that an expert psychiatrist could detect, and all high officials undergo regular psychoanalytic checkups.

"I'll just have to report you as accidentally killed on the planet." Goram smiled. "I don't think you'll find life exile on this world, out of sight of the observers, uncongenial. And we might as well see about making your successor one of our men. It was about ready for that."

He added thoughtfully: "In fact, the Galaxy may be ready for a new Solarian Emperor."

Although Mars had long been a dead planet, one "Martian" remained—among the crew of Earth's spaceship. One was enough.

And the Moon Be Still As Bright

Ray Bradbury

I

IT WAS so cold that when they first came from the ship into the night, Spender began to gather the dry Martian wood and build a small fire. He didn't say anything about a celebration, he merely gathered the wood, set fire to it and watched it burp.

In the flare that illumined the thin air of this dried up sea of Mars he looked over his shoulder and saw the rocket ship that had brought them all, Wilder and Cheroke, and Gibbs and McClure and himself across a silent black space of stars to land upon a dead, dreaming world. Jeff Spender waited for the noise. He looked at the other men and waited for them to jump around and shout. It would happen as soon as the numbness of being the first men to Mars wore off. Gibbs walked over to the freshly ignited fire and said, "Why don't we use the ship chemical fire instead of that wood?"

"Never mind," said Spender, not looking up.

It wouldn't be right, the first night on Mars, to make a loud noise, to introduce a strange silly bright thing like a stove. It would be a kind of imported blasphemy. There'd be time for that later; time to throw condensed milk cans in the proud Martian canals, time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone gray Martian sea-bottoms, time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted delicate ruins of old Martian valley towns. Plenty of time for that. And he gave a small inward shiver at the thought.

He fed the fire by hand and it was like an offering to a dead giant. They were on an immense tomb. They had landed on a tomb planet. Here, a civilization had died. It was only simple courtesy that the first night be spent quietly, in reverence to a world that had once moved with life and was now buried and lifeless.

"This is not my idea of a landing celebration," said Gibbs. He looked at Captain Wilder. "Sir, I thought we might break out rashers of gin and meat and whoop it up a bit." Captain Wilder looked off toward a dead city, a mile away. "We're all of us tired," he said, remotely, as if his whole attention was upon the city and the men were forgotten. "Tomorrow night, perhaps. Tonight we should be glad we got across all that space without getting a meteor in our bulkhead or having one man of us die."

The men shifted around. There were twenty of them and they stood around, some of them holding on to each other's shoulders quietly. Spender watched them. They were not satisfied. They had risked their lives to do a big thing, and now they wanted to be shouting drunk and firing off guns to show how wonderful they were to have kicked a hole in space and ridden a rocket all the way to Mars. But nobody was yelling. Especially Captain Wilder and Spender himself. The captain gave a quiet order. One of the men ran into the ship and brought forth tins of food which were opened and dished out without much noise. The men were beginning to talk now. The captain sat down and recounted the trip to them. They already knew it all, but it was good to hear about it, as something over and done and safely finished. They would not talk about the return trip. Someone brought that up, but they told him to keep quiet. The spoons moved in the double moonlight; the food tasted good and the wine was even better. Spender did not take his eyes off them. He left his food on the plate under his hands. He felt the land getting colder. The stars drew closer, very clear.

When anybody talked too loudly, the captain would reply in a low voice that made them talk quietly from imitation.

The air smelled clean and new. Spender sat for a long time just enjoying the way it was made. It had a lot of things in it he couldn't identify; flowers, Chemistries, dusts, winds.

"Then, there was the time in New York when I got hold of that blonde, what was her name—Ginnie!" cried Biggs. "That was it!"

Spender sat there, tightening in. His hand began to tremble. His eyes moved behind the thin, sparse lids. His mouth was shut.

"And Ginnie said to me . . ." cried Biggs. The men listened and roared.

"So I smacked her one," shouted Biggs, with a bottle in his hand. Spender put down his food tray. He listened to the wind over his ears, cool and whispering. He looked at the cool ice of the Martian buildings over there on the empty sea lands.

"Let me tell you, what a woman, what a woman!" Biggs emptied his bottle into his open mouth. "Of all the women I ever knew!"

The smell of Biggs' sweating body was on the air. Spender let the fire die. "Hey, kick her up there, Spender," said Biggs, looking at him for a moment, then back to his bottle. "Well, one night, me and Ginnie .. ."

"This," murmured Spender to his empty hands in front of him, "is the first night on Mars."

"What?" said Biggs, pausing.

"Nothing," said Spender.

"As I was saying—" Biggs turned to the other men. They laughed. A man named Schoenke got out his accordion. He began to do a kicking dance. The dust sprang up under him. "Ahoo—I'm alive!" he shouted.

"Yay!" roared the men. Their eyes brightened. They threw down their empty plates. Two or three of them lined up and kicked like chorus maidens, joking coarsely. The others, clapping hands, cried for something to happen. Cheroke pulled off his shirt and his undershirt and showed his naked chest, sweating, as he whirled around. The moonlight shone on his crew-cut hair and his young clean shaven cheeks glinted with light.

In the sea bottom, the wind stirred along faint pieces of vapor, and from the mountains, great stone visages looked upon the moonlight and the rocket and the small fire.

Spender closed his hands into fists.

