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SCIENCE FICTION

OCTOBER 1957

35<J

BEGINNING

A GREAT

2-PART SERIAL

WOLFBANE

FREDERIK
POHL

and

CM.
KORNBLUTH

HUNTING DOWN
THE DODO

WILLY LEY

IDEAS
DIE HARD

By
ISAAC

ASIMOV

DOUBLE
INDEMNITY

ROBERT
SHECKLEY

AND
OTHER STORIES

/ You see STARS «* ***

LE,NSTER ,ut4t* sU ** in r^AI AYVI j*

*<*»., ° uM * *£ in GALAXY!

O ot*^ sxN v»^ , n f _• a | n y v I

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OCTOBER, 1957 VOL 14, NO. 6

Galaxy

SCIENCE FICTION

ALL ORIGINAL STORIES • NO REPRINTS!

CONTENTS

BOOK-LENGTH SERIAL - Installment 1

WOLFBANE by Frederik Pohl

and C. M. Kornbluth 8

NOVELETS

DOUBLE INDEMNITY by Robert Sheckley 80

IDEAS DIE HARD by Isaac Asimov 126

SHORT STORIES

SHARE ALIKE by Daniel F. Gatouye 53

ROBOTS ARE NICE? by Gordon R. Dickson 108

SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

FOR YOUR INFORMATION by Willy Ley 68

Hunting Down the Dodo

FEATURES

EDITOR'S PAGE by H. L Gold 4

FORECAST

GALAXY'S FIVE STAR SHELF by Floyd C. Gale 122

Cover by WALLACE WOOD Illustrating WOLFBANE

ROBERT M. GUINN, Publisher H. 1. GOLD, Editor

WILLY LEY, Science Editor
W. I. VAN DER POEL, Art Director JOAN J. De MARIO, Production Manager

GALAXY Science Fiction is published monthly by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Main offices:
421 Hudson Street, New York 14, N. Y. 35c per copy. Subscription: (12 copies) $3.50 per
year in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South and Central America and U. S. Possessions.
Elsewhere $4.50. Entered as second-class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Copyright,
New York 1957, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, Robert M. Guinn, president. All rights, includ-
ing translations reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped
envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in
this magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental.

Printed in the U.S.A. by The Guinn Co., Inc., N. Y. 14, N. Y. Title Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.

THE RICHEST PLANET

HPHREE years ago, an editorial
•*• based on The Amazing Ama-
zon by Willard Price (John Day)
seemed about to cause a mass
migration by refuting the argu-
ment that Earth — gutted, over-
crowded — should be abandoned
for other planets. But authors
have been falling back into the
easy falsehood of a poor, jammed
Earth. Jarring them with more
of Price's astonishing statistics
might not be a bad idea.

In size and phenomena, the
Amazon River is cosmic enough
to belong to science fiction rather
than fact. Here, listen:

The mouth of the river is 200

miles wide

ten times as wide

as the English Channel, twice as
wide as the Mediterranean. Even
a fast airliner takes half an hour
to cross it.

This "moving sea," as Willard
Price rightly calls it, represents
one-fifth of all the running fresh
water on Earth!

"Place the mouth of the Ama-
zon at New York," states Price,
"and its arms would reach up
into Canada and down into Mex-
ico and almost to California."
With its 1100 known tributaries,
many of them larger than the
Rhine, it drains 3,000,000 square
miles — an area nearly as huge
as the entire U.S. A.

This most gigantic of rivers

even has a tide, a monstrous
wave known as the pororoca, ten
to 15 feet high, which races up
as far as Santarem once a month
at the murderous rate of 45 miles
an hour.

One of the three large islands
at the mouth of the river, Marajo,
is as big as Denmark or Switzer-
land!

A hundred miles offshore, a
ship can drop buckets and bring
up drinkable water, for the 60
billion gallons per hour sweep out
with such force that the Amazon
goes on flowing right in the ocean
itself.

The League of Nations esti-
mated that Brazil could accom-
modate 900 million people. But
agricultural and industrial pro-
ductivity have increased so great-
ly since then that this figure
could easily be enlarged by 25
to 50% — about half the present
population of Earth!

Amazonia is so unthinkably
rich in natural resources that it
could give its citizens the most
lavish economy in history — with
enough left over to fuel and feed

the machines, factories and people
of the world.

Here are the greatest deposits

of high-grade iron ore oil all

Earth, plus industrial diamonds,

gold, manganese and just about

(Continued on Page 6)

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

(Continued from Page s)
every other metal and mineral.
Geologists declare that half of
Brazil floats on oil. Nowhere on
this planet is there deeper, blacker
topsoil.

"The great forests of Canada
and Russia are thin compared
with those of Brazil," says Price,
"and they take 400 years to
grow. An Amazon forest rises to
full stature in one-eighth of that
time . . . and provides food,
drink, rubber, belting, industrial

oils, ropes and fibers, wax, chew-
ing gum, insulation, bedding, in-
secticides, medicines, button, dyes
and hundreds of other articles
of daily use."

We think of Argentina as a
great cattle country. But Brazil
has 40 million head as against
Argentina's 32 million and can
support 75 million — more than
any other land.

Brazil supplies 98.2% of all
quartz crystal, essential in the
building of precision instruments;
beryllium and tantalum, over 80%.
Zirconium comes only from Bra-
zil. There are plentiful deposits
of chrome, nickel, cobalt.

"If the supply of the vital
metal, manganese, is cut off from
Russia and India," the author as-
sures us, "the western hemis-
phere's only source would be
Amazonia . . . there's lots of it."

I mentioned iron deposits; the
actual figure is nearly a third of

the world's iron reserves.

Sharks, tarpons, sawfishes,
swordfishes, porpoises and mana-
tees thrive in the Amazon. So do
over 1800 species, compared with
the 150 of all the rivers of Eu-
rope, and more than the whole
Atlantic from pole to pole.

"Amazon fish," Price says, "are
of such gigantic size that one
fish will fill an unconscionable

number of cans . . . The day
seems to be coming when the
Amazon will surpass Alaskan and
North American rivers in canned
fish and fish by-products."

There's just too much data in
The Amazing Amazon — it spills,
it gushes, it pours with a flood
of richness matched only by the
Amazon itself. You can't dip into
the book; you'll find yourself
thrashing through it, demanding
impatiently, "Let's go! What are
we waitings for?"

Aim for the planets and stars?
Of course. But the colonization *
of Amazonia is possible the min-
ute we clear out the animals and
insects — and we have the means
to do it now — and no giant space-
ships with small payloads are
needed, no sealed domes or oxy-
gen and water extractors, refrig-
eration or heating units of
awesome capacity.

Amazonia is right here and it
makes Earth the richest planet
in the Solar System!

H. L. GOLD

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

,v *: /"; - v y. : l.l-

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BEGINNING A 2-PART SERBAL

FREDERIK POHL

d C. M. KORNBLUTH

Appallingly, the Earth and the Moon had been
kidnapped from the Solar System — but who were
the kidnappers and what ransom did they want?

Illustrated by WOOD

OGET Germyn, banker,
of Wheeling, West Vir-
ginia, a Citizen, woke
gently from a Citizen's dreamless
sleep. It was the third-hour-ris-
ing time, the time proper to a
day of exceptional opportunity
to appreciate.

Citizen Germyn dressed him-
self in the clothes proper for the
appreciation of great works— such
as viewing the Empire State ruins
against storm clouds from a small
boat, or walking in silent single
file across the remaining course of
the Golden Gate Bridge. Or as
today— one hoped— witnessing the
Re-creation of the Sun.

fc .;.!.;,**

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

.^^ x:

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: ■

t^mm^ ■■■■■■

iflllillllll:.

-:^i.

WOLFBANE

Germyn with difficulty retained
a Citizen's necessary calm. One
was tempted to meditate on im-
proper things: Would the Sun be

f i

re-created? What if it were not?

* i

He put his mind to his dress.
First of all, he put on an old and
storied bracelet, a veritable iden-
tity bracelet of heavy silver links
and a plate which was inscribed:

PFC JOE HARTMANN

Korea
1953

His fellow jewelry-appreciators
would have envied him that
bracelet— if they had been capa-
ble of such an emotion as envy.
No other ID bracelet as much as

■

two hundred and fifty years old
was known to exist in Wheeling.

His finest shirt and pair of
light pants went next to his skin,
and over them he wore a loose
parka whose seams had been
carefully weakened. When the
Sun was re-created, every five
years or so, it was the custom to
remove the parka gravely and
rend it with the prescribed grace-
ful gestures . . . but not so dras-
tically that it could not be
stitched together again. Hence
the weakened seams.

This was, he counted, the forty-
first day on which he and all of
Wheeling had donned the ap-
propriate Sun Re-creation cloth-
ing. It was the forty-first day on

which the Sun — no longer white,
no longer blazing yellow, no
longer even bright red — had
risen and displayed a color that
was darker maroon and always
darker.

T had, thought Citizen Ger-
myn, never grown so dark
and so cold in all of his life. Per-
haps it was an occasion for spe-
cial viewing. For surely it would
never come again, this opportu-
nity to see the old Sun so near to
death ...

One hoped.

Gravely, Citizen Germyn com-
pleted his dressing, thinking only
of the act of dressing itself. It
was by no means his specialty,
but he considered, when it was
done, that he had done it well,
in the traditional flowing gestures,
with no flailing, at all times bal-
anced lightly on the ball of the
foot. It was all the more per-
fectly consummated because no
one saw it but himself.

He woke his wife gently, by
placing the palm of his hand on
her forehead as she lay neatly,
in the prescribed fashion, on the
Woman's Third of the bed.

The warmth of his hand gradu-
ally penetrated the layers of
sleep. Her eyes demurely opened.

"Citizeness Germyn," he greet-
ed her, making the assurance-of-
identity sign with his left hand.

"Citizen Germyn," she said,

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

with the assurance-of -identity in-
clination of the head which was
prescribed when the hands are
covered.

He retired to his tiny study.

It was the time appropriate to
meditation on the properties of
Connectivity. Citizen Germyn

was skilled in meditation, even
for a banker; it was a grace in
which he had schooled himself

* ■

since earliest childhood.

Citizen Germyn, his young face
composed, his slim body erect as
he sat but in no way tense or
straining, successfully blanked
out, one after another, all of the
external sounds and sights and
feelings that interfered with
proper meditation. His mind was
very nearly vacant except of one
central problem : Connectivity.

Over his head and behind, out
of sight, the cold air of the room
seemed to thicken and form a —
call it a blob; a blob of air.

There was a name for those

Germyn meditated.

The blob of air grew and slow-
ly moved. A vagrant current that
spun out from it caught a frag-
ment of paper and whirled it to
the floor. Germyn stirred. The
blob retreated.

Germyn, all unaware, disci-
plined his thoughts to disregard
the interruption, to return to the
central problem of Connectivity.
The blob hovered . . .

From the other room, his wife's
small, thrice-repeated throat-
clearing signaled to him that she
was dressed. Germyn got up to go
to her, his mind returning to the
world; and the overhead Eye
spun relentlessly, and
peared.

disap-

GOME miles east of Wheeling,
^ Glenn Tropile — of a class
which found it wisest to give
itself no special name, and which
had devoted much time and
thought to shaking the unwel-
blobs of air. They had been seen come name it had been given —

- awoke on the couch of his apart-

before. They were a known fact
of existence in Wheeling and in
all the world. They came. They
hovered. And they went away —
sometimes not alone. If someone
had been in the room with Citi-
zen Germyn to look at it, he
would have seen a distortion, a
twisting of what was behind the
blob, like flawed glass, a lens,

like an eye. And they were called
Eye.

ment.

He sat up, shivering. It was
cold. The damned Sun was still
bloody dark outside the window
and the apartment was soggy and
chilled.

He had kicked off the blankets
in his sleep. Why couldn't he
learn to sleep quietly, like any-
body else? Lacking a robe, he
clutched the blankets around him,

WOLFBANE

got up and walked to the un-
glassed window.

It was not unusual for Glenn
Tropile to wake up on his couch.
This happened because Gala Tro-
pile had a temper, was inclined
to exile him from her bed after
a quarrel, and — the operative fac-
tor — he knew he always had the
advantage over her for the whole
day following the night's exile.
Therefore the quarrel was worth
it. An advantage was, by defini-
tion, worth anything you paid for
it or else it was no advantage.

He could hear her moving
about in one of the other rooms
and cocked an ear, satisfied. She
hadn't waked him. Therefore she
was about to make amends. A
little itch in his spine or his brain
— it was not a physical itch, so he
couldn't locate it; he could only
be sure that it was there— stopped
troubling him momentarily; he
was winning a contest. It was
Glenn Tropile's nature to win
contests . . . and his nature to
create them.

Gala Tropile, young, dark, at-
tractive, with a haunted look,
came in tentatively carrying cof-
fee from some secret hoard of
hers.

Glenn Tropile affected not to
notice. He stared coldly out at

■

the cold landscape. The sea, white
with thin ice, was nearly out of
sight, so far had it retreated as
the little sun waned.

"Glenn

» -

Ah, good! Glenn. Where was
the proper mode of first-greeting-
one's-husband? Where was the
prescribed throat-clearing upon
entering a room?

Assiduously, he had untaught
her the meticulous ritual of man-
ners that they had all of them
been brought up to know; and
it was the greatest of his many
victories over her that sometimes,
now, she was the aggressor, she
would be the first to depart from
the formal behavior prescribed

for Citizens.

Depravity! Perversion!

Sometimes they would touch
each other at times which were
not the appropriate coming-to-
gether times, Gala sitting on her

husband's lap in the late even-
ing, perhaps, or Tropile kissing
her awake in the morning. Some-
times he would force her to let
him watch her dress — no, not
now, for the cold of the waning
sun made that sort of frolic un-
attractive, but she had permitted
it before; and such was his mas-
tery over her that he knew she
would permit it again, when the
Sun was re-created ...

If, a thought came to him, it
the Sun was re-created.

JflU luBL

E turned away from the cold
outside and looked at his
wife. "Good morning, darling."
She was contrite.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

He demanded jarringly: "Is

I've got it made, he exulted;

it?" Deliberately he stretched, de- it was what I needed to clinch

liberately he yawned, deliberate-
ly he scratched his chest. Every
movement was ugly. Gala Tro-
pile quivered, but said nothing.

Tropile flung himself on the
better of the two chairs, one hairy
leg protruding from under the
wrapped blankets. His wife was
on her best behavior — in his
unique terms; she didn't avert her
eyes.

"What've you got there?" he
asked. "Coffee?"

"Yes, dear. I thought -

"Where'd you get it?"

The haunted eyes looked away.
Still better, thought Glenn Tro-
pile, more satisfied even than
usual; she's been ransacking an

old warehouse again. It was a
trick he had taught her, and like
all of the illicit tricks she had
learned from him, a handy
weapon when he chose to use it.
It was not prescribed that a
Citizen should rummage through
Old Places. A Citizen did his
work, whatever that work might
be — banker, baker or furniture

repairman. He received what re-
wards were his due for the work
he did. A Citizen never took any-
thing that was not his due — not
even if it lay abandoned and rot-
ting.

It was one of the differences

my victory over her.

He spoke : "I need you more
than I need coffee, Gala."

She looked up, troubled.

"What would I do," he de-
manded, "if a beam fell on you
one day while you were scram-
bling through the fancy groceries?
How can you take such chances?
Don't you know what you mean
to me?"

