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Contents

LOST IN TRANSLATION

By Laurence Mark Janifer

 

In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!

 

The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en--and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.

An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.

Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.

He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.

In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.

True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.

He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.

But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.

As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.

The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.

He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid--that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.

The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. "You are Korvin," he said.

It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. "You are of the Tr'en," he replied. The green being nodded.

"I am Didyak of the Tr'en," he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly--but no more than slightly--and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.

"What do you want with me?" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech--apparently there was only one language on the planet--was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.

"I want nothing with you," Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. "You have other questions?"

Korvin sighed. "What are you doing here, then?" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.

"I am leaning against the door," Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.

"Why did you come to me?" he said at last.

Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. "I have been ordered to come to you," Didyak said, "by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you."

It wasn't quite "talk"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: "gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means." Korvin filed it away for future reference. "Why did the Ruler not come to me?" Korvin asked.

"The Ruler is the Ruler," Didyak said, slightly discomfited. "You are to go to him. Such is his command."

Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. "I obey the command of the Ruler," he said--another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.

But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en--and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.

That, after all, was his job.

* * * * *

The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings--a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair--were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.

The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.

Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.

The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex--if any--and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.

Korvin was answering the last question. "Some men are larger than I am," he said, "and some are smaller."

"Within what limits?"

Korvin shrugged. "Some are over eight feet tall," he said, "and others under four feet." He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. "Then there is a group of humans," he went on, "who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that--approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children," he volunteered helpfully.

"Approximately?" the Ruler growled. "We ask for precision here," he said. "We are scientific men. We are exact."

Korvin nodded hurriedly. "Our race is more ... more approximate," he said apologetically.

"Slipshod," the Ruler muttered.

"Undoubtedly," Korvin agreed politely. "I'll try to do the best I can for you."

"You will answer my questions," the Ruler said, "with exactitude." He paused, frowning slightly. "You landed your ship on this planet," he went on. "Why?"

"My job required it," Korvin said.

"A clumsy lie," the Ruler said. "The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt."

"True," Korvin said.

"And it is your job to crash your ship?" the Ruler said. "Wasteful."

Korvin shrugged again. "What I say is true," he announced. "Do you have tests for such matters?"

"We do," the Ruler told him. "We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you."

Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector--and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnopædic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.

Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.

He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job--not to mention the strongest personal inclinations--demanded most strongly that he stay alive.

He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.

"We shall test the machine," the Ruler said. "In what room are you?"

"In the Room of the Ruler," Korvin said equably.

"Are you standing or sitting?"

"I am sitting," Korvin said.

"Are you a chulad?" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.

"I am not," he said.

* * * * *

The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. "You will tell an untruth now," he said. "Are you standing or sitting?"

"I am standing," Korvin said.

The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. "The machine," he announced, "has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue."

Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.

He hoped they were right.

The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive. "Why did you land your ship on this planet?" the Ruler said.

"My job required it," Korvin said.

The Ruler nodded. "Your job is to crash your ship," he said. "It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?"

Korvin looked sober. "Yes," he said.

The Ruler blinked. "Very well," he said. "Was your job ended when the ship crashed?" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended, nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant "disposed of for all time."

"No," he said.

"What else does your job entail?" the Ruler said.

Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. "Staying alive."

The Ruler roared. "Do not waste time with the obvious!" he shouted. "Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly."

"I have told the truth," Korvin said.

"But it is not--not the truth we want," the Ruler said.

Korvin shrugged. "I replied to your question," he said. "I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?"

"I--" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. "You try to confuse the Ruler," he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. "But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic"--the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying--"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called."

Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.

The Ruler looked down at Korvin. "You will find that you cannot trick us," he said. "You will find that such fiddling"--chulad-like Korvin translated--"attempts will get you nowhere."

Korvin devoutly hoped so.

* * * * *

The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. "They can be treated mathematically," one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. "Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means."

"Good," Korvin said.

The experts blinked. "Good?" he said.

"Naturally," Korvin said in a friendly tone.

The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. "Your plan is a failure," the expert said, "and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with."

"True," Korvin said.

There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. "What is your plan?" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.

"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically," Korvin said.

The silence this time was even longer.

"The machine says that you tell the truth," the experts said at last, in a awed tone. "Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us."

Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.

But it happened to be wrong.

* * * * *

"The name of your planet is Earth?" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.

"Sometimes," Korvin said.

"It has other names?" the Ruler said.

"It has no name," Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.

"Yet you call it Earth?" the Ruler said.

"I do," Korvin said, "for convenience."

"Do you know its location?" the Ruler said.

"Not with exactitude," Korvin said.

There was a stir. "But you can find it again," the Ruler said.

"I can," Korvin said.

"And you will tell us about it?" the Ruler went on.

"I will," Korvin said, "so far as I am able."

"We will wish to know about weapons," the Ruler said, "and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?"

Korvin nearly smiled. "Both," he said.

A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. "We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?"

Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. "It is," he said.

"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme," the Ruler said.

"It is," Korvin said.

"Who is it that governs?" the Ruler said.

They key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.

"The answer to that question," Korvin said, "cannot be given to you."

"Any question of fact has an answer," the Ruler snapped. "A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?"

"Certainly," Korvin said. "It is completely obvious and true."

"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said," the Ruler went on.

"True," Korvin said.

"Then there is a governor for this system," the Ruler said.

"True," Korvin said again.

The ruler sighed gently. "Explain this governor to us," he said.

Korvin shrugged. "The explanation cannot be given to you."

The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. "Is the deficiency in you?" he said. "Are you in some way unable to describe this government?"

"It can be described," Korvin said.

"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?" the Ruler went on.

"I will not," Korvin said.

It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.

The plan was taking hold.

The Ruler had finished his conference. "You are attempting again to confuse us," he said.

Korvin shook his head earnestly. "I am attempting," he said, "not to confuse you."

"Then I ask for an answer," the Ruler said.

"I request that I be allowed to ask a question," Korvin said.

The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. "Ask it," he said. "We shall answer it if we see fit to do so."

Korvin tried to look grateful. "Well, then," he said, "what is your government?"

The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. "Our government is the only logical form of government," he said in a high, sweet tenor. "The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment."

"You have heard our government defined," the Ruler said. "Now, you will define yours for us."

Korvin shook his head. "If you insist," he said, "I'll try it. But you won't understand it."

The Ruler frowned. "We shall understand," he said. "Begin. Who governs you?"

"None," Korvin said.

"But you are governed?"

Korvin nodded. "Yes."

"Then there is a governor," the Ruler insisted.

"True," Korvin said. "But everyone is the governor."

"Then there is no government," the Ruler said. "There is no single decision."

"No," Korvin said equably, "there are many decisions binding on all."

"Who makes them binding?" the Ruler asked. "Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?"

"Many of them are unfavorable," Korvin said. "But we are not forced to accept them."

"Do you act against your own interests?"

Korvin shrugged. "Not knowingly," he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. "I told you you wouldn't understand it," he said.

"It is a defect in your explanation," the Ruler almost snarled.

"My explanation is as exact as it can be," he said.

The Ruler breathed gustily. "Let us try something else," he said. "Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples--"

"Neither have we," Korvin said. "We are all individuals, like yourselves."

"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions--"

"We have no need of one," Korvin said calmly.

"Ah," the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. "And why not?"

"We call our form of government democracy," Korvin said. "It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler."

One of the experts piped up suddenly. "The beings themselves rule each other?" he said. "This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule."

"That is our form of government," Korvin said.

"You are lying," the expert said.

One of the technicians chimed in: "The machine tells us--"

"Then the machine is faulty," the expert said. "It will be corrected."

Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.

It took three days--but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.

Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.

On the third day Korvin escaped.

It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.

Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.

Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.

But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.

The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby--all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.

He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.

Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought--nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course--but try to make a Tr'en see it!

With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own--and that means no translation.

But--damn it--I wish I were home already.

I'm bored absolutely stiff!

THE END

 

 

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Contents

McILVAINE'S STAR

By August Derleth

 

Old Thaddeus McIlvaine discovered a dark star and took it for his own. Thus he inherited a dark destiny--or did he?

 

"Call them what you like," said Tex Harrigan. "Lost people or strayed, crackpots or warped geniuses--I know enough of them to fill an entire department of queer people. I've been a reporter long enough to have run into quite a few of them."

"For example?" I said, recognizing Harrigan's mellowness.

"Take Thaddeus McIlvaine," said Harrigan.

"I never heard of him."

"I suppose not," said Harrigan. "But I knew him. He was an eccentric old fellow who had a modest income--enough to keep up his hobbies, which were three: he played cards and chess at a tavern called Bixby's on North Clark Street; he was an amateur astronomer; and he had the fixed idea that there was life somewhere outside this planet and that it was possible to communicate with other beings--but unlike most others, he tried it constantly with the queer machinery he had rigged up.

"Well, now, this old fellow had a trio of cronies with whom he played on occasion down at Bixby's. He had no one else to confide in. He kept them up with his progress among the stars and his communication with other life in the cosmos beyond our own, and they made a great joke out of it, from all I could gather. I suppose, because he had no one else to talk to, McIlvaine took it without complaint. Well, as I said, I never heard of him until one morning the city editor--it was old Bill Henderson then--called me in and said, 'Harrigan, we just got a lead on a fellow named Thaddeus McIlvaine who claims to have discovered a new star. Amateur astronomer up North Clark. Find him and get a story.' So I set out to track him down...."

* * * * *

It was a great moment for Thaddeus McIlvaine. He sat down among his friends almost portentously, adjusted his spectacles, and peered over them in his usual manner, half way between a querulous oldster and a reproachful schoolmaster.

"I've done it," he said quietly.

"Aye, and what?" asked Alexander testily.

"I discovered a new star."

"Oh," said Leopold flatly. "A cinder in your eye."

"It lies just off Arcturus," McIlvaine went on, "and it would appear to be coming closer."

"Give it my love," said Richardson with a wry smile. "Have you named it yet? Or don't the discoverers of new stars name them any more? McIlvaine's Star--that's a good name for it. Hard a port of Arcturus, with special displays on windy nights."

McIlvaine only smiled. "It's a dark star," he said presently. "It doesn't have light." He spoke almost apologetically, as if somehow he had disappointed his friends. "I'm going to try and communicate with it."

"That's the ticket," said Alexander.

"Cut for deal," said Leopold.

That was how the news about McIlvaine's Star was received by his cronies. Afterward, after McIlvaine had dutifully played several games of euchre, Richardson conceived the idea of telephoning the Globe to announce McIlvaine's discovery.

* * * * *

"The old fellow took himself seriously," Harrigan went on. "And yet he was so damned mousy about it. I mean, you got the impression that he had been trying for so long that now he hardly believed in his star himself any longer. But there it was. He had a long, detailed story of its discovery, which was an accident, as those things usually are. They happen all the time, and his story sounded convincing enough. Just the same, you didn't feel that he really had anything. I took down notes, of course; that was routine. I got a picture of the old man, with never an idea we'd be using it.

"To tell the truth, I carried my notes around with me for a day or so before it occurred to me that it wouldn't do any harm to put a call in to Yerkes Observatory up in Wisconsin. So I did, and they confirmed McIlvaine's Star. The Globe had the story, did it up in fine style.

"It was two weeks before we heard from McIlvaine again...."

* * * * *

That night McIlvaine was more than usually diffident. He was not like a man bearing a message of considerable importance to himself. He slipped into Bixby's, got a glass of beer, and approached the table where his friends sat, almost with trepidation.

"It's a nice evening for May," he said quietly.

Richardson grunted.

Leopold said, "By the way, Mac, whatever became of that star of yours? The one the papers wrote up."

"I think," said McIlvaine cautiously, "I'm quite sure--I have got in touch with them. Only," his brow wrinkled and furrowed, "I can't understand their language."

"Ah," said Richardson with an edge to his voice, "the thing for you to do is to tell them that's your star, and they'll have to speak English from now on, so you can understand them. Why, next thing we know, you'll be getting yourself a rocket or a space-ship and going over to that star to set yourself up as king or something."

"King Thaddeus the First," said Alexander loftily. "All you star-dwellers may kiss the royal foot."

"That would be unsanitary, I think," said McIlvaine, frowning.

Poor McIlvaine! They made him the butt of their jests for over an hour before he took himself off to his quarters, where he sat himself down before his telescope and found his star once more, almost huge enough to blot out Arcturus, but not quite, since it was moving away from that amber star now.

McIlvaine's star was certainly much closer to the Earth than it had been.

He tried once again to contact it with his home-made radio, and once again he received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he could not doubt were speech of some kind or other--a rasping, grating speech, to be sure, utterly unlike the speech of McIlvaine's own kind. It rose and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing--McIlvaine sensed all this and strove mightily to understand.

He sat there for perhaps two hours when he received the distant impression that someone was talking to him in his own language. But there was no longer any sound on the radio. He could not understand what had taken place, but in a few moments he received the clear conviction that the inhabitants of his star had managed to discover the basic elements of his language by the simple process of reading his mind, and were now prepared to talk with him.

What manner of creatures inhabited Earth? they wished to know.

McIlvaine told them. He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put him into words. It was difficult, since he could not rid himself of the conviction that his interlocutors might be utterly alien.

They had no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star. There were plant-people on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and four-armed beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese--but nothing resembling man. "You are evidently alone of your kind in the cosmos," said his interstellar correspondent.

"And what about you?" cried McIlvaine with unaccustomed heat.

Silence was his only answer, but presently he conceived a mental image which was remarkable for its vividness. But the image was of nothing he had ever seen before--of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings. Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could detect no difference among them--all appeared to be the same age.

"We are not, but we rejuvenate regularly," said the creature with whom he corresponded in this strange manner.

Did they have names? McIlvaine wondered.

"I am Guru," said the star's inhabitant. "You are McIlvaine."

And the civilization of their star?

Instantly he saw in his mind's eye vast cities, which rose from beneath a surface which appeared to bear no vegetation recognizable to any human eye, in a terrain which seemed to be desert, of monolithic buildings, which were windowless and had openings only of sufficient size to permit the free passage of its dwarfed dwellers. Within the buildings was evidence of a great and old civilization....

* * * * *

"You see, McIlvaine really believed all this. What an imagination the man had! Of course, the boys at Bixby's gave him a bad time; I don't know how he stood it, but he did. And he always came back. Richardson called the story in; he took a special delight in deviling McIlvaine, and I was sent out to see the old fellow again.

"You couldn't doubt his sincerity. And yet he didn't sound touched."

"But, of course, that part about the insect-like dwellers of the star comes straight out of Wells, doesn't it?" I put in.