The noise got a little louder and a little louder. More of the men got up and the accordion was squeezed dry of its music. Somebody sucked on a mouth-organ.

"A perverted pastime!" observed Biggs with a slap on the player's back. Somebody blew on a tissue-papered comb. Twenty more bottles were brought out, opened, drunk. Biggs staggered about, wagging his arms to direct the dancing men.

"Come on, sir!" cried Cheroke to the captain, jumping around, one foot in the air, wailing a song. The captain shook his head.

"Come on, sir!" called several others.

The captain had to join the dance. He didn't do a very good one. His face was solemn. Spender watched, thinking, you poor man, oh, you poor man, what a night this is! A good man among fools. They don't know what they're doing. They should have been prepared for this. Before they came to Mars they should have been told how to look and how to walk around and be good for a few days.

"That does it." The captain begged off and sat down, saying he was exhausted. Spender looked at the captain's chest. It wasn't moving up and down very fast. His face wasn't sweaty either. Accordion, harmonica, wine, shout, dance, wail, roundabout, clash of pan, break of bottle, laughter, giggle, stamping—all of it. They had quite a time.

Biggs weaved to the rim of the canal. He carried six bottles in his arms and he dropped one of them, empty, down into the blue canal waters. It made an empty hollow drowning sound as it sank.

"I christen thee, I chrisien thee, I christen thee—" said Biggs, thickly, unable to say it. "I christen thee Biggs Canal, Biggs, Biggs Canal!" And he dropped two more bottles.

Spender was on his feet and over the fire and alongside of Biggs before anybody could move. He hit Biggs once in the teeth, and once in the ear and then pushed him so Biggs toppled and fell down into the canal water. Spender did it all without so much as a word. After the splash he just stood there, waiting for Biggs to climb back up onto the rim stones. By that time, the men were holding Spender.

"Hey, hey—what's wrong?" they asked.

"What's eating you, Spender? Hey?" Spender stared brightly into the canal waters where Biggs floundered like a large fat beetle.

The wind came in off the dead sea.

Biggs climbed up and stood dripping. "Who kicked me off?" he said. He saw the men holding Spender. "Well," he said, and started forward.

"That's enough," said Captain Wilder. The men broke and left Spender standing there. Biggs did riot continue his movement. He stopped and looked at the captain.

"Sir," he said.

"All right, Biggs, go climb into some dry clothes," ordered the captain. Biggs went into the ship.

"Here now!" Captain Wilder gestured at Spender. The captain waved his hand at the men. "Carry on with your party! You come with me, Spender."

The men took up the party. Captain Wilder walked off with Spender after him, and stopped quite some distance from the other men.

"I suppose you can just explain what happened now," Wilder said. Spender looked at the canal. "I don't know. I was ashamed."

"Of what?"

"Of Biggs and us and the noise. Pah, what a spectacle!"

"They've got to have their fun, it's been a long trip."

"Where's their respect, sir? Where's their sense of the right thing?"

"You're tired, too, and you have a different way of looking at things, Spender. That'll be a fifty-dollar fine for you."

"Yes, sir. It was just the idea of Them watching us make vile fools of ourselves."

"Them, Spender?"

"The Martians, dead or not."

"Most certainly dead," said the captain. "But do you think They know we're here?"

"Doesn't an old thing always know when a new thing comes?" said Spender.

"I suppose so. You sound as if you believe in ghosts and spirits."

"I believe in the things that were done, sir, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and there are houses and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and clocks and places for stabling, if not horses, well then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows. Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries.

"Ask me if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us, we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere, in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do. We'll rip it all up, rip the skin off and change it to fit ourselves."

"We won't ruin Mars," said the captain. "It's too big and too good."

"You think not? We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot dog stands in the midst of the Temple of Karnak in Egypt is because it was out of the way, and served no large commercial purpose. And Egypt is a small part of Earth. But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up. I haven't any faith in humans. We'll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and we'll call the mountain King George Mountain and we'll call the sea the Dupont Sea and we'll call the cities Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge City and it won't ever be right, when there are the proper names to these places."

"That'll be your job, as archaeologist, to find out the names and we'll use them."

"A few men like myself, against all the commercial interests?" Spender looked at the iron mountains.

"They know we're here tonight, and I imagine they hate us because we've come to pry and ruin things." The captain shook his head. "There's no hatred here." He listened to the wind. "From the look of their cities, they were a graceful, aesthetic, beautiful and philosophical people. They accepted what came to them. They acceded to racial death, that much we know, and without a last-moment war of frustration to tumble down their cities. Everyone we've seen so far has been flawlessly intact. They probably don't mind us being here, any more than they'd mind children playing on the lawn, knowing and understanding children for what they are. And, anyway, perhaps all this will change us for the better.

"Did you notice the peculiar quiet of the men, Spender, until Biggs forced them to get happy? They looked pretty humble and frightened. Looking at all this we know we're not so hot, we're young kids in rompers, shouting with our play-rockets and our atoms, loud and alive. But, one day, Earth will be this way, too. This will sober us up. It's an object lesson in civilizations. We'll learn from Mars. Now, suck in your chin and let's go back and play happy. That fifty-dollar fine still stands."