She sniffed a couple of times.
She said brokenly: "Darling,
about last night — I'm sorry — "
and miserably held out the cup.
He took it and set it down. He
took her hand, looked up at her,
and kissed it lingeringly. He felt
her tremble. Then she gave him

a wild, adoring look and flung
herself into his arms.

A new dominance cycle was
begun at the moment he returned
her frantic kisses.

Glenn knew, and Gala knew,
that he had over her an edge, an
advantage — the weather gauge,
initiative of fire, percentage, the
can't-lose lack of tension. Call it
anything, but it was life itself
to such as Glenn Tropile. He
knew, and she knew, that having
the advantage he would press it
and she would yield — on and on,
in a rising spiral.

He did it because it was his

between Glenn Tropile and the life, the attaining of an advan-

people he moved among.

tage over anyone he might en-

WOLFBANE

counter; because he was (unwel-
comely but justly) called a Son
of the Wolf.

A WORLD away, a Pyramid
squatted sullenly on the
planed-off top of the highest peak
of the Himalayas.

It had not been built there. It
had not been carried there by
Man or Man's machines. It had —
come, in its own time; for its own
reasons.

Did it wake on that day, the
thing atop Mount Everest, or did
it ever sleep? Nobody knew. It
stood, or sat, there, approximate-
ly a tetrahedron. Its appearance
was known: constructed on a
base line of some thirty-five
yards, slaggy, midnight-blue in

color. Almost nothing else about
it was known — at least, to man-
kind.

It was the only one of its kind

(without much sure knowledge)
that there were more, perhaps
many thousands more, like it on
the unfamiliar planet that was
Earth's binary, swinging around
the miniature Sun that hung at
their common center of gravity
like an unbalanced dumbbell. But
men knew very little about that
planet itself, only that it had
come out of space and was now
there.

Time was when men had tried

two centuries before, when it
had first appeared. "Runaway
Planet." "The Invader." "Rejoice
in Messias, the Day Is at Hand."
The labels were sense-free; they
were Xs in an equation, signi-
fying only that there was some-
thing there which was unknown.

"The Runaway Planet" stopped
running when it closed on Earth.

"The Invader" didn't invade;
it merely sent down one slaggy,
midnight-blue tetrahedron to
Everest.

And "Rejoice in Messias" stole
Earth from its sun — with Earth's
old moon, which it converted into
a miniature sun of its own.

That was the time when men
were plentiful and strong — or
thought they were — • with many
huge cities and countless powerful
machines. It didn't matter. The
new binary planet showed no in-
terest in the cities or the ma-

on Earth, though men thought chines.

There was a plague of things
like Eyes — dust-devils without
dust, motionless air that sudden-
ly tensed and quivered into len-
ticular shapes. They came with
the planet and the Pyramid, so
that there probably was some
connection. But there was
nothing to do about the Eyes.
Striking at them was like strik-
ing at air — was the same thing,
in fact.

While the men and machines

to label that binary, more than tried uselessly to do something

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

■

about it, the new binary system ward; it is the same with a race.

— the stranger planet and Earth —
began to move, accelerating very
slowly.

But accelerating.

In a week, astronomers knew
something was happening. In a
month, the Moon sprang into
flame and became a new sun —
beginning to be needed, for al-
ready the parent Sol was visibly
more distant, and in a few years
it was only one other star among
many.

WHEN the little sun was
burned to a clinker, they —
whoever "they" were, for men
saw only the one Pyramid —
would hang a new one in the sky.
It happened every five clock-
years, more or less. It was the
same old moon-turned-sun, but
it burned out, and the fires
needed to be rekindled.

The first of these suns had
looked down on an Earthly popu-
lation of ten billion. As the se-
quence of suns waxed and waned,
there were changes, climatic fluc-
tuation, all but immeasurable
differences in the quantity and
kind of radiation from the new
source.

The changes were such that
the forty-fifth such sun looked
down on a shrinking human race
that could not muster up a hun-
dred million.

A frustrated man drives in-

The hundred million that clung
to existence were not the same
as the bold, vital ten billion.

The thing on Everest had, in
its time, received many labels,

too: The Devil, The Friend, The
Beast, A Pseudo-living Entity of
Quite Unknown Electrochemical
Properties. v

All these labels were also Xs.

If it did wake that morning,
it did not open its eyes, for it
had no eyes — apart from the
quivers of air that might or might
not belong to it. Eyes might have
been gouged; therefore it had
none. So an illogical person might

have argued — and yet it was
tempting to apply the "purpose,
not function" fallacy to it. Limbs
could be crushed; it had no limbs.
Ears could be deafened; it had
none. Through a mouth, it might
be poisoned; it had no mouth. In-
tentions and actions could be
frustrated; apparently it had
neither.

It was there. That was all.

It and others like it had stolen
the Earth and the Earth did not
know why. It was there. And the
one thing on Earth you could not
do was hurt it, influence it, or
coerce it in any way whatever.

It was there — and it, or the
masters it represented, owned
the Earth by right of theft. Ut-
terly. Beyond human hope of
challenge or redress.

WOLFBANE

/^ ITIZEN and Citizeness Roget
^ Germyn walked down Pine
Street in the chill and dusk of —
one hoped — a Sun Re-creation
Morning.

It was the convention to pre-
tend that this was a morning like
any other morning. It was not
proper either to cast frequent
hopeful glances at the sky, nor
yet to seem disturbed or afraid
because this was, after all, the
forty-first such morning since
those whose specialty was Sky
Viewing had come to believe the
Re-creation of the Sun was near.

The Citizen and his Citizeness
exchanged the assurance-of-iden-
tity sign with a few old friends
and stopped to converse. This
also was a convention of skill
divorced from purpose. The con-
versation was without relevance
to anything that any one of the
participants might know, or think,
or wish to ask.

Germyn said for his friends
a twenty-word poem he had made
in honor of the occasion and
heard their responses. They did
line-capping for a while — until
somebody indicated unhappiness
and a wish to change by frown-
ing the Two Grooves between his
brows. The game was deftly
ended with an improvised
rhymed exchange.

Casually, Citizen Germyn

glanced aloft. The sky-change had
not begun yet; the dying old Sun
hung just over the horizon, east
and south, much more south than
east. It was an ugly thought, but
suppose, thought Germyn, just
suppose that the Sun were not
re-created today? Or tomorrow.
Or-

Or ever.

The Citizen got a grip on him-
self and told his wife: "We shall
dine at the oatmeal stall."

The Citizeness did not imme-
diately reply. When Germyn
glanced at her with well-masked
surprise, he found her almost
staring down the dim street at a
Citizen who moved almost in a
stride, almost swinging his arms.
Scarcely graceful.

"That might be more Wolf
than man," she said doubtfully.

Germyn knew the fellow. Tro-
pile was his name. One of those
curious few who made their
homes outside of Wheeling,
though they were not farmers.
Germyn had had banking deal-
ings with him — or would have
had, if it had been up to Tropile.

"That is a careless man," he
decided, "and an ill-bred one."

They moved toward the oat-
meal stall with the gait of Citi-
zens, arms limp, feet scarcely
lifted, slumped forward a little.
It was the ancient gait of fifteen
hundred calories per day, not one
of which could be squandered.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

HP HERE was a need for more
•*• calories. So many for walking,
so many for gathering food. So
many for the economical pleas-
ures of the Citizens, so many
more — oh, many more, these
days! — to keep out the cold. Yet
there were no more calories; the
diet the whole world lived on was
a bare subsistence diet.

It was impossible to farm well
when half the world's land was
part of the time drowned in the
rising sea, part of the time smoth-
ered in falling snow.

Citizens knew this and, know-
ing, did not struggle — it was un-
graceful to struggle, particularly
when one could not win. Only —
well, Wolves struggled, wasting
calories, lacking grace.

Citizen Germyn turned his
mind to more pleasant things.

He allowed himself his First
Foretaste of the oatmeal. It
would be warm in the bowl, hot
in the throat, a comfort in the
belly. There was a great deal of
pleasure there, in weather like

this, when the cold plucked
through the loosened seams and
the wind came up the sides of
the hills. Not that there wasn't
pleasure in the cold itself, for
that matter. It was proper that
one should be cold now, just be-
fore the re-creation of the Sun,
when the old Sun was smoky-
red and the new one not yet
kindled.

- still looks like Wolf to me,"
his wife was muttering.

"Cadence," Germyn reproved
his Citizeness, but took the sting
out of it with a Quirked Smile.

The man with the ugly man-
ners was standing at the very bar
of the oatmeal stall where they
were heading. In the gloom of
mid-morning, he was all angles
and strained lines. His head was
turned awkwardly on his shoul-
der, peering toward the back of
the stall where the vendor was
rhythmically measuring grain
into a pot. His hands were rest-
ing helter-skelter on the counter,
not hanging by his sides.

Citizen Germyn felt a faint
shudder from his wife. But he did
not reprove her again, for who

could blame her? The exhibition
was revolting.

She said faintly: "Citizen,
might we dine on bread this
morning?"

He hesitated and glanced again
at the ugly man. He said indul-
gently, knowing that he was in-
dulgent: "On Sun Re-creation
Morning, the Citizeness may dine
on bread." Bearing in mind the
occasion, it was only a small favor
and therefore a very proper one.

The bread was good, very
good. They shared out the half-
kilo between them and ate it in
silence, as it deserved. Germyn
finished his first portion and, in
the prescribed pause before be-

WOLFBANE

ginning his second, elected to re-
fresh his eyes upward.

He nodded to his wife and
stepped outside.

i^kVERHEAD, the Old Sun par-
^-^ celed out its last barrel-
scrapings of heat. It was larger
than the stars around it, but many
of them were nearly as bright.

A high-pitched male voice
said: "Citizen Germyn, good
morning."

Germyn was caught off bal-
ance. He took his eyes off the
sky, half turned, glanced at the
face of the person who had
spoken to him, raised his hand in
the assurance-of-identity sign. It
was all very quick and fluid —
almost too quick, for he had had

■

his fingers bent nearly into the
sign for female friends and this
was a man. Citizen Boyne. Ger-
myn knew him well; they had
shared the Ice Viewing at Niaga-
ra a year before.

Germyn recovered quickly
enough, but it had been discon-
certing.

He improvised swiftly: "There
are stars, but are stars still there
if there is no Sun?" It was a hur-
ried effort, he grieved, but no
doubt Boyne would pick it up
and carry it along. Boyne had
always been very good,
graceful.

Boyne did no such thing.
"Good morning," he said again,

very

faintly. He glanced at the stars
overhead, as though trying to
unravel what Germyn was talk-
ing about. He said accusingly,
his voice cracking sharply:
"There isn't any Sun, Germyn.
What do you think of that?"
Germyn swallowed. "Citizen,

perhaps you — "

"No Sun, you hear me!" the
man sobbed. "It's cold, Germyn.
The Pyramids aren't going to
give us another Sun, do you
know that? They're going to
starve us, freeze us; they're
through with us. We're done, all
of us!" He was nearly screaming.

All up and down Pine Street,
people were trying not to look
at him and some of them were

failing.

Boyne clutched at Germyn
helplessly. Revolted, Germyn
drew back — bodily contact!

It seemed to bring the man to
his senses. Reason returned to
his eyes. He said : "I — " He
stopped, stared about him. "I
think I'll have bread for break-
fast," he said foolishly, and
plunged into the stall.

Boyne left behind him a

■

shaken Citizen, caught halfway
into the wrist-flip of parting, star-
ing after him with jaw slack and
eyes wide, as though Germyn had
no manners, either.

All this on Sun Re-creation
Day!

What could it mean? Germyn

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

wondered fretfully, worriedly.

Was Boyne on the point of —

Could Boyne be about to —
Germyn drew back from the

thought. There was one thing that
might explain Boyne's behavior.
But it was not a proper specula-
tion for one Citizen to make
about another.

All the same— Germyn dared
the thought — all the same, it
did seem almost as though Citi-
zen Boyne were on the point of
— well, running amok.

AT the oatmeal stall, Glenn
Tropile thumped on the
counter. The laggard oatmeal
vendor finally brought the ritual
bowl of salt and the pitcher of
thin milk. Tropile took his paper

twist of salt from the top of the
neatly arranged pile in the bowl.
He glanced at the vendor. His
ringers hesitated. Then, quickly,
he ripped the twist of paper into
his oatmeal and covered it to the

permitted level with the milk.

He ate quickly and efficiently,
watching the street outside.

They were wandering and

pile had not as yet located it, not
even in the bonds of the mar-

riage contract.

He was in no hurry. At the
age of fourteen, Glenn Tropile
had reluctantly come to realize
certain things about himself —
that he disliked being bested,
that he had to have a certain
advantage in all his dealings, or
an intolerable itch of the mind
drove him to discomfort. The
things added up to a terrifying
fear, gradually becoming knowl-
edge, that the only we that
could properly include him was
one that it was not very wise to
join.

He had realized, in fact, that

he was a Wolf.

For some years, Tropile had

struggled against it, for Wolf was
an obscene word; the children he
played with were punished
severely for saying it, and for
almost nothing else.

It was not proper for one Citi-
zen to advantage himself at the
expense of another; Wolves did
that.

It was proper for a Citizen to
accept what he had, not to strive
for more, to find beauty in small
things, to accommodate himself,
with the minimum of strain and
awkwardness, to whatever his life
happened to be.

Wolves were not like that.
Wolves never meditated, Wolves
for Tropile, no doubt, but Tro- never Appreciated, Wolves never

mooning about, as always — may-
be today more than most days,
since they hoped it would be the
day the Sun blossomed flame

once more.

Tropile always thought of the
wandering, mooning Citizens as
they. There was a we somewhere

WOLFBANE

were Translated — that supreme
fulfillment, granted only to those
who succeeded in a perfect medi-
tation, that surrender of the world
and the flesh by taking leave of
both, which could never be
achieved by a Wolf.

Accordingly, Glenn Tropile
had tried very hard to do all the
things that Wolves could not do.

He had nearly succeeded. His
specialty, Water Watching, had
been most rewarding. He had
achieved many partly successful
meditations on Connectivity.

And yet he was still a Wolf,
for he still felt that burning,
itching urge to triumph and to
hold an advantage. For that
reason, it was almost impossible
for him to make friends among
the Citizens; and gradually he
had almost stopped trying.

Tropile had arrived in Wheel-
ing nearly a year before, making
him one of the early settlers in
point of time. And yet there was
not a Citizen in the street who
was prepared to exchange recog-
nition gestures with him.

He knew them, nearly every
one. He knew their names and
their wives' names. He knew what
northern states they had moved
down from with the spreading of
the ice, as the sun grew dim. He
knew very nearly to the quarter
of a gram what stores of sugar
and salt and coffee each one of

guests, of course, not for them-
selves; the well-bred Citizen
hoarded only for the entertain-
ment of others.

Tropile knew these things be-
cause there was an advantage in
knowing them. But there was no
advantage in having anyone
know him.

A few did — that banker, Ger-
myn; Tropile had approached
him only a few months before
about a prospective loan. But it
had been a chancy, nervous en-
counter. The idea was so lumi-
nously simple to Tropile— organ-
ize an expedition to the coal
mines that once had flourished
nearby, find the coal, bring it to
Wheeling, heat the houses. And
yet it had seemed blasphemous
to Germyn. Tropile had counted
himself lucky merely to have
been refused the loan, instead of
being cried out upon as Wolf.