"Wells and scores of others," agreed Harrigan. "Wells was probably the first writer to suggest insectivorous inhabitants on Mars; his were considerably larger, though."

"Go on."

"Well, I talked with McIlvaine for quite a while. He told me all about their civilization and about his friend, Guru. You might have thought he was talking about a neighbor of his I had only to step outside to meet.

"Later on, I dropped around at Bixby's and had a talk with the boys there. Richardson let me in on a secret. He had decided to rig up a connection to McIlvaine's machine and do a little talking to the old fellow, making him believe Guru was coming through in English. He meant to give McIlvaine a harder time than ever, and once he had him believing everything he planned to say, they would wait for him at Bixby's and let him make a fool of himself.

"It didn't work out quite that way, however...."

* * * * *

"McIlvaine, can you hear me?"

McIlvaine started with astonishment. His mental impression of Guru became confused; the voice speaking English came clear as a bell, as if from no distance at all.

"Yes," he said hesitantly.

"Well, then, listen to me, listen to Guru. We have now had enough information from you to suit our ends. Within twenty-four hours, we, the inhabitants of Ahli, will begin a war of extermination against Earth...."

"But, why?" cried McIlvaine, astounded.

The image before his mind's eye cleared. The cold, precise features of Guru betrayed anger.

"There is interference," the thought-image informed him. "Leave the machine for a few moments, while we use the disintegrators."

Before he left the machine, McIlvaine had the impression of a greater machine being attached to the means of communication which the inhabitants of his star were using to communicate with him.

* * * * *

"McIlvaine's story was that a few moments later there was a blinding flash just outside his window," continued Harrigan. "There was also a run of instantaneous fire from the window to his machine. When he had collected his wits sufficiently, he ran outside to look. There was nothing there but a kind of grayish dust in a little mound--as if, as he put it, 'somebody had cleaned out a vacuum bag'. He went back in and examined the space from the window to the machine; there were two thin lines of dust there, hardly perceptible, just as if something had been attached to the machine and led outside.

"Now the obvious supposition is naturally that it was Richardson out there, and that the lines of dust from the window to the machine represented the wires he had attached to his microphone while McIlvaine was at Bixby's entertaining his other two cronies, but this is fact, not fiction, and the point of the episode is that Richardson disappeared from that night on."

"You investigated, of course?" I asked.

Harrigan nodded. "Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might have done better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, and Richardson was nobody with any connections. His nearest relatives weren't anxious about anything but what they might inherit; to tell the truth, his cronies at Bixby's were the only people who worried about him. McIlvaine as much as the rest of them.

"Oh, they gave the old man a hard time, all right. They went through his house with a fine-toothed comb. They dug up his yard, his cellar, and generally put him through it, figuring he was a natural to hang a murder rap on. But there was just nothing to be found, and they couldn't manufacture evidence when there was nothing to show that McIlvaine ever knew that Richardson planned to have a little fun with him.

"And no one had seen Richardson there. There was nothing but McIlvaine's word that he had heard what he said he heard. He needn't have volunteered that, but he did. After the police had finished with him, they wrote him off as a harmless nut. But the question of what happened to Richardson wasn't solved from that day to this."

"People have been known to walk out of their lives," I said. "And never come back."

"Oh, sometimes they do. Richardson didn't. Besides, if he walked out of his life here, he did so without more than the clothing he had on. So much was missing from his effects, nothing more."

"And McIlvaine?"

Harrigan smiled thinly. "He carried on. You couldn't expect him to do anything less. After all, he had worked most of his life trying to communicate with the worlds outside, and he had no intention of resigning his contact, no matter how much Richardson's disappearance upset him. For a while he believed that Guru had actually disintegrated Richardson; he offered that explanation, but by that time the dust had vanished, and he was laughed out of face. So he went back to the machine and Guru and the little excursions to Bixby's...."

* * * * *

"What's the latest word from that star of yours?" asked Leopold, when McIlvaine came in.

"They want to rejuvenate me," said McIlvaine, with a certain shy pleasure.

"What's that?" asked Alexander sourly.

"They say they can make me young again. Like them up there. They never die. They just live so long, and then they rejuvenate, they begin all over. It's some kind of a process they have."

"And I suppose they're planning to come down and fetch you up there and give you the works, is that it?" asked Alexander.

"Well, no," answered McIlvaine. "Guru says there's no need for that--it can be done through the machine; they can work it like the disintegrators; it puts you back to thirty or twenty or wherever you like."

"Well, I'd like to be twenty-five myself again," admitted Leopold.

"I'll tell you what, Mac," said Alexander. "You go ahead and try it; then come back and let us know how it works. If it does, we'll all sit in."

"Better make your will first, though, just in case."

"Oh, I did. This afternoon."

Leopold choked back a snicker. "Don't take this thing too seriously, Mac. After all, we're short one of us now. We'd hate to lose you, too."

McIlvaine was touched. "Oh, I wouldn't change," he hastened to assure his friends. "I'd just be younger, that's all. They'll just work on me through the machine, and over-night I'll be rejuvenated."

"That's certainly a little trick that's got it all over monkey glands," conceded Alexander, grinning.

"Those little bugs on that star of yours have made scientific progress, I'd say," said Leopold.

"They're not bugs," said McIlvaine with faint indignation. "They're people, maybe not just like you and me, but they're people just the same."

He went home that night filled with anticipation. He had done just what he had promised himself he would do, arranging everything for his rejuvenation. Guru had been astonished to learn that people on Earth simply died when there was no necessity of doing so; he had made the offer to rejuvenate McIlvaine himself.

McIlvaine sat down to his machine and turned the complex knobs until he was en rapport with his dark star. He waited for a long time, it seemed, before he knew his contact had been closed. Guru came through.

"Are you ready, McIlvaine?" he asked soundlessly.

"Yes. All ready," said McIlvaine, trembling with eagerness.

"Don't be alarmed now. It will take several hours," said Guru.

"I'm not alarmed," answered McIlvaine.

And indeed he was not; he was filled with an exhilaration akin to mysticism, and he sat waiting for what he was certain must be the experience above all others in his prosaic existence.

* * * * *

"McIlvaine's disappearance coming so close on Richardson's gave us a beautiful story," said Harrigan. "The only trouble was, it wasn't new when the Globe got around to it. We had lost our informant in Richardson; it never occurred to Alexander or Leopold to telephone us or anyone about McIlvaine's unaccountable absence from Bixby's. Finally, Leopold went over to McIlvaine's house to find out whether the old fellow was sick.

"A young fellow opened up.

"'Where's McIlvaine?' Leopold asked.

"'I'm McIlvaine,' the young fellow answered.

"'Thaddeus McIlvaine,' Leopold explained.

"'That's my name,' was the only answer he got.

"'I mean the Thaddeus McIlvaine who used to play cards with us over at Bixby's,' said Leopold.

"He shook his head. 'Sorry, you must be looking for someone else.'

"'What're you doing here?' Leopold asked then.

"'Why, I inherited what my uncle left,' said the young fellow.

"And, sure enough, when Leopold talked to me and persuaded me to go around with him to McIlvaine's lawyer, we found that the old fellow had made a will and left everything to his nephew, a namesake. The stipulations were clear enough; among them was the express wish that if anything happened to him, the elder Thaddeus McIlvaine, of no matter what nature, but particularly something allowing a reasonable doubt of his death, the nephew was still to be permitted to take immediate possession of the property and effects."

"Of course, you called on the nephew," I said.

Harrigan nodded. "Sure. That was the indicated course, in any event. It was routine for both the press and the police. There was nothing suspicious about his story; it was straightforward enough, except for one or two little details. He never did give us any precise address; he just mentioned Detroit once. I called up a friend on one of the papers there and put him up to looking up Thaddeus McIlvaine; the only young man of that name he could find appeared to be the same man as the present inhabitant's uncle, though the description fit pretty well."

"There was a resemblance, then?"

"Oh, sure. One could have imagined that old Thaddeus McIlvaine had looked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man. But don't let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep an impression on you. The first thing the young fellow did was to get rid of that machine of his uncle's. Can you imagine his uncle having done something like that?"

* * * * *

I shook my head, but I could not help thinking what an ironic thing it would have been if there had been something to McIlvaine's story, and in the process to which he had been subjected from out of space he had not been rejuvenated so much as just sent back in time, in which case he would have no memory of the machine nor of the use to which it had been put. It would have been as ironic for the inhabitants of McIlvaine's star, too; they would doubtless have looked forward to keeping this contact with Earth open and failed to realize that McIlvaine's construction differed appreciably from theirs.

"He virtually junked it. Said he had no idea what it could be used for, and didn't know how to operate it."

"And the telescope?"

"Oh, he kept that. He said he had some interest in astronomy and meant to develop that if time permitted."

"So much ran in the family, then."

"Yes. More than that. Old McIlvaine had a trick of seeming shy and self-conscious. So did this nephew of his. Wherever he came from, his origins must have been backward. I suspect that he was ashamed of them, and if I had to guess, I'd put him in the Kentucky hill-country or the Ozarks. Modern concepts seemed to be pretty well too much for him, and his thinking would have been considerably more natural at the turn of the century.

"I had to see him several times. The police chivvied him a little, but not much; he was so obviously innocent of everything that there was nothing for them in him. And the search for the old man didn't last long; no one had seen him after that last night at Bixby's, and, since everyone had already long since concluded that he was mentally a little off center, it was easy to conclude that he had wandered away somewhere, probably an amnesiac. That he might have anticipated that is indicated in the hasty preparation of his will, which came out of the blue, said Barnevall, who drew it up for him.

"I felt sorry for him."

"For whom?"

"The nephew. He seemed so lost, you know--like a man who wanted to remember something, but couldn't. I noticed that several times when I tried to talk to him; I had the feeling each time that there was something he wanted desperately to say, it hovered always on the rim of his awareness, but somehow there was no bridge to it, no clue to put it into words. He tried so hard for something he couldn't put his finger on."

"What became of him?"

"Oh, he's still around. I think he found a job somewhere. As a matter of fact, I saw him just the other evening. He had apparently just come from work and he was standing in front of Bixby's with his face pressed to the window looking in. I came up nearby and watched him. Leopold and Alexander were sitting inside--a couple of lonely old men looking out. And a lonely young man looking in. There was something in McIlvaine's face--that same thing I had noticed so often before, a kind of expression that seemed to say there was something he ought to know, something he ought to remember, to do, to say, but there was no way in which he could reach back to it."

"Or forward," I said with a wry smile.

"As you like," said Harrigan. "Pour me another, will you?"

I did and he took it.

"That poor devil!" he muttered. "He'd be happier if he could only go back where he came from."

"Wouldn't we all?" I asked. "But nobody ever goes home again. Perhaps McIlvaine never had a home like that."

"You'd have thought so if you could have seen his face looking in at Leopold and Alexander. Oh, it may have been a trick of the streetlight there, it may have been my imagination. But it sticks to my memory, and I keep thinking how alike the two were--old McIlvaine trying so desperately to find someone who could believe him, and his nephew now trying just as hard to find someone to accept him or a place he could accept on the only terms he knows."

THE END

 

 

---

Contents

MISSING LINK

by Frank Herbert

The Romantics used to say that the eyes were the windows of the Soul. A good Alien Xenologist might not put it quite so poetically ... but he can, if he's sharp, read a lot in the look of an eye!

 

"We ought to scrape this planet clean of every living thing on it," muttered Umbo Stetson, section chief of Investigation & Adjustment.

Stetson paced the landing control bridge of his scout cruiser. His footsteps grated on a floor that was the rear wall of the bridge during flight. But now the ship rested on its tail fins--all four hundred glistening red and black meters of it. The open ports of the bridge looked out on the jungle roof of Gienah III some one hundred fifty meters below. A butter yellow sun hung above the horizon, perhaps an hour from setting.

"Clean as an egg!" he barked. He paused in his round of the bridge, glared out the starboard port, spat into the fire-blackened circle that the cruiser's jets had burned from the jungle.

The I-A section chief was dark-haired, gangling, with large head and big features. He stood in his customary slouch, a stance not improved by sacklike patched blue fatigues. Although on this present operation he rated the flag of a division admiral, his fatigues carried no insignia. There was a general unkempt, straggling look about him.

Lewis Orne, junior I-A field man with a maiden diploma, stood at the opposite port, studying the jungle horizon. Now and then he glanced at the bridge control console, the chronometer above it, the big translite map of their position tilted from the opposite bulkhead. A heavy planet native, he felt vaguely uneasy on this Gienah III with its gravity of only seven-eighths Terran Standard. The surgical scars on his neck where the micro-communications equipment had been inserted itched maddeningly. He scratched.

"Hah!" said Stetson. "Politicians!"

A thin black insect with shell-like wings flew in Orne's port, settled in his close-cropped red hair. Orne pulled the insect gently from his hair, released it. Again it tried to land in his hair. He ducked. It flew across the bridge, out the port beside Stetson.

There was a thick-muscled, no-fat look to Orne, but something about his blocky, off-center features suggested a clown.

"I'm getting tired of waiting," he said.

"You're tired! Hah!"

A breeze rippled the tops of the green ocean below them. Here and there, red and purple flowers jutted from the verdure, bending and nodding like an attentive audience.

"Just look at that blasted jungle!" barked Stetson. "Them and their stupid orders!"

A call bell tinkled on the bridge control console. The red light above the speaker grid began blinking. Stetson shot an angry glance at it. "Yeah, Hal?"

"O.K., Stet. Orders just came through. We use Plan C. ComGO says to brief the field man, and jet out of here."

"Did you ask them about using another field man?"

Orne looked up attentively.

The speaker said: "Yes. They said we have to use Orne because of the records on the Delphinus."

"Well then, will they give us more time to brief him?"

"Negative. It's crash priority. ComGO expects to blast the planet anyway."

Stetson glared at the grid. "Those fat-headed, lard-bottomed, pig-brained ... POLITICIANS!" He took two deep breaths, subsided. "O.K. Tell them we'll comply."

"One more thing, Stet."

"What now?"

"I've got a confirmed contact."

Instantly, Stetson was poised on the balls of his feet, alert. "Where?"

"About ten kilometers out. Section AAB-6."

"How many?"

"A mob. You want I should count them?"

"No. What're they doing?"

"Making a beeline for us. You better get a move on."

"O.K. Keep us posted."

"Right."

* * * * *

Stetson looked across at his junior field man. "Orne, if you decide you want out of this assignment, you just say the word. I'll back you to the hilt."

"Why should I want out of my first field assignment?"

"Listen, and find out." Stetson crossed to a tilt-locker behind the big translite map, hauled out a white coverall uniform with gold insignia, tossed it to Orne. "Get into these while I brief you on the map."

