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Contents

THE WAR OF THE WENUSES

by C. L. GRAVES AND E. V. LUCAS

 

BOOK I.

The Coming of the Wenuses.

I.

"JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE, MOTHER."

No one would have believed in the first years of the twentieth century that men and modistes on this planet were being watched by intelligences greater than woman's and yet as ambitious as her own. With infinite complacency maids and matrons went to and fro over London, serene in the assurance of their empire over man. It is possible that the mysticetus does the same. Not one of them gave a thought to Wenus as a source of danger, or thought of it only to dismiss the idea of active rivalry upon it as impossible or improbable. Yet across the gulf of space astral women, with eyes that are to the eyes of English women as diamonds are to boot-buttons, astral women, with hearts vast and warm and sympathetic, were regarding Butterick's with envy, Peter Robinson's with jealousy, and Whiteley's with insatiable yearning, and slowly and surely maturing their plans for a grand inter-stellar campaign.

The pale pink planet Wenus, as I need hardly inform the sober reader, revolves round the sun at a mean distance of [character: Venus sigil] vermillion miles. More than that, as has been proved by the recent observations of Puits of Paris, its orbit is steadily but surely advancing sunward. That is to say, it is rapidly becoming too hot for clothes to be worn at all; and this, to the Wenuses, was so alarming a prospect that the immediate problem of life became the discovery of new quarters notable for a gentler climate and more copious fashions. The last stage of struggle-for-dress, which is to us still remote, had embellished their charms, heightened their heels and enlarged their hearts. Moreover, the population of Wenus consisted exclusively of Invisible Men--and the Wenuses were about tired of it. Let us, however, not judge them too harshly. Remember what ruthless havoc our own species has wrought, not only on animals such as the Moa and the Maori, but upon its own inferior races such as the Wanishing Lady and the Dodo Bensonii.

The Wenuses seem to have calculated their descent with quite un-feminine accuracy. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have witnessed their preparations. Similarly pigs, had they wings, might fly. Men like Quellen of Dresden watched the pale pink planet--it is odd, by the way, that for countless centuries Wenus has been the star of Eve--evening by evening growing alternately paler and pinker than a literary agent, but failed to interpret the extraordinary phenomena, resembling a series of powder puffs, which he observed issuing from the cardiac penumbra on the night of April 1st, 1902. At the same time a great light was remarked by Idos of Yokohama and Pegadiadis of Athens.

The storm burst upon us six weeks later, about the time of the summer sales. As Wenus approached opposition, Dr. Jelli of Guava set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the intelligence of a huge explosion of laughing gas moving risibly towards the earth. He compared it to a colossal cosmic cachinnation. And, in the light of subsequent events, the justice of the comparison will commend itself to all but the most sober readers.

Had it not been for my chance meeting with Swears, the eminent astronomer and objurgationist, this book would never have been written. He asked me down to our basement, which he rents from me as an observatory, and in spite of all that has happened since I still remember our wigil very distinctly. (I spell it with a "w" from an inordinate affection for that letter.) Swears moved about, invisible but painfully audible to my naked ear. The night was very warm, and I was very thirsty. As I gazed through the syphon, the little star seemed alternately to expand and contract, and finally to assume a sort of dual skirt, but that was simply because my eye was tired. I remember how I sat under the table with patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes. Grotesque and foolish as this may seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true.

Swears watched till one, and then he gave it up. He was full of speculations about the condition of Wenus. Swears' language was extremely sultry.

"The chances against anything lady-like on Wenus," he said, "are a million to one."

Even Pearson's Weekly woke up to the disturbance at last, and Mrs. Lynn Linton contributed an article entitled "What Women Might Do" to the Queen. A paper called Punch, if I remember the name aright, made a pun on the subject, which was partially intelligible with the aid of italics and the laryngoscope. For my own part, I was too much occupied in teaching my wife to ride a Bantam, and too busy upon a series of papers in Nature on the turpitude of the classical professoriate of the University of London, to give my undivided attention to the impending disaster. I cannot divide things easily; I am an indivisible man. But one night I went for a bicycle ride with my wife. She was a Bantam of delight, I can tell you, but she rode very badly. It was starlight, and I was attempting to explain the joke in the paper called, if I recollect aright, Punch. It was an extraordinarily sultry night, and I told her the names of all the stars she saw as she fell off her machine. She had a good bulk of falls. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true. Coming home, a party of bean-feasters from Wimbledon, Wormwood Scrubs, or Woking passed us, singing and playing concertinas. It all seemed so safe and tranquil. But the Wenuses were even then on their milky way.

II.

THE FALLING STAR.

Then came the night of the first star. It was seen early in the morning rushing over Winchester; leaving a gentle frou-frou behind it. Trelawny, of the Wells' Observatory, the greatest authority on Meteoric Crinolines, watched it anxiously. Winymann, the publisher, who sprang to fame by the publication of The War of the Worlds, saw it from his office window, and at once telegraphed to me: "Materials for new book in the air." That was the first hint I received of the wonderful wisit.

I lived in those days at 181a Campden Hill Gardens. It is the house opposite the third lamp-post on the right as you walk east. It was of brick and slate, with a party-wall, and two spikes were wanting to the iron railings. When the telegram came I was sitting in my study writing a discussion on the atomic theory of Krelli of Balmoral. I at once changed the Woking jacket in which I was writing for evening dress--which wanted, I remember, a button--and hastened to the Park. I did not tell my wife anything about it. I did not care to have her with me. In all such adventures I find her more useful as a sentimental figure in the background--I, of course, allow no sentiment in the foreground--than an active participant.

On the way I met Swears, returning from breakfast with our mutual friend, Professor Heat Ray Lankester--they had had Lee-Metford sardines and Cairns marmalade, he told me,--and we sought the meteor together.

Find it we did in Kensington Gardens. An enormous dimple had been made by the impact of the projectile, which lay almost buried in the earth. Two or three trees, broken by its fall, sprawled on the turf. Among this débris was the missile; resembling nothing so much as a huge crinoline. At the moment we reached the spot P.C. A581 was ordering it off; and Henry Pearson, aged 28 (no fixed abode), and Martha Griffin, aged 54, of Maybury Tenements, were circulating among the crowd offering matches for sale. They have nothing to do with this story, but their names and addresses make for verisimilitude; or at least, I hope so. In case they do not, let me add that Mary Griffin wore a blue peignoir which had seen better days, and Herbert Pearson's matches struck everywhere except on the box.

With a mental flash we linked the Crinoline with the powder puffs on Wenus. Approaching it more nearly, we heard a hissing noise within, such as is made by an ostler, or Mr. Daimler grooming his motor car.

"Good heavens!" said Swears, "there's a horse in it. Can't you hear? He must be half-roasted."

So saying he rushed off, fraught with pity, to inform the Secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; while I hurried away to tell Pendriver the journalist, proposing in my own mind, I recollect, that he should give me half the profits on the article.

Pendriver the journalist, so called to distinguish him from Hoopdriver the cyclist, was working in his garden. He does the horticultural column for one of the large dailies.

"You've read about the disturbances in Venus?" I cried.

"What!" said Pendriver. He is as deaf as the Post, the paper he writes for.

"You've read about Venus?" I asked again.

"No," he said, "I've never been to Venice."

"Venus!" I bawled, "Venus!"

"Yes," said Pendriver, "Venus. What about it?"

"Why," I said, "there are people from Venus in Kensington Gardens."

"Venus in Kensington Gardens!" he replied. "No, it's not Venus; it's the Queen."

I began to get angry.

"Not the statue," I shouted. "Wisitors from Wenus. Make copy. Come and see! Copy! Copy!"

The word "copy" galvanised him, and he came, spade and all. We quickly crossed the Park once more. Pendriver lives to the west of it, in Strathmore Gardens, and has a special permit from his landlord to dig. We did not, for sufficient reasons, converse much. Many persons were now hastening towards the strange object. Among them I noticed Jubal Gregg the butcher (who fortunately did not observe me--we owed him a trifle of eighteen shillings, and had since taken to Canterbury lamb from the Colonial Meat Stores), and a jobbing gardener, whom I had not recently paid. I forget his name, but he was lame in the left leg: a ruddy man.

Quite a crowd surrounded the Crinoline when we arrived, and in addition to the match-vendors already mentioned, there was now Giuseppe Mandolini, from Leather Lane, with an accordion and a monkey. Monkeys are of course forbidden in Kensington Gardens, and how he eluded the police I cannot imagine. Most of the people were staring quietly at the Crinoline, totally unaware of its significance. Scientific knowledge has not progressed at Kensington by the same leaps and bounds as at Woking. Extra-terrestrial had less meaning for them than extra-special.

We found Swears hard at work keeping the crowd from touching the Crinoline. With him was a tall, red-haired man, who I afterwards learnt was Lee-Bigge, the Secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He had a summons and several officials with him, and was standing on the Crinoline, bellowing directions in a clear, rich voice, occasionally impeded by emotion, like an ox with a hiccough.

As soon as Swears saw me, he asked me to bring a policeman to assist him to keep back the crowd; and I went away, proud to be so honoured, to find one. I was unsuccessful. P.C. A581 had gone off duty; but another constable, I was told, had been seen, an hour or so earlier, asleep against the railings,--it was a baker's boy who told me, just back from delivering muffins in St. Mary Abbot's Terrace,--and had since wandered in the direction of the Albert Hall. I followed, but could not see him in any of the areas, and therefore returned slowly by way of Queen's Gate, Cromwell Road, Earl's Court Road, and Kensington High Street, hoping to meet another; and as it was then about noon, I entered an A.B.C. and had half a pork-pie and a bucket of Dr. Jaeger's Vi-cocolate. I remember the circumstance distinctly, because feeling rather hungry and wishing to vary the menu, I asked the girl for half a veal-and-ham pie and she brought me the balance of the original pasty; and when I remonstrated, she said that her directors recognised no essential difference between veal-and-ham and pork.

III.

THE CRINOLINE EXPANDS.

When I returned to the Gardens the sun was at his zenith. The crowd around the Crinoline had increased and some sort of a struggle seemed to be going on. As I drew near I heard Lee-Bigge's voice:

"Keep back! keep back!"

A boy came running towards me.

"It's a-movin'," he said to me as he passed; "a-blowin' and a-blowin' out. Now we shan't be long!" Passing on, I saw that it was indeed expanding. The ribs were more distended and the covering more tightly stretched. The hissing had ceased and a creaking noise had taken its place. There was evidently great pressure within. Once something resembling an en tout cas was thrust through the top, making what was presumably an attempt to dislodge Lee-Bigge, and then suddenly the Crinoline burst, revealing a wision of ultra-mundane loveliness.

I shall not attempt exhaustively to describe the indescribable. It is enough to assure the sober reader that, grotesque and foolish as it may seem, this is absolutely true, and to record that after the glimpse I had of the Wenuses emerging from the Crinoline in which they had come to the earth from their planet, a kind of fascination paralysed my actions. All other men in the crowd seemed to be similarly affected. We were battle-grounds of love and curiosity. For the Wenuses were gorgeous: that is the sum of the matter.

Those who have never seen a living Wenus (there is a specimen in fairly good spirits in the Natural History Museum) can scarcely imagine the strange beauty of their appearance. The peculiar W-shaped mouth, the incessant nictitation of the sinister eyelid, the naughty little twinkle in the eye itself, the glistening glory of the arms, each terminating in a fleshy digitated Handling Machine resembling more than anything else a Number 6 glove inflated with air (these members, by the way, have since been named rather aptly by that distinguished anatomist and original dog, Professor Howes, the hands)--all combined to produce an effect akin to stupefaction. I stood there ecstatic, unprogressive, immoderate; while swiftly and surely ungovernable affection for all Wenuses gripped me.

Meanwhile I heard inarticulate exclamations on all sides.

"Shameless hussies!" cried a woman near me.

"By Jove, that's something like!" said a young man who had been reading Captain Coe's finals, swinging round towards the Crinoline, with one foot arrested in mid-air.

My inclination when I recovered partial self-possession was to make instantly for the Crinoline and avow my devotion and allegiance, but at that moment I caught the eye of my wife, who had followed me to the Park, and I hastily turned my back on the centre of attraction. I saw, however, that Pendriver was using his spade to cleave his way to the Wenuses; and Swears was standing on the brink of the pit transfixed with adoration; while a young shopman from Woking, in town for the day, completely lost his head. It came bobbing over the grass to my very feet; but I remembered the experiences of Pollock and the Porroh man and let it go.

The news of our visitors seemed to have spread by some subtle magic, for in every direction I could see nothing but running men, some with women pulling at their sleeves and coat-tails to detain them, advancing by great strides towards us. Even a policeman was among them, rubbing his eyes. My wife broke through the crowd and grasped me firmly by the arm.

"Pozzy," she said, "this is my opportunity and I mean to use it. I was kept doing nothing between pages 68 and 296 of the other book, and this time I mean to work. Look at these fools rushing to their doom. In another moment they will be mashed, mashed to jelly; and you too, unless I prevent it. I know what these Wenuses are. Haven't I had a scientific training? You will be mashed, I tell you--mashed!"

So saying she banged on the ground with her umbrella, which, I remember now with sorrow, we had bought the week before at Derry and Toms' for five-and-eleven-three.