HP HE oatmeal vendor was fuss-
■*• ing worriedly around his neat
stack of paper twists in the salt
bowl.

Tropile avoided the man's eyes.
Tropile was not interested in the
little wry smile of self-depreca-
tion which the vendor would
make to him, given half a chance.
Tropile knew well enough what
was disturbing the vendor. Let
it disturb him. It was Tropile's
custom to take extra twists of

them had put away — for their salt. They were in his pockets

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

now; they would stay there. Let
the vendor wonder why he was
short.

Tropile licked the bowl of his
spoon and stepped into the
street. He was comfortably aware
under a double-thick parka that
the wind was blowing very cold.

A Citizen passed him, walking
alone: odd, thought Tropile. He
was walking rapidly and there
was a look of taut despair on his
face. Still more odd. Odd enough
to be worth another look, be-
cause that sort of haste, that sort
of abstraction, suggested some-
thing to Tropile. They were in
no way normal to the gentle
sheep of the class They, except
in one particular circumstance.

Glenn Tropile crossed the
street to follow the abstracted
Citizen, whose name, he knew,
was Boyne. The man blundered
into Citizen Germyn outside the
baker's stall, and Tropile stood
back out of easy sight, watching
and listening.

Boyne was on the ragged edge
of breakdown. What Tropile
heard and saw confirmed his
diagnosis. The one particular cir-
cumstance was close to happen-
ing — Citizen Boyne was on the
verge of running amok.

Tropile looked at the man with
amusement and contempt. Amok!
The gentle sheep could be pushed
too far. He had seen Citizens run
amok, the signs were obvious.

There was pretty sure to be an
advantage in it for Glenn Tro-
pile. There was an advantage in
almost anything, if you looked

for it.

He watched and waited. He
picked his spot with care, so that
he could see Citizen Boyne in-
side the baker's stall, making a
dismal botch of slashing his quar-
ter-kilo of bread from the Morn-
ing Loaf.

He waited for Boyne to come

racing out ...

Boyne did.

A yell — loud, piercing. It was
Citizen Germyn, shrilling: "Amok,
amok!" A scream. An enraged
wordless cry from Boyne, and the
baker's knife glinting in the faint
light as Boyne swung it. And then
Citizens were scattering in every
direction — all of the Citizens but
one.

One Citizen was under the
knife— his own knife, as it hap-
pened; it was the baker himself.
Boyne chopped and chopped
again. And then Boyne came out,
roaring, the broad knife whistling
about his head. The gentle Citi-
zens fled panicked before him.
He struck at their retreating
forms and screamed and struck
again. Amok.

It was the one particular cir-

cumstance when they forgot to
be gracious— one of the two, Tro-
pile corrected himself as he
strolled across to the baker's stall.

WOLFBANE

His brow furrowed, because there
was another circumstance when
they lacked grace, and one which
affected him nearly.

E watched the maddened
creature, Boyne, already far
down the road, chasing a knot

of Citizen? around a corner. Tro-

pile sighed and stepped into the

baker's stall to see what he might

gain from this.

Boyne would wear himself out

—the surging rage would leave

him as quickly as it came; he
would be a sheep again and the
other sheep would close in and
capture him. That was what hap-
pened when a Citizen ran amok.
It was a measure of what pres-
sures were on the Citizens that,
at any moment, there might be
one gram of pressure too much
and one of them would crack. It
had happened here in Wheeling
twice within the past two months.
Glenn Tropile had seen it hap-
pen in Pittsburgh, Altoona and
Bronxville.

There is a limit to the pres-
sure that can be endured.

Tropile walked into the baker's
stall and looked down - without
emotion at the slaughtered baker.
The corpse was a gory mess, but
Tropile had seen corpses before.

He looked around the stall, cal-
culating. As a starter, he bent to

and slipped it into his pocket.
Food was always useful. Given
enough food, perhaps Boyne
would not have run amok.

Was it simple hunger they
cracked under? Or the knowledge
of the thing on Mount Everest,
or the hovering Eyes, or the
sought-after-dreaded prospect of
Translation, or merely the strain
of keeping up their laboriously
figured lives?

Did it matter? They cracked
and ran amok, and Tropile never
would, and that was what mat-
tered.

He leaned across the counter,
reaching for what was left of the
Morning Loaf—

And found himself staring into
the terrified large eyes of Citi-
zeness Germyn.

She screamed: "Wolf! Citizens,
help me! Wolf!"

Tropile faltered. He hadn't
even seen the damned woman,
but there she was, rising up from
behind the counter, screaming her
head off: "Wolf! Wolf!"

He said sharply: "Citizeness, I
beg you—" But that was no good.
The evidence was on him and her
screams would fetch others.

Tropile panicked. He started
toward her to silence her, but that
was no good, either. He whirled.
She was screaming, screaming,
and there were people to hear.

pick up the quarter-kilo of bread Tropile darted into the street,
Boyne had dropped, dusted it off but they were popping out of

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

every doorway now, appearing
from each rat's hole in which they
had hid to escape Boyne.

"Please!" he cried, sobbing.

"Wait a minute!"

But they weren't waiting. They
had heard the woman and maybe
some of them had seen him with
the bread. They were all around
him— no, they were all over him;
they were clutching at him, tear-
ing at his soft, warm furs.

They pulled at his pockets and
the stolen twists of salt spilled
accusingly out. They yanked at
his sleeves and even the stout,
unweakened seams ripped open.
He was fairly captured.

"Wolf!" they were shouting.

"Wolf!" It drowned out the dis-
tant noise from where Boyne had
finally been run to earth, a block
and more away. It drowned out
everything.

It was the other circumstance
when rhey forgot to be gracious:
when they had trapped a Son of
the Wolf.

Ill

J? NGINEERING had long ago
■^ come to an end.

Engineering is possible under
one condition of the equation:
Total available Calories divided
by Population equals Artistic-
Technological Style. When the
ratio Calories-to-Population is
large—say, five thousand or more,

five thousand daily calories for
every living person— then the Ar-
tistic-Technological Style is big.
People carve Mount Rushmore;
they build great foundries; they

manufacture enormous automo- .

biles to carry one housewife half
a mile for the purchase of one.
lipstick.

Life is coarse and rich where
C : P is large. At the other ex-
treme, where C : P is too small, life
does not exist at all. It has

starved out.

Experimentally, add little in-
crements to C:P and it will be
some time before the right-hand
side of the equation becomes sig-
nificant. But at last, in the 1,000
to 1,500 calorie range, Artistic-
Technological Style firmly ap-
pears in self-perpetuating form.
C:P in that range produces the
small arts, the appreciations, the
peaceful arrangements of neces-
sities into subtle relationships of
traditionally agreed-upon virtue.

Think of Japan, locked into
its Shogunate prison, with a hun-
gry population scrabbling food
out of mountainsides and beauty
out of arrangements of lichens.
The small, inexpensive sub-sub-
arts are characteristic of the 1,000
to 1,500 calorie range.

And this was the range of
Earth, the world of ten billion
men, when the planet was stolen
by its new binary.

Some few persons inexpensive-

•

WOLFBANE

ly studied the study of science
with pencil and renewable paper,
but the last research accelerator
had long since been shut down.
The juice from its hydro-power
dam was needed - to supply
meager light to a million homes
and to cook the pablum for two
million brand-new babies.

In those days, one dedicated

Byzantine wrote the definitive
encyclopedia of engineering
(though he was no engineer). Its
four hundred and twenty tiny
volumes examined exhaustively
the engineering feats of ancient
Greece and Egypt, the Wall of
Shih-Hwang Ti, the Gothic build-
ers, Brunei who changed the face
of England, the Roeblings of
Brooklyn, Groves of the Penta-
gon, Duggan of the Shelter Sys-
tem (before C:P dropped to the
point where war became vanish-
ingly implausible), Levern of
Operation Up. But the encyclo-
pedist could not use a slide rule
without thinking, faltering, jotting
down his decimals.

And then . . . the magnitudes
grew less.

Under the tectonic and climatic
battering of the great abduction
of Earth from its primary, under
the sine-wave advances to and
retreats from the equator of the
ice sheath, as the small successor
Suns waxed, waned, died and
were replaced, the ratio C:P re-
mained stable. C had diminished

enormously; so had P. As the
calories to support life grew
scarce, so the consuming mouths
of mankind grew less in number.

HP HE forty-fifth small Sun shone
■■• on no engineers.

Not even on the binary, per-
haps. The Pyramids, the things

on the binary, the thing on Mount
Everest— they were not engineers.
They employed a crude meta-
physic based on dissection and
shoving.

They had no elegant field
theories. All they knew was that
everything came apart, and that
if you pushed a thing, it would
move.

If your biggest push would
not move a thing, you took it
apart and pushed the parts, and
then it would move. Sometimes,
for nuclear effects, they had to
take things apart into 3 x 10 9
pieces and shove each piece very
carefully.

By taking apart and shoving,
then, they landed their one space-
ship on the burned-out sunlet.
Four human beings were on that
ship. They meditated briefly on
Connectivity and died screaming.

A point of new flame appeared
on the sunlet's surface and the
spaceship scrambled for the bi-
nary. The point of flame went
from cherry through orange into
the blue-white and began to
spread.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

T the moment of the Re-crea-
tion of the Sun, there was
rejoicing on the Earth.

Not quite everywhere, though.
In Wheeling's House of the
Five Regulations, Glenn Tropile
waited unquietly for death. Citi-
zen Boyne, who had run amok
and slaughtered the baker, shared
Tropile's room and his doom, but
not his rage. Boyne, with demure
pleasure, was composing his
death poem.

"Talk to me!" snapped Tropile.
"Why are we here? What did
you do and why did you do it?
What have I done? Why don't
I pick up a bench and kill you
with it? You would've killed me
two hours ago if I'd caught your
eye!"

There was no satisfaction in
Citizen Boyne; the passions were
burned out of him. He politely
tendered Tropile a famous apho-
rism: "Citizen, the art of living is
the substitution of unimportant,
answerable questions for impor-
tant, unanswerable ones. Come,
let us appreciate the new-born
Sun."

He turned to the window,
where the spark of blue-white
flame in what had once been the
crater of Tycho was beginning
to spread across the charred
moon.

Tropile was child enough of
his culture to turn with him, al-
most involuntarily. He was silent.

That blue-white infinitesimal up
there growing slowly— the one-
ness, the calm rapture of Being
in a universe that you shaded
into without harsh discontinua,
the being one with the great blue-
white gem-flower blossoming
now in the heavens that were no
different stuff than you your-
self -

He closed his eyes, calm, and
meditated on Connectivity.

He was being Good.

By the time the fusion reaction
had covered the whole small disk
of the sunlet, a quarter-hour at
the most, his meditation began
to wear off.

Tropile shrugged out of his
torn parka, not bothering to rip
it further. It was already grow-
ing warm in the room. Citizen
Boyne, of course, was carefully
opening every seam with grace-
ful rending motions, miming
great and smooth effort of the bi-
ceps and trapezius.

But the meditation was over,

and as Tropile watched his cell-
mate, he screamed a silent Why?
Since his adolescence, that wail-
ing syllable had seldom been far
from his mind. It could be si-
lenced by appreciation and medi-
tation.

Tropile's specialty was Water
Watching and he was so good at
it that several beginners had
asked him for instruction in the
subtle art, in spite of his notorious

WOLFBANE

oddities of life and manner. He
enjoyed Water Watching. He al-
most pitied anybody so single-
mindedly devoted to, say, Clouds
and Odors— great game though it
was— that he had never even
tried Water Watching. And after
a session of Watching, when one
was lucky enough to observe the
Nine Boiling Stages in classic
perfection, one might slip into
meditation and be harmonious,

feel Good.

But what did one do when the
meditations failed, as they had
failed him? What did one do
when they came farther and
farther apart, became less and
less intense, could be inspired, fi-

nally, only by a huge event like
the renewal of the Sun?

One went amok, he had always
thought.

But he had not. Boyne had. He
had been declared a Son of the

^ i

Wolf, on no evidence that he
could understand. Yet he had
not run amok.

Still, the penalties were the
same, he thought, uncomfortably
aware of an unfamiliar itch— not
the inward intolerable itch of
needing the advantage, but a lo-
calized sensation at the base of
his spine. The penalties for all
gross crimes— Wolfhood or run-
ning amok— were the same, and
simply this:

They would perform the Lum-
bar Puncture. He would make

the Donation of Spinal Fluid.
He would be dead.

HP HE Keeper of the House of
-■■ Five Regulations, an old man,
Citizen Harmane, looked in on his
charges— approvingly at Boyne,
with a beclouded expression at
Glenn Tropile.

It was thought that even
Wolves were entitled to the com-
mon human decencies in the
brief interval between exposure
and the Donation of Fluid. The
Keeper would not have dreamed
of scowling at the detected Wolf
or of interfering with whatever
wretched imitation of meditation-
before-dying the creature might
practice. But he could not, all the
same, bring himself to offer even
an assurance-of-identity gesture.

Tropile had no such qualms.

He scowled at Keeper Har-
mane with such ferocity that the
old man almost hurried away. He
turned an almost equally ugly
scowl upon Citizen Boyne. How
dared that knife-murderer be so
calm, so relaxed!

Tropile said brutally: "They'll
kill us! You know that? They'll
stick a needle in our spines and
drain us dry. It hurts. Do you
understand me? They're going
to drain us, and then they're go-
ing to drink our spinal fluid, and
it's going to hurt"

He was gently corrected. "We
shall make the Donation," Citizen

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Boyne said calmly. "Is not the
difference intelligible to a Son
of the Wolf?"

True culture demanded that

you're a Citizen. Would a Citi-
zen speak as you are speaking?"
"But they're going to kill us!"
"Then why aren't you compos-

that remark be accepted as a ing your death poem?"

friendly joke, probably based on
a truth— how else could an un-

palatable truth be put in words?
Otherwise the unthinkable might
happen. They might quarrel.
They might even come to blows!

The appropriate mild smile
formed on Tropile's lips, but
harshly he wiped it off. They
were going to kill him. He would
not smile for them! And the ef-
fort was enormous.

"I'm not a Son of the Wolf!"
he howled, desperate, knowing
he was protesting to the man of
all men in Wheeling who didn't

care, and who could do least
about it if he did. "What's this
crazy talk about Wolves? I don't
know what a Son of the Wolf is
and I don't think you or any-
body does. All I know is that I
was acting sensibly. And every-
body began howling! You're sup-
posed to know a Son of the Wolf
by his unculture, his ignorance,
his violence. But you chopped
down three people and I only
picked up a piece of bread! And
I'm supposed to be the dangerous
one!"

"Wolves never know they're
Wolves," sighed Citizen Boyne.
"Fish probably think they're
birds and you evidently think

GLENN Tropile took a deep
breath. Something was biting
him. It was bad enough that he
was about to die, bad enough that
he had done nothing worth dy-
ing for. But what was gnawing at
him now had nothing to do with

dying.

The percentages were going
the wrong way. This pale Citizen
was getting an edge on him.

An engorged gland in Tropile's
adrenals— it was only a pinhead
in Citizen Boyne's— gushed raw
hormones into his bloodstream.
He could die, yes— that was a
skill everyone had to acquire,
sooner or later. But while he was
alive, he could not stand to be
bested in an encounter, an argu-
ment, a relationship— not and stay
alive. Wolf? Call him Wolf. Call
him Operator, or Percentage
Player; call him Sharp Article;
call him Gamesman.