"But this is an R&R uni--" began Orne.

"Get that uniform on your ugly frame!"

"Yes, sir, Admiral Stetson, sir. Right away, sir. But I thought I was through with old Rediscovery & Reeducation when you drafted me off of Hamal into the I-A ... sir." He began changing from the I-A blue to the R&R white. Almost as an afterthought, he said: "... Sir."

A wolfish grin cracked Stetson's big features. "I'm soooooo happy you have the proper attitude of subservience toward authority."

Orne zipped up the coverall uniform. "Oh, yes, sir ... sir."

"O.K., Orne, pay attention." Stetson gestured at the map with its green superimposed grid squares. "Here we are. Here's that city we flew over on our way down. You'll head for it as soon as we drop you. The place is big enough that if you hold a course roughly northeast you can't miss it. We're--"

Again the call bell rang.

"What is it this time, Hal?" barked Stetson.

"They've changed to Plan H, Stet. New orders cut."

"Five days?"

"That's all they can give us. ComGO says he can't keep the information out of High Commissioner Bullone's hands any longer than that."

"It's five days for sure then."

"Is this the usual R&R foul-up?" asked Orne.

Stetson nodded. "Thanks to Bullone and company! We're just one jump ahead of catastrophe, but they still pump the bushwah into the Rah & Rah boys back at dear old Uni-Galacta!"

"You're making light of my revered alma mater," said Orne. He struck a pose. "We must reunite the lost planets with our centers of culture and industry, and take up the glor-ious onward march of mankind that was so bru-tally--"

"Can it!" snapped Stetson. "We both know we're going to rediscover one planet too many some day. Rim War all over again. But this is a different breed of fish. It's not, repeat, not a re-discovery."

Orne sobered. "Alien?"

"Yes. A-L-I-E-N! A never-before-contacted culture. That language you were force fed on the way over, that's an alien language. It's not complete ... all we have off the minis. And we excluded data on the natives because we've been hoping to dump this project and nobody the wiser."

"Holy mazoo!"

"Twenty-six days ago an I-A search ship came through here, had a routine mini-sneaker look at the place. When he combed in his net of sneakers to check the tapes and films, lo and behold, he had a little stranger."

"One of theirs?"

"No. It was a mini off the Delphinus Rediscovery. The Delphinus has been unreported for eighteen standard months!"

"Did it crack up here?"

"We don't know. If it did, we haven't been able to spot it. She was supposed to be way off in the Balandine System by now. But we've something else on our minds. It's the one item that makes me want to blot out this place, and run home with my tail between my legs. We've a--"

Again the call bell chimed.

"NOW WHAT?" roared Stetson into the speaker.

"I've got a mini over that mob, Stet. They're talking about us. It's a definite raiding party."

"What armament?"

"Too gloomy in that jungle to be sure. The infra beam's out on this mini. Looks like hard pellet rifles of some kind. Might even be off the Delphinus."

"Can't you get closer?"

"Wouldn't do any good. No light down there, and they're moving up fast."

"Keep an eye on them, but don't ignore the other sectors," said Stetson.

"You think I was born yesterday?" barked the voice from the grid. The contact broke off with an angry sound.

* * * * *

"One thing I like about the I-A," said Stetson. "It collects such even-tempered types." He looked at the white uniform on Orne, wiped a hand across his mouth as though he'd tasted something dirty.

"Why am I wearing this thing?" asked Orne.

"Disguise."

"But there's no mustache!"

Stetson smiled without humor. "That's one of I-A's answers to those fat-keistered politicians. We're setting up our own search system to find the planets before they do. We've managed to put spies in key places at R&R. Any touchy planets our spies report, we divert the files."

"Then what?"

"Then we look into them with bright boys like you--disguised as R&R field men."

"Goody, goody. And what happens if R&R stumbles onto me while I'm down there playing patty cake?"

"We disown you."

"But you said an I-A ship found this joint."

"It did. And then one of our spies in R&R intercepted a routine request for an agent-instructor to be assigned here with full equipment. Request signed by a First-Contact officer name of Diston ... of the Delphinus!"

"But the Del--"

"Yeah. Missing. The request was a forgery. Now you see why I'm mostly for rubbing out this place. Who'd dare forge such a thing unless he knew for sure that the original FC officer was missing ... or dead?"

"What the jumped up mazoo are we doing here, Stet?" asked Orne. "Alien calls for a full contact team with all of the--"

"It calls for one planet-buster bomb ... buster--in five days. Unless you give them a white bill in the meantime. High Commissioner Bullone will have word of this planet by then. If Gienah III still exists in five days, can't you imagine the fun the politicians'll have with it? Mama mia! We want this planet cleared for contact or dead before then."

"I don't like this, Stet."

"YOU don't like it!"

"Look," said Orne. "There must be another way. Why ... when we teamed up with the Alerinoids we gained five hundred years in the physical sciences alone, not to mention the--"

"The Alerinoids didn't knock over one of our survey ships first."

"What if the Delphinus just crashed here ... and the locals picked up the pieces?"

"That's what you're going in to find out, Orne. But answer me this: If they do have the Delphinus, how long before a tool-using race could be a threat to the galaxy?"

"I saw that city they built, Stet. They could be dug in within six months, and there'd be no--"

"Yeah."

Orne shook his head. "But think of it: Two civilizations that matured along different lines! Think of all the different ways we'd approach the same problems ... the lever that'd give us for--"

"You sound like a Uni-Galacta lecture! Are you through marching arm in arm into the misty future?"

Orne took a deep breath. "Why's a freshman like me being tossed into this dish?"

"You'd still be on the Delphinus master lists as an R&R field man. That's important if you're masquerading."

"Am I the only one? I know I'm a recent convert, but--"

"You want out?"

"I didn't say that. I just want to know why I'm--"

"Because the bigdomes fed a set of requirements into one of their iron monsters. Your card popped out. They were looking for somebody capable, dependable ... and ... expendable!"

"Hey!"

"That's why I'm down here briefing you instead of sitting back on a flagship. I got you into the I-A. Now, you listen carefully: If you push the panic button on this one without cause, I will personally flay you alive. We both know the advantages of an alien contact. But if you get into a hot spot, and call for help, I'll dive this cruiser into that city to get you out!"

Orne swallowed. "Thanks, Stet. I'm--"

* * * * *

"We're going to take up a tight orbit. Out beyond us will be five transports full of I-A marines and a Class IX Monitor with one planet-buster. You're calling the shots, God help you! First, we want to know if they have the Delphinus ... and if so, where it is. Next, we want to know just how warlike these goons are. Can we control them if they're bloodthirsty. What's their potential?"

"In five days?"

"Not a second more."

"What do we know about them?"

"Not much. They look something like an ancient Terran chimpanzee ... only with blue fur. Face is hairless, pink-skinned." Stetson snapped a switch. The translite map became a screen with a figure frozen on it. "Like that. This is life size."

"Looks like the missing link they're always hunting for," said Orne. "Yeah, but you've got a different kind of a missing link."

"Vertical-slit pupils in their eyes," said Orne. He studied the figure. It had been caught from the front by a mini-sneaker camera. About five feet tall. The stance was slightly bent forward, long arms. Two vertical nose slits. A flat, lipless mouth. Receding chin. Four-fingered hands. It wore a wide belt from which dangled neat pouches and what looked like tools, although their use was obscure. There appeared to be the tip of a tail protruding from behind one of the squat legs. Behind the creature towered the faery spires of the city they'd observed from the air.

"Tails?" asked Orne.

"Yeah. They're arboreal. Not a road on the whole planet that we can find. But there are lots of vine lanes through the jungles." Stetson's face hardened. "Match that with a city as advanced as that one."

"Slave culture?"

"Probably."

"How many cities have they?"

"We've found two. This one and another on the other side of the planet. But the other one's a ruin."

"A ruin? Why?"

"You tell us. Lots of mysteries here."

"What's the planet like?"

"Mostly jungle. There are polar oceans, lakes and rivers. One low mountain chain follows the equatorial belt about two thirds around the planet."

"But only two cities. Are you sure?"

"Reasonably so. It'd be pretty hard to miss something the size of that thing we flew over. It must be fifty kilometers long and at least ten wide. Swarming with these creatures, too. We've got a zone-count estimate that places the city's population at over thirty million."

"Whee-ew! Those are tall buildings, too."

"We don't know much about this place, Orne. And unless you bring them into the fold, there'll be nothing but ashes for our archaeologists to pick over."

"Seems a dirty shame."

"I agree, but--"

The call bell jangled.

* * * * *

Stetson's voice sounded tired: "Yeah, Hal?"

"That mob's only about five kilometers out, Stet. We've got Orne's gear outside in the disguised air sled."

"We'll be right down."

"Why a disguised sled?" asked Orne.

"If they think it's a ground buggy, they might get careless when you most need an advantage. We could always scoop you out of the air, you know."

"What're my chances on this one, Stet?"

Stetson shrugged. "I'm afraid they're slim. These goons probably have the Delphinus, and they want you just long enough to get your equipment and everything you know."

"Rough as that, eh?"

"According to our best guess. If you're not out in five days, we blast."

Orne cleared his throat.

"Want out?" asked Stetson.

"No."

"Use the back-door rule, son. Always leave yourself a way out. Now ... let's check that equipment the surgeons put in your neck." Stetson put a hand to his throat. His mouth remained closed, but there was a surf-hissing voice in Orne's ears: "You read me?"

"Sure. I can--"

"No!" hissed the voice. "Touch the mike contact. Keep your mouth closed. Just use your speaking muscles without speaking."

Orne obeyed.

"O.K.," said Stetson. "You come in loud and clear."

"I ought to. I'm right on top of you!"

"There'll be a relay ship over you all the time," said Stetson. "Now ... when you're not touching that mike contact this rig'll still feed us what you say ... and everything that goes on around you, too. We'll monitor everything. Got that?"

"Yes."

Stetson held out his right hand. "Good luck. I meant that about diving in for you. Just say the word."

"I know the word, too," said Orne. "HELP!"

* * * * *

Gray mud floor and gloomy aisles between monstrous bluish tree trunks--that was the jungle. Only the barest weak glimmering of sunlight penetrated to the mud. The disguised sled--its para-grav units turned off--lurched and skidded around buttress roots. Its headlights swung in wild arcs across the trunks and down to the mud. Aerial creepers--great looping vines of them--swung down from the towering forest ceiling. A steady drip of condensation spattered the windshield, forcing Orne to use the wipers.

In the bucket seat of the sled's cab, Orne fought the controls. He was plagued by the vague slow-motion-floating sensation that a heavy planet native always feels in lighter gravity. It gave him an unhappy stomach.

Things skipped through the air around the lurching vehicle: flitting and darting things. Insects came in twin cones, siphoned toward the headlights. There was an endless chittering whistling tok-tok-toking in the gloom beyond the lights.

Stetson's voice hissed suddenly through the surgically implanted speaker: "How's it look?"

"Alien."

"Any sign of that mob?"

"Negative."

"O.K. We're taking off."

Behind Orne, there came a deep rumbling roar that receded as the scout cruiser climbed its jets. All other sounds hung suspended in after-silence, then resumed: the strongest first and then the weakest.

A heavy object suddenly arced through the headlights, swinging on a vine. It disappeared behind a tree. Another. Another. Ghostly shadows with vine pendulums on both sides. Something banged down heavily onto the hood of the sled.

Orne braked to a creaking stop that shifted the load behind him, found himself staring through the windshield at a native of Gienah III. The native crouched on the hood, a Mark XX exploding-pellet rifle in his right hand directed at Orne's head. In the abrupt shock of meeting, Orne recognized the weapon: standard issue to the marine guards on all R&R survey ships.

The native appeared the twin of the one Orne had seen on the translite screen. The four-fingered hand looked extremely capable around the stock of the Mark XX.

Slowly, Orne put a hand to his throat, pressed the contact button. He moved his speaking muscles: "Just made contact with the mob. One on the hood now has one of our Mark XX rifles aimed at my head."

The surf-hissing of Stetson's voice came through the hidden speaker: "Want us to come back?"

"Negative. Stand by. He looks cautious rather than hostile."

Orne held up his right hand, palm out. He had a second thought: held up his left hand, too. Universal symbol of peaceful intentions: empty hands. The gun muzzle lowered slightly. Orne called into his mind the language that had been hypnoforced into him. Ocheero? No. That means 'The People.' Ah ... And he had the heavy fricative greeting sound.

"Ffroiragrazzi," he said.

The native shifted to the left, answered in pure, unaccented High Galactese: "Who are you?"

Orne fought down a sudden panic. The lipless mouth had looked so odd forming the familiar words.

Stetson's voice hissed: "Is that the native speaking Galactese?"

Orne touched his throat. "You heard him."

He dropped his hand, said: "I am Lewis Orne of Rediscovery and Reeducation. I was sent here at the request of the First-Contact officer on the Delphinus Rediscovery."

"Where is your ship?" demanded the Gienahn.

"It put me down and left."

"Why?"

"It was behind schedule for another appointment."

* * * * *

Out of the corners of his eyes, Orne saw more shadows dropping to the mud around him. The sled shifted as someone climbed onto the load behind the cab. The someone scuttled agilely for a moment.

The native climbed down to the cab's side step, opened the door. The rifle was held at the ready. Again, the lipless mouth formed Galactese words: "What do you carry in this ... vehicle?"

"The equipment every R&R field man uses to help the people of a rediscovered planet improve themselves." Orne nodded at the rifle. "Would you mind pointing that weapon some other direction? It makes me nervous."

The gun muzzle remained unwaveringly on Orne's middle. The native's mouth opened, revealing long canines. "Do we not look strange to you?"

"I take it there's been a heavy mutational variation in the humanoid norm on this planet," said Orne. "What is it? Hard radiation?"

No answer.

"It doesn't really make any difference, of course," said Orne. "I'm here to help you."

"I am Tanub, High Path Chief of the Grazzi," said the native. "I decide who is to help."

Orne swallowed.

"Where do you go?" demanded Tanub.

"I was hoping to go to your city. Is it permitted?"

A long pause while the vertical-slit pupils of Tanub's eyes expanded and contracted. "It is permitted."

Stetson's voice came through the hidden speaker: "All bets off. We're coming in after you. That Mark XX is the final straw. It means they have the Delphinus for sure!"

Orne touched his throat. "No! Give me a little more time!"

"Why?"

"I have a hunch about these creatures."

"What is it?"

"No time now. Trust me."

Another long pause in which Orne and Tanub continued to study each other. Presently, Stetson said: "O.K. Go ahead as planned. But find out where the Delphinus is! If we get that back we pull their teeth."

"Why do you keep touching your throat?" demanded Tanub.