II

The party was not going too well. The wind kept coming in off the dead sea. It moved around the men and it moved around the captain and Jeff Spender as they returned to the group. The wind pulled at the dust and the shining rocket and pulled at the accordion and the dust got into the vamped harmonica. The dust got in their eyes and the wind made a high singing sound in the air. As suddenly as it had come the wind died.

But the party had died, too.

The men stood upright against the dark cold sky. They had their pale hands to their eyes, some of them coughed. Spender and the captain sat down.

"Come on, gents, come on!" Biggs bounded from the ship, in a fresh uniform, not looking at Spender even once. "Come on, you guys!" His voice was like someone in an empty auditorium. It was alone. It sounded like bad oratory.

Nobody did anything but stand there.

"Come on, Whitie, your harmonica!"

The wind passed on away along the length of the canal, stirring the cool deep clear waters like so much distilled wine lying in the stone channel.

"Oh," said Whitie, and blew a harmonica chord. It sounded funny and alone and wrong. Whitie knocked the moisture from the harmonica and put it in his pocket.

The party was over.

"Come on," insisted Biggs. "What kind of a party is this?" Somebody hugged the accordion. It gave a sound like a dying animal. That was all.

Biggs put his hands down. "We're tired," said Whitie.

"Well, me and my bottle will go off and have our own party, by gosh!" Biggs held a bottle to his chest. He walked to the ship and squatted against it, taking a drink from the flask. Jeff Spender watched him. Spender did not move for a long time. Then his fingers crawled up along his trembling leg to his holstered pistol very quietly and stroked and tapped the leather sheath for a moment.

"All of those who want to can come into the city with me. Come along," said the captain. "We'll need a guard posted here at the rocket, of course, and we'll go armed, in case anything untoward happens." The men counted off. Fourteen of them wanted to go along, including Biggs, who laughed when he included himself and waved his bottle. Six others stayed behind.

The party moved out into the night, through the moonlight, saying not a word, Captain Wilder and Jeff Spender in the lead, Biggs bringing up the rear, stumbling and swearing.

"Here we go!" Biggs shouted.

They stood on the outer rim of the dreaming dead city in the light of the racing twin moons. Their shadows, under them, were double shadows. They did not breathe, or it seemed they did not, perhaps, for a long time. They were waiting for something to stir in the dead city, some gray form to rise, some ancient, ancestral shape to come galloping across the vacant sea bottom on an ancient, armored steed of impossible lineage, of unbelievable derivation.

Spender filled the streets with his eyes and his mind. People moved like blue vapor lights on the cobbled avenues, and there were faint murmurs of sound, and odd animals scurrying across the gray-red sands. Each window was given a person who leaned from it and waved slowly, as if under a timeless water, at some moving form in the fathoms of space below the moonsilvered towers. Music was played on some inner ear, and Spender imagined the shape of such instruments to evoke such music. The land was haunted.

"Hey!" shouted Biggs, standing tall, his hands around his open mouth. He pointed his face at the city.

"Hey, you people in there, you!"

"Biggs!" said the captain.

Biggs quieted.

They walked forward on a tiled avenue. They were all whispering now, for it was like entering a vast open library or a mausoleum in which the wind lived and over which the stars shone. The captain talked. He wondered where the people had gone, and what they had been, and who their kings were and how they died? And he wondered, quietly aloud, how they had built this city to last the ages through, and had they ever come to Earth? Were they ancestors of

Earth men, ten thousand years removed? And had they loved and hated similar loves and similar hates, and done similar silly things when silly things were done?

Nobody moved. The moons held and froze them, the wind beat slowly around them, the sand shifted in little tremors over their feet.

"Lord Byron," said Jeff Spender.

"Lord who?" The captain turned and regarded the man.

"Lord Byron, a Nineteenth Century poet. He wrote a poem a long time ago that fits this city and how

.

the Martians may feel, if there's anything left of them to feel. It might have been written by the last Martian poet."

The men stood motionless, their shadows under them. The captain said, "How does it go, Spender?"

"What, sir?"

"The poem, how does it go?"

Spender shifted, put out his hands to remember, squinted silently a moment; then, remembering, his slow quiet voice repeated the words and the men listened to everything he said:

So we'll no more a-roving

So late into the night

Though the heart be still as loving

And the moon be still as bright

The city was gray and high and motionless. The men's faces were turned in the light.

For the sword outwears its sheath

And the soul wears out the breast

And the heart must pause to breathe

And love itself must rest.

Though the night was made for loving

And the day returns too soon

Yet we'll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon.

Without a word, the Earth men stood in the center of the city. It was a clear night. There was riot a sound, except the wind. At their feet lay a tile court, worked into the shape of ancient animals and peoples. They stood looking down upon it.

Biggs made a noise in his throat. His eyes were dull. He groped out thick senseless fingers, shuffled

,

forward upon the tiles, there to hesitate. His hands went up to his neck, he choked several times, shut his eyes, bent, and a thick rush of fluid filled his mouth, came out, fell to and lay upon the tiles, covering the patterns. Biggs repeated this twice and a sharp stench filled the quiet air. Nobody moved to help Biggs. He went on being sick.

Spender stared for a moment, then turned and walked off into the avenues of the city, lost to their sight, alone in the moonlight. Never once did he pause to look back at the gathered men there. They turned in at four in the morning. They lay down upon the blankets with pillows under their heads and shut their eyes and breathed the quiet air. Captain Wilder sat feeding the fire little sticks. His hands hung down between his muscular legs. He watched the fire steadily.