Meanwhile a few of the men had to some extent recovered, and headed by the R.S.P.C.A. Secretary had formed a deputation, and were busy talking on their fingers to the Wenuses. But the Wenuses were too much occupied in dropping into each other's eyes something from a bright flask, which I took to be Beggarstaffs' Elect Belladonna, to heed them.

I turned in response to a tug at my swallow-tails from my wife, and when I looked again a row of Wenuses with closed lids stood before the Crinoline. Suddenly they opened their eyes and flashed them on the men before them. The effect was instantaneous. The deputation, as the glance touched them, fell like skittles--viscous, protoplasmic masses, victims of the terrible Mash-Glance of the Wenuses.

I attributed my own escape to the prompt action of my wife, who stood before and shielded me, for upon women the Mash-Glance had no effect. The ray must have missed me only by a second, for my elbow which was not wholly covered by my wife's bulk was scorched, and my hat has never since recovered its pristine gloss. Turning, I saw a bus-driver in Knightsbridge leap up and explode, while his conductor clutched at the rail, missed it and fell overboard; farther still, on the distant horizon, the bricklayers on a gigantic scaffolding went off bang against the lemon-yellow of the sky as the glance reached them, and the Bachelors' Club at Albert Gate fell with a crash. All this had happened with such swiftness, that I was dumbfounded. Then, after a few moments, my wife slowly and reluctantly stepped aside and allowed me to survey the scene. The Wenuses, having scored their first victory, once more had retired into the recesses of the Crinoline. The ground for some distance was littered with the bodies of the mashed; I alone among men stood erect, my conscious companions being a sprinkling of women, pictures of ungovernable fury.

Yet my feeling was not one of joy at my escape. Strange mind of man!--instead, even with the Wenuses' victims lying all around me, my heart went out to the Crinoline and its astral occupants. I, too, wished to be mashed. And suddenly I was aware that my wife knew that I was thinking thus. With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through the Park.

IV.

HOW I REACHED HOME.

I remember nothing of my flight, except the stress of blundering against trees and stumbling over the railings. To blunder against some trees is very stressful. At last I could go no further: I had run full tilt into a gasworks. I fell and lay still.

I must have remained there some time.

Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came--Beer. It was being poured down my throat by my cousin's man, and I recollect thinking that he must have used the same can with which he filled the lamps. How he got there I cannot pretend to tell.

"What news from the park?" said I.

"Eh!" said my cousin's man.

"What news from the Park?" I said.

"Garn! 'oo yer getting at?" said my cousin's man. "Aint yer just been there?" (The italics are his own.) "People seem fair silly abart the Pawk. Wot's it all abart?"

"Haven't you heard of the Wenuses?" said I. "The women from Wenus?" "Quite enough," said my cousin's man, and laughed.

I felt foolish and angry.

"You'll hear more yet," I said, and went on my way.

Judging by the names of the streets, I seemed to be at Kennington, and it was an hour after dawn, and my collar had burst away from its stud. But I had ceased to feel fear. My terror had fallen from me like a bath towel. Three things struggled for the possession of my mind: the beauty of Kennington, the whereabouts of the Wenuses, and the wengeance of my wife. In spite of my cousin's man's beer, which I could still taste, I was ravenously hungry; so, seeing no one about, I broke into a chemist's shop and stayed the pangs on a cake of petroleum soap, some Parrish's food, and a box of menthol pastilles, which I washed down with a split ammoniated quinine and Condy. I then stole across the road, and dragging the cushions from a deserted cab (No. 8648) into the cab shelter, I snatched a few more hours of restless sleep.

When I woke I found myself thinking consecutively, a thing I do not remember to have done since I killed the curate in the other book. In the interim my mental condition had been chaotic, asymptotic. But during slumber my brain, incredible as it may seem, stimulated and clarified by the condiments of which I had partaken, had resumed its normal activity. I determined to go home.

Resolving at any cost to reach Campden Hill Gardens by a sufficiently circuitous route, I traversed Kennington Park Road, Newington Butts, Newington Causeway, Blackman Street, and the Borough High Street, to London Bridge. Crossing the bridge, I met a newspaper boy with a bundle of papers, still wet from the press. They were halfpenny copies of the Star, but he charged me a penny for mine. The imposition still rankles.

From it I learned that a huge cordon of police, which had been drawn round the Crinoline, had been mashed beyond recognition, and two regiments of Life Guards razed to the ground, by the devastating Glance of the Wenuses. I passed along King William Street and Prince's Street to Moorgate Street. Here I met another newspaper boy, carrying the Pall Mall Gazette. I handed him a threepenny bit; but though I waited for twenty minutes, he offered me no change. This will give some idea of the excitement then beginning to prevail. The Pall Mall had an article on the situation, which I read as I climbed the City Road to Islington. It stated that Mrs. Pozzuoli, my wife, had constituted herself Commander-in-Chief, and was busy marshalling her forces. I was relieved by the news, for it suggested that my wife was fully occupied. Already a good bulk of nursemaids and cooks, enraged at the destruction of the Scotland Yard and Knightsbridge heroes by the Wenuses' Mash-Glance, had joined her flag. It was, said the Pall Mall, high time that such an attack was undertaken, and since women had been proved to be immune to the Mash-Glance, it was clearly their business to undertake it.

Meanwhile, said the Pall Mall, nothing could check the folly of the men. Like moths to a candle, so were they hastening to Kensington Gardens, only to be added to the heap of mashed that already had accumulated there.

So far, the P.M.G. But my mother, who was in the thick of events at the time, has since given me fuller particulars. Notwithstanding, my mother tells me, the fate of their companions, the remainder of the constabulary and military forces stationed in London hastened to the Park, impelled by the fearful fascination, and were added to the piles of mashed.

Afterwards came the Volunteers, to a man, and then the Cloth. The haste of most of the curates, and a few bishops whose names have escaped me, was, said my mother, cataclysmic. Old dandies with creaking joints tottered along Piccadilly to their certain doom; young clerks in the city, explaining that they wished to attend their aunt's funeral, crowded the omnibuses for Kensington and were seen no more; while my mother tells me that excursion trains from the country were arriving at the principal stations throughout the day, bearing huge loads of provincial inamorati.

A constant stream of infatuated men, flowing from east to west, set in, and though bands of devoted women formed barriers across the principal thoroughfares for the purpose of barring their progress, no perceptible check was effected. Once, a Judge of notable austerity was observed to take to a lamp-post to avoid detention by his wife: once, a well-known tenor turned down by a by-street, says my mother, pursued by no fewer than fifty-seven admirers burning to avert his elimination. Members of Parliament surged across St. James' Park and up Constitution Hill.

Yet in every walk of life, says my mother, there were a few survivors in the shape of stolid, adamantine misogynists.

Continuing my journey homewards, I traversed Upper Street, Islington, and the Holloway Road to Highgate Hill, which I ascended at a sharp run. At the summit I met another newspaper boy carrying a bundle of Globes, one of which I purchased, after a hard-driven bargain, for two shillings and a stud from the shirt-front of my evening dress, which was beginning to show signs of ennui. I leaned against the wall of the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute, to read it. The news was catastrophic. Commander Wells of the Fire Brigade had, it stated, visited Kensington Gardens with two manuals, one steam engine, and a mile of hose, in order to play upon the Crinoline and its occupants. Presuming on the immunity of persons bearing his name during the Martian invasion, the gallant Commander had approached too near and was in a moment reduced to salvage.

Pondering on this news, I made for Parliament Hill, by way of West Hill and Milfield Lane. On the top I paused to survey London at my feet, and, to get the fullest benefit of the invigorating breeze, removed my hat. But the instant I did so, I was aware of a sharp pain on my scalp and the aroma of singed hair. Lifting my hand to the wounded place, I discovered that I had been shaved perfectly clean, as with a Heat Razor. The truth rushed upon me: I had come within the range of the Mash-Glance, and had been saved from total dissolution only by intervening masonry protecting my face and body.

To leave the Hill was the work of an instant. I passed through John Street to Hampstead Road, along Belsize Avenue and Buckland Crescent to Belsize Road, and so to Canterbury Road and Kilburn Lane. Here I met a fourth newspaper boy loaded with copies of the St. James' Gazette. He offered me one for seven-and-sixpence, or two for half a sovereign, but it seemed to me I had read enough.

Turning into Ladbroke Grove Road I quickly reached Notting Hill, and stealthily entered my house in Campden Hill Gardens ten minutes later.

BOOK II.

London under the Wenuses.

I.

THE DEATH OF THE EXAMINER.

My first act on entering my house, in order to guard against any sudden irruption on the part of my wife, was to bolt the door and put on the chain. My next was to visit the pantry, the cellar, and the larder, but they were all void of food and drink. My wife must have been there first. As I had drunk nothing since I burgled the Kennington chemist's, I was very thirsty, though my mind was still hydrostatic. I cannot account for it on scientific principles, but I felt very angry with my wife. Suddenly I was struck by a happy thought, and hurrying upstairs I found a bottle of methylated spirits on my wife's toilet-table. Strange as it may seem to the sober reader, I drank greedily of the unfamiliar beverage, and feeling refreshed and thoroughly kinetic, settled down once more to an exhaustive exposure of the dishonest off-handedness of the external Examiners at University College. I may add that I had taken the bread-knife (by Mappin) from the pantry, as it promised to be useful in the case of unforeseen Clerical emergencies. I should have preferred the meat-chopper with which the curate had been despatched in The War of the Worlds, but it was deposited in the South Kensington Museum along with other mementoes of the Martian invasion. Besides, my wife and I had both become Wegetarians.

The evening was still, and though distracted at times by recollections of the Wenuses, I made good progress with my indictment. Suddenly I was conscious of a pale pink glow which suffused my writing-pad, and I heard a soft but unmistakable thud as of a pinguid body falling in the immediate vicinity.

Taking off my boots, I stole gently down to the scullery and applied the spectroscope to the keyhole. To my mingled amazement and ecstasy, I perceived a large dome-shaped fabric blocking up the entire back garden. Roughly speaking, it seemed to be about the size of a full-grown sperm whale. A faint heaving was perceptible in the mass, and further evidences of vitality were forthcoming in a gentle but pathetic crooning, as of an immature chimæra booming in the void. The truth flashed upon me in a moment. The Second Crinoline had fallen in my back garden.

My mind was instantly made up. To expose myself unarmed to the fascination of the Wonderful Wisitors would have irreparably prejudiced the best interests of scientific research. My only hope lay in a complete disguise which should enable me to pursue my investigations of the Wenuses with the minimum amount of risk. A student of the humanities would have adopted a different method, but my standpoint has always been dispassionate, anti-sentimental. My feelings towards the Wenuses were, incredible as it may seem, purely Platonic. I recognised their transcendental attractions, but had no desire to succumb to them. Strange as it may seem, the man who succumbs rarely if ever is victorious in the long run. To disguise my sex and identity--for it was a priori almost impossible that the inhabitants of Wenus had never heard of Pozzuoli--would guard me from the jellifying Mash-Glance of the Wenuses. Arrayed in feminine garb I could remain immune to their malignant influences.

With me, to think is to act; so I hastily ran upstairs, shaved off my moustache, donned my wife's bicycle-skirt, threw her sortie de bal round my shoulders, borrowed the cook's Sunday bonnet from the servants' bedroom, and hastened back to my post of observation at the scullery door.

Inserting a pipette through the keyhole and cautiously applying my eye, I saw to my delight that the Crinoline had been elevated on a series of steel rods about six feet high, and that the five Wenuses who had descended in it were partaking of a light but sumptuous repast beneath its iridescent canopy. They were seated round a tripod imbibing a brown beverage from small vessels resembling the half of a hollow sphere, and eating with incredible velocity a quantity of tiny round coloured objects--closely related, as I subsequently had occasion to ascertain, to the Bellaria angelica,--which they raised to their mouths with astonishing and unerring aim in the complex Handling-Machines, or Tenticklers, which form part of their wonderful organism.

Belonging as they undoubtedly do to the order of the Tunicates, their exquisitely appropriate and elegant costume may be safely allowed to speak for itself. It is enough, however, to note the curious fact that there are no buttons in Wenus, and that their mechanical system is remarkable, incredible as it may seem, for having developed the eye to the rarest point of perfection while dispensing entirely with the hook. The bare idea of this is no doubt terribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think we should remember how indescribably repulsive our sartorial habits must seem to an intelligent armadillo.

Of the peculiar coralline tint of the Wenuses' complexion, I think I have already spoken. That it was developed by their indulgence in the Red Weed has been, I think, satisfactorily proved by the researches of Dr. Moreau, who also shows that the visual range of their eyes was much the same as ours, except that blue and yellow were alike to them. Moreau established this by a very pretty experiment with a Yellow Book and a Blue Book, each of which elicited exactly the same remark, a curious hooting sound, strangely resembling the ut de poitrine of one of Professor Garner's gorillas.

After concluding their repast, the Wenuses, still unaware of my patient scrutiny, extracted, with the aid of their glittering tintackles, a large packet of Red Weed from a quasi-marsupial pouch in the roof of the Crinoline, and in an incredibly short space of time had rolled its carmine tendrils into slim cylinders, and inserted them within their lips. The external ends suddenly ignited as though by spontaneous combustion; but in reality that result was effected by the simple process of deflecting the optic ray. Clouds of roseate vapour, ascending to the dome of the canopy, partially obscured the sumptuous contours of these celestial invaders; while a soft crooning sound, indicative of utter contentment, or as Professor Nestlé of the Milky Ray has more prosaically explained it, due to expiration of air preparatory to the suctional operation involved in the use of the Red Weed, added an indescribable glamour to the enchantment of the scene.