"I'm nervous," said Orne. "Guns always make me nervous."

The muzzle lowered slightly.

"Shall we continue on to your city?" asked Orne. He wet his lips with his tongue. The cab light on Tanub's face was giving the Gienahn an eerie sinister look.

"We can go soon," said Tanub.

"Will you join me inside here?" asked Orne. "There's a passenger seat right behind me."

Tanub's eyes moved catlike: right, left. "Yes." He turned, barked an order into the jungle gloom, then climbed in behind Orne.

"When do we go?" asked Orne.

"The great sun will be down soon," said Tanub. "We can continue as soon as Chiranachuruso rises."

"Chiranachuruso?"

"Our satellite ... our moon," said Tanub.

"It's a beautiful word," said Orne. "Chiranachuruso."

"In our tongue it means: The Limb of Victory," said Tanub. "By its light we will continue."

Orne turned, looked back at Tanub. "Do you mean to tell me that you can see by what light gets down here through those trees?"

"Can you not see?" asked Tanub.

"Not without the headlights."

"Our eyes differ," said Tanub. He bent toward Orne, peered. The vertical slit pupils of his eyes expanded, contracted. "You are the same as the ... others."

"Oh, on the Delphinus?"

Pause. "Yes."

Presently, a greater gloom came over the jungle, bringing a sudden stillness to the wild life. There was a chittering commotion from the natives in the trees around the sled. Tanub shifted behind Orne.

"We may go now," he said. "Slowly ... to stay behind my ... scouts."

"Right." Orne eased the sled forward around an obstructing root.

* * * * *

Silence while they crawled ahead. Around them shapes flung themselves from vine to vine.

"I admired your city from the air," said Orne. "It is very beautiful."

"Yes," said Tanub. "Why did you land so far from it?"

"We didn't want to come down where we might destroy anything."

"There is nothing to destroy in the jungle," said Tanub.

"Why do you have such a big city?" asked Orne.

Silence.

"I said: Why do you--"

"You are ignorant of our ways," said Tanub. "Therefore, I forgive you. The city is for our race. We must breed and be born in sunlight. Once--long ago--we used crude platforms on the tops of the trees. Now ... only the ... wild ones do this."

Stetson's voice hissed in Orne's ears: "Easy on the sex line, boy. That's always touchy. These creatures are oviparous. Sex glands are apparently hidden in that long fur behind where their chins ought to be."

"Who controls the breeding sites controls our world," said Tanub. "Once there was another city. We destroyed it."

"Are there many ... wild ones?" asked Orne.

"Fewer each year," said Tanub.

"There's how they get their slaves," hissed Stetson.

"You speak excellent Galactese," said Orne.

"The High Path Chief commanded the best teacher," said Tanub. "Do you, too, know many things, Orne?"

"That's why I was sent here," said Orne.

"Are there many planets to teach?" asked Tanub.

"Very many," said Orne. "Your city--I saw very tall buildings. Of what do you build them?"

"In your tongue--glass," said Tanub. "The engineers of the Delphinus said it was impossible. As you saw--they are wrong."

"A glass-blowing culture," hissed Stetson. "That'd explain a lot of things."

Slowly, the disguised sled crept through the jungle. Once, a scout swooped down into the headlights, waved. Orne stopped on Tanub's order, and they waited almost ten minutes before proceeding.

"Wild ones?" asked Orne.

"Perhaps," said Tanub.

A glowing of many lights grew visible through the giant tree trunks. It grew brighter as the sled crept through the last of the jungle, emerged in cleared land at the edge of the city.

Orne stared upward in awe. The city fluted and spiraled into the moonlit sky. It was a fragile appearing lacery of bridges, winking dots of light. The bridges wove back and forth from building to building until the entire visible network appeared one gigantic dew-glittering web.

"All that with glass," murmured Orne.

"What's happening?" hissed Stetson.

Orne touched his throat contact. "We're just into the city clearing, proceeding toward the nearest building."

"This is far enough," said Tanub.

* * * * *

Orne stopped the sled. In the moonlight, he could see armed Gienahns all around. The buttressed pedestal of one of the buildings loomed directly ahead. It looked taller than had the scout cruiser in its jungle landing circle.

Tanub leaned close to Orne's shoulder. "We have not deceived you, have we, Orne?"

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"You have recognized that we are not mutated members of your race."

Orne swallowed. Into his ears came Stetson's voice: "Better admit it."

"That's true," said Orne.

"I like you, Orne," said Tanub. "You shall be one of my slaves. You will teach me many things."

"How did you capture the Delphinus?" asked Orne.

"You know that, too?"

"You have one of their rifles," said Orne.

"Your race is no match for us, Orne ... in cunning, in strength, in the prowess of the mind. Your ship landed to repair its tubes. Very inferior ceramics in those tubes."

Orne turned, looked at Tanub in the dim glow of the cab light. "Have you heard about the I-A, Tanub?"

"I-A? What is that?" There was a wary tenseness in the Gienahn's figure. His mouth opened to reveal the long canines.

"You took the Delphinus by treachery?" asked Orne.

"They were simple fools," said Tanub. "We are smaller, thus they thought us weaker." The Mark XX's muzzle came around to center on Orne's stomach. "You have not answered my question. What is the I-A?"

"I am of the I-A," said Orne. "Where've you hidden the Delphinus?"

"In the place that suits us best," said Tanub. "In all our history there has never been a better place."

"What do you plan to do with it?" asked Orne.

"Within a year we will have a copy with our own improvements. After that--"

"You intend to start a war?" asked Orne.

"In the jungle the strong slay the weak until only the strong remain," said Tanub.

"And then the strong prey upon each other?" asked Orne.

"That is a quibble for women," said Tanub.

"It's too bad you feel that way," said Orne. "When two cultures meet like this they tend to help each other. What have you done with the crew of the Delphinus?"

"They are slaves," said Tanub. "Those who still live. Some resisted. Others objected to teaching us what we want to know." He waved the gun muzzle. "You will not be that foolish, will you, Orne?"

"No need to be," said Orne. "I've another little lesson to teach you: I already know where you've hidden the Delphinus."

"Go, boy!" hissed Stetson. "Where is it?"

"Impossible!" barked Tanub.

"It's on your moon," said Orne. "Darkside. It's on a mountain on the darkside of your moon."

Tanub's eyes dilated, contracted. "You read minds?"

"The I-A has no need to read minds," said Orne. "We rely on superior mental prowess."

"The marines are on their way," hissed Stetson. "We're coming in to get you. I'm going to want to know how you guessed that one."

"You are a weak fool like the others," gritted Tanub.

"It's too bad you formed your opinion of us by observing only the low grades of the R&R," said Orne.

"Easy, boy," hissed Stetson. "Don't pick a fight with him now. Remember, his race is arboreal. He's probably as strong as an ape."

"I could kill you where you sit!" grated Tanub.

"You write finish for your entire planet if you do," said Orne. "I'm not alone. There are others listening to every word we say. There's a ship overhead that could split open your planet with one bomb--wash it with molten rock. It'd run like the glass you use for your buildings."

"You are lying!"

"We'll make you an offer," said Orne. "We don't really want to exterminate you. We'll give you limited membership in the Galactic Federation until you prove you're no menace to us."

"Keep talking," hissed Stetson. "Keep him interested."

"You dare insult me!" growled Tanub.

"You had better believe me," said Orne. "We--"

Stetson's voice interrupted him: "Got it, Orne! They caught the Delphinus on the ground right where you said it'd be! Blew the tubes off it. Marines now mopping up."

"It's like this," said Orne. "We already have recaptured the Delphinus." Tanub's eyes went instinctively skyward. "Except for the captured armament you still hold, you obviously don't have the weapons to meet us," continued Orne. "Otherwise, you wouldn't be carrying that rifle off the Delphinus."

"If you speak the truth, then we shall die bravely," said Tanub.

"No need for you to die," said Orne.

"Better to die than be slaves," said Tanub.

"We don't need slaves," said Orne. "We--"

"I cannot take the chance that you are lying," said Tanub. "I must kill you now."

* * * * *

Orne's foot rested on the air sled control pedal. He depressed it. Instantly, the sled shot skyward, heavy G's pressing them down into the seats. The gun in Tanub's hands was slammed into his lap. He struggled to raise it. To Orne, the weight was still only about twice that of his home planet of Chargon. He reached over, took the rifle, found safety belts, bound Tanub with them. Then he eased off the acceleration.

"We don't need slaves," said Orne. "We have machines to do our work. We'll send experts in here, teach you people how to exploit your planet, how to build good transportation facilities, show you how to mine your minerals, how to--"

"And what do we do in return?" whispered Tanub.

"You could start by teaching us how you make superior glass," said Orne. "I certainly hope you see things our way. We really don't want to have to come down there and clean you out. It'd be a shame to have to blast that city into little pieces."

Tanub wilted. Presently, he said: "Send me back. I will discuss this with ... our council." He stared at Orne. "You I-A's are too strong. We did not know."

* * * * *

In the wardroom of Stetson's scout cruiser, the lights were low, the leather chairs comfortable, the green beige table set with a decanter of Hochar brandy and two glasses.

Orne lifted his glass, sipped the liquor, smacked his lips. "For a while there, I thought I'd never be tasting anything like this again."

Stetson took his own glass. "ComGO heard the whole thing over the general monitor net," he said. "D'you know you've been breveted to senior field man?"

"Ah, they've already recognized my sterling worth," said Orne.

The wolfish grin took over Stetson's big features. "Senior field men last about half as long as the juniors," he said. "Mortality's terrific?"

"I might've known," said Orne. He took another sip of the brandy.

Stetson flicked on the switch of a recorder beside him. "O.K. You can go ahead any time."

"Where do you want me to start?"

"First, how'd you spot right away where they'd hidden the Delphinus?"

"Easy. Tanub's word for his people was Grazzi. Most races call themselves something meaning The People. But in his tongue that's Ocheero. Grazzi wasn't on the translated list. I started working on it. The most likely answer was that it had been adopted from another language, and meant enemy."

"And that told you where the Delphinus was?"

"No. But it fitted my hunch about these Gienahns. I'd kind of felt from the first minute of meeting them that they had a culture like the Indians of ancient Terra."

"Why?"

"They came in like a primitive raiding party. The leader dropped right onto the hood of my sled. An act of bravery, no less. Counting coup, you see?"

"I guess so."

"Then he said he was High Path Chief. That wasn't on the language list, either. But it was easy: Raider Chief. There's a word in almost every language in history that means raider and derives from a word for road, path or highway."

"Highwaymen," said Stetson.

"Raid itself," said Orne. "An ancient Terran language corruption of road."

"Yeah, yeah. But where'd all this translation griff put--"

"Don't be impatient. Glass-blowing culture meant they were just out of the primitive stage. That, we could control. Next, he said their moon was Chiranachuruso, translated as The Limb of Victory. After that it just fell into place."

"How?"

"The vertical-slit pupils of their eyes. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"Maybe. What's it mean to you?"

"Night-hunting predator accustomed to dropping upon its victims from above. No other type of creature ever has had the vertical slit. And Tanub said himself that the Delphinus was hidden in the best place in all of their history. History? That'd be a high place. Dark, likewise. Ergo: a high place on the darkside of their moon."

"I'm a pie-eyed greepus," whispered Stetson.

Orne grinned, said: "You probably are ... sir."

THE END

 

 

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Contents

NEXT LOGICAL STEP

by Ben Bova

 

Ordinarily the military least wants to have the others know the final details of their war plans. But, logically, there would be times--

 

"I don't really see where this problem has anything to do with me," the CIA man said. "And, frankly, there are a lot of more important things I could be doing."

Ford, the physicist, glanced at General LeRoy. The general had that quizzical expression on his face, the look that meant he was about to do something decisive.

"Would you like to see the problem first-hand?" the general asked, innocently.

The CIA man took a quick look at his wristwatch. "O.K., if it doesn't take too long. It's late enough already."

"It won't take very long, will it, Ford?" the general said, getting out of his chair.

"Not very long," Ford agreed. "Only a lifetime."

The CIA man grunted as they went to the doorway and left the general's office. Going down the dark, deserted hallway, their footsteps echoed hollowly.

"I can't overemphasize the seriousness of the problem," General LeRoy said to the CIA man. "Eight ranking members of the General Staff have either resigned their commissions or gone straight to the violent ward after just one session with the computer."

The CIA man scowled. "Is this area Secure?"

General LeRoy's face turned red. "This entire building is as Secure as any edifice in the Free World, mister. And it's empty. We're the only living people inside here at this hour. I'm not taking any chances."

"Just want to be sure."

"Perhaps if I explain the computer a little more," Ford said, changing the subject, "you'll know what to expect."

"Good idea," said the man from CIA.

"We told you that this is the most modern, most complex and delicate computer in the world ... nothing like it has ever been attempted before--anywhere."

"I know that They don't have anything like it," the CIA man agreed.

"And you also know, I suppose, that it was built to simulate actual war situations. We fight wars in this computer ... wars with missiles and bombs and gas. Real wars, complete down to the tiniest detail. The computer tells us what will actually happen to every missile, every city, every man ... who dies, how many planes are lost, how many trucks will fail to start on a cold morning, whether a battle is won or lost ..."

General LeRoy interrupted. "The computer runs these analyses for both sides, so we can see what's happening to Them, too."

The CIA man gestured impatiently. "War games simulations aren't new. You've been doing them for years."

"Yes, but this machine is different," Ford pointed out. "It not only gives a much more detailed war game. It's the next logical step in the development of machine-simulated war games." He hesitated dramatically.

"Well, what is it?"

"We've added a variation of the electro-encephalograph ..."

The CIA man stopped walking. "The electro-what?"

"Electro-encephalograph. You know, a recording device that reads the electrical patterns of your brain. Like the electro-cardiograph."

"Oh."

"But you see, we've given the EEG a reverse twist. Instead of using a machine that makes a recording of the brain's electrical wave output, we've developed a device that will take the computer's readout tapes, and turn them into electrical patterns that are put into your brain!"

"I don't get it."

General LeRoy took over. "You sit at the machine's control console. A helmet is placed over your head. You set the machine in operation. You see the results."

"Yes," Ford went on. "Instead of reading rows of figures from the computer's printer ... you actually see the war being fought. Complete visual and auditory hallucinations. You can watch the progress of the battles, and as you change strategy and tactics you can see the results before your eyes."

"The idea, originally, was to make it easier for the General Staff to visualize strategic situations," General LeRoy said.

"But every one who's used the machine has either resigned his commission or gone insane," Ford added.

The CIA man cocked an eye at LeRoy. "You've used the computer."

"Correct."