McClure opened his eyes for a moment. "Are you sleeping, sir?"

"Never you mind." The captain smiled faintly. "I'm waiting for Spender."

"Isn't he back, sir?"

Captain Wilder shook his head.

McClure thought it over a moment. "You know, sir, I don't think he'll ever come back. I don't know how I know it, but that's the way I feel about him, sir, he'll never come back." McClure rolled over into sleep. The fire crackled and died out.

Spender did not return in the following week. The captain sent out a party for him, but they came back saying they didn't know where he could have gone. He would be back when he got good and ready. He was a sorehead, they said. To the devil with him.

The captain said nothing, but wrote it down in the log....

It was a morning that might have been a Monday or a Tuesday or any day on Mars. Biggs was sitting at the edge of the canal, now and again lifting his bare feet up and peering at them while he spread the toes with his fingers. Then he hung the feet back down into the cool water and sat there. A man came walking along the rim of the canal. The man threw a shadow down upon Biggs and Biggs looked up. "Well, I'll be blistered!" said Biggs.

"I'm the last Martian," said the man, taking out a gun.

"What did you say?" asked Biggs.

"I'm going to kill you."

"Cut it. What kind of joke is that, Spender?"

"Stand up and take it in the stomach."

"For Christ's sake, put that gun away."

Spender pulled the trigger only once. Biggs sat on the edge of the canal for a moment before he leaned forward and fell into the water. The body drifted with slow unconcern under the slow tides of the canal. It went away and down, making a hollow bubbling sound that ceased after a moment. Spender shoved his gun into its holster and walked away quietly. The sun was shining down upon Mars. He felt it burn his hands and slide over the sides of his tight face. He did not run, he walked as if nothing was new except the daylight. It was good to take it easy. He walked down to the rocket and some of the men were having a freshly cooked breakfast under a shelter built by Cookie.

"Here comes the Lonely One," somebody said.

"Hello, Spender! Long time no see."

The four men at the table regarded the silent man who stood looking back at them.

"You and them shoddy ruins," said Cookie, stirring a black substance in a crock. "You're like a dog in a boneyard."

"Maybe." Spender sat down and said, "I've been finding out things. What would you say if I said I'd found a Martian prowling around?"

The four men laid down their forks.

"Did you? Where?"

"I'm not saying I did, I just said 'supposing.' "

The four men relaxed. Cookie went on stirring the stuff in the crock. "Well, supposing," said Cheroke, at the table, waiting.

"How would you feel if you were a Martian and people came to your land and started tearing it up?" asked Spender.

"I know exactly how I'd feel," said Cheroke. "I've got some Cherokee blood in me. My grandfather told me a lot of things about the Oklahoma Territory. If there's a Martian around, I'm all for him."

"What about you other men?" asked Spender, carefully.

Nobody said anything, but the silence they maintained was talk enough. Catch as catch can, finder's keepers, if the other fellow turns his cheek slap it hard. Et cetera.

"Well," said Spender. "I've found a Martian."

"Where?" The men squinted at him.

"Up in the ruins. I didn't think I'd find him. I didn't intend to find him. I don't know what he was doing there. I've been living in a little valley town for about a week, learning how to read the ancient books and looking at their old art forms. And one day I saw this Martian. He stood there for a moment and then he was gone. He didn't come back for another day. And I sat around, learning how to read the old writing and the Martian came back, each time a little nearer, until, on the day I learned how to read the old writing—it's an amazingly simple language to learn, and there are tile picture-graphs to help you, and old song-spools you can listen to.”

"On that day when I learned the language, the Martian appeared before me. He said to me, 'Give me your boots,' and I gave him my boots and he said, 'Give me your shirt and all the rest of your clothes,'

and I gave him all of that, and then he looked at me and he said, 'Give me your gun,' and I gave him my gun. Then he said, 'Now come along, and watch what happens.' And the Martian walked down into camp and he's here now."

The men looked around and then looked at each other. "I don't see any Martian," said Cheroke.

"I'm sorry."

Spender took out his gun. The first bullet got the man on the left, the second and third bullets got the men on the right and the center of the table. Cookie turned in horror from the fire to receive the fourth bullet. He fell back into the fire and lay there while his clothes caught the flames. It was like stamping your foot lightly, for all the sound it made.

The rocket lay in the sun. Three men sat at breakfast, their hands on the table, not moving, their food getting cold in front of them. Cheroke, untouched, sat alone, staring in numb disbelief at Spender.

"You can come with me," said Spender to Cheroke. Cheroke said nothing. His lips moved but nothing came out. His eyes widened into a kind of dull blindness. "You can be with me on this." Spender waited.

Finally Cheroke was able to speak. "You killed them," he said, daring to look at the men around him.

"They deserved it."

"You killed them. Why? You're crazy."

"Maybe I am. But you can come with me."

"Come with you, for what?" cried Cheroke, the color out of his face, his eyes watering. "Go on, get out."

"You won't come with me?"

"No, no, you idiot!"

Spender's face hardened. "And of all of them, I thought you would understand."

"Go on, get out." Cheroke reached for his gun.