If there was an advantage to be
derived, he would derive it. It was
the way he was put together.

He said, for time: "You're
right. Stupid of me. I must have
lost my head!"

He thought. Some men think
by poking problems apart; some
think by laying facts side by side

WOLFBANE

to compare. Tropile's thinking
was neither of these, but a spe-
cies of judo. He conceded to
his opponent such things as
Strength, Armor, Resource. He
didn't need these things for him-
self; to every contest, the op-
ponent brought enough of them
to supply two. It was Tropile's
habit (and Wolfish, he had to
admit) to use the opponent's
strength against him, to break
the opponent against his own
steel walls.

He thought.

The first thing was to make up
his mind: He was Wolf. Then let
him be Wolf. He wouldn't stay
around for the spinal tap; he
would go from there. But how?

The second thing was to plan.
There were obstacles. Citizen
Boyne was one. The Keeper of
the House of the Five Regula-
tions was another.

Where was the pole which
would permit him to vault over
these hurdles? There was always
his wife, Gala. He owned her;
she would do what he wished—
provided he made her want to do
it.

Yes, Gala. He walked to the
door and shouted to Citizen Har-
mane: "Keeper! I must see my
wife! Have her brought to me!"

It was impossible for the Keep-
er to refuse. He called gently,
"I will invite the Citizeness," and
toddled away.

The third thing was time.

Tropile turned to Citizen
Boyne. "Citizen," he said per-
suasively, "since your death poem
is ready and mine is not, will you
be gracious enough to go first
when they— when they come?"

Citizen Boyne looked tem-
perately at his cellmate and made
the Quirked Smile.

"You see?" he said. "Wolf."
And that was true. But what
was also true was that Boyne
couldn't and didn't refuse.

¥TALF a world away, the mid-
■*--■■ night-blue Pyramid sat on
its planed-off peak as it had sat
since the days when Earth had
a real sun of its own.

It was of no importance to the
Pyramid that Glenn Tropile was
about to receive a slim catheter
into his spine, to drain his saps

and his life. It didn't matter to
the Pyramid that the pretext for
the execution was an act which
human history had long stopped
considering a capital crime. Rit-
ual sacrifice in any guise made no
difference to the Pyramid.

The Pyramid saw them come
and the Pyramid saw them go—
if the Pyramid could be said to
"see." One human being more or
less, what matter? Who bothers
to take a census of the cells in a
hangnail?

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

And yet the Pyramid did have
a kind of interest in Glenn Tro-
pile. Or, at least, in the human
race of which he was a part.

Nobody knew much about the
Pyramids, but everybody knew
that much. They wanted some-
thing—else why would they have
bothered to steal the Earth?

The date of the theft was 2027.
A great year— the year of the first
landings on the Runaway Planet
that had come blundering into the
Solar System. Maybe those land-
ings were a mistake — although
they were a very great triumph,
too; but maybe if it hadn't been
for the landings, the Runaway
Planet might have run right
through the ecliptic and away.

However, the triumphal mis-
take was made and that was the

come to take us away.

A world of ten billion people,
some of them brilliant, many of
them brave, built and flung the
giant rockets of Operation Up at
the invader: Nothing.

The first, and only, Interplane-
tary Expeditionary Force was
boosted up to no-gravity and
dropped onto the new planet to
strike back: Nothing.

Earth moved spirally outward.

If a battle could not be won,
then perhaps a migration. New
ships were built in haste. But they
lay there rusting as the sun grew
small and the ice grew thick, be-
cause where was there to go? Not
Mars. Not the Moon, which was
trailing alone. Not choking Venus
or crushing Jupiter.

The migration was defeated as

first time a human eye saw a surely as the war, there being

Pyramid.

Shortly after— though not be-
fore a radio message was sent—
that human eye winked out for-
ever; but by then the damage
was done. What passed in a Pyra-
mid for "attention" had been at-
tracted. The next thing that hap-
pened set the wireless channels
between Palomar and Pernambu-
co, between Greenwich and the
Cape of Good Hope, buzzing and
worrying, as astronomers all over
the Earth reported and confirmed
and reconfirmed the astonishing
fact that our planet was on the
move. Rejoice in Messias had

no place to migrate to.

One Pyramid came to Earth,
only one. It shaved the crest off
the highest mountain there was
and squatted on it. An observer?
A warden? Whatever it was, it
stayed.

The sun grew too distant to
be of use, and out of the old
Moon, the Pyramid aliens built
a new small sun in the sky— a
five-year sun that burned out and
was replaced, again and again
and endlessly again.

It had been a fierce struggle
against unbeatable odds on the
part of the ten billion; and when

WOLFB AN E

the uselessness of struggle was
demonstrated at last, many of the
ten billion froze to death, and
many of them starved, and near-
ly all of the rest had something
frozen or starved out of them;

we've always meant to each
other?"

She looked at him wretchedly.
Fretfully she tore at the billow-
ing filmy sleeve of her summer
blouse. The seams hadn't been

and what was left, two centuries loosened; there had not been

and more later, was more or less
like Citizen Boyne, except for a
few— a very few— like Glenn Tro-
pile.

ALA Tropile stared miserably
at her husband. "I want to
get out of here," he was saying
urgently. "They mean to kill me.
Gala, you know you can't make
yourself suffer by letting them
kill me!"

She wailed : "I can'r/"

Tropile looked over his shoul-
der. Citizen Boyne was fingering
the textured contrasts of a golden
watch-case which had been his
father's— and soon would be his
son's. Boyne's eyes were closed
and he wasn't listening.

Tropile leaned forward and
deliberately put his hand on his
wife's arm. She started and
flushed, of course.

"You can" he said, "and whafs
more, you will. You can help me
get out of here. I insist on it,
Gala, because I must save you
that pain."

He took his hand off her arm,
content.

He said harshly: "Darling,
don't you think I know how much

time. She had just been getting
into the appropriate Sun Re-crea-
tion Day costume, to be worn
under the parka, when the mes-
senger had come with the news
about her husband.

She avoided his eyes. "If you're
really Wolf ..."

Tropile's sub-adrenals pulsed
and filled him with confident
strength. "You know what I am
—you better than anyone else."
It was a sly reminder of their
curious furtive behavior together;
like the hand on her arm, it had
its effect. "After all, why do we
quarrel the way we did last
night?"

He hurried on; the job of the
rowel was to spur her to action,
not to inflame a wound. "Be-
cause we're important to each
other. I know that you would
count on me to help if you were
in trouble. And I know that you'd
be hurt— deeply, Gala!— if I didn't
count on you."

She sniffled and scuffed the
bright strap over her open-toed
sandal.

Then she met his eyes.

It was the after-effect of the
argument, of course. Glenn Tro-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

pile knew just how heavily he
could rely on the after-spiral of
a quarrel. She was submitting.

She glanced furtively at Citi-
zen Boyne and lowered her voice.

"What do I have to do?" she
whispered.

N five minutes, she was gone,
but that was more than
enough time. Tropile had at least
thirty minutes left. They would
take Boyne first; he had seen to
that. And once Boyne was gone—

Tropile wrenched a leg off his
three-legged stool and sat pre-
cariously balanced on the other
two. He tossed the loose leg clat-
tering into a corner.

The Keeper of the House of
Five Regulations ambled slack-
bodied by and glanced into the
room. "Wolf, what happened to
your stool?"

Tropile made a left-handed
sign of no-importance. "It doesn't
matter. Except it is hard to medi-
tate, sitting on this thing, with
every muscle tensing and fight-
ing against every other to keep
my balance . . ."

The Keeper made an over-
ruling sign of please-let-me-help.
"It's your last half-hour, Wolf,"
he reminded Tropile. "I'll fix the
stool for you."

He entered and slammed and
banged it together, and left with
an expression of mild concern.
Even a Son of the Wolf was en-

titled to the fullest appreciation
of that unique opportunity for
meditation, the last half-hour be-
fore a Donation.

In five minutes, the Keeper
was back, looking solemn and yet
glad, like a bearer of serious but
welcome tidings.

"It is the time for the first
Donation," he announced. "Which
of you—"

"Him," said Tropile quickly,
pointing.

Boyne opened his eyes calmly
and nodded. He got to his feet,
made a formal leavetaking bow
to Tropile, and followed the
Keeper toward his Donation and
his death. As they were going out,
Tropile coughed a would-you-
please-grant-me-a-favor cough.

The Keeper paused. "What is
it, Wolf?"

Tropile showed him the empty
water pitcher— empty, all right;
he had emptied it out the win-
dow.

"My apologies," the Keeper
said, flustered, and hurried Boyne
along. He came back almost at
once to fill the pitcher, even
though he should be there to
watch Boyne's ceremonial Do-
nation.

Tropile stood looking at the
Keeper, his sub-adrenals begin-
ning to pound like the rolling boil
of Well-aged Water. The Keeper
was at a disadvantage. He had
been neglectful of his charge—

WOLFB ANE

a broken stool, no water in the
pitcher. And a Citizen, brought
up in a Citizen's maze of consid-
eration and tact, could not help
but be humiliated, seeking to

make amends.

Tropile pressed his advantage
home. "Wait," he said to the
Keeper. "I'd like to talk to you."

The Keeper hesitated, torn.
"The Donation-"

"Damn the Donation," Tropile
said calmly. "After all, what is
it but sticking a pipe into a man's
backbone and sucking out the
juice that keeps him alive? It's
killing, that's all."

The Keeper turned literally
white. Tropile was speaking blas-
phemy and he wasn't stopping.

"I want to tell you about my
wife," Tropile went on, assuming
a confidential air. "Now there's
a real woman. Not one of these
frozen-up Citizenesses, you know?
Why, she and I used to—" He
hesitated. "You're a man of the
world, aren't you?" he demanded.
"I mean you've seen life."

suppose so," the Keeper
said faintly.

"Then you won't be shocked,"
Tropile lied. "Well, let me tell
you, there's a lot to women that
these stuffed-shirt Citizens don't
know about. Boy! Ever see a wo-
man's knee?" He sniggered. "Ever
kiss a woman with—" he winked
-" with the light on? Ever sit
in a big armchair, say, with a

woman in your lap— all soft and
heavy, and kind of warm, and
slumped up against your chest,
you know, and—"

He stopped and swallowed. He
was almost making himself
retch, it was so hard to say these
things. But he forced himself to
go on: "Well, that's what she and
I used to do. Plenty. All the time.
That's what I call a real woman!'

He stopped, warned by the
Keeper's sudden change of ex-
pression, glazed eyes, strangling
breath. He had gone too far. He
had only wanted to paralyze the
man, revolt him, put him out of
commission, but he was overdoing
it. He jumped forward and
caught the Keeper as he fell,
fainting.

rpROPILE callously emptied
-■- the water pitcher over the
man. The Keeper sneezed and
sat up groggily. He focused his
eyes on Tropile and agonizedly
blushed.

Tropile said harshly: "I wish
to see the new sun from the
street."

The request was incredible.
Even after the unbelievable ob-
scenities he had heard, the Keep-
er was not prepared for this; he
was staggered. Tropile was in de-
tention regarding the Fifth Regu-
lation. That was all there was to
it. Such persons were not to be
released from their quarters. The

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

tmim

WOLFBANE

Keeper knew it, the world knew
it, Tropile knew it.

It was an obscenity even great-
er than the lurid tales of per-
verted lust, for Tropile had asked
something which was impossible!
No one ever asked anything that
was impossible to grant, for no
one could ever refuse anything.
That was utterly graceless, un-
thinkable.

One could only attempt to com-
promise. The Keeper stammer-
ingly said : "May I— may I let you
see the new sun from the cor-
ridor?" And even that was
wretchedly wrong, but he had to
offer something. One always of-
fered something. The Keeper
had never since babyhood given
a flat no to anybody about any-
thing. No Citizen had. A flat no
led to anger, strong words— per-
haps even hurt feelings. The only
flat no conceivable was the enor-
mous terminal no of an amok.
Short of that -

One offered. One split the dif-
ference. One was invariably filled
with tepid pleasure when, in-
variably, the offer was accepted,
the difference was split, both par-
ties were satisfied.

"That will do for a start," Tro-
pile snarled. "Open, man, open!
Don't make me wait."

The Keeper reeled and un-
latched the door to the corridor.

"Now the street!"

"I can't!" burst in an anguished

cry from the Keeper. He buried
his face in his hands and began
to sob, hopelessly incapacitated.
"The street!" Tropile said re-
morselessly. He himself felt
wrenchingly ill; he was going

against custom that had ruled his
own life as surely as the Keeper's.

But he was Wolf. "I will be
Wolf," he growled, and advanced
upon the Keeper. "My wife," he
said, "I didn't finish telling you.
Sometimes she used to put her
arm around me and just snuggle
up and— I remember one time
she kissed my ear. Broad day-
light. It felt funny and warm— I
can't describe it."

Whimpering, the Keeper flung
the keys at Tropile and tottered
brokenly away.

He was out of the action. Tro-
pile himself was nearly as badly
off; the difference was that he.
continued to function. The words
coming from him had seared like
acid in his throat.

"They call me Wolf," he. said
aloud, reeling against the wall.
"I will be one."

He unlocked the outer door and

his wife was waiting, holding in

her arms the things he had asked
her to bring.

Tropile said strangely to her:
"I am steel and fire. I am Wolf,
full of the old moxie."

She wailed: "Glenn, are you
sure I'm doing the right thing?"

He laughed unsteadily and led

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

her by the arm through the de
serted streets.

CITIZEN Germyn, as was his
right by position and status
as a connoisseur, helped prepare
Citizen Boyne for his Donation.
There was nothing much to it—
which made it an elaborate and
lengthy task, according to the
ethic of the Citizens; it had to
be protracted, each step being
surrounded by fullest dress of
ritual.

Jt was done in the broad day-
light of the new Sun, and as many
of the three hundred citizens of
Wheeling as could manage it
were in the courtyard of the old
Federal Building to watch.

The nature of the ceremony

was this: A man who revealed
himself Wolf, or who finally
crumbled under the demands of
life and ran amok, could not be
allowed to live. He was haled
before an audience of his equals
and permitted— with the help of
regretful force, if that should be
necessary, but preferably not— to
make the Donation of Spinal
Fluid.

Execution was murder and
murder was not permitted under
the gentle code of Citizens; this
was not execution. The draining
of a man's spinal fluid did not
kill him. It only insured that,

after a time and with much suf-
fering, his internal chemistry
would so arrange itself that it
would continue to function, only
not in a way that would sustain
life.

Once the Donation was made,
the problem was completely al-
tered, of course. Suffering was
bad in itself. To save the Donor
from the suffering that lay ahead,
it was the custom to have the
oldest and gentlest Citizen on
hand stand by with a sharp-edged
knife. When the Donation was
complete, the Donor's head was
removed— purely to avert suffer-
ing. That was not execution,
either, but only the hastening of
an inevitable end.

The dozen or so Citizens whose
rank permitted them to assist
then dissolved the spinal fluids
in water and ceremoniously
sipped them, at which time it
was proper to offer a small poem
in commentary. All in all, it
was a perfectly splendid oppor-
tunity for the purest form of
meditation for everyone con-
cerned.