"And you have neither resigned nor cracked up."

General LeRoy nodded. "I called you in."

Before the CIA man could comment, Ford said, "The computer's right inside this doorway. Let's get this over with while the building is still empty."

* * * * *

They stepped in. The physicist and the general showed the CIA man through the room-filling rows of massive consoles.

"It's all transistorized and subminiaturized, of course," Ford explained. "That's the only way we could build so much detail into the machine and still have it small enough to fit inside a single building."

"A single building?"

"Oh yes; this is only the control section. Most of this building is taken up by the circuits, the memory banks, and the rest of it."

"Hm-m-m."

They showed him finally to a small desk, studded with control buttons and dials. The single spotlight above the desk lit it brilliantly, in harsh contrast to the semidarkness of the rest of the room.

"Since you've never run the computer before," Ford said, "General LeRoy will do the controlling. You just sit and watch what happens."

The general sat in one of the well-padded chairs and donned a grotesque headgear that was connected to the desk by a half-dozen wires. The CIA man took his chair slowly.

When they put one of the bulky helmets on him, he looked up at them, squinting a little in the bright light. "This ... this isn't going to ... well, do me any damage, is it?"

"My goodness, no," Ford said. "You mean mentally? No, of course not. You're not on the General Staff, so it shouldn't ... it won't ... affect you the way it did the others. Their reaction had nothing to do with the computer per se ..."

"Several civilians have used the computer with no ill effects," General LeRoy said. "Ford has used it many times."

The CIA man nodded, and they closed the transparent visor over his face. He sat there and watched General LeRoy press a series of buttons, then turn a dial.

"Can you hear me?" The general's voice came muffled through the helmet.

"Yes," he said.

"All right. Here we go. You're familiar with Situation One-Two-One? That's what we're going to be seeing."

Situation One-Two-One was a standard war game. The CIA man was well acquainted with it. He watched the general flip a switch, then sit back and fold his arms over his chest. A row of lights on the desk console began blinking on and off, one, two, three ... down to the end of the row, then back to the beginning again, on and off, on and off ...

And then, somehow, he could see it!

He was poised incredibly somewhere in space, and he could see it all in a funny, blurry-double-sighted, dream-like way. He seemed to be seeing several pictures and hearing many voices, all at once. It was all mixed up, and yet it made a weird kind of sense.

For a panicked instant he wanted to rip the helmet off his head. It's only an illusion, he told himself, forcing calm on his unwilling nerves. Only an illusion.

But it seemed strangely real.

He was watching the Gulf of Mexico. He could see Florida off to his right, and the arching coast of the southeastern United States. He could even make out the Rio Grande River.

Situation One-Two-One started, he remembered, with the discovery of missile-bearing Enemy submarines in the Gulf. Even as he watched the whole area--as though perched on a satellite--he could see, underwater and close-up, the menacing shadowy figure of a submarine gliding through the crystal blue sea.

He saw, too, a patrol plane as it spotted the submarine and sent an urgent radio warning.

The underwater picture dissolved in a bewildering burst of bubbles. A missile had been launched. Within seconds, another burst--this time a nuclear depth charge--utterly destroyed the submarine.

It was confusing. He was everyplace at once. The details were overpowering, but the total picture was agonizingly clear.

Six submarines fired missiles from the Gulf of Mexico. Four were immediately sunk, but too late. New Orleans, St. Louis and three Air Force bases were obliterated by hydrogen-fusion warheads.

The CIA man was familiar with the opening stages of the war. The first missile fired at the United States was the signal for whole fleets of missiles and bombers to launch themselves at the Enemy. It was confusing to see the world at once; at times he could not tell if the fireball and mushroom cloud was over Chicago or Shanghai, New York or Novosibirsk, Baltimore or Budapest.

It did not make much difference, really. They all got it in the first few hours of the war; as did London and Moscow, Washington and Peking, Detroit and Delhi, and many, many more.

The defensive systems on all sides seemed to operate well, except that there were never enough anti-missiles. Defensive systems were expensive compared to attack rockets. It was cheaper to build a deterrent than to defend against it.

The missiles flashed up from submarines and railway cars, from underground silos and stratospheric jets; secret ones fired off automatically when a certain airbase command post ceased beaming out a restraining radio signal. The defensive systems were simply overloaded. And when the bombs ran out, the missiles carried dust and germs and gas. On and on. For six days and six firelit nights. Launch, boost, coast, re-enter, death.

* * * * *

And now it was over, the CIA man thought. The missiles were all gone. The airplanes were exhausted. The nations that had built the weapons no longer existed. By all the rules he knew of, the war should have been ended.

Yet the fighting did not end. The machine knew better. There were still many ways to kill an enemy. Time-tested ways. There were armies fighting in four continents, armies that had marched overland, or splashed ashore from the sea, or dropped out of the skies.

Incredibly, the war went on. When the tanks ran out of gas, and the flame throwers became useless, and even the prosaic artillery pieces had no more rounds to fire, there were still simple guns and even simpler bayonets and swords.

The proud armies, the descendents of the Alexanders and Caesars and Temujins and Wellingtons and Grants and Rommels, relived their evolution in reverse.

The war went on. Slowly, inevitably, the armies split apart into smaller and smaller units, until the tortured countryside that so recently had felt the impact of nuclear war once again knew the tread of bands of armed marauders. The tiny savage groups, stranded in alien lands, far from the homes and families that they knew to be destroyed, carried on a mockery of war, lived off the land, fought their own countrymen if the occasion suited, and revived the ancient terror of hand-wielded, personal, one-head-at-a-time killing.

The CIA man watched the world disintegrate. Death was an individual business now, and none the better for no longer being mass-produced. In agonized fascination he saw the myriad ways in which a man might die. Murder was only one of them. Radiation, disease, toxic gases that lingered and drifted on the once-innocent winds, and--finally--the most efficient destroyer of them all: starvation.

Three billion people (give or take a meaningless hundred million) lived on the planet Earth when the war began. Now, with the tenuous thread of civilization burned away, most of those who were not killed by the fighting itself succumbed inexorably to starvation.

Not everyone died, of course. Life went on. Some were lucky.

A long darkness settled on the world. Life went on for a few, a pitiful few, a bitter, hateful, suspicious, savage few. Cities became pestholes. Books became fuel. Knowledge died. Civilization was completely gone from the planet Earth.

* * * * *

The helmet was lifted slowly off his head. The CIA man found that he was too weak to raise his arms and help. He was shivering and damp with perspiration.

"Now you see," Ford said quietly, "why the military men cracked up when they used the computer."

General LeRoy, even, was pale. "How can a man with any conscience at all direct a military operation when he knows that that will be the consequence?"

The CIA man struck up a cigarette and pulled hard on it. He exhaled sharply. "Are all the war games ... like that? Every plan?"

"Some are worse," Ford said. "We picked an average one for you. Even some of the 'brushfire' games get out of hand and end up like that."

"So ... what do you intend to do? Why did you call me in? What can I do?"

"You're with CIA," the general said. "Don't you handle espionage?"

"Yes, but what's that got to do with it?"

The general looked at him. "It seems to me that the next logical step is to make damned certain that They get the plans to this computer ... and fast!"

 

 

---

Contents

PANDEMIC

by Jesse Franklin Bone

Generally, human beings don't do totally useless things consistently and widely. So--maybe there is something to it--

 

"We call it Thurston's Disease for two perfectly good reasons," Dr. Walter Kramer said. "He discovered it--and he was the first to die of it." The doctor fumbled fruitlessly through the pockets of his lab coat. "Now where the devil did I put those matches?"

"Are these what you're looking for?" the trim blonde in the gray seersucker uniform asked. She picked a small box of wooden safety matches from the littered lab table beside her and handed them to him.

"Ah," Kramer said. "Thanks. Things have a habit of getting lost around here."

"I can believe that," she said as she eyed the frenzied disorder around her. Her boss wasn't much better than his laboratory, she decided as she watched him strike a match against the side of the box and apply the flame to the charred bowl of his pipe. His long dark face became half obscured behind a cloud of bluish smoke as he puffed furiously. He looked like a lean untidy devil recently escaped from hell with his thick brows, green eyes and lank black hair highlighted intermittently by the leaping flame of the match. He certainly didn't look like a pathologist. She wondered if she was going to like working with him, and shook her head imperceptibly. Possibly, but not probably. It might be difficult being cooped up here with him day after day. Well, she could always quit if things got too tough. At least there was that consolation.

He draped his lean body across a lab stool and leaned his elbows on its back. There was a faint smile on his face as he eyed her quizzically. "You're new," he said. "Not just to this lab but to the Institute."

She nodded. "I am, but how did you know?"

"Thurston's Disease. Everyone in the Institute knows that name for the plague, but few outsiders do." He smiled sardonically. "Virus pneumonic plague--that's a better term for public use. After all, what good does it do to advertise a doctor's stupidity?"

She eyed him curiously. "De mortuis?" she asked.

He nodded. "That's about it. We may condemn our own, but we don't like laymen doing it. And besides, Thurston had good intentions. He never dreamed this would happen."

"The road to hell, so I hear, is paved with good intentions."

"Undoubtedly," Kramer said dryly. "Incidentally, did you apply for this job or were you assigned?"

"I applied."

"Someone should have warned you I dislike clichés," he said. He paused a moment and eyed her curiously. "Just why did you apply?" he asked. "Why are you imprisoning yourself in a sealed laboratory which you won't leave as long as you work here. You know, of course, what the conditions are. Unless you resign or are carried out feet first you will remain here ... have you considered what such an imprisonment means?"

"I considered it," she said, "and it doesn't make any difference. I have no ties outside and I thought I could help. I've had training. I was a nurse before I was married."

"Divorced?"

"Widowed."

Kramer nodded. There were plenty of widows and widowers outside. Too many. But it wasn't much worse than in the Institute where, despite precautions, Thurston's disease took its toll of life.

"Did they tell you this place is called the suicide section?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Weren't you frightened?"

"Of dying? Hardly. Too many people are doing it nowadays."

He grimaced, looking more satanic than ever. "You have a point," he admitted, "but it isn't a good one. Young people should be afraid of dying."

"You're not."

"I'm not young. I'm thirty-five, and besides, this is my business. I've been looking at death for eleven years. I'm immune."

"I haven't your experience," she admitted, "but I have your attitude."

"What's your name?" Kramer said.

"Barton, Mary Barton."

"Hm-m-m. Well, Mary--I can't turn you down. I need you. But I could wish you had taken some other job."

"I'll survive."

He looked at her with faint admiration in his greenish eyes. "Perhaps you will," he said. "All right. As to your duties--you will be my assistant, which means you'll be a dishwasher, laboratory technician, secretary, junior pathologist, and coffee maker. I'll help you with all the jobs except the last one. I make lousy coffee." Kramer grinned, his teeth a white flash across the darkness of his face. "You'll be on call twenty-four hours a day, underpaid, overworked, and in constant danger until we lick Thurston's virus. You'll be expected to handle the jobs of three people unless I can get more help--and I doubt that I can. People stay away from here in droves. There's no future in it."

Mary smiled wryly. "Literally or figuratively?" she asked.

He chuckled. "You have a nice sense of graveyard humor," he said. "It'll help. But don't get careless. Assistants are hard to find."

She shook her head. "I won't. While I'm not afraid of dying I don't want to do it. And I have no illusions about the danger. I was briefed quite thoroughly."

"They wanted you to work upstairs?"

She nodded.

* * * * *

"I suppose they need help, too. Thurston's Disease has riddled the medical profession. Just don't forget that this place can be a death trap. One mistake and you've had it. Naturally, we take every precaution, but with a virus no protection is absolute. If you're careless and make errors in procedure, sooner or later one of those submicroscopic protein molecules will get into your system."

"You're still alive."

"So I am," Kramer said, "but I don't take chances. My predecessor, my secretary, my lab technician, my junior pathologist, and my dishwasher all died of Thurston's Disease." He eyed her grimly. "Still want the job?" he asked.

"I lost a husband and a three-year old son," Mary said with equal grimness. "That's why I'm here. I want to destroy the thing that killed my family. I want to do something. I want to be useful."

He nodded. "I think you can be," he said quietly.

"Mind if I smoke?" she asked. "I need some defense against that pipe of yours."

"No--go ahead. Out here it's all right, but not in the security section."

Mary took a package of cigarettes from her pocket, lit one and blew a cloud of gray smoke to mingle with the blue haze from Kramer's pipe.

"Comfortable?" Kramer asked.

She nodded.

He looked at his wrist watch. "We have half an hour before the roll tube cultures are ready for examination. That should be enough to tell you about the modern Pasteur and his mutant virus. Since your duties will primarily involve Thurston's Disease, you'd better know something about it." He settled himself more comfortably across the lab bench and went on talking in a dry schoolmasterish voice. "Alan Thurston was an immunologist at Midwestern University Medical School. Like most men in the teaching trade, he also had a research project. If it worked out, he'd be one of the great names in medicine; like Jenner, Pasteur, and Salk. The result was that he pushed it and wasn't too careful. He wanted to be famous."

"He's well known now," Mary said, "at least within the profession."

"Quite," Kramer said dryly. "He was working with gamma radiations on microorganisms, trying to produce a mutated strain of Micrococcus pyogenes that would have enhanced antigenic properties."

"Wait a minute, doctor. It's been four years since I was active in nursing. Translation, please."

Kramer chuckled. "He was trying to make a vaccine out of a common infectious organism. You may know it better as Staphylococcus. As you know, it's a pus former that's made hospital life more dangerous than it should be because it develops resistance to antibiotics. What Thurston wanted to do was to produce a strain that would stimulate resistance in the patient without causing disease--something that would help patients protect themselves rather than rely upon doubtfully effective antibiotics."

"That wasn't a bad idea."

"There was nothing wrong with it. The only trouble was that he wound up with something else entirely. He was like the man who wanted to make a plastic suitable for children's toys and ended up with a new explosive. You see, what Thurston didn't realize was that his cultures were contaminated. He'd secured them from the University Clinic and had, so he thought, isolated them. But somehow he'd brought a virus along--probably one of the orphan group or possibly a phage."

"Orphan?"

"Yes--one that was not a normal inhabitant of human tissues. At any rate there was a virus--and he mutated it rather than the bacteria. Actually, it was simple enough, relatively speaking, since a virus is infinitely simpler in structure than a bacterium, and hence much easier to modify with ionizing radiation. So he didn't produce an antigen--he produced a disease instead. Naturally, he contracted it, and during the period between his infection and death he managed to infect the entire hospital. Before anyone realized what they were dealing with, the disease jumped from the hospital to the college, and from the college to the city, and from the city to--"

"Yes, I know that part of it. It's all over the world now--killing people by the millions."