Spender pressed the trigger of his own gun once more. Cheroke stopped moving. Now Spender swayed. He put his hand to his sweating face. He glanced at the rocket and suddenly began to shake all over. He almost fell down, the physical reaction was so overwhelming. His face held an expression of one awakening from hypnosis, from a dream. He sat down for a moment and told the shaking to go away.

"Stop it, stop it," he commanded his body. Every fibre of him was quivering and shaking. "Stop it!" He crushed his body with his mind until all the shaking was squeezed out of it. His hands lay calmly now upon his silent knees.

He arose and strapped a portable storage locker on his back with quiet efficiency. His hand began to tremble again, just for a breath of an instant, but he said, "No!" very firmly and the trembling passed. Then, walking stiffly, he moved out between the hot red hills of the land, alone.

III

As the day advanced, it grew nice and warm. The sun burned further along the sky. An hour later, the captain climbed down out of the ship to get some ham and eggs. He was just saying hello to the four men sitting there when he stopped and noticed a faint smell of powder fumes on the air. He saw the cook lying on the ground, with the camp fire under him. The four men at the table sat before food that was cold.

From the ship, a moment later, Whitie and two other men climbed down. The captain stood in their way, fascinated by the silent men before him and the way they sat so quietly at their breakfast. The others moved past him and stopped.

The captain's face was pale. "Get the men, all of them."

"Yes, sir." Whitie hurried off down the canal rim.

The captain walked up and touched Cheroke. Cheroke twisted quietly and fell from his chair. Sunlight burned in his bristled short hair and on his high cheekbones.

The men were called in. They looked at each other's faces and counted each other, one, two, three, four, and said each other's names.

"Who's missing?"

"Just a moment."

"It's still Spender, sir."

"Spender!"

The captain saw the hills rising in the daylight. The sun showed the captain's teeth in a grimace as he stared at the hills. "Blast him," he said, in tired tones. "Why didn't he come and talk to me?"

"He should've come and talked to me," cried Whitie, his eyes blazing. "I'd 've shot his bloody brains out, that's what I'd 've done, and I'll do it now, by God! I'll spill them all over the place!" Captain Wilder nodded at two of the men. "Get shovels. There'll be a service, and then we'll go up in the hills and find Spender."

"We'll beat his brains out," said Whitie.

It was hot digging the graves. A warm wind came from over the vacant sea and blew the dust up into their faces as the captain turned the Bible pages and said the few necessary words. They were all sweating around the opened earth. When the captain closed the book, somebody began shoveling slow streams of sand down upon the wrapped figures.

They walked back to the rocket, clicked the mechanisms of their stifles, put thick packets of grenades on their backs and checked the free play of pistols in their holsters. They were each assigned to a certain part of the hills. The captain directed them without raising his voice or moving his hands from his belt at the waist. It was like a little sermon on fishing.

"Let's go," he said. . . .

Spender saw the thin dust rising in several places in the valley and he knew the pursuit was organized and ready. He put down the thin aluminum book that he had been reading as he perched easily on a flat boulder. The pages were tissue-thin pure aluminum, stamped in black and gold. It was a book of philosophy at least 10,000 years old he had found in one of the buildings of a Martian valley town. He was reluctant to lay it aside.

For a long time he had thought, What's the use? I'll sit here reading until they come along and shoot me.

The first reaction to his killing the five men at breakfast had caused a period of stunned blankness, then sickness, and now, a strange peace. But the peace was passing too, for he saw the dust going up from the trails of the hunting men and experienced the return of resentment. He took a drink of cool water from the hip canteen. Then he stood up, stretched, yawned, and listened to the peaceful wonder of the valley around him. How very fine if he and a few others that he knew on Earth could be here, live out their lives here, without a sound or a worry. He carried the book with him in one hand, the pistol ready in the other hand. There was a little swift running stream filled with white pebbles and rocks where he undressed and waded in for a brief washing. He took all the time he wanted before dressing and picking up the gun again. The firing began about three in the afternoon. By then, Spender was high in the hills. They passed through three small Martian towns. Really, it looked to all of them, as if the Martians were a tribal or family lot. One or another of the families from one town would find a green spot in the hills and a villa would be built with a pool and a library and some sort of stage and a good many balustrades and tiled terraces. Spender spent half an hour in one, bathing once more in a pool filled by the seasonal rains, waiting for the men to catch up with him. The shots rang out just as he was leaving the little family town, and some tile chipped up about twenty feet behind him. He broke into a trot, got behind a series of little hills, turned, and, with the first shot, dropped one of the men dead in his tracks. They would form a net, a circle, Spender knew that. They would go around and close in and they would get him. It was a strange thing that the grenades were not used. Captain Wilder could easily order the grenades tossed.

But I'm much too nice to be blown to bits, thought Spender, that's what the captain thinks. He wants me with only one hole in me. Now isn't that strange? The captain wants my death to be clean. Nothing messy. Because why? Because he understands me and, because he understands, therefore is willing to risk his good men to give me a clean shot in the head?

Seven, eight, nine shots broke out in a rattle. The rocks around him flew up at the explosions. Spender fired steadily, sometimes while looking at the aluminum book he carried in his hand. The captain ran in the hot sunlight, with a rifle in his hand. Spender followed him in the sights of his pistol, but did not fire. Instead he shifted over and blew the top off a rock where Whitie lay, and heard an angry shout. Suddenly the captain stood up and he had a white handkerchief in his hands. He said something to the men and came walking up the mountain after putting aside his rifle. Spender lay there, then arose to his feet, his pistol ready.