Humiliating as it may seem to the scientific reader, I found it impossible to maintain a Platonic attitude any longer; and applying my mouth to the embouchure of the pipette, warbled faintly in an exquisite falsetto:

"Ulat tanalareezul Savourneen Dheelish tradioun marexil Vi-Koko for the hair. I want yer, ma honey."

The effect was nothing short of magical. The rhythmic exhalations ceased instanteously, and the tallest and most fluorescent of the Wenuses, laying aside her Red Weed, replied in a low voice thrilling with kinetic emotion:

"Phreata mou sas agapo!"

The sentiment of these remarks was unmistakable, though to my shame I confess I was unable to fathom their meaning, and I was on the point of opening the scullery door and rushing out to declare myself, when I heard a loud banging from the front of the house.

I stumbled up the kitchen stairs, hampered considerably by my wife's skirt; and, by the time I had reached the hall, recognised the raucous accents of Professor Tibbles, the Classical Examiner, shouting in excited tones:

"Let me in, let me in!"

I opened the door as far as it would go without unfastening the chain, and the Professor at once thrust in his head, remaining jammed in the aperture.

"Let me in!" he shouted. "I'm the only man in London besides yourself that hasn't been pulped by the Mash-Glance."

He then began to jabber lines from the classics, and examples from the Latin grammar.

A sudden thought occurred to me. Perhaps he might translate the observation of the Wenus. Should I use him as an interpreter? But a moment's reflection served to convince me of the danger of such a plan. The Professor, already exacerbated by the study of the humanities, was in a state of acute erethism. I thought of the curate, and, maddened by the recollection of all I had suffered, drew the bread-knife from my waist-belt, and shouting, "Go to join your dead languages!" stabbed him up to the maker's name in the semi-lunar ganglion. His head drooped, and he expired.

I stood petrified, staring at his glazing eyes; then, turning to make for the scullery, was confronted by the catastrophic apparition of the tallest Wenus gazing at me with reproachful eyes and extended tentacles. Disgust at my cruel act and horror at my extraordinary habiliments were written all too plainly in her seraphic lineaments. At least, so I thought. But it turned out to be otherwise; for the Wenus produced from behind her superlatively radiant form a lump of slate which she had extracted from the coal-box.

"Decepti estis, O Puteoli!" she said.

"I beg your pardon," I replied; "but I fail to grasp your meaning."

"She means," said the Examiner, raising himself for another last effort, "that it is time you changed your coal merchant," and so saying he died again.

I was thunderstruck: the Wenuses understood coals!

And then I ran; I could stand it no longer. The game was up, the cosmic game for which I had laboured so long and strenuously, and with one despairing yell of "Ulla! Ulla!" I unfastened the chain, and, leaping over the limp and prostrate form of the unhappy Tibbles, fled darkling down the deserted street.

II.

THE MAN AT UXBRIDGE ROAD.

At the corner a happy thought struck me: the landlord of the "Dog and Measles" kept a motor car. I found him in his bar and killed him. Then I broke open the stable and let loose the motor car. It was very restive, and I had to pat it. "Goo' Tea Rose," I said soothingly, "goo' Rockefeller, then." It became quiet, and I struck a match and started the paraffinalia, and in a moment we were under weigh.

I am not an expert motist, although at school I was a fairly good hoop-driver, and the pedestrians I met and overtook had a bad time. One man said, as he bound up a punctured thigh, that the Heat Ray of the Martians was nothing compared with me. I was moting towards Leatherhead, where my cousin lived, when the streak of light caused by the Third Crinoline curdled the paraffin tank. Vain was it to throw water on the troubled oil; the mischief was done. Meanwhile a storm broke. The lightning flashed, the rain beat against my face, the night was exceptionally dark, and to add to my difficulties the motor took the wick between its teeth and fairly bolted.

No one who has never seen an automobile during a spasm of motor ataxy can have any idea of what I suffered. I held the middle of the way for a few yards, but just opposite Uxbridge Road Station I turned the wheel hard a-port, and the motor car overturned. Two men sprang from nowhere, as men will, and sat on its occiput, while I crawled into Uxbridge Road Station and painfully descended the stairs.

I found the platform empty save for a colony of sturdy little newsboys, whose stalwart determination to live filled me with admiration, which I was enjoying until a curious sibillation beneath the bookstall stirred me with panic.

Suddenly, from under a bundle of British Weeklies, there emerged a head, and gradually a man crawled out. It was the Artilleryman.

"I'm burning hot," he said; "it's a touch of--what is it?--erethism."

His voice was hoarse, and his Remarks, like the Man of Kent's, were Rambling.

"Where do you come from?" he said.

"I come from Woking," I replied, "and my nature is Wobbly. I love my love with a W because she is Woluptuous. I took her to the sign of the Wombat and read her The War of the Worlds, and treated her to Winkles, Winolia and Wimbos. Her name is Wenus, and she comes from the Milky Way."

He looked at me doubtfully, then shot out a pointed tongue.

"It is you," he said, "the man from Woking. The Johnny what writes for Nature. By the way," he interjected, "don't you think some of your stuff is too--what is it?--esoteric? The man," he continued, "as killed the curate in the last book. By the way, it was you as killed the curate?"

"Artilleryman," I replied, "I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little meat-chopper. And you, I presume, are the Artilleryman who attended my lectures on the Eroticism of the Elasmobranch?"

"That's me," he said; "but Lord, how you've changed. Only a fortnight ago, and now you're stone-bald!"

I stared, marvelling at his gift of perception.

"What have you been living on?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, "immature potatoes and Burgundy" (I give the catalogue so precisely because it has nothing to do with the story), "uncooked steak and limp lettuces, precocious carrots and Bartlett pears, and thirteen varieties of fluid beef, which I cannot name except at the usual advertisement rates."

"But can you sleep after it?" said I.

"Blimy! yes," he replied; "I'm fairly--what is it?--eupeptic."

"It's all over with mankind," I muttered.

"It is all over," he replied. "The Wenuses 'ave only lost one Crinoline, just one, and they keep on coming; they're falling somewhere every night. Nothing's to be done. We're beat!"

I made no answer. I sat staring, pulverised by the colossal intellectuality of this untutored private. He had attended only three of my lectures, and had never taken any notes.

"This isn't a war," he resumed; "it never was a war. These 'ere Wenuses they wants to be Mas, that's the long and the short of it. Only----"

"Yes?" I said, more than ever impressed by the man's pyramidal intuition.

"They can't stand the climate. They're too--what is it?--exotic."

We sat staring at each other.

"And what will they do?" I humbly asked, grovelling unscientifically at his feet.

"That's what I've been thinking," said the gunner. "I ain't an ornamental soldier, but I've a good deal of cosmic kinetic optimism, and it's the cosmic kinetic optimist what comes through. Now these Wenuses don't want to wipe us all out. It's the women they want to exterminate. They want to collar the men, and you'll see that after a bit they'll begin catching us, picking the best, and feeding us up in cages and men-coops."

"Good heavens!" I exclaimed; "but you are a man of genius indeed," and I flung my arms around his neck.

"Steady on!" he said; "don't be so--what is it?--ebullient."

"And what then?" I asked, when my emotion had somewhat subsided.

"Then," said he, "the others must be wary. You and I are mean little cusses: we shall get off. They won't want us. And what do we do? Take to the drains!" He looked at me triumphantly.

Quailing before his glory of intellect, I fainted.

"Are you sure?" I managed to gasp, on recovering consciousness.

"Yes," he said, "sewer. The drains are the places for you and me. Then we shall play cricket--a narrow drain makes a wonderful pitch--and read the good books--not poetry swipes, and stuff like that, but good books. That's where men like you come in. Your books are the sort: The Time Machine, and Round the World in Eighty Days, The Wonderful Wisit, and From the Earth to the Moon, and----"

"Stop!" I cried, nettled at his stupidity. "You are confusing another author and myself."

"Was I?" he said, "that's rum, but I always mix you up with the man you admire so much--Jools Werne. And," he added with a sly look, "you do admire him, don't you?"

In a flash I saw the man plain. He was a critic. I knew my duty at once: I must kill him. I did not want to kill him, because I had already killed enough--the curate in the last book, and the Examiner and the landlord of the "Dog and Measles" in this,--but an author alone with a critic in deserted London! What else could I do?

He seemed to divine my thought.

"There's some immature champagne in the cellar," he said.

"No," I replied, thinking aloud; "too slow, too slow."

He endeavoured to pacify me.

"Let me teach you a game," he said.

He taught me one--he taught me several. We began with "Spadille," we ended with "Halma" and "Snap," for parliament points. That is to say, instead of counters we used M.Ps. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true. Strange mind of man! that, with our species being mashed all around, we could sit following the chance of this painted pasteboard.

Afterwards we tried "Tiddleywinks" and "Squails," and I beat him so persistently that both sides of the House were mine and my geniality entirely returned. He might have been living to this hour had he not mentioned something about the brutality of The Island of Dr. Moreau. That settled it. I had heard that absurd charge once too often, and raising my Blaisdell binaural stethoscope I leaped upon him. With one last touch of humanity, I turned the orbicular ivory plate towards him and struck him to the earth.

At that moment fell the Fourth Crinoline.

III.

THE TEA-TRAY IN WESTBOURNE GROVE.

My wife's plan of campaign was simple but masterly. She would enlist an army of enormous bulk, march on the Wenuses in Westbourne Grove, and wipe them from the face of the earth.

Such was my wife's project. My wife's first step was to obtain, as the nucleus of attack, those women to whom the total loss of men would be most disastrous. They flocked to my wife's banner, which was raised in Regent's Park, in front of the pavilion where tea is provided by a maternal County Council.

My mother, who joined the forces and therefore witnessed the muster, tells me it was a most impressive sight. My wife, in a nickel-plated Russian blouse, trimmed with celluloid pom-pons, aluminium pantaloons, and a pair of Norwegian Skis, looked magnificent.

An old Guard, primed with recent articles from the Queen by Mrs. Lynn Linton, marched in a place of honour; and a small squadron of confirmed misogynists, recruited from the Athenaeum, the Travellers' and the Senior United Service Clubs, who professed themselves to be completely Mash-proof, were in charge of the ambulance. The members of the Ladies' Kennel Club, attended by a choice selection of carefully-trained Chows, Schipperkes, Whippets and Griffons, garrisoned various outposts.

The Pioneers joined my wife's ranks with some hesitation. The prospects of a world depleted of men did not seem (says my mother) to fill them with that consternation which was evident in my wife and her more zealous lieutenants. But after a heated discussion at the Club-house, which was marked by several resignations, it was decided to join in the attack. A regiment of Pioneers therefore, marching to the battle-chant of Walt Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers!" brought up (says my mother) the rear.

The march of my wife's troops was a most impressive sight. Leaving Regent's Park by the Clarence Gate, they passed down Upper Baker Street, along Marylebone Road into Edgware Road. Here the troops divided. One detachment hastened to Queen's Road, by way of Praed Street, Craven Road, Craven Hill, Leinster Terrace and the Bayswater Road, with the purpose of approaching Whiteley's from the South; the other half marched direct to Westbourne Grove, along Paddington Green Road to Bishop's Road.

Thus, according to my wife's plan, the Wenuses would be between the two wings of the army and escape would be impossible.

Everything was done as my wife had planned. The two detachments reached their destination almost simultaneously. My wife, with the northern wing, was encamped in Bishop's Road, Westbourne Grove and Pickering Place. My mother, with the southern wing (my wife shrewdly kept the command in the family), filled Queen's Road from Whiteley's to Moscow Road. My mother, who has exquisite taste in armour, had donned a superb Cinque-Cento cuirass, a short Zouave jacket embroidered with sequins, accordion-pleated bloomers, luminous leggings, brown Botticelli boots and one tiger-skin spat.

Between the two hosts was the empty road before the Universal Provider's Emporium. The Wenuses were within the building. By the time my wife's warriors were settled and had completed the renovation of their toilets it was high noon.

My wife had never imagined that any delay would occur: she had expected to engage with the enemy at once and have done with it, and consequently brought no provisions and no protection from the sun, which poured down a great bulk of pitiless beams.

The absence of Wenuses and of any sound betokening their activity was disconcerting. However, my wife thought it best to lay siege to Whiteley's rather than to enter the establishment.

The army therefore waited.

The heat became intense. My wife and her soldiers began to feel the necessity for refreshment. My wife is accustomed to regular meals. The sun grew in strength as the time went on, and my wife gave the order to sit at ease, which was signalled to my mother. My mother tells me that she was never so pleased in her life.

One o'clock struck; two o'clock; three o'clock; and still no Wenuses. Faint sounds were now audible from the crockery department, and then a hissing, which passed by degrees into a humming, a long, loud droning noise. It resembled as nearly as anything the boiling of an urn at a tea-meeting, and awoke in the breasts of my wife and her army an intense and unconquerable longing for tea, which was accentuated as four o'clock was reached. Still no Wenuses. Another hour dragged wearily on, and the craving for tea had become positively excruciating when five o'clock rang out.

At that moment, the glass doors of the crockery department were flung open, and out poured a procession of Wenuses smiling, said my mother, with the utmost friendliness, dressed as A.B.C. girls, and bearing trays studded with cups and saucers.