* * * * *

"Well," Kramer said, "at least it's solved the population explosion." He blew a cloud of blue smoke in Mary's direction. "And it did make Thurston famous. His name won't be quickly forgotten."

She coughed. "I doubt if it ever will be," she said, "but it won't be remembered the way he intended."

He looked at her suspiciously. "That cough--"

"No, it's not Thurston's Disease. It's that pipe. It's rancid."

"It helps me think," Kramer said.

"You could try cigarettes--or candy," she suggested.

"I'd rather smoke a pipe."

"There's cancer of the lip and tongue," she said helpfully.

"Don't quote Ochsner. I don't agree with him. And besides, you smoke cigarettes, which are infinitely worse."

"Only four or five a day. I don't saturate my system with nicotine."

"In another generation," Kramer observed, "you'd have run through the streets of the city brandishing an ax smashing saloons. You're a lineal descendent of Carrie Nation." He puffed quietly until his head was surrounded by a nimbus of smoke. "Stop trying to reform me," he added. "You haven't been here long enough."

"Not even God could do that, according to the reports I've heard," she said.

He laughed. "I suppose my reputation gets around."

"It does. You're an opinionated slave driver, a bully, an intellectual tyrant, and the best pathologist in this center."

"The last part of that sentence makes up for unflattering honesty of the first," Kramer said. "At any rate, once we realized the situation we went to work to correct it. Institutes like this were established everywhere the disease appeared for the sole purpose of examining, treating, and experimenting with the hope of finding a cure. This section exists for the evaluation of treatment. We check the human cases, and the primates in the experimental laboratories. It is our duty to find out if anything the boys upstairs try shows any promise. We were a pretty big section once, but Thurston's virus has whittled us down. Right now there is just you and me. But there's still enough work to keep us busy. The experiments are still going on, and there are still human cases, even though the virus has killed off most of the susceptibles. We've evaluated over a thousand different drugs and treatments in this Institute alone."

"And none of them have worked?"

"No--but that doesn't mean the work's been useless. The research has saved others thousands of man hours chasing false leads. In this business negative results are almost as important as positive ones. We may never discover the solution, but our work will keep others from making the same mistakes."

"I never thought of it that way."

"People seldom do. But if you realize that this is international, that every worker on Thurston's Disease has a niche to fill, the picture will be clearer. We're doing our part inside the plan. Others are, too. And there are thousands of labs involved. Somewhere, someone will find the answer. It probably won't be us, but we'll help get the problem solved as quickly as possible. That's the important thing. It's the biggest challenge the race has ever faced--and the most important. It's a question of survival." Kramer's voice was sober. "We have to solve this. If Thurston's Disease isn't checked, the human race will become extinct. As a result, for the first time in history all mankind is working together."

"All? You mean the Communists are, too?"

"Of course. What's an ideology if there are no people to follow it?" Kramer knocked the ashes out of his pipe, looked at the laboratory clock and shrugged. "Ten minutes more," he said, "and these tubes will be ready. Keep an eye on that clock and let me know. Meantime you can straighten up this lab and find out where things are. I'll be in the office checking the progress reports." He turned abruptly away, leaving her standing in the middle of the cluttered laboratory.

"Now what am I supposed to do here?" Mary wondered aloud. "Clean up, he says. Find out where things are, he says. Get acquainted with the place, he says. I could spend a month doing that." She looked at the littered bench, the wall cabinets with sliding doors half open, the jars of reagents sitting on the sink, the drainboard, on top of the refrigerator and on the floor. The disorder was appalling. "How he ever manages to work in here is beyond me. I suppose that I'd better start somewhere--perhaps I can get these bottles in some sort of order first." She sighed and moved toward the wall cabinets. "Oh well," she mused, "I asked for this."

* * * * *

"Didn't you hear that buzzer?" Kramer asked.

"Was that for me?" Mary said, looking up from a pile of bottles and glassware she was sorting.

"Partly. It means they've sent us another post-mortem from upstairs."

"What is it?"

"I don't know--man or monkey, it makes no difference. Whatever it is, it's Thurston's Disease. Come along. You might as well see what goes on in our ultra modern necropsy suite."

"I'd like to." She put down the bottle she was holding and followed him to a green door at the rear of the laboratory.

"Inside," Kramer said, "you will find a small anteroom, a shower, and a dressing room. Strip, shower, and put on a clean set of lab coveralls and slippers which you will find in the dressing room. You'll find surgical masks in the wall cabinet beside the lockers. Go through the door beyond the dressing room and wait for me there. I'll give you ten minutes."

* * * * *

"We do this both ways," Kramer said as he joined her in the narrow hall beyond the dressing room. "We'll reverse the process going out."

"You certainly carry security to a maximum," she said through the mask that covered the lower part of her face.

"You haven't seen anything yet," he said as he opened a door in the hall. "Note the positive air pressure," he said. "Theoretically nothing can get in here except what we bring with us. And we try not to bring anything." He stood aside to show her the glassed-in cubicle overhanging a bare room dominated by a polished steel post-mortem table that glittered in the harsh fluorescent lighting. Above the table a number of jointed rods and clamps hung from the ceiling. A low metal door and series of racks containing instruments and glassware were set into the opposite wall together with the gaping circular orifice of an open autoclave.

"We work by remote control, just like they do at the AEC. See those handlers?" He pointed to the control console set into a small stainless steel table standing beside the sheet of glass at the far end of the cubicle. "They're connected to those gadgets up there." He indicated the jointed arms hanging over the autopsy table in the room beyond. "I could perform a major operation from here and never touch the patient. Using these I can do anything I could in person with the difference that there's a quarter inch of glass between me and my work. I have controls that let me use magnifiers, and even do microdissection, if necessary."

"Where's the cadaver?" Mary asked.

"Across the room, behind that door," he said, waving at the low, sliding metal partition behind the table. "It's been prepped, decontaminated and ready to go."

"What happens when you're through?"

"Watch." Dr. Kramer pressed a button on the console in front of him. A section of flooring slid aside and the table tipped. "The cadaver slides off that table and through that hole. Down below is a highly efficient crematorium."

Mary shivered. "Neat and effective," she said shakily.

"After that the whole room is sprayed with germicide and sterilized with live steam. The instruments go into the autoclave, and thirty minutes later we're ready for another post-mortem."

"We use the handlers to put specimens into those jars," he said, pointing to a row of capped glass jars of assorted sizes on a wall rack behind the table. "After they're capped, the jars go onto that carrier beside the table. From here they pass through a decontamination chamber and into the remote-control laboratory across the hall where we can run biochemical and histological techniques. Finished slides and mounted specimens then go through another decontamination process to the outside lab. Theoretically, this place is proof against anything."

"It seems to be," Mary said, obviously impressed. "I've never seen anything so elegant."

"Neither did I until Thurston's Disease became a problem." Kramer shrugged and sat down behind the controls. "Watch, now," he said as he pressed a button. "Let's see what's on deck--man or monkey. Want to make a bet? I'll give you two to one it's a monkey."

She shook her head.

* * * * *

The low door slid aside and a steel carriage emerged into the necropsy room bearing the nude body of a man. The corpse gleamed pallidly under the harsh shadowless glare of the fluorescents in the ceiling as Kramer, using the handlers, rolled it onto the post-mortem table and clamped it in place on its back. He pushed another button and the carriage moved back into the wall and the steel door slid shut. "That'll be decontaminated," he said, "and sent back upstairs for another body. I'd have lost," he remarked idly. "Lately the posts have been running three to one in favor of monkeys."

He moved a handler and picked up a heavy scalpel from the instrument rack. "There's a certain advantage to this," he said as he moved the handler delicately. "These gadgets give a tremendous mechanical advantage. I can cut right through small bones and cartilage without using a saw."

"How nice," Mary said. "I expect you enjoy yourself."

"I couldn't ask for better equipment," he replied noncommittally. With deft motion of the handler he drew the scalpel down across the chest and along the costal margins in the classic inverted "Y" incision. "We'll take a look at the thorax first," he said, as he used the handlers to pry open the rib cage and expose the thoracic viscera. "Ah! Thought so! See that?" He pointed with a small handler that carried a probe. "Look at those lungs." He swung a viewer into place so Mary could see better. "Look at those abscesses and necrosis. It's Thurston's Disease, all right, with secondary bacterial invasion."

The grayish solidified masses of tissue looked nothing like the normal pink appearance of healthy lungs. Studded with yellowish spherical abscesses they lay swollen and engorged within the gaping cavity of the chest.

"You know the pathogenesis of Thurston's Disease?" Kramer asked.

Mary shook her head, her face yellowish-white in the glare of the fluorescents.

"It begins with a bronchial cough," Kramer said. "The virus attacks the bronchioles first, destroys them, and passes into the deeper tissues of the lungs. As with most virus diseases there is a transitory leukopenia--a drop in the total number of white blood cells--and a rise in temperature of about two or three degrees. As the virus attacks the alveolar structures, the temperature rises and the white blood cell count becomes elevated. The lungs become inflamed and painful. There is a considerable quantity of lymphoid exudate and pleural effusion. Secondary invaders and pus-forming bacteria follow the viral destruction of the lung tissue and form abscesses. Breathing becomes progressively more difficult as more lung tissue is destroyed. Hepatization and necrosis inactivate more lung tissue as the bacteria get in their dirty work, and finally the patient suffocates."

"But what if the bacteria are controlled by antibiotics?"

"Then the virus does the job. It produces atelectasis followed by progressive necrosis of lung tissue with gradual liquefaction of the parenchyma. It's slower, but just as fatal. This fellow was lucky. He apparently stayed out of here until he was almost dead. Probably he's had the disease for about a week. If he'd have come in early, we could have kept him alive for maybe a month. The end, however, would have been the same."

"It's a terrible thing," Mary said faintly.

"You'll get used to it. We get one or two every day." He shrugged. "There's nothing here that's interesting," he said as he released the clamps and tilted the table. For what seemed to Mary an interminable time, the cadaver clung to the polished steel. Then abruptly it slid off the shining surface and disappeared through the square hole in the floor. "We'll clean up now," Kramer said as he placed the instruments in the autoclave, closed the door and locked it, and pressed three buttons on the console.

From jets embedded in the walls a fine spray filled the room with fog.

"Germicide," Kramer said. "Later there'll be steam. That's all for now. Do you want to go?"

Mary nodded.

"If you feel a little rocky there's a bottle of Scotch in my desk. I'll split a drink with you when we get out of here."

"Thanks," Mary said. "I think I could use one."

* * * * *

"Barton! Where is the MacNeal stain!" Kramer's voice came from the lab. "I left it on the sink and it's gone!"

"It's with the other blood stains and reagents. Second drawer from the right in the big cabinet. There's a label on the drawer," Mary called from the office. "If you can wait until I finish filing these papers, I'll come in and help you."

"I wish you would," Kramer's voice was faintly exasperated. "Ever since you've organized my lab I can't find anything."

"You just have a disorderly mind," Mary said, as she slipped the last paper into its proper folder and closed the file. "I'll be with you in a minute."

"I don't dare lose you," Kramer said as Mary came into the lab. "You've made yourself indispensable. It'd take me six months to undo what you've done in one. Not that I mind," he amended, "but I was used to things the way they were." He looked around the orderly laboratory with a mixture of pride and annoyance. "Things are so neat they're almost painful."

"You look more like a pathologist should," Mary said as she deftly removed the tray of blood slides from in front of him and began to run the stains. "It's my job to keep you free to think."

"Whose brilliant idea is that? Yours?"

"No--the Director's. He told me what my duties were when I came here. And I think he's right. You should be using your brain rather than fooling around with blood stains and sectioning tissues."

"But I like to do things like that," Kramer protested. "It's relaxing."

"What right have you to relax," Mary said. "Outside, people are dying by the thousands and you want to relax. Have you looked at the latest mortality reports?"

"No--"

"You should. The WHO estimates that nearly two billion people have died since Thurston's Disease first appeared in epidemic proportions. That's two out of three. And more are dying every day. Yet you want to relax."

"I know," Kramer said, "but what can we do about it. We're working but we're getting no results."

"You might use that brain of yours," Mary said bitterly. "You're supposed to be a scientist. You have facts. Can't you put them together?"

"I don't know." He shrugged, "I've been working on this problem longer than you think. I come down here at night--"

"I know. I clean up after you."

"I haven't gotten anywhere. Sure, we can isolate the virus. It grows nicely on monkey lung cells. But that doesn't help. The thing has no apparent antigenicity. It parasitizes, but it doesn't trigger any immune reaction. We can kill it, but the strength of the germicide is too great for living tissue to tolerate."

"Some people seem to be immune."

"Sure they do--but why?"

"Don't ask me. I'm not the scientist."

"Play like one," Kramer growled. "Here are the facts. The disease attacks people of all races and ages. So far every one who is attacked dies. Adult Europeans and Americans appear to be somewhat more resistant than others on a population basis. Somewhere around sixty per cent of them are still alive, but it's wiped out better than eighty per cent of some groups. Children get it worse. Right now I doubt if one per cent of the children born during the past ten years are still alive."

"It's awful!" Mary said.

"It's worse than that. It's extinction. Without kids the race will die out." Kramer rubbed his forehead.

"Have you any ideas?"

"Children have less resistance," Kramer replied. "An adult gets exposed to a number of diseases to which he builds an immunity. Possibly one of these has a cross immunity against Thurston's virus."

"Then why don't you work on that line?" Mary asked.

"Just what do you think I've been doing? That idea was put out months ago, and everyone has been taking a crack at it. There are twenty-four laboratories working full time on that facet and God knows how many more working part time like we are. I've screened a dozen common diseases, including the six varieties of the common cold virus. All, incidentally, were negative."

"Well--are you going to keep on with it?"

"I have to." Kramer rubbed his eyes. "It won't let me sleep. I'm sure we're on the right track. Something an adult gets gives him resistance or immunity." He shrugged. "Tell you what. You run those bloods out and I'll go take another look at the data." He reached into his lab coat and produced a pipe. "I'll give it another try."

"Sometimes I wish you'd read without puffing on that thing," Mary said.

"Your delicate nose will be the death of me yet--" Kramer said.

"It's my lungs I'm worried about," Mary said. "They'll probably look like two pieces of well-tanned leather if I associate with you for another year."

"Stop complaining. You've gotten me to wear clean lab coats. Be satisfied with a limited victory," Kramer said absently, his eyes staring unseeingly at a row of reagent bottles on the bench. Abruptly he nodded. "Fantastic," he muttered, "but it's worth a check." He left the room, slamming the door behind him in his hurry.