Citizen Germyn, whose role
was Catheter Bearer, took his
place behind the Introducer Bear-
er, the Annunciators and the
Questioner of Purpose. As he
passed Citizen Boyne, Germyn
assisted him to assume the proper
crouched-over position. Boyne
looked up gratefully and Ger-

WOLFBANE

myn found the occasion correct
for a commendatory half-smile.
The Questioner of Purpose
said solemnly to Boyne: "It is
your privilege to make a Dona-
tion here today. Do you wish to

do so?"

"I do," said Boyne raptly. The
anxiety had passed; clearly he
was confident of making a good
Donation. Germyn approved with

all his heart.

The Annunciators, in alternate

stanzas, announced the right
pause for meditation to the
meager crowd, and all fell silent.
Citizen Germyn began the proc-
ess of blanking out his mind, to
ready himself for the great op-
portunity to Appreciate that lay
ahead. A sound distracted him;
he glanced up irritably. It seemed
to come from the House of the
Five Regulations, a man's voice,
carrying. But no one else ap-
peared to notice it. All of the
watchers, all of those on the stone
steps, were in somber meditation.
Germyn tried to return his
thoughts to where they belonged.
But something was troubling
him. He had caught a glimpse of
the Donor and there had been
something— something-
He angrily permitted himself
to look up once more to see just
what it had been about Citizen
Boyne that had attracted his at-
tention.

the form of Citizen Boyne, silent,
barely visible, a flicker of life
and motion. Nothing tangible. It
was as if the air itself were in
motion.

It was, Germyn thought with a
bursting heart— it was an Eye!

The veritable miracle of Trans-
lation and it was about to take
place here and now, upon the
person of Citizen Boyne! And no
one knew it but Germyn him-
self!

N this last surmise, Citizen
Germyn was wrong. Or was
he? True, no other human eyes
saw the flawed-glass thing that
twisted the air over Boyne's pros-
trate body, but there was, in a
sense, another witness . . . some
thousands of miles away.

The Pyramid on Mount Ever-
est "stirred."

It did not move, but some-
thing about it moved, or changed,
or radiated. The Pyramid sur-
veyed its— cabbage patch? Wrist-
watch mine? As much sense, it
may be, to say wristwatch patch
or cabbage mine. At any rate,
it surveyed what to it was a place
where intricate mechanisms grew,
ripened and were dug up at the
moment of usefulness, whereupon
they were quick-frozen and wired
into circuits.

Through signals perceptible to
it, the Pyramids had become

Yes, there was something. Over "aware" that one of its mecha-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

nisms was now ready to be
plucked— harvested.

The Pyramid's blood was di-
electric fluid. Its limbs were elec-
trostatic charges. Its philosophy
was: Unscrew It and Push. Its
motive was survival.

Survival today was not what sur-
vival once had been, for a Pyra-
mid.

Once survival had merely
been gliding along on a cushion
of repellent charges, streaming
electrons behind for the push,
sending h-f pulses out often
enough to get a picture of their
bounced return to integrate deep
inside.

If the picture showed some-
thing metabolizable, one meta-
bolized it. One broke it down
into molecules by lashing it with
the surplus protons left over from
the dispersed electrons; one ad-
sorbed the molecules. Sometimes
the metabolizable object was an
Immobile and sometimes a Mo-
bile—a vague, theoretical, frivo-
lous classification to a philosophy
whose basis was that everything
unscrewed. If it was a Mobile,
one sometimes had to move after

it.

That was the difference.

The essential was survival, not
making idle distinctions. And one
small part of survival today was
the Everest Pyramid's job.

It sat and waited. It sent out

tering, and it bounced and scat-
tered them additionally on their

Deep inside, the more-
distorted

return.

than - anamorphically

picture was reintegrated. Deeper

inside, it was interpreted and

evaluated for its part in survival.

npHERE was a need for certain
■*• mechanisms which grew on
this planet. At irregular times,
the Pyramid evaluated the pic-
ture to the effect that a mecha-
nism—a wristwatch, so to speak
—was ripe for plucking; and by
electrostatic charges, it did so.
The electrostatic charges, in
forming, produced what humans
called an Eye. But the Pyramid
had no use for names.

It merely plucked, when a
mechanism was ripe. It had
found that a mechanism was ripe
now. /

A world away, before the ste|)s
of Wheeling's Federal Building,
electrostatic charges gathered
above a component whose name
was Citizen Boyne. There was
a small sound like the clapping
of two hands which made the
three hundred citizens of Wheel-
ing jerk upright out of their medi-
tations.

The sound was air filling the
gap that had once been occupied
by Citizen Boyne, who had in-
stantly vanished— who had, in a
word, been ripe and therefore

its h-f pulses bouncing and scat- been plucked.

WOLFBANE

GLENN Tropile and his sob-
bing wife passed the night
in the stubble of a cornfield.
Neither of them slept much.

Tropile, numbed by contact
with the iron chill of the field-
it would be months before the
new Sun warmed the Earth
enough for it to begin radiating
in turn— tossed restlessly, dream-
ing. He was Wolf. Let it be so,
he told himself again and again.
I will be Wolf. I will strike back
at the Citizens. I will-
Always the thought trailed
off. He would exactly What?
What could he do?

Migration was an answer— go
to another city. With Gala, he

guessed. Start a new life, where
he was not known as Wolf.

And then what? Try to live a
sheep's life, as he had tried all
his years? And there was the
question of whether, in fact, he
could manage to find a city where
he was not known. The human
race was migratory, in these
years of subjection to the never
quite understood rule of the

Pyramids.

It was a matter of insulation.
When the new Sun was young,
it was hot, and there was plenty
of warmth; it was possible to
spread north and south, away

from final line of permafront
which, in North America, came

just above the old Mason-Dixon
line. When the Sun was dying,
the cold spread down. The race
followed the seasons. Soon all of
Wheeling would be spreading
north again, and how was he to
be sure that none of Wheeling's
Citizens might not turn up
wherever he might go?

He could be sure— that was the
answer to that.

All right, scratch migration.
What remained? He could— with
Gala, he guessed— live a solitary
life on the fringes of cultivated
land. They both had some skill
at rummaging the old store-
houses of the ancients, and there
was still food and other commodi-
ties to be found.

But even a Wolf is gregarious
by nature and there were bleak
hours in that night when Tropile
found himself close to sobbing
with his wife.

At the first break of dawn, he
was up. Gala had fallen into a
light and restless sleep; he called
her awake.

"We have to move," he said
harshly. "Maybe they'll get up
enough guts to follow us. I don't
want them to find us."

Silently she got up. They
rolled and tied the blankets she
had bought; they ate quickly
from the food she had brought;
they made packs and put them
on their shoulders and started
to walk. One thing in their favor:

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

they were moving fast, faster
than any Citizen was likely to

follow. All the same, .Tropile
kept looking nervously behind
him.

They hurried north and east,
and that was a mistake, because
by noon they found themselves
blocked by water. Once it had
been a river; the melting of the
polar ice caps that had sub-
merged the coasts of the old con-
tinents had drowned it out and
now it was salt water. But what-
ever it was, it was impassable.
They would have to skirt it west-
ward until they found a bridge
or a boat.

"We can stop and eat," Tro-
pile said grudgingly, trying not
to despair.

They slumped to the ground. It
was warmer now. Tropile found
himself getting drowsier, drow-
sier—

He jerked erect and stared
around belligerently, Beside him,
his wife was lying motionless,
though her eyes were open, gaz-
ing at the sky. Tropile sighed
and stretched out. A moment's
rest, he promised himself, and
then a quick bite to eat, and then
onward . . .

sleep, awakening to panic. It was
outside the possibility of belief,
but there it was:

In the sky over him, etched
black against a cloud, a helicop-
ter. And men staring out of it,
staring down at him.

A helicopter!

But there were no helicopters,
or none that flew— if there had
been fuel to fly them with— if
any man had had the skill to
make them fly. It was impossible!
And yet there it was, and the
men were looking at him, and
the impossible great whirling
thing was coming down, nearer.

He began to run in the down-
ward wash of air from the vanes.
But it was no use. There were

three men and they were fresh
and he wasn't. He stopped, drop-
ping into the fighter's crouch
that is pre-set into the human
body, ready to do battle.

The men didn't want to fight.
They laughed and one of them
said amiably: "Long past your
bedtime, boy. Get in. We'll take
you home."

Tropile stood poised, hands
half-clenched. "Take-"

"Take you home. Yeah. Where
you belong, Tropile. Not back to

He was sound asleep when Wheeling, if that's what is wor-

they spotted him.

THERE was a flutter of iron
bird's wings from overhead.
Tropile jumped up out of his

rying you.
"Where I-"

"Where you belong."
Then Tropile understood.
He got into the helicopter won-

WOLFBANE

,£;;

.■ ■

deringly. Home. So there was a
home for such as he. He wasn't
alone. He needn't keep his soli-
tary self apart. He could be with
his own kind.

He remembered Gala Tropile
and paused. One of the men said
with quick understanding: "Your
wife? I think we saw her about
half a mile from here. Heading
back to Wheeling as fast as she
could go."

Tropile nodded. That was bet-
ter, after all. Gala was no Wolf,
though he had tried his best to
make her one.

One of the men closed the
door; another did something -
with levers and wheels; the vanes
whooshed around overhead; the
helicopter bounced on its stiff-
sprung landing legs and then
rocked up and away.

For the first time in his life,
Glenn Tropile looked down on
the land.

Glenn Tropile had never flown
at all, and the two or three hun-
dred feet of air beneath made

him faint and

They

queasy,
danced through the passes in the
West Virginia hills, crossed icy
streams and rivers, swung past
old empty towns which no longer
even had names of their own.
They saw no one.

It was something over four
hundred miles to where they
were going, one of the men told
him. They made it easily before
dark.

A S Tropile walked through the
^*- town in the evening light,
electricity flared white and violet
in the buildings around him.
Imagine! Electricity was calories,
and calories were to be hoarded.
There were other walkers in

They didn't fly high -but

the street. Their gait was not
the economical shuffle with pen-
dant arms. They burned energy
visibly. They swung. They

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

■ . ■

WOLFBANE

strode. It had been chiseled on
his brain in earliest childhood
that such walking was wrong,
reprehensible, debilitating. It
wasted calories. These people did
not look debilitated and they
didn't seem to mind wasting
calories.

It was an ordinary sort of
town, apparently named Prince-
ton. It did not have the transient
look to it of, say, Wheeling, or
Altoona, or Gary, in Tropile's ex-
perience. It looked like — well,
it looked permanent.

Tropile had heard of a town
called Princeton, but it happened
that he had never passed through
it southwarding or northbound.
There was no reason why he or
anybody should or should not
have. Still, there was a possi-
bility, once he thought of it, that
things were somehow so arranged
that they should not; maybe it
was all on purpose. Like every
town, it was underpopulated, but
not so much so as most. Perhaps
one living space in five was used.
A high ratio.

The man beside him was
named Haendl, one of the men
from the helicopter. They hadn't
talked much on the flight and
they didn't talk much now. "Eat
first," Haendl said, and took Tro-
pile to a bright and busy sort of
food stall. Only it wasn't a stall.
It was a restaurant.

This Haendl

what to make

of him? He should have been dis-
gusting, nasty, an abomination.
He had no manners whatever.
He didn't know, or at least didn't
use, the Seventeen Conventional
Gestures. He wouldn't let Tro-
pile walk behind him and to his
left, though he was easily five
years Tropile's senior. When he
ate, he ate. The Sip of Apprecia-
tion, the Pause of First Surfeit,
the Thrice Proffered Share meant
nothing to him. He laughed when
Tropile tried to give him the
Elder's Portion.

Cheerfully patronizing, this
man Haendl said to Tropile:
"That stuff's all right when you
don't have anything better to

do with your time. Those poor
mutts don't. They'd die of bore-
dom without their inky-pinky
cults and they don't have the
resources to do anything bigger.
Yes, I do know the Gestures.
Seventeen delicate ways of com^
municating emotions too refined
for words. The hell with them,
Tropile. I've got words. You'll
learn them, too."

Tropile ate silently, trying to
think.

A man arrived, threw himself
in a chair, glanced curiously at
Tropile and said: "Haendl, the
Somerville Road. The creek
backed up when it froze. Flooded
bad. Ruined everything."

Tropile ventured: "The flood
ruined the road?"

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"The road? No. Say, you must
be the fellow Haendl went after.
Tropile, that the name?" He
leaned across the table, pumped
Tropile's hand. "We had the road
nicely blocked," he explained.
"The flood washed it clean. Now
we have to block it again."

Haendl said: "Take the trac-
tor if you need it."

The man nodded and left.

Haendl said: "Eat up. We're
wasting time. About that road—
we keep all entrances blocked up,
see? Why let a lot of sheep in
and out?"

"Sheep?"

"The opposite," said Haendl,
"of Wolves." .

HPAKE ten billion people and
■*• say that, out of every mil-
lion of them, one— just one— is
different. He has a talent for sur-
vival; call him Wolf. Ten thou-
sand of him in a world of ten
billion.

Squeeze them, freeze them,
cut them down. Let old Rejoice
in Messias loom in the terrify-
ing sky and so abduct the Earth
that the human race is deci-
mated, fractionated, reduced to
what is in comparison a bare
handful of chilled, stunned sur-
vivors. There aren't ten billion
people in the world any more.
No, not by a factor of a thousand.
Maybe there are as many as
ten million, more or less, rattling

around in the space their enor-
mous Elder Generations made
for them.

And of these ten million, how
many are Wolf?

Ten thousand.

"You understand, Tropile?"
said Haendl. "We survive. I don't
care what you call us. The sheep
call us Wolves. Me, I kind of call
us Supermen. We have a talent for
survival."

Tropile nodded, beginning to
understand. "The way I survived
the House of the Five Regula-
tions."

Haendl gave him a pitying
look. "The way you survived
thirty years of Sheephood before
that. Come on."

It was a tour of inspection.
They went into a building, big,
looking like any other big and
useful building of the ancients,
gray stone walls, windows with
ragged spears of glass. Inside,
though, it wasn't like the others.
Two sub-basements down, Tro-
pile winced and turned away
from the flood of violet light that
poured out of a quartz bull's-eye
on top of a squat steel cone.

"Perfectly harmless, Tropile—
you don't have to worry," Haendl
boomed. "Know what you're look-
ing at? There's a fusion reactor
down there. Heat. Power. All the
power we need. Do you know
what that means?"

He stared soberly down at the

WOLFBANE

flaring violet light of the inspec-
tion port.

"Come on," he said abruptly
to Tropile.

Another building, also big, also
gray stone. A cracked inscription
over the entrance read: ORIAL
HALL OF HUMANITIES. The
sense-shock this time was not
light; it was sound. Hammering,
screeching, rattling, rumbling.
Men were doing noisy things with
metal and machines.

"Repair shop!" Haendl yelled.
"See those machines? They be-
long to our man Innison. We've
salvaged them from every big
factory ruin we could find. Give
Innison a piece of metal— any al-
loy, any shape— and one of those
machines will change it into any
other shape and damned near
any other alloy. Drill it, cut it,
plane it, weld it, smelt it, zone-
melt it, bond it— you tell him
what to do and he'll do it.

"We got the parts to make six
tractors and forty-one cars out
of this shop. And we've got other
shops— aircraft in Farmingdale
and Wichita, armaments in Wil-
mington. Not that we can't make
some armaments here. Innison
could build you a tank if he had
to, complete with 105-millimeter

a tank?" . Tropile

gun,

"What's
asked.