With the most seductive and ingratiating charm, a cup was handed to my wife. What to do she did not for the moment know. "Could such a gift be guileless?" she asked herself. "No." And yet the Wenuses looked friendly. Finally her martial spirit prevailed and my wife repulsed the cup, adjuring the rank and file to do the same. But in vain. Every member of my wife's wing of that fainting army greedily grasped a cup. Alas! what could they know of the deadly Tea-Tray of the Wenuses? Nothing, absolutely nothing, such is the disgraceful neglect of science in our schools and colleges. And so they drank and were consumed.

Meanwhile my mother, at the head of the south wing of the army, which had been entirely overlooked by the Wenuses, stood watching the destruction of my wife's host--a figure petrified with alarm and astonishment. One by one she watched her sisters in arms succumb to the awful Tea-Tray.

Then it was that this intrepid woman rose to her greatest height.

"Come!" she cried to her Amazons. "Come! They have no more tea left. Now is the moment ripe."

With these spirited words, my mother and her troops proceeded to charge down Queen's Road upon the unsuspecting Wenuses.

But they had reckoned without the enemy.

The tumult of the advancing host caught the ear of the Wonderful Wisitors, and in an instant they had extracted glittering cases of their crimson cigarettes from their pockets, and lighting them in the strange fashion I have described elsewhere, they proceeded to puff the smoke luxuriously into the faces of my mother and her comrades.

Alas! little did these gallant females know of the horrible properties of the Red Weed. How could they, with our science-teaching in such a wretched state?

The smoke grew in volume and density, spread and spread, and in a few minutes the south wing of my wife's army was as supine as the north.

How my wife and mother escaped I shall not say. I make a point of never explaining the escape of my wife, whether from Martians or Wenuses; but that night, as Commander-in-Chief, she issued this cataleptic despatch:

"The Wenuses are able to paralyse all but strong-minded women with their deadly Tea-Tray. Also they burn a Red Weed, the smoke of which has smothered our troops in Westbourne Grove. No sooner have they despoiled Whiteley's than they will advance upon Jay's and Marshall and Snelgrove's. It is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Tea-Tray and the Red Weed but in instant flight."

That night the world was again lit by a pale pink flash of light. It was the Fifth Crinoline.

IV.

WRECKAGE.

The general stampede that ensued on the publication of my wife's despatch is no fit subject for the pen of a coherent scientific writer. Suffice it to say, that in the space of twenty-four hours London was practically empty, with the exception of the freaks at Barnum's, the staff of The Undertakers' Gazette, and Mrs. Elphinstone (for that, pace Wilkie Collins, was the name of the Woman in White), who would listen to no reasoning, but kept calling upon "George," for that was the name of my cousin's man, who had been in the service of Lord Garrick, the Chief Justice, who had succumbed to dipsomania in the previous invasion.

Meantime the Wenuses, flushed with their success in Westbourne Grove, had carried their devastating course in a south-easterly direction, looting Marshall and Snelgrove's, bearing away the entire stock of driving-gloves from Sleep's and subjecting Redfern's to the asphyxiating fumes of the Red Weed.

It is calculated that they spent nearly two days in Jay's, trying on all the costumes in that establishment, and a week in Peter Robinson's. During these days I never quitted Uxbridge Road Station, for just as I was preparing to leave, my eye caught the title on the bookstall of Grant Allen's work, The Idea of Evolution! and I could not stir from the platform until I had skimmed it from cover to cover.

Wearily mounting the stairs, I then turned my face westward. At the corner of Royal Crescent, just by the cabstand, I found a man lying in the roadway. His face was stained with the Red Weed, and his language was quite unfit for the columns of Nature.

I applied a limp lettuce to his fevered brow, took his temperature with my theodolite, and pressing a copy of Home Chat into his unresisting hand, passed on with a sigh. I think I should have stayed with him but for the abnormal obtusity of his facial angle.

Turning up Clarendon Road, I heard the faint words of the Wenusberg music by Wagner from a pianoforte in the second story of No. 34. I stepped quickly into a jeweller's shop across the road, carried off eighteen immature carats from a tray on the counter, and pitched them through the open window at the invisible pianist. The music ceased suddenly.

It was when I began to ascend Notting Hill that I first heard the hooting. It reminded me at first of a Siren, and then of the top note of my maiden aunt, in her day a notorious soprano vocalist. She subsequently emigrated to France, and entered a nunnery under the religious name of Soeur Marie Jeanne. "Tul-ulla-lulla-liety," wailed the Voice in a sort of superhuman jodel, coming, as it seemed to me, from the region of Westminster Bridge.

The persistent ululation began to get upon my nerves. I found, moreover, that I was again extremely hungry and thirsty. It was already noon. Why was I wandering alone in this derelict city, clad in my wife's skirt and my cook's Sunday bonnet?

Grotesque and foolish as it may seem to the scientific reader, I was entirely unable to answer this simple conundrum. My mind reverted to my school days. I found myself declining musa. Curious to relate, I had entirely forgotten the genitive of ego.... With infinite trouble I managed to break into a vegetarian restaurant, and made a meal off some precocious haricot beans, a brace of Welsh rabbits, and ten bottles of botanic beer.

Working back into Holland Park Avenue and thence keeping steadily along High Street, Notting Hill Gate, I determined to make my way to the Marble Arch, in the hopes of finding some fresh materials for my studies in the Stone Age.

In Bark Place, where the Ladies' Kennel Club had made their vast grand-stand, were a number of pitiful vestiges of the Waterloo of women-kind. There was a shattered Elswick bicycle, about sixteen yards and a half of nun's veiling, and fifty-three tortoise-shell side-combs. I gazed on the débris with apathy mingled with contempt. My movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I knew that I wished to avoid my wife, but had no clear idea how the avoiding was to be done.

V.

BUBBLES.

From Orme Square, a lean-faced, unkempt and haggard waif, I drifted to Great Orme's Head and back again. Senile dementia had already laid its spectral clutch upon my wizened cerebellum when I was rescued by some kindly people, who tell me that they found me scorching down Hays Hill on a cushion-tired ordinary. They have since told me that I was singing "My name is John Wellington Wells, Hurrah!" and other snatches from a pre-Wenusian opera.

These generous folk, though severely harassed by their own anxieties, took me in and cared for me. I was a lonely man and a sad one, and they bored me. In spite of my desire to give public expression to my gratitude, they have refused to allow their names to appear in these pages, and they consequently enjoy the proud prerogative of being the only anonymous persons in this book. I stayed with them at the Bath Club for four days, and with tears parted from them on the spring-board. They would have kept me for ever, but that would have interfered with my literary plans. Besides, I had a morbid desire to gaze on the Wenuses once more.

And so I went out into the streets again, guided by the weird Voice, and viâ Grafton Street, Albemarle Street, the Royal Arcade, Bond Street, Burlington Gardens, Vigo Street and Sackville Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Pall Mall East, Cockspur Street and Whitehall, steadily wheeled my way across Westminster Bridge.

There were few people about and their skins were all yellow. Lessing, presumably in his Laocoon, has attributed this to the effects of sheer panic; but Carver's explanation, which attributes the ochre-like tint to the hypodermic operation of the Mash-Glance, seems far more plausible. For myself I abstain from casting the weight of my support in either scale, because my particular province is speculative philosophy and not comparative dermatology.

As I passed St. Thomas's Hospital, the tullululation grew ever louder and louder. At last the source of the sound could no longer be disguised. It proceeded without doubt from the interior of some soap works just opposite Doulton's. The gate was open and a faint saponaceous exhalation struck upon my dilated nostrils. I have always been peculiarly susceptible to odours, though my particular province is not Osmetics but speculative philosophy, and I at once resolved to enter. Leaning my bicycle against the wall of the archway, I walked in, and was immediately confronted by the object of my long search.

There, grouped picturesquely round a quantity of large tanks, stood the Wenuses, blowing assiduously through pellucid pipettes and simultaneously chanting in tones of unearthly gravity a strain poignantly suggestive of baffled hopes, thwarted aspirations and impending departure. So absorbed were they in their strange preparations, that they were entirely unconscious of my presence. Grotesque and foolish as this may seem to the infatuated reader, it is absolutely true.

Gradually from out the troubled surface of the tanks there rose a succession of transparent iridescent globules, steadily waxing in bulk until they had attained a diameter of about sixteen feet. The Wenuses then desisted from their labours of inflation, and suddenly plunging into the tanks, reappeared inside these opalescent globules. I can only repeat that speculative philosophy, and not sapoleaginous hydro-dynamics, is my particular forte, and would refer doubtful readers, in search of further information, to the luminous hypothesis advanced by Professor Cleaver of Washington to account for the imbullification of the Wenuses.[1]

Never shall I forget the touching scene that now unfolded itself before my bewildered eyes. Against a back ground of lemon-coloured sky, with the stars shedding their spiritual lustre through the purple twilight, these gorgeous creatures, each ensphered in her beatific bubble, floated tremulously upward on the balmy breeze. In a moment it all flashed upon me. They were passing away from the scene of their brief triumph, and I, a lonely and dejected scientist, saw myself doomed to expiate a moment's madness in long years of ineffectual speculation on the probable development of Moral Ideas.

My mind reverted to my abandoned arguments, embodied in the article which lay beneath the selenite paperweight in my study in Campden Hill Gardens. Frenzied with despair, I shot out an arm to arrest the upward transit of the nearest Wenus, when a strange thing occurred.

"At last!" said a voice.

I was startled. It was my wife, accompanied by Mrs. Elphinstone, my cousin's man, my mother, the widow of the landlord of the "Dog and Measles," Master Herodotus Tibbles in deep mourning, and the Artillery-man's brother from Beauchamp's little livery stables.

I shot an appealing glance to the disappearing Wenus. She threw me a kiss. I threw her another.

My wife took a step forward, and put her hand to my ear. I fell.

[Footnote 1: Cleaver in a subsequent Memoir [Sonnenschein, London, pp. xiv., 954, 20 in. x 8-1/2, price £2 2s. net] has made out, reluctantly and against the judgment of his firm, that the basic material of the globules, the peculiar tenacity of which was due to some toughening ingredient imported by the Wisitors from their planet, was undoubtedly that indispensable domestic article which is alleged to "save rubbing."]

APPENDIX A.

APPENDIX A.

My mother, whose vigilance during the Wenuses' invasion has been throughout of the greatest assistance to me, kept copies of the various papers of importance which commented upon that event. From them I am enabled, with my mother's consent, to supplement the allusions to contemporary journalism in the body of my history with the following extracts:--

The Times, or, as it is better known, the Thunder Child of Printing House Square, said:

"The Duke of Curzon's statesmanlike reply in the House of Lords last night to the inflammatory question or string of questions put by Lord Ashmead with reference to our planetary visitors will go far to mitigate the unreasoning panic which has laid hold of a certain section of the community. As to the methods by which it has been proposed to confront and repel the invaders, the Duke's remark, 'that the use of dynamite violated the chivalrous instincts which were at the root of the British Nature,' called forth loud applause. The Foreign Secretary, however, showed that, while deprecating senseless panic, he was ready to take any reasonable steps to allay the natural anxiety of the public, and rising later on in the evening, he announced that a Royal Commission had been appointed, on which Lord Ashmead, Dr. Joseph Parker (of the City Temple), and Mr. Hall Caine, representing the Isle of Man, had consented to serve, and would be dispatched without delay to Kensington Gardens to inquire into the cause of the visit, and, if possible, to induce the new comers to accept an invitation to tea on the Terrace. By way of supplementing these tranquillizing assurances, we may add that we have the authority of the best scientific experts, including Dr. Moreau, Professor Sprudelkopf of Carlsbad, and Dr. Fountain Penn of Philadelphia, for asserting that no animate beings could survive their transference from the atmosphere of Venus to that of our planet for more than fourteen days. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the members of the Royal Commission may be successful in impressing upon our aërial visitors the imperative necessity of a speedy return. In these negotiations it is anticipated that the expressive pantomime of Dr. Parker, and Mr. Hall Caine's mastery of the Manx dialect, will be of the greatest possible assistance."

To the Daily Telegraph Sir Edwin Arnold contributed a poem entitled "Aphrodite Anadyomené; or, Venus at the Round Pond." My mother can remember only the last stanza, which ran as follows:

"Though I fly to Fushiyama, Steeped in opalescent Karma, I shall ne'er forget my charmer, My adorable Khansamah. Though I fly to Tokio, Where the sweet chupatties blow, I shall ne'er forget thee, no! Yamagata, daimio."

A shilling testimonial to the Wenuses was also started by the same journal, in accordance with the precedent furnished by the similar treatment of the Graces, and an animated controversy raged in its correspondence columns with reference to mixed bathing at Margate, and its effect on the morality of the Wenuses.

A somewhat painful impression was created by the publication of an interview with a well-known dramatic critic in the periodical known as Great Scott's Thoughts. This eminent authority gave it as his unhesitating opinion that the Wenuses were not fit persons to associate with actors, actresses, or dramatic critics, and that if, as was announced, they had been engaged at Covent Garden to lend realistic verisimilitude to the Venusberg scene in Tannhäuser, it was his firm resolve to give up his long crusade against Ibsen, emigrate to Norway, and change his name to that of John Gabriel Borkman. A prolonged sojourn in Poppyland, however, resulted in the withdrawal of this dreadful threat, and, some few weeks after the extinction of the Wenuses, his reconciliation with the dramatic profession was celebrated at a public meeting, where, after embracing all the actor-managers in turn, he was presented by them with a magnificent silver butter-boat, filled to the brim with melted butter ready for immediate use.