* * * * *

"That man!" Mary murmured. "He'd drive a saint out of his mind. If I wasn't so fond of him I'd quit. If anyone told me I'd fall in love with a pathologist, I'd have said they were crazy. I wish--" Whatever the wish was, it wasn't uttered. Mary gasped and coughed rackingly. Carefully she moved back from the bench, opened a drawer and found a thermometer. She put it in her mouth. Then she drew a drop of blood from her forefinger and filled a red and white cell pipette, and made a smear of the remainder.

She was interrupted by another spasm of coughing, but she waited until the paroxysm passed and went methodically back to her self-appointed task. She had done this many times before. It was routine procedure to check on anything that might be Thurston's Disease. A cold, a sore throat, a slight difficulty in breathing--all demanded the diagnostic check. It was as much a habit as breathing. This was probably the result of that cold she'd gotten last week, but there was nothing like being sure. Now let's see--temperature 99.5 degrees, red cell count 4-1/2 million. White cell count ... oh! 2500 ... leukopenia! The differential showed a virtual absence of polymorphs, lymphocytes and monocytes. The whole slide didn't have two hundred. Eosinophils and basophils way up--twenty and fifteen per cent respectively--a relative rise rather than an absolute one--leukopenia, no doubt about it.

She shrugged. There wasn't much question. She had Thurston's Disease. It was the beginning stages, the harsh cough, the slight temperature, the leukopenia. Pretty soon her white cell count would begin to rise, but it would rise too late. In fact, it was already too late. It's funny, she thought. I'm going to die, but it doesn't frighten me. In fact, the only thing that bothers me is that poor Walter is going to have a terrible time finding things. But I can't put this place the way it was. I couldn't hope to.

She shook her head, slid gingerly off the lab stool and went to the hall door. She'd better check in at the clinic, she thought. There was bed space in the hospital now. Plenty of it. That hadn't been true a few months ago but the only ones who were dying now were the newborn and an occasional adult like herself. The epidemic had died out not because of lack of virulence but because of lack of victims. The city outside, one of the first affected, now had less than forty per cent of its people left alive. It was a hollow shell of its former self. People walked its streets and went through the motions of life. But they were not really alive. The vital criteria were as necessary for a race as for an individual. Growth, reproduction, irritability, metabolism--Mary smiled wryly. Whoever had authored that hackneyed mnemonic that life was a "grim" proposition never knew how right he was, particularly when one of the criteria was missing.

The race couldn't reproduce. That was the true horror of Thurston's Disease--not how it killed, but who it killed. No children played in the parks and playgrounds. The schools were empty. No babies were pushed in carriages or taken on tours through the supermarkets in shopping carts. No advertisements of motherhood, or children, or children's things were in the newspapers or magazines. They were forbidden subjects--too dangerously emotional to touch. Laughter and shrill young voices had vanished from the earth to be replaced by the drab grayness of silence and waiting. Death had laid cold hands upon the hearts of mankind and the survivors were frozen to numbness.

* * * * *

It was odd, she thought, how wrong the prophets were. When Thurston's Disease broke into the news there were frightened predictions of the end of civilization. But they had not materialized. There were no mass insurrections, no rioting, no organized violence. Individual excesses, yes--but nothing of a group nature. What little panic there was at the beginning disappeared once people realized that there was no place to go. And a grim passivity had settled upon the survivors. Civilization did not break down. It endured. The mechanics remained intact. People had to do something even if it was only routine counterfeit of normal life--the stiff upper lip in the face of disaster.

It would have been far more odd, Mary decided, if mankind had given way to panic. Humanity had survived other plagues nearly as terrible as this--and racial memory is long. The same grim patience of the past was here in the present. Man would somehow survive, and civilization go on.

It was inconceivable that mankind would become extinct. The whole vast resources and pooled intelligence of surviving humanity were focused upon Thurston's Disease. And the disease would yield. Humanity waited with childlike confidence for the miracle that would save it. And the miracle would happen, Mary knew it with a calm certainty as she stood in the cross corridor at the end of the hall, looking down the thirty yards of tile that separated her from the elevator that would carry her up to the clinic and oblivion. It might be too late for her, but not for the race. Nature had tried unaided to destroy man before--and had failed. And her unholy alliance with man's genius would also fail.

She wondered as she walked down the corridor if the others who had sickened and died felt as she did. She speculated with grim amusement whether Walter Kramer would be as impersonal as he was with the others, when he performed the post-mortem on her body. She shivered at the thought of that bare sterile room and the shining table. Death was not a pretty thing. But she could meet it with resignation if not with courage. She had already seen too much for it to have any meaning. She did not falter as she placed a finger on the elevator button.

Poor Walter--she sighed. Sometimes it was harder to be among the living. It was good that she didn't let him know how she felt. She had sensed a change in him recently. His friendly impersonality had become merely friendly. It could, with a little encouragement, have developed into something else. But it wouldn't now. She sighed again. His hardness had been a tower of strength. And his bitter gallows humor had furnished a wry relief to grim reality. It had been nice to work with him. She wondered if he would miss her. Her lips curled in a faint smile. He would, if only for the trouble he would have in making chaos out of the order she had created. Why couldn't that elevator hurry?

* * * * *

"Mary! Where are you going?" Kramer's voice was in her ears, and his hand was on her shoulder.

"Don't touch me!"

"Why not?" His voice was curiously different. Younger, excited.

"I have Thurston's Disease," she said.

He didn't let go. "Are you sure?"

"The presumptive tests were positive."

"Initial stages?"

She nodded. "I had the first coughing attack a few minutes ago."

He pulled her away from the elevator door that suddenly slid open. "You were going to that death trap upstairs," he said.

"Where else can I go?"

"With me," he said. "I think I can help you."

"How? Have you found a cure for the virus?"

"I think so. At least it's a better possibility than the things they're using up there." His voice was urgent. "And to think I might never have seen it if you hadn't put me on the track."

"Are you sure you're right?"

"Not absolutely, but the facts fit. The theory's good."

"Then I'm going to the clinic. I can't risk infecting you. I'm a carrier now. I can kill you, and you're too important to die."

"You don't know how wrong you are," Kramer said.

"Let go of me!"

"No--you're coming back!"

She twisted in his grasp. "Let me go!" she sobbed and broke into a fit of coughing worse than before.

"What I was trying to say," Dr. Kramer said into the silence that followed, "is that if you have Thurston's Disease, you've been a carrier for at least two weeks. If I am going to get it, your going away can't help. And if I'm not, I'm not."

"Do you come willingly or shall I knock you unconscious and drag you back?" Kramer asked.

She looked at his face. It was grimmer than she had ever seen it before. Numbly she let him lead her back to the laboratory.

* * * * *

"But, Walter--I can't. That's sixty in the past ten hours!" she protested.

"Take it," he said grimly, "then take another. And inhale. Deeply."

"But they make me dizzy."

"Better dizzy than dead. And, by the way--how's your chest?"

"Better. There's no pain now. But the cough is worse."

"It should be."

"Why?"

"You've never smoked enough to get a cigarette cough," he said.

She shook her head dizzily. "You're so right," she said.

"And that's what nearly killed you," he finished triumphantly.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm certain. Naturally, I can't prove it--yet. But that's just a matter of time. Your response just about clinches it. Take a look at the records. Who gets this disease? Youngsters--with nearly one hundred per cent morbidity and one hundred per cent mortality. Adults--less than fifty per cent morbidity--and again one hundred per cent mortality. What makes the other fifty per cent immune? Your crack about leather lungs started me thinking--so I fed the data cards into the computer and keyed them for smoking versus incidence. And I found that not one heavy smoker had died of Thurston's Disease. Light smokers and nonsmokers--plenty of them--but not one single nicotine addict. And there were over ten thousand randomized cards in that spot check. And there's the exact reverse of that classic experiment the lung cancer boys used to sell their case. Among certain religious groups which prohibit smoking there was nearly one hundred per cent mortality of all ages!

"And so I thought since the disease was just starting in you, perhaps I could stop it if I loaded you with tobacco smoke. And it works!"

"You're not certain yet," Mary said. "I might not have had the disease."

"You had the symptoms. And there's virus in your sputum."

"Yes, but--"

"But, nothing! I've passed the word--and the boys in the other labs figure that there's merit in it. We're going to call it Barton's Therapy in your honor. It's going to cause a minor social revolution. A lot of laws are going to have to be rewritten. I can see where it's going to be illegal for children not to smoke. Funny, isn't it?

"I've contacted the maternity ward. They have three babies still alive upstairs. We get all the newborn in this town, or didn't you know. Funny, isn't it, how we still try to reproduce. They're rigging a smoke chamber for the kids. The head nurse is screaming like a wounded tiger, but she'll feel better with live babies to care for. The only bad thing I can see is that it may cut down on her chain smoking. She's been worried a lot about infant mortality.

"And speaking of nurseries--that reminds me. I wanted to ask you something."

"Yes?"

"Will you marry me? I've wanted to ask you before, but I didn't dare. Now I think you owe me something--your life. And I'd like to take care of it from now on."

"Of course I will," Mary said. "And I have reasons, too. If I marry you, you can't possibly do that silly thing you plan."

"What thing?"

"Naming the treatment Barton's. It'll have to be Kramer's."

 

 

---

Contents

REMEMBER THE ALAMO!

 

By T. R. FEHRENBACH

THIS IS, I THINK, ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL COMMENTS ON THE MODERN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY I HAVE SEEN—A REALLY BLOOD-CHILLING LITTLE TALE....

Toward sundown, in the murky drizzle, the man who called himself Ord brought Lieutenant colonel William Barrett Travis word that the Mexican light cavalry had completely invested Bexar, and that some light guns were being set up across the San Antonio River. Even as he spoke, there was a flash and bang from the west, and a shell screamed over the old mission walls. Travis looked worried.

"What kind of guns?" he asked.

"Nothing to worry about, sir," Ord said. "Only a few one-pounders, nothing of respectable siege caliber. General Santa Anna has had to move too fast for any big stuff to keep up." Ord spoke in his odd accent. After all, he was a Britainer, or some other kind of foreigner. But he spoke good Spanish, and he seemed to know everything. In the four or five days since he had appeared he had become very useful to Travis.

Frowning, Travis asked, "How many Mexicans, do you think, Ord?"

"Not more than a thousand, now," the dark-haired, blue-eyed young man said confidently. "But when the main body arrives, there'll be four, five thousand."

Travis shook his head. "How do you get all this information, Ord? You recite it like you had read it all some place—like it were history."

Ord merely smiled. "Oh, I don't know everything, colonel. That is why I had to come here. There is so much we don't know about what happened.... I mean, sir, what will happen—in the Alamo." His sharp eyes grew puzzled for an instant. "And some things don't seem to match up, somehow—"

Travis looked at him sympathetically. Ord talked queerly at times, and Travis suspected he was a bit deranged. This was understandable, for the man was undoubtedly a Britainer aristocrat, a refugee from Napoleon's thousand-year Empire. Travis had heard about the detention camps and the charcoal ovens ... but once, when he had mentioned the Empereur's sack of London in '06, Ord had gotten a very queer look in his eyes, as if he had forgotten completely.

But John Ord, or whatever his name was, seemed to be the only man in the Texas forces who understood what William Barrett Travis was trying to do. Now Travis looked around at the thick adobe wall surrounding the old mission in which they stood. In the cold, yellowish twilight even the flaring cook fires of his hundred and eighty-two men could not dispel the ghostly air that clung to the old place. Travis shivered involuntarily. But the walls were thick, and they could turn one-pounders. He asked, "What was it you called this place, Ord ... the Mexican name?"

"The Alamo, sir." A slow, steady excitement seemed to burn in the Britainer's bright eyes. "Santa Anna won't forget that name, you can be sure. You'll want to talk to the other officers now, sir? About the message we drew up for Sam Houston?"

"Yes, of course," Travis said absently. He watched Ord head for the walls. No doubt about it, Ord understood what William Barrett Travis was trying to do here. So few of the others seemed to care.

Travis was suddenly very glad that John Ord had shown up when he did.

On the walls, Ord found the man he sought, broad-shouldered and tall in a fancy Mexican jacket. "The commandant's compliments, sir, and he desires your presence in the chapel."

The big man put away the knife with which he had been whittling. The switchblade snicked back and disappeared into a side pocket of the jacket, while Ord watched it with fascinated eyes. "What's old Bill got his britches hot about this time?" the big man asked.

"I wouldn't know, sir," Ord said stiffly and moved on.

Bang-bang-bang roared the small Mexican cannon from across the river. Pow-pow-pow! The little balls only chipped dust from the thick adobe walls. Ord smiled.

He found the second man he sought, a lean man with a weathered face, leaning against a wall and chewing tobacco. This man wore a long, fringed, leather lounge jacket, and he carried a guitar slung beside his Rock Island rifle. He squinted up at Ord. "I know ... I know," he muttered. "Willy Travis is in an uproar again. You reckon that colonel's commission that Congress up in Washington-on-the-Brazos give him swelled his head?"

Rather stiffly, Ord said, "Colonel, the commandant desires an officers' conference in the chapel, now." Ord was somewhat annoyed. He had not realized he would find these Americans so—distasteful. Hardly preferable to Mexicans, really. Not at all as he had imagined.

For an instant he wished he had chosen Drake and the Armada instead of this pack of ruffians—but no, he had never been able to stand sea sickness. He couldn't have taken the Channel, not even for five minutes.

And there was no changing now. He had chosen this place and time carefully, at great expense—actually, at great risk, for the X-4-A had aborted twice, and he had had a hard time bringing her in. But it had got him here at last. And, because for a historian he had always been an impetuous and daring man, he grinned now, thinking of the glory that was to come. And he was a participant—much better than a ringside seat! Only he would have to be careful, at the last, to slip away.

John Ord knew very well how this coming battle had ended, back here in 1836.

He marched back to William Barrett Travis, clicked heels smartly. Travis' eyes glowed; he was the only senior officer here who loved military punctilio. "Sir, they are on the way."

"Thank you, Ord," Travis hesitated a moment. "Look, Ord. There will be a battle, as we know. I know so little about you. If something should happen to you, is there anyone to write? Across the water?"

Ord grinned. "No, sir. I'm afraid my ancestor wouldn't understand."

Travis shrugged. Who was he to say that Ord was crazy? In this day and age, any man with vision was looked on as mad. Sometimes he felt closer to Ord than to the others.

The two officers Ord had summoned entered the chapel. The big man in the Mexican jacket tried to dominate the wood table at which they sat. He towered over the slender, nervous Travis, but the commandant, straight-backed and arrogant, did not give an inch. "Boys, you know Santa Anna has invested us. We've been fired on all day—" He seemed to be listening for something. Wham! Outside, a cannon split the dusk with flame and sound as it fired from the walls. "There is my answer!"