Haendl only looked at him and
said: "Come on!"

LENN Tropile's head spun
dizzily and all the spectacles
merged and danced in his mind.
They were incredible. All of
them.

Fusion pile, machine shop,
vehicular garage, aircraft hangar.
There was a storeroom under the
seats of a football stadium, and
Tropile's head spun on his shoul-
ders again as he tried to count
the cases of coffee and canned
soups and whiskey and beans.
There was another storeroom,
only this one was called an
armory. It was filled with . . .
guns. Guns that could be loaded
with cartridges, of which they
had very many; guns which,

when you loaded them and
pulled the trigger, would fire.

Tropile said, remembering: "I
saw a gun once that still had its
firing pin. But it was rusted
solid."

"These work, Tropile," said
Haendl. "You can kill a man
with them. Some of us have."

"Kill-"

"Get that sheep look out of
your eyes, Tropile! What's the
difference how you execute a
criminal? And what's a criminal
but someone who represents a
danger to your world? We prefer
a gun instead of the Donation
of the Spinal Tap, because it's
quicker, because it's less messy
—and because we don't like to
drink spinal fluid, no matter what

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

imaginary therapeutic or sym-
bolic value it has. You'll learn."

But he didn't add "come on."
They had arrived where they
were going.

It was a small room in the
building that housed the armory
and it held, among other things,
a rack of guns.

"Sit down," said Haendl, tak-
ing one of the guns out of the
rack thoughtfully and handling
it as the doomed Boyne had
caressed his watch-case. It was
the latest pre-Pyramid-model
rifle, anti-personnel, short-range.
It would not scatter a cluster of
shots in a coffee can at more than
two and a half miles.

"All right," said Haendl, strok-
ing the stock. "You've seen the
works, Tropile. You've lived thir-
ty years with sheep. You've seen
what they have and what we
have. I don't have to ask you to
make a choice. I know what you
choose. The only thing left is
to tell you what we want from

you.

A faint pulsing began inside
Glenn Tropile. "I expected we'd
be getting to that."

"Why not? We're not sheep.
We don't act that way. Quid pro
quo. Remember that — it saves
time. You've seen the quid. Now
we come to the quo." He leaned
forward. "Tropile, what do you
know about the Pyramids?"

"Nothing."

Haendl nodded. "Right. They're
all around us and our lives are
beggared because of them. And
we don't even know why. We
don't have the least idea of what
they are. Did you know that one
of the sheep was Translated in
Wheeling when you left?"

"Translated?"

Tropile listened with his
mouth open while Haendl told
him about what had happened to
Citizen Boyne.

"So he didn't make the Dona-
tion after all," Tropile said.

"Might have been better if
he had," said Haendl. "Still, it
gave you a chance to get away.
We had heard— never mind how
just yet— that Wheeling'd caught
itself a Wolf, so we came looking
for you. But you were already
gone."

TROPILE said, faintly an-
noyed: "You were damn near
too late."

"Oh, no, Tropile," Haendl as-
sured him. "We're never too
late. If you don't have enough
guts and ingenuity to get away
from sheep, you're no wolf-
simple as that. But there's this
Translation. We know it happens,
but we don't even know what it
is. All we know, people disappear.
There's a new sun in the sky
every five years or so. Who
makes it? The Pyramids. How?
We don't know that. Sometimes

WOLFBANE

something floats around in the
air and we call it an Eye. It has
something to do with Translation,
something to do with the Pyra-
mids. What? We don't know
that."

"We don't know much of any-
thing," interrupted Tropile, try-
ing to hurry him along.

"Not about the Pyramids, no."
Haendl shook his head. "Hardly
anyone has ever* seen one, for
that matter."

"Hardly

You

mean

you

have?"

"Oh, yes. There's a Pyramid
on Mount Everest, you know.
That's not just a story. It's true.
I've been there, and it's there. At
least, it was there five years ago,
right after the last Sun Re-crea-
tion. I guess it hasn't moved. It
just sits there."

Tropile listened, marveling. To
have seen a real Pyramid! Al-
most he had thought of them as
legends, contrived to account for
such established physical facts as
the Eyes and Translation, as
children with a Santa Claus. But
this incredible man had seen it!

"Somebody dropped an H-
bomb on it, way back," Haendl
continued, "and the only thing
that happened is that now the
North Col is a crater. You can't
move the Pyramid. You can't
hurt it. But it's alive. It has been
there, alive, for a couple of hun-
dred years; and that's about all

we know about the Pyramids.
Right?"

"Right."

Haendl stood up. "Tropile,
that's what all of this is all
about!" He gestured around him.
"Guns, tanks, airplanes— we want
to know more! We're going to
find out more and then we're go-
ing to fight."

There was a jarring note and
Tropile caught at it, sniffing the
air. Somehow — perhaps it was his
sub-adrenals that told him— this
very positive, very self-willed
man was just the slightest bit
unsure of himself. But Haendl
swept on and Tropile, for a mo-
ment, forgot to be alert.

"We had a party up Mount
Everest five years ago," Haendl
was saying. "We didn't find out
a thing. Five years before that,
and five years before that— every
time there's a sun, while it is
still warm enough to give a party
a chance to climb up the sides
—we send a team up there. It's
a rough job. We give it to the
new boys, Tropile. Like you."

There it was. He was being in-
vited to attack a Pyramid.

Tropile hesitated, delicately
balanced, trying to get the feel
of this negotiation. This was Wolf
against Wolf; it was hard. There
had to be an advantage—

"There is an advantage,"
Haendl said aloud.

Tropile jumped, but then he

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

remembered: Wolf against Wolf.

Haendl went on: "What yor
get out of it is your life, in the
first place. You understand you
can't get out now. We don't
want sheep meddling around.
And in the second place, there's
a considerable hope of gain." He
stared at Tropile with a dream-
er's eyes. "We don't send par-
ties up there for nothing, you
know. We want to get something
out of it. What we want is the
Earth."

"The Earth?" It reeked of
madness. But this man wasn't
mad.

"Some day, Tropile, it's going
to be us against them. Never
mind the sheep — they don't
count. It's going to be Pyramids
and Wolves, and the Pyramids
won't win. And then—"

It was enough to curdle the
blood. This man was proposing
to fight, and against the invul-
nerable, the godlike Pyramids.

But he was glowing and the
fever was contagious. Tropile
felt his own blood begin to pound.
Haendl hadn't finished his "and
then—" but he didn't have to.
The "and then" was obvious:
And then the world takes up
again from the day the wander-
ing planet first came into view.
And then we go back to our own
solar system and an end to the
five-year cycle of frost and hun-

And then the Wolves can rule
a world worth ruling. ,

It was a meretricious appeal,
perhaps, but it could not be re-
fused. Tropile was lost.

He said: "You can put away
the gun, Haendl. You've signed

me up.

VII

THE way to Mount Everest,
Tropile glumly found, lay
through supervising the colony's
nursery school. It wasn't what he
had expected, but it had the ad-
vantages that while his charges
were learning, he was learning,

too.

One jump ahead of the three-
year-olds, he found that the
"wolves," far from being preda-
tors on the "sheep," existed with
them in a far more complicated
ecological relationship. There
were Wolves all through sheep-
dom; they leavened the dough
of society.

In barbarously simple prose,
a primer said: "The Sons of the
Wolf are good at numbers and
money. You and your friends
play money games almost as
soon as you can talk, and you
can think in percentages and
compound interest when you
want to. Most people are not able
to do this."

True, thought Tropile subvo-
cally, reading aloud to the tots.

WOLFBANE

That was how it had been with

him.

"Sheep are afraid of the Sons

of the Wolf. Those of us who live
among them are in constant dan-
ger of detection and death— al-
though ordinarily a Wolf can take
care of himself against any num-
ber of sheep." True, too.

"It is one of the most dan-
gerous assignments a Wolf can
be given to live among the sheep.
Yet it is essential. Without us,
they would die— of stagnation, of
rot, eventually of hunger."

It didn't have to be spelled out
any further. Sheep can't mend
their own fences.

The prose was horrifyingly
bald and the children were hor-
rifyingly—he choked on the word,

but managed to form it in his
mind — competitive. The verbal
taboos lingered, he found, after
he had broken through the bar-
riers of behavior.

But it was distressing, in a
way. At an age when future Citi-
zens would have been learning
their Little Pitcher Ways, these
children were learning to fight.
The perennial argument about
who would get to be Big Bill
Zeckendorf when they played a
strange game called "Zeckendorf
and Hilton" sometimes ended in
bloody noses.

And nobody— nobody at all—
meditated on Connectivity.

it himself. Haendl said grimly:
"We don't understand it and we
don't like what we don't under-
stand. We're suspicious animals,
Tropile. As the children grow
older, we give them just enough
practice so they can go into one

meditation and get the feel of
it— or pretend to, at any rate.
If they have to pass as Citizens,
they'll need that much. But more
than that we do not allow."

"Allow?" Somehow the word
grated; somehow his sub-adrenals
began to pulse.

"Allow! We have our suspicions
and we know for a fact that
sometimes people disappear when
they meditate. We don't want to
disappear. We think it's not a
good thing to disappear. Don't
meditate, Tropile. You hear?"

UT later, . Tropile had to

argue the point. He picked
a time when Haendl was free, or
as nearly free as that man ever
was. The whole adult colony
had been out on what they used
as a parade ground— it had once
been a football field, Haendl said.
They had done their regular
twice-a-week infantry drill, that
being one of the prices one paid
for living among the free, pro-
gressive Wolves instead of the
dull and tepid sheep.

Tropile was mightily winded,
but he cast himself on the ground

Tropile was warned not to do near Haendl, caught his breath

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

and said: "Haendl— about medi-
tation."

"What about it?"

"Well, perhaps you don't real-
ly grasp it."

Tropile searched for words. He
knew what he wanted to say.
How could anything that felt as
good as Oneness be bad? And
wasn't Translation, after all, so
rare as hardly to matter? But
he wasn't sure he could get
through to Haendl in those
terms.

He tried: "When you meditate
successfully, Haendl, you're one
with the Universe. Do you know
what I mean? There's no feeling
like it. It's indescribable peace,
beauty, harmony, repose."

"It's the world's cheapest nar-
cotic," Haendl snorted. .

"Oh, now, really

"And the world's cheapest re-
ligion. The stone-broke mutts
can't afford gilded idols, so they
use their own navels. That's all
it is. They can't afford alcohol;
they can't even afford the mus-
cular exertion of deep breathing
that would throw them into a
state of hyperventilated oxygen
drunkenness. Then what's left?
Self-hypnosis. Nothing else. It's
all they can do, so they learn it,
they define it as pleasant and
good, and they're all fixed up."

self up on his elbows. "Aren't you
leaving something out? What
about Translation?"

Haendl glowered at him.
"That's the part we don't under-
stand."

"But surely self - hypnosis
doesn't account for—"

"Surely it doesn't!" Haendl
mimicked "savagely. "All right.
We don't understand it and we're
afraid of it. Kindly do not tell
me Translation is the supreme
act of Un-willing, Total Dis-
avowal of Duality, Unison with
the Brahm-Ground or any such
slop. You don't know what it is
and neither do we." He started
to get up. "All we know is, peo-
ple vanish. And we want no part
of it, so we don't meditate. None
of us— including you!"

TT was foolishness, this close-
-*- order drill. Could you de-
feat the unreachable Himalayan
Pyramid with a squads-right
flanking maneuver?

And yet it wasn't all foolish-
ness. Close-order drill and 2500-
calorie-a-day diet began to put
fat and flesh and muscle on Tro-
pile's body, and something other
than that on his mind. He had
not lost the edge of his acquisi-
tiveness, his drive— his whatever
it was that made the difference

Tropile sighed. The man was between Wolf and sheep.

so stubborn! Then a thought oc-
curred to him and he pu hed him-

But he had gained something.
Happiness? Well, if "happiness"

WOLFBANE

is a sense of purpose, and a hope
that the purpose can be accom-
plished, then happiness. It was
a feeling that had never existed
in his life before. Always it had
been the glandular compulsion
to gain an advantage, and that
was gone, or anyway almost gone,
because it was permitted in the
society in which he now lived.

Glenn Tropile sang as he putt-
putted in his tractor, plowing the
thawing Jersey fields. Still, a
faint doubt remained. Squads
right against the Pyramids?

Stiffly, i Tropile stopped the
tractor, slowed the diesel to a
steady thrum and got off. It was
hot— being midsummer of the
five-year calendar the Pyramids
had imposed. It was time for
rest and maybe something to eat.

He sat in the shade of a tree,
as farmers always have done, and
opened his sandwiches. He was
only a mile or so from Princeton,
but he might as well have been
in Limbo; there was no sign of
any living human but himself.
The northering sheep didn't
come near Princeton — it "hap-
pened" that way, on purpose.

He caught a glimpse of some-
thing moving, but when he stood
up for a better look into the
woods on the other side of the
neld, it was gone. Wolf? Real
Wolf, that is? It could have been
a bear, for that matter— there
was talk of wolves and bears

around Princeton; and although
Tropile knew that much of the
talk was assiduously encouraged
by men like Haendl, he also
knew that some of it was true.
As long as he was up, he gath-
ered straw from the litter of last
"year's" head-high grass, gath-
ered sticks under the trees, built
a small fire and put water on to
boil for coffee. Then he sat back
and ate his sandwiches, thinking

Maybe it was a promotion, go-
ing from the nursery school to
labor in the fields. Or maybe it
wasn't. Haendl had promised him
a place in the expedition that
would — maybe — discover some-
thing new and great and helpful
about the Pyramids. And that
might still come to pass, because
the expedition was far from
ready to leave.

Tropile munched his sand-
wiches thoughtfully. Now why
was the expedition so far from
ready to leave? It was absolutely
essential to get there in the
warmest weather possible— other-
wise Mt. Everest was unclimb-
able. Generations of alpinists had
proved that. That warmest
weather was rapidly going by.

And why were Haendl and the
Wolf colony so insistent on
building tanks, arming them-
selves with rifles, organizing in
companies and squads? The H-
bomb hadn't flustered the Pyra-
mid. What lesser weapon could?

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Uneasily, Tropile put a few
more sticks on the fire, staring
thoughtfully into the canteen cup
of water. It was a satisfyingly
hot fire, he noticed abstractedly.
The water was very nearly ready
to boil.

TTALF across the world, the
M.M. Pyramid in the Himalays
felt, or heard, or tasted— a differ-
ence.

Possibly the h-f pulses that
had gone endlessly wheep, wheep,
wheep were now going wheep-
beep, wheep-foeep. Possibly the
electromagnetic "taste" of lower-
than-red was now spiced with a
tang of beyond-violet. Whatever
the sign was, the Pyramid recog-
nized it.

A part of the crop it tended
was ready to harvest.

The ripening bud had a name,
of course, but names didn't mat-
ter to the Pyramid. The man
named Tropile didn't know he
was ripening, either. All that Tro-
pile knew was that, for the first
time in nearly a year, he had
succeeded in catching each stage
of the nine perfect states of
water-coming-to-a-boil in its pur-
est form.