APPENDIX B.

My mother has obtained permission from the Laureate's publishers to reprint the following stanzas from "The Pale Pink Raid":--

"Wrong? O of coarse it's heinous, But we're going, girls, you just bet! Do they think that the Wars of Wenus Can be stopped by an epithet? When the henpecked Earth-men pray us To join them at afternoon tea, Not rhyme nor reason can stay us From flying to set them free.

* * * * *

"When the men on that hapless planet, Handsome and kind and true, Cry out, 'Hurry up!' O hang it! What else can a Wenus do? I suppose it was rather bad form, girls, But really we didn't care, For our planet was growing too warm, girls, And we wanted a change of air.

* * * * *

"Mrs. Grundy may go on snarling, But still, at the Judgment Day, The author of England's Darling I think won't give us away. We failed, but we chose to chance it, And as one of the beaten side, I'd rather have made that transit Than written Jameson's Ride!"

THE END.

 

 

---

Contents

NATIVE SON

By T. D. Hamm

 

Tommy hated Earth, knowing his mother might go home to Mars without him. Worse, would a robot secretly take her place?...

 

Tommy Benton, on his first visit to Earth, found the long-anticipated wonders of twenty-first-century New York thrilling the first week, boring and unhappy the second week, and at the end of the third he was definitely ready to go home.

The never-ending racket of traffic was torture to his abnormally acute ears. Increased atmospheric pressure did funny things to his chest and stomach. And quick and sure-footed on Mars, he struggled constantly against the heavy gravity that made all his movements clumsy and uncoordinated.

The endless canyons of towering buildings, with their connecting Skywalks, oppressed and smothered him. Remembering the endless vistas of rabbara fields beside a canal that was like an inland sea, homesickness flooded over him.

He hated the people who stared at him with either open or hidden amusement. His Aunt Bee, for instance, who looked him up and down with frank disapproval and said loudly, "For Heavens sake, Helen! Take him to a good tailor and get those bones covered up!"

Was it his fault he was six inches taller than Terran boys his age, and had long, thin arms and legs? Or that his chest was abnormally developed to compensate for an oxygen-thin atmosphere? I'd like to see her, he thought fiercely, out on the Flatlands; she'd be gasping like a canal-fish out of water.

Even his parents, happily riding the social merry-go-round of Terra, after eleven years in the Martian flatlands, didn't seem to understand how he felt.

"Don't you like Earth, Tommy?" queried his mother anxiously.

"Oh ... it's all right, I guess."

"... 'A nice place to visit' ..." said his father sardonically.

"... 'but I wouldn't live here if they gave me the place!' ..." said his mother, and they both burst out laughing for no reason that Tommy could see. Of course, they did that lots of times at home and Tommy laughed with them just for the warm, secure feeling of belonging. This time he didn't feel like laughing.

"When are we going home?" he repeated stubbornly.

His father pulled Tommy over in the crook of his arm and said gently, "Well, not right away, son. As a matter of fact, how would you like to stay here and go to school?"

Tommy pulled away and looked at him incredulously.

"I've been to school!"

"Well, yes," admitted his father. "But only to the colony schools. You don't want to grow up and be an ignorant Martian sandfoot all your life, do you?"

"Yes, I do! I want to be a Martian sandfoot. And I want to go home where people don't look at me and say, 'So this is your little Martian!'"

Benton, Sr., put his arm around Tommy's stiffly resistant shoulders. "Look here, old man," he said persuasively. "I thought you wanted to be a space engineer. You can't do that without an education you know. And your Aunt Bee will take good care of you."

Tommy faced him stubbornly. "I don't want to be any old spaceman. I want to be a sandfoot like old Pete. And I want to go home."

Helen bit back a smile at the two earnest, stubborn faces so ridiculously alike, and hastened to avert the gathering storm.

"Now look, fellows. Tommy's career doesn't have to be decided in the next five minutes ... after all, he's only ten. He can make up his mind later on if he wants to be an engineer or a rabbara farmer. Right now, he's going to stay here and go to school ... and I'm staying with him."

Resolutely avoiding both crestfallen faces, Helen, having shepherded Tommy to bed, returned to the living room acutely conscious of Big Tom's bleak, hurt gaze at her back.

"Helen, you're going to make a sissy out of the boy," he said at last. "There isn't any reason why he can't stay here at home with Bee."

Helen turned to face him.

"Earth isn't home to Tommy. And your sister Bee told him he ought to be out playing football with the boys instead of hanging around the house."

"But she knows the doctor said he'd have to take it easy for a year till he was accustomed to the change in gravity and air-pressure," he answered incredulously.

"Exactly. She also asked me," Helen went on grimly, "if I thought he'd be less of a freak as he got older."

Tom Benton swore. "Bee always did have less sense than the average hen," he gritted. "My son a freak! Hell's-bells!"

Tommy, arriving at the hall door in time to hear the tail-end of the sentence, crept back to bed feeling numb and dazed. So even his father thought he was a freak.

* * * * *

The last few days before parting was one of strain for all of them. If Tommy was unnaturally subdued, no one noticed it; his parents were not feeling any great impulse toward gaiety either.

They all went dutifully sight-seeing as before; they saw the Zoo, and went shopping on the Skywalks, and on the last day wound up at the great showrooms of "Androids, Inc."

Tommy had hated them on sight; they were at once too human and too inhuman for comfort. The hotel was full of them, and most private homes had at least one. Now they saw the great incubating vats, and the processing and finally the showroom where one of the finished products was on display as a maid, sweeping and dusting.

"There's one that's a dead-ringer for you, Helen. If you were a little better looking, that is." Tommy's dad pretended to compare them judicially. Helen laughed, but Tommy looked at him with a resentfulness. Comparing his mother to an Android....

"They say for a little extra you can get an exact resemblance. Maybe I'd better have one fixed up like you to take back with me," Big Tom added teasingly. Then as Helen's face clouded over, "Oh, hon, you know I was only kidding. Let's get out of here; this place gives me the collywobbles. Besides, I've got to pick up my watch."

But his mother's face was still unhappy and Tommy glowered sullenly at his father's back all the way to the watch-shop.

It was a small shop, with an inconspicuous sign down in one corner of the window that said only, "KRUMBEIN--watches," and was probably the most famous shop of its kind in the world. Every spaceman landing on Terra left his watch to be checked by the dusty, little old man who was the genius of the place. Tommy ranged wide-eyed about the clock and chronometer crammed interior. He stopped fascinated before the last case. In it was a watch ... but, what a watch! Besides the regulation Terran dial, it had a second smaller dial that registered the corresponding time on Mars. Tommy's whole heart went out to it in an ecstasy of longing. He thought wistfully that if you could know what time it was there, you could imagine what everyone was doing and it wouldn't seem so far away. Haltingly, he tried to explain.

"Look, Mom," he said breathlessly. "It's almost five o'clock at home. Douwie will be coming up to the barn to be fed. Gosh, do you suppose old Pete will remember about her?"

His mother smiled at him reassuringly. "Of course he will, silly. Don't forget he was the one who caught and tamed her for you."

Tommy gulped as he thought of Douwie. Scarcely as tall as himself; the big, rounded, mouselike ears, and the flat, cloven pads that could carry her so swiftly over the sandy Martian flatlands. One of the last dwindling herds of native Martian douwies, burden-carriers of a vanished race, she had been Tommy's particular pride and joy for the last three years.

Behind him, Tommy heard his mother murmur under her breath, "Tom ... the watch; could we?"

And his Dad regretfully, "It's a pretty expensive toy for a youngster, Helen. And even a rabbara raiser's bank account has limits."

"Of course, dear; it was silly of me." Helen smiled a little ruefully. "And if Mr. Krumbein has your watch ready, we must go. Bee and some of her friends are coming over, and it's only a few hours 'till you ... leave."

Big Tom squeezed her elbow gently, understandingly, as she blinked back quick tears. Trailing after them, Tommy saw the little by-play and his heart ached. The guilt-complex building up in him grew and deepened.

He knew he had only to say, "Look, I don't mind staying. Aunt Bee and I will get along swell," and everything would be all right again. Then the terror of this new and complex world--as it would be without a familiar face--swept over him and kept him silent.

His overwrought feelings expressed themselves in a nervously rebelling stomach, culminating in a disgraceful moment over the nearest gutter. The rest of the afternoon he spent in bed recuperating.

In the living room Aunt Bee spoke her mind in her usual, high-pitched voice.

"It's disgraceful, Helen. A boy his age.... None of the Bentons ever had nerves."

His mother's reply was inaudible, but on the heels of his father's deeper tones, Aunt Bee's voice rose in rasping indignation.

"Well! I never! And from my own brother, too. From now on don't come to me for help with your spoiled brat. Good-bye!"

The door slammed indignantly, his mother chuckled, and there was a spontaneous burst of laughter. Tommy relaxed and lay back happily. Anyway, that was the last of Aunt Bee!

* * * * *

The next hour or two passed in a flurry of ringing phones, people coming and going, and last-minute words and reminders. Then suddenly it was time to leave. Dad burst in for a last quick hug and a promise to send him pictures of Douwie and her foal, due next month; Mother dropped a hasty kiss on his hair and promised to hurry back from the Spaceport. Then Tommy was alone, with a large, painful lump where his heart ought to be.

The only activity was the almost noiseless buzzing as the hotel android ran the cleaner over the living room. Presently even that ceased, and Tommy lay relaxed and inert, sleepily watching the curtains blow in and out at the open window. Thirty stories above the street the noises were pleasantly muffled and remote, and his senses drifted aimlessly to and fro on the tides of half-sleep.

Drowsily his mind wandered from the hotel's android servants ... to the strictly utilitarian mechanical monstrosity at home, known affectionately as "Old John" ... to the android showroom where they had seen the one that Dad said looked like Mother....

He jolted suddenly, sickeningly awake. Suppose, his mind whispered treacherously, suppose that Dad had ordered one to take Mom's place ... not on Mars, but here while she returned to Mars with him. Suppose that instead of Mom he discovered one of those Things ... or even worse, suppose he went on from day to day not even knowing....

It was a bad five minutes; he was wet with perspiration when he lay back on his pillows, a shaky smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He had a secret defense against the Terror. He giggled a little at the thought of what Aunt Bee would say if she knew.

And what had brought him back from the edge of hysteria was the triumphant knowledge that with the abnormally acute hearing bred in the thin atmosphere of Mars, no robot ever created could hide from him the infinitesimal ticking of the electronic relays that gave it life. Secure at last, his overstrung nerves relaxed and he slid gratefully over the edge of sleep.

He woke abruptly, groping after some vaguely remembered sound. A soft clicking of heels down the hall.... Of course, his mother back from the Spaceport! Now she would be stopping at his door to see if he were asleep. He lay silently; through his eyelashes he could see her outlined in the soft light from the hall. She was coming in to see if he was tucked in. In a moment he would jump up and startle her with a hug, as she leaned over him. In a moment....

Screaming desperately, he was out of bed, backing heedlessly across the room. He was still screaming as the low sill of the open window caught him behind the knees and toppled him thirty stories to the street.

Alone in the silent room, Helen Benton stood dazed, staring blindly at the empty window.

Tommy's parting gift from his father slid from her hand and lay on the carpet, still ticking gently.

It was 9:23 on Mars.

The End

 

 

---

Contents

WIZARD

By Laurence Mark Janifer

 

 

Although the Masquerade itself, as a necessary protection against non-telepaths, was not fully formulated until the late years of the Seventeenth Century, groups of telepaths-in-hiding existed long before that date. Whether such groups were the results of natural mutations, or whether they came into being due to some other cause, has not yet been fully determined, but that a group did exist in the district of Offenburg, in what is now Prussia, we are quite sure. The activities of the group appear to have begun, approximately, in the year 1594, but it was not until eleven years after that date that they achieved a signal triumph, the first and perhaps the last of its kind until the dissolution of the Masquerade in 2103.

--Excerpt from "A Short History of the Masquerade," by A. Milge, Crystal 704-54-368, Produced 2440.

Jonas came over the hill whistling as if he had not a care in the world--which was not even approximately true, he reflected happily. The state of complete and utter quiet was both foreign and slightly repugnant to him; he was never more pleased than when he had a job in hand, a job that involved a slight and unavoidable risk.

This time, of course, the risk was more than slight. Why, he thought happily, it was even possible for him to get killed, and most painfully, too! With a great deal of pleasure, he stood for a second at the crest of the hill, his hands on his hips, looking down at the town of Speyer as it baked in the May afternoon sunlight.

"Behold the Tortoise: He maketh no progress unless he sticketh out his neck." But he maketh very little progress unless he pick the right time and place to "sticketh out his neck"--which can be quite a sticky problem for a man in a medieval culture!

 

Jonas did not, in spite of his pose, look like the typical hero of folk tale or scribe's tome; he was not seven feet tall, for instance, nor did he have a handsome, lovesome face with flashing blue eyes, or a broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted marvel of a figure. He was, instead, somewhat shorter than the average of men in Europe in 1605 and for some time thereafter. He had small, almost hidden eyes that seemed to see a great deal, but failed completely to make a fuss about the fact. And while his figure was just a trifle dumpy, his face completed the rhyme by being extraordinarily lumpy. The nose, as a matter of strict truth, was hard to distinguish from the other contusions, swellings and marks that covered the head.