The man in the lounge coat shrugged. "What I want to know is what our orders are. What does old Sam say? Sam and me were in Congress once. Sam's got good sense; he can smell the way the wind's blowin'." He stopped speaking and hit his guitar a few licks. He winked across the table at the officer in the Mexican jacket who took out his knife. "Eh, Jim?"

"Right," Jim said. "Sam's a good man, although I don't think he ever met a payroll."

"General Houston's leaving it up to me," Travis told them.

"Well, that's that," Jim said unhappily. "So what you figurin' to do, Bill?"

Travis stood up in the weak, flickering candlelight, one hand on the polished hilt of his saber. The other two men winced, watching him. "Gentlemen, Houston's trying to pull his militia together while he falls back. You know, Texas was woefully unprepared for a contest at arms. The general's idea is to draw Santa Anna as far into Texas as he can, then hit him when he's extended, at the right place, and right time. But Houston needs more time—Santa Anna's moved faster than any of us anticipated. Unless we can stop the Mexican Army and take a little steam out of them, General Houston's in trouble."

Jim flicked the knife blade in and out. "Go on."

"This is where we come in, gentlemen. Santa Anna can't leave a force of one hundred eighty men in his rear. If we hold fast, he must attack us. But he has no siege equipment, not even large field cannon." Travis' eye gleamed. "Think of it, boys! He'll have to mount a frontal attack, against protected American riflemen. Ord, couldn't your Englishers tell him a few things about that!"

"Whoa, now," Jim barked. "Billy, anybody tell you there's maybe four or five thousand Mexicaners comin'?"

"Let them come. Less will leave!"

But Jim, sour-faced turned to the other man. "Davey? You got something to say?"

"Hell, yes. How do we get out, after we done pinned Santa Anna down? You thought of that, Billy boy?"

Travis shrugged. "There is an element of grave risk, of course. Ord, where's the document, the message you wrote up for me? Ah, thank you." Travis cleared his throat. "Here's what I'm sending on to general Houston." He read, "Commandancy of the Alamo, February 24, 1836 ... are you sure of that date, Ord?"

"Oh, I'm sure of that," Ord said.

"Never mind—if you're wrong we can change it later. 'To the People of Texas and all Americans in the World. Fellow Freemen and Compatriots! I am besieged with a thousand or more Mexicans under Santa Anna. I have sustained a continual bombardment for many hours but have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison is to be put to the sword, if taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly over the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character—" He paused, frowning, "This language seems pretty old-fashioned, Ord—"

"Oh, no, sir. That's exactly right," Ord murmured.

"'... To come to our aid with all dispatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due his honor or that of his homeland. VICTORY OR DEATH!'"

Travis stopped reading, looked up. "Wonderful! Wonderful!" Ord breathed. "The greatest words of defiance ever written in the English tongue—and so much more literate than that chap at Bascogne."

"You mean to send that?" Jim gasped.

The man called Davey was holding his head in his hands.

"You object, Colonel Bowie?" Travis asked icily.

"Oh, cut that 'colonel' stuff, Bill," Bowie said. "It's only a National Guard title, and I like 'Jim' better, even though I am a pretty important man. Damn right I have an objection! Why, that message is almost aggressive. You'd think we wanted to fight Santa Anna! You want us to be marked down as warmongers? It'll give us trouble when we get to the negotiation table—"

Travis' head turned. "Colonel Crockett?"

"What Jim says goes for me, too. And this: I'd change that part about all Americans, et cetera. You don't want anybody to think we think we're better than the Mexicans. After all, Americans are a minority in the world. Why not make it 'all men who love security?' That'd have world-wide appeal—"

"Oh, Crockett," Travis hissed.

Crockett stood up. "Don't use that tone of voice to me, Billy Travis! That piece of paper you got don't make you no better'n us. I ran for Congress twice, and won. I know what the people want—"

"What the people want doesn't mean a damn right now," Travis said harshly. "Don't you realize the tyrant is at the gates?"

Crockett rolled his eyes heavenward. "Never thought I'd hear a good American say that! Billy, you'll never run for office—"

Bowie held up a hand, cutting into Crockett's talk. "All right, Davey. Hold up. You ain't runnin' for Congress now. Bill, the main thing I don't like in your whole message is that part about victory or death. That's got to go. Don't ask us to sell that to the troops!"

Travis closed his eyes briefly. "Boys, listen. We don't have to tell the men about this. They don't need to know the real story until it's too late for them to get out. And then we shall cover ourselves with such glory that none of us shall ever be forgotten. Americans are the best fighters in the world when they are trapped. They teach this in the Foot School back on the Chatahoochee. And if we die, to die for one's country is sweet—"

"Hell with that," Crockett drawled. "I don't mind dyin', but not for these big landowners like Jim Bowie here. I just been thinkin'—I don't own nothing in Texas."

"I resent that," Bowie shouted. "You know very well I volunteered, after I sent my wife off to Acapulco to be with her family." With an effort, he calmed himself. "Look, Travis. I have some reputation as a fighting man—you know I lived through the gang wars back home. It's obvious this Alamo place is indefensible, even if we had a thousand men."

"But we must delay Santa Anna at all costs—"

Bowie took out a fine, dark Mexican cigar and whittled at it with his blade. Then he lit it, saying around it, "All right, let's all calm down. Nothing a group of good men can't settle around a table. Now listen. I got in with this revolution at first because I thought old Emperor Iturbide would listen to reason and lower taxes. But nothin's worked out, because hot-heads like you, Travis, queered the deal. All this yammerin' about liberty! Mexico is a Republic, under an Emperor, not some kind of democracy, and we can't change that. Let's talk some sense before it's too late. We're all too old and too smart to be wavin' the flag like it's the Fourth of July. Sooner or later, we're goin' to have to sit down and talk with the Mexicans. And like Davey said, I own a million hectares, and I've always paid minimum wage, and my wife's folks are way up there in the Imperial Government of the Republic of Mexico. That means I got influence in all the votin' groups, includin' the American Immigrant, since I'm a minority group member myself. I think I can talk to Santa Anna, and even to old Iturbide. If we sign a treaty now with Santa Anna, acknowledge the law of the land, I think our lives and property rights will be respected—" He cocked an eye toward Crockett.

"Makes sense, Jim. That's the way we do it in Congress. Compromise, everybody happy. We never allowed ourselves to be led nowhere we didn't want to go, I can tell you! And Bill, you got to admit that we're in better bargaining position if we're out in the open, than if old Santa Anna's got us penned up in this old Alamo."

"Ord," Travis said despairingly. "Ord, you understand. Help me! Make them listen!"

Ord moved into the candlelight, his lean face sweating. "Gentlemen, this is all wrong! It doesn't happen this way—"

Crockett sneered, "Who asked you, Ord? I'll bet you ain't even got a poll tax!"

Decisively, Bowie said, "We're free men, Travis, and we won't be led around like cattle. How about it, Davey? Think you could handle the rear guard, if we try to move out of here?"

"Hell, yes! Just so we're movin'!"

"O.K. Put it to a vote of the men outside. Do we stay, and maybe get croaked, or do we fall back and conserve our strength until we need it? Take care of it, eh, Davey?"

Crockett picked up his guitar and went outside.

Travis roared, "This is insubordination! Treason!" He drew his saber, but Bowie took it from him and broke it in two. Then the big man pulled his knife.

"Stay back, Ord. The Alamo isn't worth the bones of a Britainer, either."

"Colonel Bowie, please," Ord cried. "You don't understand! You must defend the Alamo! This is the turning point in the winning of the west! If Houston is beaten, Texas will never join the Union! There will be no Mexican War. No California, no nation stretching from sea to shining sea! This is the Americans' manifest destiny. You are the hope of the future ... you will save the world from Hitler, from Bolshevism"

"Crazy as a hoot owl," Bowie said sadly. "Ord, you and Travis got to look at it both ways. We ain't all in the right in this war—we Americans got our faults, too."

"But you are free men," Ord whispered. "Vulgar, opinionated, brutal—but free! You are still better than any breed who kneels to tyranny—"

Crockett came in. "O.K., Jim."

"How'd it go?"

"Fifty-one per cent for hightailin' it right now."

Bowie smiled. "That's a flat majority. Let's make tracks."

"Comin', Bill?" Crockett asked. "You're O.K., but you just don't know how to be one of the boys. You got to learn that no dog is better'n any other."

"No," Travis croaked hoarsely. "I stay. Stay or go, we shall all die like dogs, anyway. Boys, for the last time! Don't reveal our weakness to the enemy—"

"What weakness? We're stronger than them. Americans could whip the Mexicans any day, if we wanted to. But the thing to do is make 'em talk, not fight. So long, Bill."

The two big men stepped outside. In the night there was a sudden clatter of hoofs as the Texans mounted and rode. From across the river came a brief spatter of musket fire, then silence. In the dark, there had been no difficulty in breaking through the Mexican lines.

Inside the chapel, John Ord's mouth hung slackly. He muttered, "Am I insane? It didn't happen this way—it couldn't! The books can't be that wrong—"

In the candlelight, Travis hung his head. "We tried, John. Perhaps it was a forlorn hope at best. Even if we had defeated Santa Anna, or delayed him, I do not think the Indian Nations would have let Houston get help from the United States."

Ord continued his dazed muttering, hardly hearing.

"We need a contiguous frontier with Texas," Travis continued slowly, just above a whisper. "But we Americans have never broken a treaty with the Indians, and pray God we never shall. We aren't like the Mexicans, always pushing, always grabbing off New Mexico, Arizona, California. We aren't colonial oppressors, thank God! No, it wouldn't have worked out, even if we American immigrants had secured our rights in Texas—" He lifted a short, heavy, percussion pistol in his hand and cocked it. "I hate to say it, but perhaps if we hadn't taken Payne and Jefferson so seriously—if we could only have paid lip service, and done what we really wanted to do, in our hearts ... no matter. I won't live to see our final disgrace."

He put the pistol to his head and blew out his brains.

Ord was still gibbering when the Mexican cavalry stormed into the old mission, pulling down the flag and seizing him, dragging him before the resplendent little general in green and gold.

Since he was the only prisoner, Santa Anna questioned Ord carefully. When the sharp point of a bayonet had been thrust half an inch into his stomach, the Britainer seemed to come around. When he started speaking, and the Mexicans realized he was English, it went better with him. Ord was obviously mad, it seemed to Santa Anna, but since he spoke English and seemed educated, he could be useful. Santa Anna didn't mind the raving; he understood all about Napoleon's detention camps and what they had done to Britainers over there. In fact, Santa Anna was thinking of setting up a couple of those camps himself. When they had milked Ord dry, they threw him on a horse and took him along.

Thus John Ord had an excellent view of the battlefield when Santa Anna's cannon broke the American lines south of the Trinity. Unable to get his men across to safety, Sam Houston died leading the last, desperate charge against the Mexican regulars. After that, the American survivors were too tired to run from the cavalry that pinned them against the flooding river. Most of them died there. Santa Anna expressed complete indifference to what happened to the Texans' women and children.

Mexican soldiers found Jim Bowie hiding in a hut, wearing a plain linen tunic and pretending to be a civilian. They would not have discovered his identity had not some of the Texan women cried out, "Colonel Bowie—Colonel Bowie!" as he was led into the Mexican camp.

He was hauled before Santa Anna, and Ord was summoned to watch. "Well, don Jaime," Santa Anna remarked, "You have been a foolish man. I promised your wife's uncle to send you to Acapulco safely, though of course your lands are forfeit. You understand we must have lands for the veterans' program when this campaign is over—" Santa Anna smiled then. "Besides, since Ord here has told me how instrumental you were in the abandonment of the Alamo, I think the Emperor will agree to mercy in your case. You know, don Jaime, your compatriots had me worried back there. The Alamo might have been a tough nut to crack ... pues, no matter."

And since Santa Anna had always been broadminded, not objecting to light skin or immigrant background, he invited Bowie to dinner that night.

Santa Anna turned to Ord. "But if we could catch this rascally war criminal, Crockett ... however, I fear he has escaped us. He slipped over the river with a fake passport, and the Indians have interned him."

"Sí, Señor Presidente," Ord said dully.

"Please, don't call me that," Santa Anna cried, looking around. "True, many of us officers have political ambitions, but Emperor Iturbide is old and vain. It could mean my head—"

Suddenly, Ord's head was erect, and the old, clear light was in his blue eyes. "Now I understand!" he shouted. "I thought Travis was raving back there, before he shot himself—and your talk of the Emperor! American respect for Indian rights! Jeffersonian form of government! Oh, those ponces who peddled me that X-4-A—the track jumper! I'm not back in my own past. I've jumped the time track—I'm back in a screaming alternate!"

"Please, not so loud, Señor Ord," Santa Anna sighed. "Now, we must shoot a few more American officers, of course. I regret this, you understand, and I shall no doubt be much criticized in French Canada and Russia, where there are still civilized values. But we must establish the Republic of the Empire once and for all upon this continent, that aristocratic tyranny shall not perish from the earth. Of course, as an Englishman, you understand perfectly, Señor Ord."

"Of course, excellency," Ord said.

"There are soft hearts—soft heads, I say—in Mexico who cry for civil rights for the Americans. But I must make sure that Mexican dominance is never again threatened north of the Rio Grande."

"Seguro, excellency," Ord said, suddenly. If the bloody X-4-A had jumped the track, there was no getting back, none at all. He was stuck here. Ord's blue eyes narrowed. "After all, it ... it is manifest destiny that the Latin peoples of North America meet at the center of the continent. Canada and Mexico shall share the Mississippi."

Santa Anna's dark eyes glowed. "You say what I have often thought. You are a man of vision, and much sense. You realize the Indios must go, whether they were here first or not. I think I will make you my secretary, with the rank of captain."

"Gracias, Excellency."

"Now, let us write my communique to the capital, Capitán Ord. We must describe how the American abandonment of the Alamo allowed me to press the traitor Houston so closely he had no chance to maneuver his men into the trap he sought. Ay, Capitán, it is a cardinal principle of the Anglo-Saxons, to get themselves into a trap from which they must fight their way out. This I never let them do, which is why I succeed where others fail ... you said something, Capitán?"

"Sí, Excellency. I said, I shall title our communique: 'Remember the Alamo,'" Ord said, standing at attention.

"Bueno! You have a gift for words. Indeed, if ever we feel the gringos are too much for us, your words shall once again remind us of the truth!" Santa Anna smiled. "I think I shall make you a major. You have indeed coined a phrase which shall live in history forever!"