The captain came up and sat down on a warm boulder, not looking at Spender for a moment. When he reached into his pocket, Spender waved his pistol a little.

The captain said, "Cigarette?"

"Thanks." Spender took one.

"Light?"

"Got my own."

They took one or two puffs and let it out.

"Warm," said the captain.

"It is."

"Are you comfortable up here?"

"Enough."

"How long do you think you can hold out?"

"About twelve men's worth."

"Why didn't you kill all of us this morning when you had the chance. You could have, you know."

"I know. I got sick. When you want to do a thing badly enough you lie to yourself. You say the other is all wrong. Well, soon after I started killing people, I realized they were just fools and I shouldn't be killing them. But it was too late. I couldn't go on with it then, so I came up here so I could lie to myself some more and get angry, to build it all up."

"Is it built up?"

"Not very high. Enough."

The captain puffed on a cigarette. "Why did you do it?"

Spender quietly laid his pistol at his feet. "Because I've seen that what these Martians had was just as good as anything we'll ever hope to have. They stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago. I've walked in their cities and I know these people and I'd be glad to call them my ancestors."

"They have a beautiful city there." The captain nodded at one of several places.

"It's not that alone. Yes, they have a good city here. They knew how to blend art into their living. It's always been a thing apart for Americans. Art was something you kept in the crazy son's room upstairs. Art was something you took in Sunday doses, mixed with some religion, maybe. Well, these Martians have art and religion and everything." "You think they knew what it was all about, do you?"

"For my money."

"And for that reason, you started shooting people." "When I was a kid my folks took me on a visit to Mexico City. I'll always remember the way my father acted—loud and big. And my mother didn't like the people because they were dark and didn't wash right. And my sister wouldn't talk to some of them. I was the only one really liked it. And I can see my mother and my father coming to Mars and doing the same.

"Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense. The thought of that! Oh God, the thought of that! And then—the war. You heard the Congressional speeches before we left. If things work out they hope to establish three atomic research and atom bomb depots on Mars. And that means Mars is doomed, all of this wonderful stuff gone. How would you feel if a Martian came and vomited stale liquor all over the White House floor?" Quietly the captain sat blinking in the smoke.

"And then the other power interests coming hi," said Spender. "The mineral men and the travel men. Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez."

"You haven't been acting ethically yourself, today," observed the captain.

"What could I do? Argue with you? It's simply me against the whole crooked grinding greedy setup on earth. They'll be flopping their filthy atom bombs up here, fighting for bases to have wars. Isn't it enough they're ruining one planet, without ruining another; do they have to foul someone else's manger?

The simple-minded wind-bags. When I got up here, I felt I was not only free of their so called culture, I felt I was free of their ethics and their customs. I'm out of their frame of reference, I thought. All I have to do is kill you all off, and live my own life."

"But it didn't work out," said Captain Wilder.

"No, after the fifth killing at breakfast, I discovered I wasn't all new, all Martian, after all. I couldn't throw away everything I had learned on earth so easily. But now I'm all right. I'll kill all of you off. That'll delay the next trip in a rocket for a good five years. There's no other rocket in existence today, save this one. The people on Earth will wait a year, two years, and then when they hear nothing from us, they'll be very afraid to build a new rocket. They'll take twice as long, and make a hundred extra experimental models to insure themselves against another failure."

"You're correct."

"A good report from you, on the other hand, when you returned, would hasten the whole invasion of Mars. If I'm lucky, I'll live to be sixty years old. Every expedition that lands on Mars will be met by me. There won't be more than one ship at a time coming up, one every year or so, and never more than twenty men. After I've made friends with them and explained that our rocket blew up one day—I intend to blow it up after I finish my job, today—I'll kill them off, every one of them. Mars will be untouched for the next half century. After awhile, perhaps the people of Earth will give up trying. Remember how they grew leery of the idea of building Zeppelins that were always going down in flames?"

"You've got it all planned," said the captain.

"I have."

"And yet you're outnumbered and in about an hour we'll have you surrounded and you'll be dead."

"I've found some underground passages and a place to live that you'll never find. I'll withdraw there and live for a few weeks. Until you're off guard. Then I'll come out and pick you off, one by one."

"Will you have something to drink?" The captain threw down his cigarette.

"I don't mind."

The captain poured two drinks from a hip flask.

"If you don't mind, sir, I'll take your cup, you take mine. That way we won't have anyone falling down poisoned." The captain looked him in the face. "You don't think I'd pull a thing like that." Spender said, "No. No, I guess you wouldn't. Here." They drank the whisky slowly.

"Tell me about your civilization here," suggested the captain, casually examining his man.

"They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him, and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud, and they wouldn't move very well. So, like fools, we tried knocking down religion.

"We succeeded pretty well in many instances. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people." Wilder was staring steadily at Spender whose eyes had taken on a dreamy expression.

"And these Martians are a found people?" asked the captain.

"Yes, They knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, one enriching the other."

"That sounds ideal."

"It was. And do you know how the Martians did this? I'd like to show you."

"The men are waiting down the hill for me."

"We'll be gone hall an hour. Tell them that, sir."