Nor, of course, did he carry the sword of a great hero, or a noble. Jonas had no von to stick on his name, and he had never thought it worth his while to claim one and accept the tiny risk of disclosure. After all, a noble was only a man like other men.

And, besides, Jonas knew perfectly well that he had no need of a sword.

His adventures, too, were a little out of the common run of tales. Jonas had, he thought regretfully, few duels to look forward to, and he had even fewer to look back on. And, as a maid is won by face, figure and daring, and a wife by riches, position or prospects, there was a notable paucity of lissome ladies in Jonas' career.

All in all, he thought sadly, he was not a usual hero.

But he refused to let the thought spoil his enjoyment. After all, he was a hero, though of his own unique kind; there was no denying that. And, in his own way, he had his reward. He took one hand off his hip to scratch at the top of his head, wondering briefly if he had managed to pick up lice in the last town he had visited, and he took another look at the city.

Speyer seemed a lot better, at first glance, than some of the other places Jonas had visited. For one thing, it had a full town hall, built--no less--of honest stone, and probably a relict of the Roman times. There was the parish church, of course, a good solid wooden structure, and a collection of houses strung along the dirt paths of the town. The houses of the rich were, naturally, wooden; the poor built of baked mud. There were a great many baked-mud structures, and only one wooden one, besides the church, that Jonas could see.

The paths were winding, but comparatively free from slop. That was pleasing, he told himself. And the buildings themselves, wood, mud and stone, clustered in the valley below him as if they were afraid, and needed each other's protection.

Which, in a way, they did. Jonas reflected on that a trifle grimly, thinking of the Holy Inquisition with its hierarchy of priests and lay folk, busily working in Speyer just as it worked in every other town throughout Offenburg, and throughout the civilized world.

Ordinarily, he would not have given it a thought, beyond a passing sigh for the ways of the world; he had other business. But now--

He grinned to himself, and the grin turned to a laugh as he started down the hill. The grislier methods of the Inquisitorial process were well-known to him by reputation, and soon he might be testing them out for himself. There was absolutely no way to be sure.

That thought pleased him greatly; after all, he told himself, there was nothing like a little danger to spice the boring business of living. By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, he was whistling loudly.

* * * * *

He stopped at the first house, a mud construction with a badly-carpentered wooden door and a single bare window that looked out on the street. It smelled, but Jonas went up to the door bravely and knocked.

There was no answer. He went on whistling "Fortuna plango vulnera" under his breath, and after a time he knocked again.

This time he heard movement inside the house, and nodded to himself in a satisfied fashion. But almost a minute passed before the head of an old woman showed itself at the window. She was really extraordinarily ugly, he thought. She wore a bonnet that did nothing whatever to enhance her doubtful, wrinkled charms, or to conceal them; and besides, it was dirty.

"Nobody's here," she said in the voice of a very venomous toad. "Go away."

Jonas smiled at her. It was an effort. "Madam--" he began politely.

"Nobody's home," she repeated, drawing slightly back from the window. "You go away, now."

"Ah," Jonas said pleasantly. "But you're home, aren't you?"

The old woman frowned at him suspiciously. "Now," she said vaguely. "Well."

"This is your house?" he said. "The house where you live?"

"Never saw you before," the old woman said.

"That's right," Jonas said equably.

"You come to turn me out?" she demanded. Her eyebrows--which were almost as big and black as her ancient mustache--came down over glittering little eyes. "I hold this house free and proper," she said in a determined roar, "and nobody can take it from me. It belongs to me, and to my children, and to their children, and to the children of those children--"

The catalogue seemed likely to go on forever. "Exactly," Jonas said hastily.

"Well, then," the old woman said, and started to draw back.

Jonas gestured lazily with one hand. "Wait," he said. "I am not going to take your house away from you, madam. I am only here to ask you a question."

"Question?" she said. "You come from Herr Knupf? I'm an old woman but I do no wrong, and there is no one can accuse me of heresy. I am in church every week, and more than once; I keep peace with my neighbors and there's none can say a mystery about me--"

The woman, Jonas thought, was full to the eyebrows with words. Probably, he told himself, trying to be fair, she didn't have anyone to talk to, until a stranger came along.

He sighed briefly. "I do not come from the Inquisitor," he said truthfully, "nor is my question one that should cause you alarm."

The old woman pondered for a minute. She leaned her elbows on the window sill, getting them muddy. But that, Jonas thought, didn't seem to matter to this creature, apparently.

"Ask," she said at last.

Jonas put on his most pleasant expression. "Madam," he said, "I wish to know if there be any family in this town to give room to a wayfarer--understanding, of course, that the wayfarer would insist on paying. Paying well," he added.

The old woman blinked. "You looking for an inn?" she said. "An inn in this town?" The idea appeared to strike her as the very height of idiocy. She covered her face with her hands and shook. After a second Jonas discovered that she was laughing. He waited patiently until the fit had left her.

"Not an inn," he said. "There is no inn here, I know. But a family willing to take in a stranger--"

"Strangers are seldom here," she said. "Herr Knupf watches his flock with zeal."

Which meant, Jonas reflected, that he was in a fair way to get himself burned as a heretic unless he watched his step carefully. "Herr Knupf's fame has reached my own country, far away," he said with some truth. "Nevertheless, a family which--"

"Wait," she said. "You have said that you will pay well. Yet you do not appear rich."

Jonas understood. Fishing in his sewn pocket, he withdrew a single, shiny coin. "I also wish," he said smoothly, "to pay for any help I may receive--such as the answering of an innocent question, a question in which the respected Inquisitor Knupf can have no interest whatever."

The old woman's eyes went to the coin and stayed there. "Well," she said. "It is said that the family called Scharpe has a house too large for them, now that the elder son is gone; there is only the man, his wife and a daughter. It is said that the man is in need of money; he would accept payment, were it generous, in return for sharing room in his house."

"I would be most grateful," Jonas murmured. He passed the coin over; the old woman's hand snatched it and closed on it. "Where might I find this family?" he said.

"It is now late in the afternoon," the old woman said. "Perhaps they are at home. You will see a path which takes you to the left; follow it until you reach the last house. Knock at the door."

"I shall," Jonas said, "and many thanks."

The old woman, still clutching her coin, disappeared from the window as if someone had yanked her back. Jonas turned with relief and got back on the path, but it stank quite as badly as the house had.

He endured the stench--heroically.

* * * * *

Scharpe proved to be a barrel-shaped man who was unaccountably cheerless, as if the inside structure had been carefully removed, and then replaced by sawdust, Jonas thought. Even the offer of seven kroner for a single week's stay failed to produce the delirious joy Jonas had expected.

"The money is needed," Scharpe said in a dour, bass voice, staring off past Jonas' left ear at the darkening sky. "And for the money, you will be welcome. I must take your word that you are not dangerous; I can only pray that you do not betray that trust."

It was far from a warm welcome, but Jonas was satisfied with it. "I shall work to do you good," he said, "and not evil."

"Stranger," Scharpe said, "work for your own good; do nothing for me. This is an accursed family; there is no good to be done to me, or my wife or child."

Jonas tried to look reassuring. He thought of several things to say about the sunny side of life, and decided on none or them. "My sympathy--" he began.

"Your sympathy may endanger you," Scharpe said. "My son is gone; I pray that there is an end to it."

Jonas peered once into the mind of the man, and recoiled violently; but he had enough, in that one glimpse, to tell him the reason for Scharpe's misery. And it was quite reason enough, he thought.

"Herr Knupf--"

"We do not mention that name," Scharpe said. "My wife has resigned herself to what has happened; I am not so wise."

"I promise you," Jonas said earnestly, "that you will be in no danger from me. No, more: that I will help you out of your difficulties, and ensure your peace."

"Then you are an angel from Heaven," Scharpe said bitterly. "There is no other help, while the Inquisitor remains and our sons become suspect to his rages."

Jonas shook his head. "There is help," he said, "and you will find it. Your son is gone; accused, questioned, confessed and burnt. But there will be no more."

Scharpe looked at him for a long time. "Come with me," he said at last, and led the way into his mud house. Inside, there was only one large room, but it seemed spacious enough for four. Three pallets lay against the far right wall, a single one against the left. Scharpe went to the back of the house, near the single bed. "This will be yours," he said, "while you are with us. It is poor but it is all we can offer."

"I am honored," Jonas said.

"Here we are alone," Scharpe went on, his voice lowering. "My wife and daughter have gone to visit a neighbor, for they have not yet closed us off entirely from all human contact."

He grimaced. Jonas peered into the mind again, very gently, but the mad roiling of pain and memory there was too strong for him, and he returned.

"If you have anything to say to me," Scharpe said, "tell me now. No one can hear us, not Herr Knupf himself."

"To say to you?"

"Regarding your plan," Scharpe said. "Surely you have a plan. And if I may play any part in it--"

Jonas blinked. "Plan?" he said.

"Of course," Scharpe said. "You speak of an end to troubles, an end to the Inquisition and the burnings, an end to the question. And so you must have a plan for ridding us of Herr Knupf; one which you will tell me."

Jonas shook his head. "I have no plan," he said.

"It means danger," Scharpe pressed him. "But I do not mind danger, in such a cause. I am not vengeful, but my son was no wizard. Yet the Inquisitor took him and had a confession from him; you know well the worth of such confessions. And soon there will be others, for when the curse strikes a family it does not stop with one member." He tightened his lips. "It is not for myself I am afraid," he said.

Jonas nodded. "Were there such a plan," he said, "be assured I would tell you."

"But--"

"There is none," Jonas said. "Herr Knupf shall remain, for all that I can do, while the earth remains."

Scharpe opened his mouth, shut it again, and then shrugged. "I see," he said at last. "You do not trust me. Perhaps you are wise. I might talk foolishly; I am an old man; older, in this last month, than in all my other years."

"Believe me," Jonas began. "I--"

"Let it be," Scharpe said quietly. "I believe you. If that is what you want, I believe you." He shrugged again, moving out toward the door of the hut. "And, in any case," he said, "the money is needed. For there are fines to pay, and costs of the Inquisition."

"I understand," Jonas said helplessly.

Scharpe turned and looked him full in the face. In the big man's eyes, bitterness and hopelessness glittered. "I am sure you do," he said, and turned again toward the door.

* * * * *

The others he met only briefly. Frau Scharpe was a little woman with the face of a walnut, who looked as if she had never really been cheerful. Her son's death, he saw when he looked into her mind, had not come as a surprise to her; it was one more unhappy event, in a lifetime in which she had expected nothing else. Unhappiness, she told herself, was her portion in this life; in the Life Above, things would be different.

Jonas had met the type before, and was uninterested in going further. But Ilse Scharpe was something else entirely. She did not say a word to him, coming into the house that evening, a pace behind her mother, like an obedient slave. She was about seventeen, and her mind was as fresh and clean and pretty as her face and figure. Jonas started musing on Heroes again, but he never had the chance to make a move toward her. She had a very nice smile, and from memories in the others' minds he could hear her voice, low and quiet and entirely satisfactory.

Jonas sighed. The job, he told himself sternly, came first. And afterward--

Though, come to think of it, there wouldn't be an afterward.

The evening meal was simple. There was a single dish of meat and some sort of beans; after it had been eaten, and the darkness outside grew to full night, it was time to retire. Jonas went over to his pallet, removed his jerkin and shoes, and lay down. He heard the others readying themselves for sleep, but he did not look into their minds. Soon they were asleep and breathing heavily.

But Jonas stayed awake for a while.

"It's really too bad we can't work this sort of thing at a distance," Claerten's voice said suddenly. "But then, none of us has ever met the man, and you can't read a mind if you haven't had some physical contact with the man who owns it."

"It is too bad," Jonas agreed politely. Five hundred miles away Claerten chuckled, and the linkage of minds transmitted the amusement to Jonas.

"You don't think so, at any rate," the director said. "You're having adventures--and a fine time. It's the sort of thing you like, after all."

Jonas shrugged mentally. "I suppose so," he said. "I like to work on my own, do my own job--"

"And it's got you into trouble before," Claerten said. "But you can't afford any mistakes this time."

"I know the risk perfectly well," Jonas thought back.

Claerten's thought carried a wry echo. "You know the risk to yourself," he told Jonas, "and you've accepted that. You rather like it, as a matter of fact. But you haven't thought of the risk to the rest of us--and to the town you're in."

Jonas sent a thought of uncertainty: "What?"

Claerten transmitted the entire picture in one sudden blow: the chance that Jonas would not be killed immediately, but would be discovered; the chance that the Inquisitor would get from him the secret of the Brotherhood--

"That's impossible," Jonas said.

Claerten sounded resigned. "Nothing's impossible," he said. "And if the secret is let out--why, the Brotherhood is finished. Finished before it's barely started. Because you can read a man's mind doesn't mean you can defeat him, Jonas."

"But you know what he's going to do--"

"And if he's got you in a wooden house and he's going to burn it down, what good does your knowledge do you?"

"But you can transmit false thoughts--"

"And confuse him," Claerten said. "Fine. Fine. If you've ever met the man before. And suppose you haven't? Then you can't transmit a thing to him; you're trapped in the house, remember, and the fire's started. What good's your telepathy?"