It was like . . . like . . . well,
it was like nothing that anyone
but a Water Watcher could un-
derstand. He observed. He ap-
preciated. He encompassed and
absorbed the myriad subtle per-

fections of time, of shifting trans-
parency, of sound, of distribu-
tion of ebulliency, of the faint,
faint odor of steam.

Complete, Glenn Tropile re-
laxed all his limbs and let his
chin rest on his breast-bone.

It was, he thought with placid,
crystalline perception, a rare and
perfect opportunity for medita-
tion. He thought of Connectivity.
(Overhead, a shifting glassy flaw
appeared in the thin, still air.)
There wasn't any thought of
Eyes in the erased palimpsest
that was Glenn Tropile's mind.
There wasn't any thought of
Pyramids or of Wolves. The
plowed field before him didn't
exist. Even the water, merrily
bubbling itself dry, was gone
from his perception.

He was beginning to medi-
tate.

Time passed— or stood still —
for Tropile; there was no dif-
ference. There was no time. He
found himself almost on the
brink of Understanding.

Something snapped. An intrud-
ing blue-bottle drone, maybe, or
a twitching muscle. Partly, Tro-
pile came back to reality. Al-
most, he glanced upward. Almost,
he saw the Eye . . .

It didn't matter. The thing that
really mattered, the only thing
in the world, was all within his
mind; and he was ready, he knew,
to find it.

WOLFBANE

Once more! Try harder!

He let the mind-clearing un-
answerable question drift into
his mind:

If the sound of two hands to-
gether is a clapping, what is the
sound of one hand?

Gently he pawed at the ques-
tion, the symbol of the futility of
mind— and therefore the gateway
to meditation. Unawareness of
self was stealing deliciously over
him.

He was Glenn Tropile. He was
more than that. He was the water
boiling . . . and the boiling water
was he. He was the gentle
warmth of the fire, which was—
which was, yes, itself the arc of
the sky. As each thing was each
other thing; water was fire, and
fire air; Tropile was the first sim-
mering bubble and the full roll of

Well-aged Water was Self, was—
more than Self— was—

The answer to the unanswer-
able question was coming clearer
and softer to him. And then, all
at once, but not suddenly, for
there was no time, it was not
close— it was.

The answer was his, was him.
The arc of sky was the answer,
and the answer belonged to sky
—to warmth, to all warmths that
there are, and to all waters, and
—and the answer was — was —

Tropile vanished. The mild
thunderclap that followed made
the flames dance and the column
of steam fray; and then the fire
was steady again, and so was the
rising steam. But Tropile was
gone.

— FREDERIK POHL
and C. M. KORNBLUTH

CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH

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GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Share Alike

By DANIEL F. GALOUYE

Illustrated by DILLON

Two objects occupying the same
space at the same time solve a
great many problems— or create
an exasperating one like this!

HEN CHERRY discov-

ered there was a man in

y V her apartment, she was
quite righteously and understand-
ably indignant.

Not that she was unduly puri-
tanical in the matter of sharing
her quarters with a man she
didn't know. After all, residential
facilities for the unmarried per-
sonnel in Rigel IV-Port were crit-
ically limited. And girls were ex-

pected to share apartments —
with the chances being about
even that the "other person
would be a man.

Disgustedly, she fluffed the
cushion on the sofa to smooth out
the imprint of his bulky frame —
he must be a giant to have made
that much of a hollow! — and
slammed the window against the
cold wind — fresh-air fiend, too!

Allowing her resentment no

SHARE ALIKE

chance to abate, she stormed over
to the videocom and punched the
number for Housing.

"Expediter's office." The recep-
tionist's voice came through buoy-
antly, even before her image
formed on the screen. "Good
morn — "

"It is not a good morning!"
Cherry said, her red hair swirling
as she shook her head emphati-
cally.

"First," she thrust up a rigid
finger to enumerate the point,
"there are no mornings here.

"Second," another finger indi-
cated, "none of them would be
good with a gale blustering around
outside and a man blustering
around inside!"

"Oh, it's you, Miss O'Day," the
receptionist said disappointedly
as her face replaced the shifting
pattern on the screen.

"Yes, ifs me -Cherry O'Day,
Coefficient B, Shift B. And there's
still a man in my apartment!"

"Naturally," said the reception-
ist wearily. "You understood
when you were assigned to the
dormitory that—"

"I understood there would be a
man or a woman. But I was also
assured that regardless of what-
ever else it was, it would be Co-
efficient A, Shift A, and that it
would be either working or at
recreation during the twelve
hours I am entitled to the apart-
ment!"

"I know," the receptionist said
impatiently. "And it — I mean he
is Coefficient of Existence A, but
Shift B — the same shift as yours."

"And every time I turn around
in my apartment, there he is — or,
rather, there he isn't. What space-
happy idiot in your office assigned
him to the right CE, but the
wrong shift?"

/^HERRY stamped her foot
^ and folded her arms so there
would be no question as to the
uncompromising nature of her in-
dignation.

"We have your complaint on
file, Miss O'Day," the receptionist
began formally, "and — "

"Then do something about it!
I don't care to spend any more
sleep periods in bed with a man,
however relatively immaterial he
may be!"

The receptionist shrugged apa-
thetically. "These things take
time, you know."

"Is Art - is Mr. Edson in?"

"Not yet. The A-Shift Expe-
diter is still on duty. Would you
like to speak with him?"

"Never mind," Cherry answered
stiffly. "I'll be in later."

Exasperated, she snapped off
the videocom. If there was one
thing she was sure of, it was that
she would stand for no more de-
lay in regaining unchallenged oc-
cupancy of her apartment during
her B-Shift off-period.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTI

This Mr. Whatever-His-Name-
Is was imminently close to getting
thrown out on his ear regardless
of his unguessable bulk . . . pro-
vided she could improvise some

The door swung open and a
large white towel, briskly rubbing
nothing, swept past her and into
the bedroom.

"You could at least move out,"
means of locating his nonexistent she said, following the towel and

squinting as though she might
find something else to direct her
words to, "before the whole base
discovers I'm sharing my apart-
ment with a Coefficient A man
who's on the B-Shift!"

The towel fluttered down and
draped itself across the back of a
chair.

"It could be worse," he sug-
gested. "Suppose I were Coeffi-
cient B, like you. Then they'd
really have something to waggle
their tongues about." The disem-
bodied voice receded as its owner
crossed the room.

"Please move out!" she begged.

"Back to the shuttle? Uh-uh.
You move out." ~

"This is my apartment and you

ear.

Resolutely, she strode back
into the hall and waited next to
the bathroom door, focusing her
rage on the mocking patter of
shower water against porcelain
and flesh.

Then she winced as his deep
bass voice rose gratingly off key:

"Oh-h-h-h, the ship slipped out
of Hyper

With-h-h-h the motions of a

9 •

viper .

Furiously, she beat on the door.

The spray stopped like the tail-
end of a cloudburst.

"Still out there?" There was
more amusement than annoyance
in his tone.

"Sometime this morning," she
said with forced control, "I am
expected to report to work. Be-
fore then, however, there are sure, sweetheart!"
some trifling personal necessities
I must attend to — if you will con-
cede," she was shouting now, "that

I am entitled to the use of my
bathroom!"

aren't going to tell me —"

"Ah-ah! Watch that blood pres-

"Temper, temper!" he chided.
"Our bathroom." His voice was
mockingly placating as the door-
knob turned. "After all, I'm as
much inconvenienced as you. But
do I go around shouting?"

DRESSER drawer opened
and, a moment later, closed.
Then another. But, naturally, she
couldn't see any of the things he
was withdrawing; they were Dis-
placement A articles so they
could co-exist in the same space
with her clothes.

For a long while, she was silent,
trying to control her rage, not

SHARE ALIKE

caring that time was slipping by
and she would be even later for

work. If she could only do some-
thing!

The locker door opened and
the light went on inside, illumi-
nating her clothes on the racks —
the same racks that held his
things, only on a. different level of
existence.

Smiling vengefully, she went
stealthily forward, until she real-
ized she and her personal effects
were as immaterial and invisible
to him as he was to her. Then she
lunged across the remaining dis-
tance and slammed the door, lock-
ing it.

"Now," she said triumphantly,
"you may come out when you
agree to vacate!"

Silence.

"Otherwise you'll stay in there
until the Expediter comes and
straightens out this mess."

A sudden burst of laughter ex-
ploded behind her and she spun
around, crying out apprehensively.

"I wondered when you'd try
something like that," he chuckled.

She watched the broad impres-
sion return in the sofa cushion,
straining her eyes as though she
might force herself to negotiate,
visually at least, the barrier be-
tween the two coefficients of ex-
istence.

Then, impulsively, she seized a
vase from the dresser and hurled
it.

Spilling artificial flowers, it
jolted to a stop in midair above
the sofa. The cushion's hollow
smoothed out abruptly and the
vase drifted erratically back to its
place on the dresser.

"Easy, honey! How'd you like
it if I started throwing mutually
existent things at you?"

Cherry waited until he left and
then rushed through her shower,
regaining some of the time she
had lost, and hurriedly dressed
with only token attention to de-
tail.

She darted across the lobby
and slammed into the Coefficient
Booth. Using her B-type key, she
activated the rectifiers and waited
until her displacement was erased
and until the door swung open.
Then, once again on a normal
plane of existence, she raced out-
side.

l^ORTUNATELY there was a
-*- bus waiting at the stop. It
whisked her to the Expediter's
office, where she soon stood fum-

ing in front of his desk.

"Art, how long is this going to
last?"

"That man again?" Only half
holding back a smile, he ran a
hand over his closely cropped
blond hair and came around the
desk.

"You've got to do something!"
she burst out.

"Look, Cherry — we're doing

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

utt

the best we can. It was the A-Shift
Expediter's mistake. He's check-
ing it through now."

I've had enough! I'm going
straight to the Coordinator!"

Art shrugged. "Can't. He's
eighty-six million miles away on a
survey of Rigel V-Port."

"And what am I supposed to
do in the meantime?"

"You might try bearing with us
and making the best of the situa-
tion. Anyway, even if we found
out how the mistake was made,
we couldn't do anything about it
right now. The unmarried per-
sonnel quarters are all rilled. We'd
have to change his shift. That
would upset the balance of the
entire working force."

"You could make him move
back aboard the shuttle," she in-
sisted.

"The shuttle's been sent to V-
Port. Don't you see, Cherry, we're
helpless until the Coordinator re-
turns? In any case, it can't be all
that serious. You and this fellow
are on different coefficients of ex-
istence, so it can't be a critical
question of morals."

"Oh, it can't, can't it?" she said.
"Just tell me who he is — how I
can meet him face to face!"

Art spread his hands helplessly.
"You know if he's in there by mis-
take, there's no way of tracking
down his identity until we find
out how the mistake was made.

stricted — a matter of preserving
privacy under the apartment-
sharing plan."

She drew herself up to her full
five foot two. "If you thought any-
thing of me, you'd find some way
to dump him out on his neck."

"Now how can I do that?" he
reasoned. "Like you, all I've got is
a B-key, which makes him non-
existent to me, too, while we're in
the dormitory. Taking a sock at
nothing wouldn't do any good.
And I don't think I could forcibly
convince nothing to tell me who
he is so I could settle with him
outside."

She let her chin and shoulders
down. "I give up. What am I sup-
posed to do — place myself at the
mercy of a practical joker for the
rest of my time here?"

"You might try marrying me,
you little hothead. Then we could

move into the married persons'
quarters and forget the whole
thing."

"For the twentieth time — no! v

"Why not, Cherry? What's
wrong with me?"

She backed off and surveyed
him. Actually, there wasn't any-
thing wrong with him.

"For one thing, you don't love
me," she accused. "If you did, you
wouldn't stand around and see me
living in an apartment with an-
other man."

"If I clear up the mistake — if

Housing assignments are re- I find some way to get him out

SHARE ALIKE

will you marry me then?"

She turned away. "No, Art.
That's what they expect the pre-
colonization force to do — marry
among themselves and stay on as
colonists after everything is pre-
pared."

I'd forgotten," he said deject-
edly. "You're going to make a
career out of pre-colonization."

«T>

A T SPACE plot, Cherry rushed
-**- across the large, circular
room to her calculator console.

"Wish J had devastating looks,"
Madge said jokingly as she gath-
ered up her things. "Then I could
throw away my clock, too."

Cherry glanced up at the time.
She hadn't expected to be an hour
late to relieve the other girl.

"Same trouble," she explained.
"I went to see Art again."

"Any results?"

She shook her head irritably
and began punching coordinate
figures onto the tape.

"Learn who he is?" Madge
asked.

"Not yet. But I will," Cherry
said resolutely. Then she drew
back and stared incriminatingly
at the keyboard as she surveyed
a broken nail.

Madge squirmed into her coat.
I've heard of guys like that.
They think it's fun — keeping a
girl hopping when she can't see
him any more than he can see
her. Does something for their

«T>

masculine ego. But just catch him
away from the dormitory without
his CE-A and your CE-B and
he'll soon cower!"

Cherry's resolute expression
slumped. "I can't find out who he
is. He's protected by hidden-iden-
tity regulations."

She snatched open the top of
the machine and jerked out the
half-punched roll of tape. She had
fed in data for at least three hy-
per-approach paths that would
put incoming ships within frying
distance of Rigel. She started
over again with the first coordi-
nates.

Madge leaned over and nudged
her in the ribs. "If you can't get
rid of the guy, why don't you
marry him? You're already living
with him, practically."

"Bright girl," Cherry said, not
in the least amused.

«T>

I'll bet he wouldn't frown on
the suggestion if he knew his
roommate was almost Miss Pro-
cyon VI."

Cherry hurled the role of tape
and Madge ducked.

Then she frowned troubledly.
"Why do they have to have this
silly setup of Coefficient Displace-
ments to complicate pre-coloniza-
tion work?"

"Ultimate economy of space,"
Madge said, parroting a phrase
from the Handbook. "They could
put two girls in one apartment
and two men in another. But then

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

^WF**^

SHARE ALIKE

the IV-Port base would need
twice as many drawers, chairs,
lockers, dressers, desks and so
forth. If s easier to have two shifts
sharing the quarters at different
times and separated on different
planes of existence."

|>ENSIVELY, Cherry stood be-
•*- fore the range, watching the
pot of water come to a boil.
Maybe she could manage to ig-
nore the man until the Coordina-
tor returned. After all, she re-
minded herself, he wasn't really
there at all, since they were as-
signed to different levels of exist-
ence while in the dormitory. She
could hear him talk only because
the air, which carried the vibra-
tions of his voice, was mutually
existent between them.

Something rammed sharply
into her back and she whirled
around.

"Sorry, darling," the rumbling
bass voice apologized. "Didn't
know you were here."

A frying pan, waist-high, cir-
cled wide around her and landed
on a burner. She glared with her
most annoyed expression for fully
a minute before she realized the

■

look was futile; as far as he was
concerned, she wasn't really there
at' all.

The cupboard door swung out
and a can of assorted vegetables
made a descending arc to the
range and began opening itself.

"Ohrh-Miy the ship slipped
out- 9 '

"Please!" she shouted. "Please

spare me that foghorn voice of
yours!"

The voice stopped, but the tune
continued — in a shrill, off-key

■

whistle.

The can elevated, tipped over
and poured its contents into the
frying pan.

Just like a man— not knowing
when to use a pot.

Eventually the whistling
stopped and the fire was extin-
guished under the pan. A minute
passed and she began hesitantly
scanning the kitchen for moving

* i

articles that might betray his
whereabouts.