The captain hesitated, then rose and called an order down the hill.

Spender took him down into a little mountain village built all of cool perfect marble. There were great friezes of beautiful animals, white-limbed cat things, and yellow-limbed sun symbols, and statues of bull-like creatures and statues of men and women and huge, fine-featured dogs.

"There's your answer, Captain."

"I don't see."

"The Martians discovered the secret of life in the animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life, it enjoys and relishes life. You see—the statuary, the animal symbols, again and again."

"It looks pagan."

"On the contrary, those are God symbols, symbols of life. Man had become too much man, and not enough animal on Mars, too, one day. And man realized that, in order to survive, he would have to forego asking that one question any longer. Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good life as possible. The Martians realized that they asked the question

"Why live at all?" at the height of some period of war and despair, when there was no answer. But once the civilization calmed, quieted, and became economically sound, and wars ceased, the question became senseless in a new way: Life was good now, and needed no arguments."

"It sounds as if the Martians were quite naive."

"Only when it paid to be naive. They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science, because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It is all simply a matter of degree. The Earth man thinks:

"In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore color is not really an actual part of the thing I happen to see."

"A Martian, far cleverer, would say: "This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good."

IV

Curiously the captain looked around at the little quiet cool town, sitting in the afternoon sun.

"I'd like to live here," he said.

"You may if you want."

"You ask me that?"

"Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands? There's a little patio down here with a reel of Martian music in it at least fifty thousand years old. It still plays. Music you'll never hear in your life. You could hear it. There are books. I've gotten on well in reading them, already. You could sit and read."

"It all sounds quite wonderful, Spender."

"But you won't stay?"

"No. Thanks, awfully."

"And you certainly won't let me stay, without trouble. I'll have to kill you all."

"You're optimistic."

"I have something to fight for and live for, that makes me a better warrior. I've got a religion now. It's learning how to smell and breathe all over. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun get into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization have to offer?" The captain shifted his feet. He shook his head. "I'm sorry all this is happening. I'm sorry about it all."

"I am too. I guess I'd better take you back now so you can start the attack."

"I guess so."

"I won't kill you, captain. When it's all over, you'll still be alive."

"What?"

"Yes. I decided that when I began all this. You would be the one I would leave alive. I never intended touching you. I don't intend to now."

"Well," said the captain.

"I won't kill you, I'll save you out from the rest," said Jeff Spender. "When they're all dead, maybe you'll change your mind."

"No," the captain said, "I won't change. There's too much Earth blood in me. I'll have to kill you."

"Even when you have a chance to stay here?"

"It's funny, but yes, even with that. I don't know why. I've never asked myself. Well, here we are." They had reached the place where they had met now. "Will you come on quietly with me, Spender? That is my last offer."

"Thanks, no." Spender put out his hand. "And one last thing? If you win, do me a favor? See what can be done to restrict tearing this planet apart, at least for fifty years, until the archaeologists have had a decent time of it, will you?" "Right."

"And one more thing. If it'll help you any, just think of me as a very crazy fellow who went berserk one summer day and never was right again. It'll be a little easier on you, perhaps. Do that."

"I'll think it over. So long, Spender. Good luck."

"You're an odd one," said Spender as the captain walked back down the trail in the warm blowing wind.

The captain returned like something lost to his dusty men. He kept squinting at the sun and breathing hard.

"Is there a drink?" he wondered. He felt the bottle put cool into his hand. "Thanks." He drank. He wiped his mouth. "All right," he said. "Take it easy, we have all afternoon. I don't want any more lost. You'll have to kill him. He won't come down. Make it a clean shot if you can. Don't mess him. Get it over with." He took another cool drink.

"I'll kick his bloody brains out," said Whitie.

"No, through the chest," said the captain. He could see Spender's strong, clearly determined face.

"His bloody brains," said Whitie.

The captain handed him the bottle jerkingly. "You heard what I said, through the chest." Whitie talked to himself.

"Now," said the captain.

They spread again, walking and then running, and then walking on the hot hillside places where there would be sudden cool grottoes that smelled of moss, and sudden open blasting places that smelled of sun on stone.

I hate being clever, thought the captain, when you don't really feel clever and don't want to be clever. To sneak around and make plans and feel big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I'm doing right when I'm not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway? The majority? Is that the answer. The majority is always holy, isn't it? It is always right, is it not? Always, always; just never wrong for one little insignificant, tiny moment, is it? Never ever wrong in ten million years? He thought: What is this majority and who are in it? And what do they think and how did they get that way and will they ever change and how the devil did I get caught in this rotten majority? I don't feel comfortable. Is it claustrophobia, fear of crowds, or common sense? Can one man be right, while all the world thinks they are right. Let's not think about it. Let's crawl around and act exciting and glamorous and run around and pull the trigger. There, and there!

The men ran and ducked and ran and squatted in shadow and showed their teeth and tightened their eyes and lifted their guns and tore holes in the summer air, holes of sound and heat. Spender remained where he was, firing only on occasion. "Bloody brains all over!" Whitie kept yelling as he ran up the hill.

The captain aimed his gun at Whitie. He stopped and put it down and stared at it in horror. "What were you doing?" he asked of his limp hand and the gun. His eyes widened and shut and he gasped and could not breathe.