"But--"

"It's a sense," Claerten said. "Like any other sense. But it isn't magic any more than your eyes are magic. They're ... given by God, if you like; they grow, they develop. So the ability to read minds, to transmit thought is given by God. No one knows why or how. Fifteen of us have developed it; fifteen who are members of the Brotherhood. But there are others--"

"Of course," Jonas thought impatiently. "I know all that."

"You know a great deal," Claerten said, "which I sometimes find it necessary to bring to your attention."

"I've done all right," Jonas thought sullenly.

Claerten agreed. "Of course you have," he thought, "but you're not the most careful of men; and great care is needed. The Brotherhood must grow. This new sense is of great value; perhaps we can learn to teach it to others in time, though we have had little success with that. But at the least we can maintain our numbers, pass the gift on to our children--"

"If it is possible," Jonas said.

"We must try," Claerten said. "And your job is enormously important."

"I know that," Jonas thought wearily.

"You have accomplished the first step," Claerten said. "Do nothing rash."

"Of course not."

"You will not accept help--"

"I will not," Jonas thought.

"Very well, then," Claerten thought. There was the ghost of another idea; Jonas caught it.

"I know perfectly well that you wouldn't have sent me if there were any other available member," he thought. "There is no need to remind me."

"I'm sorry," Claerten thought. He radiated caution, worry, patience; Jonas turned in the bed and cut off from the director with a grunt. He was tired; long-distance linkages were a drain on the body's energy, even when the person involved was easy to visualize. But Claerten had insisted on intermittent contact.

If there were such a thing as total contact, constant contact over a period of days, Jonas thought, Claerten would use me for a puppet, a veritable Punch among men; he would override me and take me over the way a traveling entertainer rules his jointed dolls.

And that would be a fine thing for a hero, wouldn't it?

He grimaced in the darkness. Constant contact was simply impossible; any reaching out used energy, and linking up for a long period simply burned the body up like a long starvation; it was as bad as a penance.

Jonas was thankful for that.

And for the rest--well, he thought resignedly, what was a hero without a quest? And what was a quest without someone to set it?

But that the someone had to be Claerten, with his caution and his old-woman worry--

Jonas sighed and set about the business of falling asleep.

* * * * *

The days passed slowly, with great boredom. Jonas made contact twice with Claerten, who told him over and over to wait, to do nothing: "The next move is coming soon; do nothing to hurry it. You can only upset the natural course of events."

"Which is unwise," Jonas thought bitterly, "and risky, and very probably impious as well."

"As for the piety," Claerten thought, "I leave that to the priests and the women. But wisdom and caution are my task, Jonas, as they must be yours."

"I--"

"You are a hero, out on an adventure," Claerten thought witheringly. "But set your course with sense, travel it with caution; you will the more certainly arrive."

"Philosophy for a dull plodder," Jonas thought.

"Philosophy for one of the Brotherhood," Claerten thought back. "We are tiny as yet; we have no force. You can add to that force, add greatly; but you must be wise."

"I must be slow, you mean."

"I mean what I have told you," Claerten thought. "And--one more thing, Jonas."

"Yes?"

"The daughter," Claerten thought. "I have seen her in your mind. Ignore the wench. Is she worth what your task is worth?"

"I never--"

"Then my caution is unnecessary," Claerten thought. "But, in the unlikely case that she might tempt you to folly--remember it."

Jonas, who disliked irony, sighed and cut off.

That was the third night. During the days he had done the things he had planned; he did no work with the Scharpes, but let them find him, when they returned to the hut of an evening, reciting strange words. Once he built a small outdoor fire and walked around it, widdershins, for several minutes. Then he put the fire out and went inside. He wasn't sure whether or not anyone was watching him, that time.

But sooner or later it had to happen.

And it happened, as Jonas had suspected it would, through the wife. Mrs. Scharpe came back to the hut early one day, threw a frightened glance at Jonas sitting in a corner doing nothing at all, and left.

He hardly needed to see into her mind to know where she was going.

And twenty minutes later two men came to the hut. They stood in the opened doorway, Mrs. Scharpe behind them twittering like an ancient bird, and Jonas watched them boredly. They were giants, for this part of the world, almost six feet tall, with great hands and jaws. One had black, coarse hair on his head and a stubble about his face; the other was bald as an egg.

"That's him," Mrs. Scharpe said--just a trifle hesitantly. "He's the one. He came to stay with us and we didn't know--"

The man with black hair said: "Uh. Gur."

"Herr Knupf said take him back," the bald one added.

"Herr Knupf?" Jonas said, entering the conversation with a light, pleasant tone.

"He's the ... the--" Mrs. Scharpe tried to get the word out, and then pushed by the two men and came into the hut. "I didn't want to but there's something strange, and we can't afford any suspicion, and--"

Jonas realized slowly that she was crying as she looked at him. "It's all right," he said uncomfortably.

"You're--"

"I'll be perfectly all right," Jonas said. He stood up. "This Herr Knupf," he said. "He wants to see me?"

"He said bring you along," the bald man told him.

The black-haired man nodded very slowly. "Gur," he said.

Jonas sighed and went forward to meet the two big men, leaving Mrs. Scharpe sobbing in the background. The poor woman felt terrible, he knew; but there was nothing he could do about that. "Then let us go," he said, and marched off. Feeling that one more effect wouldn't hurt, he led the way to the Town Hall; let them figure out how he had known just where to go, he thought.

Their minds were very, very boring, and quite blank. Herr Knupf, Jonas reflected, might be a definite relief.

* * * * *

First there was the cell, which was in the basement of the Town Hall. It was damp and the air was not too good, but there were compensations. Rats, for instance. Jonas told himself, after the first couple of hours, that he simply wouldn't have known what to do without the rats. Trying to trap and kill them, with no weapons beyond his bare hands--even an eating knife he had carried in his jerkin had been taken away, leaving him to the uncomfortable reflection that he was going to have to dine with his fingers--was a pastime that occupied him for several hours on the first day.

On the second day, the rats began to bore him. By that evening, they were annoying him, and when the third day dawned bright and warm--as near as he could tell from the tiny slip of window at the top of his cell--Jonas was telling himself that any move at all was a move in the right direction.

He set up a shout for one of the guards. The bald one had brought his meals every day, but the black-haired one was the man who checked his cell at night. For once, Jonas thought, he was lucky; the bald man appeared, after some fifteen minutes of screaming and cursing. Jonas was not at all sure whether the black-haired man understood language: there was little trace of it in his mind, and virtually nothing that might be called intelligence. With the bald man, at least, he could communicate.

"What's wanted?" the guard said sourly, staring through the bars.

Jonas smiled softly. "You know why I'm here, don't you?" he said in a voice as close to silky as he could make it.

"You?" the bald man said. "You're here. In a cell."

"That's right," Jonas said patiently. He rubbed at his face. "Do you know why I was put here?"

"You--cast spells. You make things happen."

"That's right," Jonas said, smiling again. "I'm a wizard. A warlock. That's what they say, isn't it?"

"You--make things happen," the bald man said.

But he had the basic idea; Jonas checked that in his mind. "Very well," he said. "Now, I wish to see Herr Knupf."

"The Inquisitor calls you when he wants you," the bald man said.

"Now," Jonas said.

"When he wants--"

"If I am a wizard," Jonas said, "I have powers. Strange powers. I could make you--" He reflected for a minute. "I could make you into a beetle, and squash you underfoot. As a matter of fact, I think I will." He gazed reflectively at the bald man, who gulped and turned a little pale.

"You ... you are in a cell," he said at last. "Locked up."

"Do you think that will stop me?" Jonas said. He came to the barred door, still smiling.

"You would not dare--"

"Why not?" Jonas asked. "What have I got to lose?"

He raised one hand, clawing the fingers slightly. He took a deep breath, as if he were about to spit out an incantation. His eyes glittered. The smile broadened.

A long second passed.

"I will tell the Inquisitor you wish to see him," the bald guard said.

Jonas relaxed and stepped back. "I shall be most grateful," he said formally. The guard turned and started to walk away. Five paces down the corridor, the walk turned into a run. Jonas watched him go, and then sat down on his louse-infested cot to await developments.

The minutes ticked by endlessly. He thought of trying to reach Claerten, but decided, not entirely with regret, that the contact would use up too much energy. And he needed all the energy he could conserve now. The second step had been taken--the fact that he sat in a cell in prison was proof of that.

The third step--the all-important final step--was about to begin.

* * * * *

Georg Knupf was a tall man with skin the color and apparent texture of good leather. He had a face like an eagle, and his eyes were ice-blue. He moved his thin, strong hands gently back and forth on the table that held his papers, inkstand and pen, and said in a voice like audible sandpaper: "You wanted to see me."

"True," Jonas said pleasantly. Knupf was sitting behind the table. Jonas had not been asked to sit; he remained standing, and he was reasonably sure that his feet were going to hurt in a minute. He tried not to let the thought disturb him.

The man's mind was like his office in the Town Hall: sparsely furnished, almost austere, but with all the necessaries laid out for easy access. Underneath the strength and iron of the mind Jonas caught the spark glowing, and nearly smiled. In spite of the reports, in spite of logic, there had been a chance the Brotherhood had guessed wrongly about this man.

Now that chance was gone, and the Brotherhood was right again.

"Not many ask to see me," Knupf said in the same voice. He went on looking at his hands. There was bitterness in his mind, bitterness that had changed to hate. "Their pleas tend to be exactly the opposite."

"I did not plead," Jonas pointed out. "It was necessary that I come to see you."

The question was, he told himself, exactly what were the Inquisitor's real beliefs? His public professions were well-known; Jonas searched and found the answer. Knupf was an honest man.

That, of course, made matters simpler.

"Necessary?" Knupf said, looking up for the first time. His gaze stabbed like a sword. He was uneasy, Jonas knew; with another mind probing his, he could not help but be uneasy. But he could not find a cause; it would never occur to him. And he controlled his feelings superbly.

"You believe that I am a wizard," Jonas said.

Knupf waited a bare second, and then nodded.

"I can do many things," Jonas went on. "It was necessary that I bring these to your attention--and prove to you that they are not wizardry, or magic."

"Many have told me," Knupf muttered, "that their feats were natural. It is a common defense."

"So I have heard," Jonas said easily. "But I shall prove what I say."

"I am under no compulsion to listen to you," Knupf said after a pause.

Jonas shrugged. His feet were beginning to hurt, he realized; he sighed briefly, but there was no time or attention to spare for them. "I could only see you by having myself accused of witchcraft," he said. "In that way, you would be forced to listen to me. You may listen now, or later at a full hearing of the Inquisitor's Court."

"And I am to take my choice?" Knupf said. He smiled briefly; his face remained cold. The strong hands moved on the tabletop.

"It is a matter of indifference to me," Jonas said. "But the wait becomes boring, after a time."

Knupf's eyebrows went up. "Boring is--hardly the word others would use."

"I am not like others," Jonas said. He wished for Claerten suddenly, but there was no way to reach him safely. He had to make his move alone.

Well, he told himself, that was what he had wanted.

"I can tell you what is in your mind," he said.

The words hung in the air of the room for a long time. At last Knupf nodded. "The Devil grants to many his power of seeing the minds of men," he said quietly.

"This is not Devil's work--as I shall prove," Jonas said. He shifted his feet. "But let me establish one point at a time, in the most scholastic manner; if you will permit."

"I permit," Knupf said. There was interest in his mind, overlaid with skepticism, of course, but interest all the same. That, Jonas thought, was a better sign than he had dared to hope for.

"Very well," he said. "Think of a word. Think of any single word. I shall tell it to you."

"As any wizard might do, who had the help of his lord the Devil," Knupf muttered. "Do you expect this to prove--"

"One thing at a time," Jonas said.

Knupf nodded. A second passed.

Jonas licked his lips. The possibilities paraded before him; on one hand, success. On the other there was the torture and death of the Inquisition. Jonas took a deep breath; there was no way to back out now. Heroism looked a little empty, though.

He closed his eyes. "Cabbages," he said.

Knupf neither applauded, nor looked surprised. "As I have said," he murmured, "that which the Devil can grant--" He paused and looked down at his hands. "Am I to take this as a confession?" he said. "Do you wish to hurry your own death?"

"I am no wizard," Jonas said.

"A stranger," Knupf said, "who enters a small city, is seen at mysterious undertakings, plucks words out of the center of a man's mind ... why, the picture is a classic one. Del Rio himself, Holzinger or any of the others could not describe a better."

"Yet all this was done to draw your attention, to fix it on what I have to tell you," Jonas said, shifting his feet again. "I am no wizard, but a man who may do certain things. And here is my proof: you may do the same yourself."

The silence was a long one, and at the end of it Knupf rose. He walked to the door of the room and opened it, and the bald-headed guard came in. "He has tried to tempt me to pact with Satan," the Inquisitor said.

"But--"

"Take him away."

* * * * *

Some day, Jonas thought, back in his cell, there would be a method of controlling minds that did not require the willing co-operation of the two parties. Some day the man who reads minds would be more than a passive onlooker.

But the talent was new; it needed practice, it needed training.

The cell grew dark as night came, and the dampness seemed to increase. Jonas heard squeaking and thought of the rats, but he couldn't even summon up enough energy to try for them. He sat crosslegged in a corner of the cell and closed his eyes.

He sighed once, deeply. This was what a hero came to, he told himself. This was the end of heroics and playing a lone hand. Why, if he had it to do over again, he would--

"You would do exactly the same thing," Claerten's voice said.