He had almost shot Whitie in the back.

"God help you!" breathed the captain. "What are you doing? What's happening!" He opened his eyes to see Whitie still running, then falling to lie safe under an outcrop.

"What goes on?" The captain stared up. From where he lay he could see it all. Spender was being gathered in by a loose running net of men. At the top of the hill, behind two rocks, Spender lay, grinning with exhaustion, great islands of sweat under each arm. The captain saw the rocks. There was an interval of about four inches giving free access through to Spender's chest.

"Hey, you!" Whitie cried. "A bullet in your head, I will!" The captain waited. Go on, Spender, he thought. Get out, like you said you would. You've only got a few more minutes to escape. Get out and come back later. Go on, get out. You said you would. Go down in the tunnels you said you found and lie there and live for months and years, reading your fine books and bathing in your temple pools. Go on, now, man, before it's too late.

Spender did not move from his position on the hill. "What's wrong with him?" the captain asked himself. The captain picked up his gun. He watched the running, hiding men. He looked at the towers of the little clean Martian village, like sharply carved chess pieces lying in the afternoon. He saw the rocks and the interval between where Spender's chest showed through.

Whitie was running up, screaming in fury.

"No, Whitie," said the captain. "I can't let you do it. Nor the others. No, none of you. Only me." He raised the gun and sighted it.

Will I be clean after I do this? he thought. Is it right that it's me who does it? Yes, it is. I know what I'm doing for what reason and it's right, because I think I'm the right person. I hope and pray I can live up to this. He nodded his head in a jerking move at Spender.

"Go on," he called in a loud whisper which nobody heard. "I'll give you thirty seconds more to get away, to escape. Thirty seconds, boy!"

The watch ticked on his wrist. The captain watched it tick. The men were running. Spender did not move. The watch ticked for a long time, very loudly in his ears. "Go on, Spender, go on, get away!" The thirty seconds were up.

The gun was sighted. The captain drew a deep breath. "Spender," he said, exhaling. He pulled the trigger.

All that happened was that a faint powdering of rock went up in the sunlight. The echoes of the report faded.

The captain stood up and called to his men. "He's dead."

The other men did not believe him. Their angles had prevented their seeing that particular fissure in the rocks. They saw their captain run up the hill, alone, and thought him either very brave or insane. The men came after him a minute later.

They gathered around the body and somebody said, "In the chest?" The captain looked down. "In the chest," he said. He saw how the rocks had changed color under Spender. "I wonder why he waited, I wonder why he didn't escape like he planned. I wonder why he stayed on and got himself killed?"

"Who knows," someone said.

Spender lay there, with his hands clasped, one around the gun, another around an aluminum book that shone in the sun.

Was it because of me? thought the captain. Was it because I refused to give in, myself? Did Spender hate the idea of killing me? Am I any different than these others here? Is that what did it? Did he figure he could trust me? What other answer is there?

None. He squatted beside the silent body.

I've got to live up to this, he thought. I can't let him down, now. If he figured there was something in me that was like himself, and couldn't kill me because of it, then what a job I have ahead of me! That's it, all right. I'm Spender all over again, but I think before I shoot. I don't shoot at all; I don't kill. I do things with people. And he couldn't kill me because I was himself under a slightly different condition. The captain felt the sunlight on the back of his neck. He heard himself saying, "If only he had come to me and talked it over before he shot anybody, we could have worked out something, somehow."

"Worked out what" said Whitie. "What could we have worked out with his likes?" There was a singing of heat in the land, off the rocks and off the blue sky. "I guess you're right," said the captain. "We could never have got together. Spender and myself, maybe. But Spender and you and the others, no, never. He's better off now. Let me have a drink of water from that canteen." It was the captain who suggested the empty sarcophagus for Spender. They put him into it with waxes and wine, his hands folded over his chest. The last they saw of him was his peaceful face. They stood for a moment in the ancient vault. "I think it would be a good idea for you to think of Spender from time to time," said the captain.

They turned and walked from the hall and shut the marble door with the name Spender marked on it and the dates 1950-1978 under that.

The next afternoon, Whitie did some target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers. The captain caught Whitie and knocked his teeth out.

Remember the three monkeys, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil, and See No Evil? There should have been a fourth one, Do No Evil, but he became civilized…

No Connection

Isaac Asimov

Raph was a typical American of his times. Remarkably ugly, too, by American standards of our times. The bony structure of his jaws was tremendous and the musculature suited it. His nose was arched and wide and his black eyes were small and forced wide apart by the span of said nose. His neck was thick, his body broad, his fingers spatulate, with strongly curved nails. If he had stood erect, on thick legs with large, well-padded feet, he would have topped two and a half yards. Standing or sitting, his mass neared a quarter of a ton.

Yet his forehead rose in an unrestricted arc and his cranial capacity did not stint. His enormous hand dealt delicately with a pen, and his mind droned comfortably on as he bent over his desk. In fact, his wife and most of his fellow-Americans found him a fine-looking fellow. Which shows the alchemy of a long displacement along the time-axis.

Raph, Junior, was a smaller edition of our typical American. He was adolescent and had not yet lost the hairy covering of childhood. It spread in a dark, close-curled mat across his chest and back, but it was already thinning and perhaps within the year he would first don the adult shirt that would cover the proudly-naked skin of manhood.