Jonas grinned suddenly, and sat straighter. "I should have known you'd be getting into contact sooner or later," he thought.

"I try to keep track of all our men," Claerten thought. "In a case like yours, I try harder."

"My foolishness," Jonas thought, "sometimes works to my benefit."

Claerten's thought was wry. "If you hadn't got impatient and tried to hurry things," his voice said in Jonas' mind, "you wouldn't be back in your cell now. There is a time and a place for your disclosure--"

"Another day in here would have driven me out of my wits," Jonas thought.

"Better out of your wits than dead," Claerten thought.

Jonas sighed.

"However," Claerten went on, "there is still a way out for you. I have read the situation in your mind, and your next move will have to be rather more spectacular than usual."

"So long as it works," Jonas said, "I will be satisfied."

"It will work," Claerten said. "At least--I think it will."

Another day dragged by. Jonas put in his time alternately going over the new plan and feeling more frightened than he had ever believed possible. Claerten reached him once, but the contact was weak and fleeting; the director hadn't enough strength to reach him again, at least not for a day or so. Jonas was exactly where he'd wanted to be: on his own.

He hated the idea.

Time passed, somehow. When morning dawned, Jonas awoke to find the door of his cell being unlocked. The bald man and the black-haired man were both there. He looked up at them with distaste.

Then he saw what was in their minds, and the distaste changed to fear.

"You have confessed," the bald one said. "It is necessary that you ratify your confession. Come with us."

Jonas knew what that meant: ratification of a free confession took place under torture. He wiped his face with one hand, but he hardly thought of escaping.

He had to go through with the plan.

The two guards came into the cell and gripped his arms. Jonas allowed himself to be carried out into the corridor, and down it to a great wooden door. The guards opened it, and dragged him through.

The torture chamber was brightly lit, with torches in brackets along the walls that gave off, by a small fraction, more light than smoke. In one corner the rack itself stood, and there were other tools of the trade scattered around the room.

Jonas found that he was sweating.

The guards brought him to the center of the room. Knupf was standing near him, a perfectly blank expression on his face. His voice was the same rough rasp, but it seemed almost mechanical.

"You have confessed to me," he said, "your heresy. Now, you will be made to ratify your confession. That done, your penalty will be exacted."

And the penalty, of course, would be death--death at the stake.

He forced himself to remain calm. Now was the time for his play. He took a deep breath and felt the strength in him gather to a single point and flow outward. The two men suddenly seemed to stagger; there was a second of confusion and they had let him go. He stood alone in the room. He turned and walked to the door, but he did not open it. Instead, he leaned against it.

He forced his voice into the patterns of calmness and ease. "Your men cannot touch me," he said.

"Wizard--"

"No," Jonas said. The confusion he was broadcasting kept the men from doing anything that required even a simple plan, but he couldn't keep it up for long. "A man like yourself, a man with a particular talent, given by God."

"The name of God--"

"I can say that name," Jonas told the Inquisitor. "No wizard may say it."

"It is a trick," Knupf said.

Jonas shook his head. "Not at all. I will ask you to do nothing against the Faith; I will merely ask you to test for yourself what I say."

"You are a heretic," Knupf said stubbornly. "I can not--"

"You can pray," Jonas said.

Knupf blinked. "Pray?" he said.

"Meditate on a prayer," Jonas said. "Keep your mind open, keep yourself ready for the gift of God. It will descend on you."

Knupf shook his head. "It is a trick--" he began.

"A trick?" Jonas said. "With the prayers of God and His Church?"

And that was the unanswerable question. For no wizard could use the name of God, no wizard could pray. So the Inquisition said; so Knupf said, so Knupf had to say, and so he had to believe.

Slowly, his mind opened and became receptive. The prayer hung in the air of the smoky room. Jonas slipped in--

"Now," he said quietly.

His control slipped. The two guards came toward him, overpowered and held him in a brief second--

"Wait," the Inquisitor said heavily. "Wait. Release him."

* * * * *

"And so," Claerten thought, "the job was accomplished."

"Naturally," Jonas thought.

Claerten's thought had an overtone of weariness. "There is no need to be smug," he told Jonas. "After all, you did not do the job yourself."

"Unimportant," Jonas thought. "The man is convinced; he can be trained further and join the Brotherhood."

"It will take time," Claerten said. "A few years, perhaps. But in the meantime there will be no trials in Speyer."

"No trials?" Jonas thought. "But ... oh. I see."

"Of course," Claerten thought. "Any man who considers himself a wizard will have his mind seen by the Inquisitor. And since there are no wizards--at least, none we have discovered--"

"The trials will cease," Jonas finished.

"And the Brotherhood has gained a new member," Claerten said. "A member with influence and power. It is an important step forward, Jonas."

"Of course," Jonas thought disinterestedly.

"Yet you seem bored by the matter," Claerten thought, puzzled. "I don't see ... oh. I see the woman in your mind. The daughter. And--"

"Now, stop it," Jonas thought. "Stop it. Cut off. After all," he finished, "there are times when even a hero wants a little privacy."

Postscript:

In 1605-1606 (in Offenburg) there were no executions....

--H. C. Lea, "Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft," Vol. III, p. 1148.

THE END

 

 

---

Contents

THE UNTOUCHABLE

By STEPHEN A. KALLIS

 

"You can see it--you can watch it--but mustn't touch!" And what could possibly be more frustrating ... when you need, most violently, to get your hands on it for just one second....

The man finally entered the office of General George Garvers. As the door closed behind him, he saw the general, who sprang from his chair to greet him.

"Max! You finally came."

"Got here as soon as I could. I wager half my time was taken up by the security check points. You are certainly isolated in here."

"All of that," agreed the general. "Have a seat, won't you?" he asked, indicating a chair.

His friend sank into it gratefully. "Now, what's this vital problem you called me about? You weren't too specific."

"No," said Garvers, "I wasn't. This is a security matter, after a fashion. It's vitally important that we get technical help on this thing, and since you and I are friends, I was asked to call you in."

"Well?"

"I'm afraid I'll have to make a story of it."

"Quite all right by me, but don't mind if I interject a question now and then. Mind if I smoke?"

"Go right ahead," said Garvers, fumbling out a lighter. "Just don't spill ashes on the rug.

"This all began on the Third of May. I was working here on some top-security stuff. I had suddenly got the feeling of being watched. I know it seems silly, what with all the check points that a potential spy would have to go through to get here, but that's just how I felt.

"Several times I glanced around the office, but of course it was empty. Then I began to think that it was my nerves."

"You always were a bit of a hypochondriac," observed his friend.

"Be that as it may," continued Garvers, "it was the only explanation I had at the time. Either someone was watching me, which seemed impossible, or I was beginning to crack under the strain.

"Well, I put my papers away and tried to take a short break. I was reaching into my drawer where I keep magazines when, so help me, a man stepped out of the wall into my office."

"What? It seems as if you just said a guy stepped out of the wall."

"That's just what I did say. It sounds crazy, but let me finish, will you? I'm not kidding, and I'll show you proof later if necessary.

"Anyway, this bird stepped straight out of the wall as if it had been a waterfall or something, but the wall itself was undamaged. The only proof I had that he had actually done it was the fact that he was in my office, but that was proof enough.

"To put it mildly, I was thunderstruck. After jumping to my feet, I could only stand there like an idiot. I was so shaken that I couldn't speak a word. But he spoke first.

"'General Garvers?' he asked, just as if he had run into me at a cocktail party or on the street.

"I told him he was correct, and asked him who he was and what he wanted. And how he got into my office.

"He identified himself as a Henry Busch and explained that he was acting in behalf of a good friend of his, the late Dr. Hymann Duvall. Have you ever heard of Duvall, Max?"

His friend twisted his face in thought. "Can't say that I have, off-hand. But the name seems to ring a bell somewhere."

"Well, anyway, he said that Duvall had perfected an invention of great national importance shortly before his death and asked Busch to deliver it to the government if anything should happen to him. Then Duvall died suddenly of a heart attack."

"And what was this invention?"

"Isn't it obvious? A machine that would enable a man to walk through walls. And Busch has no idea how the thing works, other than the general explanation that Duvall gave him. And Busch was poles apart from Duvall. They were friends from college, but not because of professional interests. It seems they were both doublecrossed by the same girl.

"Duvall was a brilliant but obscure nuclear and radiation physicist. He was one of those once-in-a-lifetime fellows like Tesla. He was so shy that he didn't bring himself to anybody's attention, save for a few papers he published in the smaller physical societies' magazines. It was only because he had inherited a considerable amount of money that he could do any research whatsoever."

"Hm-m-m. I seem to remember a paper about wave propagation in one of the quarterlies. Quite unorthodox, as I recall," said Max.

"Could be. But anyway, about Busch.

"Busch majored in psychology at college, but took special courses after he graduated and took a Master's in English. He has written two novels and three collections of poems under various pen names. At the time of Duvall's death, he was working on the libretto of an opera. He has had no technical training, unless you want to count a year of high school general science. So he wasn't too much help in explaining how Duvall's instrument works.

"And, just to make matters more juicy, Duvall kept no notes. He had total recall and a childlike fear of putting anything into writing that had not been experimentally verified."

"And this machine, how is it supposed to work?"

Garvers got up and began to pace. "According to Busch, Duvall devised the instrument after stumbling into an entirely new branch of physics.

"This device of Duvall's is a special case of a new theory of matter and energy. Matter is made up of subnuclear particles--electrons, protons and the like. However, Duvall said that these particles are in turn made up of much smaller particles grouped together in aggregate clouds. The size ratio of these particles to protons is somewhat like the ratio of an individual proton to a large star. They seem to be composed of tiny clots of energy from a fantastically complex energy system, in which electromagnetism is but a small part. Each energy-segment is represented by a different facet of each particle, and the arrangement of the individual particles to each other determines what super-particle they will form, such as an electron. Duvall called these sub-particles 'lems'.

"Busch says he was told that a field of a special nature could be generated so as to make the individual lems in the particles of matter rotate in a special way that would introduce a 'polarization field', as Duvall called it. This field seems to be connected somehow with gravity, but Busch wasn't told how.

"The upshot is that matter in the initial presence of the field is affected so that it is able to pass through ordinary matter--"

"Hold on," interrupted Max. "If a device can do that, then the user would immediately fall towards the center of the Earth."

"Just you hold on. You didn't let me finish. A single plane of atoms, at the base of the treated object is the point of contact. It remains partially unaffected because it is closest to the 'gravetostatic field center', which I guess is the Earth's center of attraction. This plane of 'semi-treated' atoms can be forced through an object, if it is moved horizontally, but its 'untreated' aspect prevents the subject wearing the device from falling through the floor.

"Busch demonstrated this device to me, turning it on and strolling through various objects in this room. Think of it! No soldier could be killed or held prisoner. And--"

"Now hang on," objected Max. "Let's not run away with ourselves. He may have perfected a device that would enable a soldier to avoid capture, but there would certainly be other ways to kill him than by bullets. Let's see now: suppose that the enemy shot a flamethrower at him. The burning materials might pass through him, but he would be cooked anyway. Or poison gas--"

"Hm-m-m. As far as gas goes, I suppose a gas mask would be necessary. Busch doesn't know about the breathing mechanism, except that he had to take breaths. But as far as fire or radiation goes, the man's protected. If the radiation is either harmful by nature or by amount, the field merely reflects it. It is something called the 'lemic stress' of the field that causes the phenomenon.

"That's why we need your help."

Max scratched his head thoughtfully. "I don't understand."

Garvers looked pained. "When Busch had finished his demonstration, he carelessly tossed the device on my desk. The thing skidded and hit my paperweight so that the switch was thrown on again. So now the device and my desk are both untouchable.

"Go over to the desk and try to touch it," said Garvers dryly.

His friend got up and ambled over to the desk. There he saw a small black box resting near a paperweight. Its toggle switch was at the "on" position, and it was lying on its side. He tried to pick the box up, but his hand slid effortlessly through it as if it were so much air.

"Well!" Max said. He passed his hand through the desk again. "Well, well. Are you sure Busch told you everything?"

"Busch! He honestly wants to help and we have taken him through the mill. Pentathol, scopolamine and the like; hypnotism and the polygraph. We've dug that man deeper than we have ever dug anybody before."

"And have you conducted any experiments of your own?"

"Certainly. That's what is so frustrating. We try to X ray the thing, and we don't get a thing. We bombarded it with every radiation we could think of, from radio to gamma and it just reflected them. We can detect no radiation coming out of it. Magnetic fields don't effect it, nor do heat and cold. Nuclear particles are ignored by it; it just sits there thumbing its nose at us. And we can't even wait for it to run down. According to Busch, the power requirements of the thing are funny and once the field is established, it takes no additional energy to maintain it. And the collapsing power remains indefinitely until it is time to turn the machine off, but it's unreachable by any means we have.

"It's pure frustration. There's no way we can analyze it until we can handle it, and no way we can handle it until we can turn it off. And there's no way we can turn it off until we have analyzed it. If it were alive, I'd think that it was laughing at us.

"Do you have any ideas?" asked Garvers hopefully.

"Nothing that would help a solution at present," said Max. "But do you remember the legend of King Tantalus?"

"Slightly. What about it?"

"Well ... if he were here," said Max thoughtfully, "he'd ... sympathize."

THE END