The cupboard opened again
and a canister floated over to the
table and kicked off its lid.
small mound of flour levitated
from the container and drifted
over toward her. Puzzled, she
wondered what sort of recipe
would call for "a handful of flour"
to be added to vegetables.

But the white mound steadied
and hung motionless between her
and the range.

"This is my first experience
with CE-Displacement," he said
thoughtfully.

She backed away. The flour
advanced, following her in a half-
circle around the kitchen. But
how could he know where she
was?

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

He laughed. "Imagine — you
displaced a half-level above nor-
mal existence and me a half-level
below."

"Three or four levels might be
a better arrangement," she said
uncertainly, her eyes riveted on
the flour.

"Interesting, this CE-A and
CE-B gimmick," he continued,
"and mutually co-existent articles
—like the furnishings in the apart-

ment and the food in the kitchen."
Of course! The apron she was
wearing — that was how he knew
where she was! It was only one
of the apartment's items that
were as real to both of them as
was the mound of flour in his
hand.

"Ever consider," he suggested,

"that there might be a way of
seeing what you look like?"

"You wouldn't dare!"

His breath came out with a
poof and the flour covered her
face with a fine powder.

Stupefied, she stood staring in
his direction.

"Small chin," he appraised, "up-
turned nose, rather high cheek-
bones. Hm-m-m . . . Blonde or
brunette?"

Enraged, she fled from the
room.

O UT it was only the beginning
■*-* of a climactic night, she
found out soon after she activated
the light filters on the windows

and turned on a table lamp in the
living room. ,

She selected Brahms on the

■

Central Relay Receiver. But be-
fore she could return to the sofa,
the Lullabye faded and a disso-
nant bit of syncopation replaced
it.

Determinedly, she went back to
the receiver and reset the dial.
Even before she removed her
hand, however, she felt the knob
return to the other position.

Tightening her grip, she moved
it back. But again it rotated in
the opposite direction. Deciding
she could present a better display
of unruffled dignity by not creat-
ing a scene, she got a book and
returned to the sofa.

But she had hardly read a

paragraph before she felt the

cushion under her sink consider-
ably lower. An open magazine
which she hadn't noticed before
drifted up and positioned itself in
front of her book.

She moved the book around in
front of the magazine, but the
magazine only leap-frogged over
the book and once more blocked
her vision.

"There are two ends to this
sofa," she said with teeth-gritting
politeness.

"But, darling," he protested fa-
cetiously, "there's hardly any light

over there."

She snapped to her feet and
stood facing the depression in the

SHARE ALIKE

cushion. Then, in a flash of inspir-
ation, she slammed the book
shut and swung it sharply in front
of her. That the volume was mu-
tually co-existent was proved by
the smack of paper against flesh.

But her satisfaction quickly
melted in embarrassment before
his laughter.

Frustrated, Cherry went to bed.

But only minutes later, she felt
the mattress sag under his weight.

"Asleep, sweetheart?" he asked.

She didn't answer; she moved
closer to the edge of the bed.
There was no one there, she told
herself. If she reached out, she
would feel nothing except the
empty space where his body — in
another level of existence — held
the top sheet up and away from
the bottom one.

Still, it was so upsettingly real
— being aware of his every move,
the pull of the covers when he
tugged on them, the sound of his
breathing.

Abruptly, the section of the co-
existent sheet that was folded
back over the covers swung up
and fluttered down on her face.

She started to spring erect. But
his hands, given reciprocal reality
by the sheet, clasped her cheeks.
Then his lips pressed down firmly
against hers through the cloth.

Fuming, she jumped from the
bed, grabbed her pillow and
stomped out to the sofa, trying
not to hear his chuckling.

If only she could come face to
face with him outside! She would
humiliate him so severely in front
of everyone within earshot that
he would become the laughing
stock of the base and it would be
impossible for him to stay on at
IV-Port!

Suddenly, a plan began taking
shape and a smile relaxed her
face as she gave it serious consid-
eration.

i^HERRY was up early the
^ next morning and out through
the Coefficient Displacement
Stall before her phantom room-
mate was even awake. Hidden be-
hind a plant in the outer lobby,
she stood vigil with her eyes on
the booth, secure in the knowl-
edge that there was no exit from
the dormitory except through the
nucleo-polarizer.

There was the subtle glow of
the rectifier field inside the en-
closure and a small, lean man
stepped out, glancing anxiously at
his watch.

If she studied everyone who
came through, she would at least
provide herself with a list of pos-
sible suspects. And by eliminating
those who didn't meet the physi-
cal specifications, she could nar-
row the field down to a handful.

Three women came through in
quick succession, hardly allowing
time for the glow to subside in
the stall. Then a steady flow of

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

workers was emerging. That was
even better, Cherry realized. If
she managed to spot him while
the lobby was filled with wit-
nesses, the ridicule that she would
heap on him would be more hu-
miliating.

Four more men, all the wrong
sizes and shapes, and two women
trailed out. Then came a stout
man, but too short; next a tall
man, but too thin.

She was just beginning to
doubt her chance for success
when she heard a whistled song
coming through from somewhere
on the other side of the booth. Ex-
citedly, she added subvocal words
to the tune : "The ship slipped out
of . . ."

The whistling stopped. But at

least she knew he would be com-
ing through shortly.

The rectifier's glow flared, then
the next suspect stepped out. He
was tall and muscular, heavy but
not stout. And bald, with a fringe
of hair circling his head like a
horseshoe . . .

Just the type! She had known
all along that he would look
something like that, even down to
his almost contemptuous smile!

She plunged from her hiding
place, swinging her handbag. It
caught him full in the chest and
he fell back with a grunt of sur-
prise.

"Yot/re the one, you miserable
sneak!" Cherry brought the bag

up in an overhanded swing and
down on his head.

The last dozen or so persons
who had come through the booth
crowded around.

"Hide out in a girl's apartment,
will you?" Her tongue worked
like a lash as she aimed the bag
at his face. "Try to take advan-
tage of a clerical error!"

E RETREATED, but she
gave him no quarter. Her
bag broke and spilled; she tossed
it aside and used her hard little

fists.

Suddenly someone had her
hands locked behind her and was
pulling her away.

"Cherry, you little hot pepper!"
It was Art. "You don't know who

that is!"

She turned around. "I — I
don't?"

Her confounded victim had fi-
nally recovered and was brushing
himself off.

'Who is this girl, Mr. Edson?"

■

he asked.

Art hesitated, then shrugged fu-
tilely. "This is Miss O'Day . . .
Cherry, Coordinator Barton. He
got back from V-Port late yes-
terday."

"Miss O'Day," the man repeat-
ed thoughtfully. "This is a coin-
cidence. I was just at your apart-
ment."

"You — you were?" Cherry
smiled weakly.

SHARE ALIKE

"I was hoping I could catch

you before you checked out on
your shift."

He straightened his coat and
tie. "I thought I might find a way
out of your difficulty."

"That's very kind -

"As a matter of fact, I still
think I might." He turned stiffly.
"Drop by at my office and we'll
talk it over — say, in five or six
weeks?"

Rigidly, Cherry watched the
Coordinator stride off. Then,
numbly, she let Art lead her to
the bus stop.

"That temper is going to get
you into trouble one of these
days." He shook his head solicit-
ously.

She felt frustration and despair
sweep over her; then, all at once,
she was crying against his chest.

"Marry me," he pleaded. "Then
they'll have to put us in the per-
manent residence quarters. I love
you, Cherry."

She blinked up angrily into his
face. "Prove it! Get that - that
despicable thing out of my quar-
ters!"

"Then will you marry me?"

She hesitated before giving him
her twenty-first no. For a mo-
ment, she had remotely consid-
ered accepting — abandoning her
plans for a pre-colonization career.
After all, there wouldn't be any-
one like Art around when she
reached the top.

"I couldn't possibly marry you
now, even if I wanted to. How
could I be sure I wouldn't be do-
ing it just to escape the man in
my apartment?"

"All right, Cherry. I'll see what
I can do about getting him out
— even if it means sidestepping
some of the regulations."

BUT Cherry was in no mood to
wait until retribution, plod-
ding at its customary snail's pace,
caught up with her immaterial
roommate — not if she could help
it along.

At the end of her next recrea-
tion period, she waited on the
handball court until she caught
Madge reporting for physical cul-
ture before starting her day's
work.

"Lend me your A-Displacement
key," she urged.

Madge drew back. "Oh, no, you
don't! If you're going to get in a
jam, you're going to do it without
my help. The Handbook says it's
against regulations to swap Co-
efficients of Existence."

"But, Madge, don't you see
that's the only way I can trap
him — by cornering him in the
apartment on his level of exist-
ence?"

The other girl's frown gave
way to a mischievous grin. "Then
you'll let him have it?"

"But good!"

Madge handed over the A-key.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

• •

"Good luck, kid!" she applauded, down at him, vaguely wonder-
Cherry had wasted almost an
hour off-shift finding Madge. But
that was to her advantage. It
would give Mr. What's-His-Name
time to get settled in the apart-
ment before she descended on

him.

She hurried back to the dormi-
tory and through the CE stall.
Displaced on the new A-level, she
strode across the inner lobby. As
she turned into the corridor
where her quarters were located,
she saw a tall, muscular man
twisting the key in her lock and
entering.

Quelling her anxiety, she slowed
to give him a chance to become
occupied so she could take him
by complete surprise.

At the door, she waited another
minute, then noiselessly let her-
self in. He was on the other side
of the room, bending down over
the Central Relay Receiver!

She crept across the carpet,
sweeping up a straight-back chair

as she advanced.

Then she let out a triumphant
cry and started the chair swing-
ing down toward her now-mate-
rial adversary. In the final second
before it struck, he started to turn
around.

It was Art!

The chair crashed against him
and he collapsed in front of the
receiver.

Confounded, she stood staring

mg .

No — the man's voice was a
deep bass; Art's was a moderate
baritone.

Then she was on her knees be-
side him as he sat up and shook
his head groggily.

"Little hellcat," he muttered.

She steadied his head between
her hands. "Art, darling — I didn't
know . . . What were you doing?"

"Told you I'd see what I could
manage," he mumbled. "Broke
into the files to find out where
your quarters were. Then got an
A-Displacement key. Figured I'd
catch him here. But he wasn't in,
after all."

"He'll show up," she promised.
"We'll get him!"

She seized his arm to help him
up.

But he grunted in pain and
grasped his shoulder. "Not now,
we won't get him."

His fingers gingerly explored
the lump on his head. "I — I —
Say, you're A-Displacement too.
How -"

He toppled over.

N THE hospital, the doctor
slipped out of his smock and
came over to where Cherry stood
anxiously in the corridor.

"You did a real good job on
him," he said sarcastically.,

"Is he badly hurt?" she asked.

"Slight concussion — plus a dis-

S H ARE ALIKE

located shoulder — plus scalp lac-
erations."

She started toward the room
into which they had wheeled Art.

But the doctor stopped her.
"He's resting now. You won't be
able to see him until tomorrow."

She started slowly across Rigel
IV-Port base for the dormitory,
realizing remorsefully that she
might have seriously hurt Art . . .
and all on account of the man in
her apartment!

Her regret simmered into in-
dignation and then deepened into
a glowing rage as she hastened
her steps. She covered the final
block in a determined stride, her
arms swinging and her fists
clenched.

It had gone far enough! Now
she would end it. And when she
got through, this Whoever-He-
Was would sorely regret the day
he had moved in with her!

In the Displacement Booth, she
used Madge's key again, then
went storming into her quarters.

"Come on out!" she challenged
as she crossed the living room.

In the bedroom, she shouted,
"Where are you?"

She swept into the kitchen. "I
know you're somewhere!"

But there was only silence.

She had used Madge's A-key,
hadn't she?

Jerking open the closet door,
she saw only his clothes on the
rack — reassurance that she was

now on his level of existence.

But he was nowhere in the
apartment.

Very well, then, she would find
something to do until he arrived
— like ripping his clothes to
shreds and destroying all his per-
sonal effects.

She started with the top drawer

of the dresser.

A RT sat up, speechless. "That's
^*- what I said," Cherry was re-
peating. "I'm in love with him."

Groaning, he sank back down
in the hospital bed.

"I hated him so much, I guess
it backfired," she explained. "Any-
way, he's the man I want to
marry."

He sprang upright again. "But
you can't do that!"

She paced, looking blithesome-
ly at the ceiling. "It's his aggres-
siveness — his forcefulness — the
way he takes over. And he's so
good-natured all the time. Do you
suppose he'll want to marry me,
Art?"

He swung his legs over the side
of the bed and sent his feet grop-
ing for his slippers.

Smiling wistfully, she returned
to the bedside. "Just think, he al-
most drove me into marrying you.
Maybe I would have, if I hadn't
been afraid I was being forced
into it to get away."

"But — but, Cherry, you don't
understand! I love you! And — "

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"He does, too. I know it. Be-
sides, IVe been living with him
over a week."

"But he doesn't love you! I
mean — look, you don't even know
who he is!"

"Oh, but I do. Furthermore, I
know he purposely arranged it so
that he'd be A-Displacement but
B-Shift. He was in a position to
swing it that way."

"He what?"

"I went back to the apartment
after I left here. I was going to
tear up his clothes, just for spite."
She reached into her handbag. "I
found his identity card in the
dresser."

She handed it to him.

He reached out with his good
arm and pulled her to him. He
didn't have to look at the photo-
graph to know it was his own.

DANIEL F. GALOUYE

• * * * *

FOREC

When Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's two-part serial, WOLF-
BANE, concludes next month, you'll have some idea of what a rocket
battery feels like in action. Few menaces in the history of science fiction

can match the Pyramid beings who have kidnapped the Earth — unaware
that they are menaces; uncaring even if they had known, chillingly remote
and yet immediately threatening every member of humanity — and totally
invulnerable. Or is there such a thing as total invulnerability? Musn't there
be a chink scmewhere, however tiny? For instance, whoever harvests
whatever is ripe is bound to pick something poisonous — but was a Son
of the Wolf poisonous enough?

Jim Harmon returns with a novelet happily entitled BREAK A LEG.
No irony intended — breakage is really the happiest thing that can
happen; it's when there is no damage or disaster that this spaceship crew
begins to worry. So will you when you see why.

MORNING AFTER, a Robert Sheckley novelet, has an equally startling
problem. What is Piersen doing here — wherever here is? Will he live
or die? For the answers to these and other questions, our hero has to
keep tuning in on a hangover!

Along with short stories and our regular features, there's more to
the exciting, frustrating, immensely rewarding quest that Willy Ley sets
out on in this month's FOR YOUR INFORMATION. Don't step out of the
safari when it's ON WITH THE DODO HUNT! — you may miss clues lead-
to one of the richest treasures of all time!

SHARE ALIKE

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Hunting Down
the Dodo

By WILLY LEY

NCE upon a time, there
lived on the island of

_ Mauritius a bird named
the dodo, with the scientific name
of Didus ineptus.

Come to think of it, this is not
a good beginning. The story of
the dodo is not a fairy tale but
the truth, or as much truth as can
still be established. Moreover, this
first sentence is a very unscien-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

tific oversimplification. Let's try
to make it a bit more accurate.
Then it will read just about like

■

this :

From a period, the beginning
of which cannot be ascertained,
but which might be considered
roughly equivalent to the begin-
ning of the glacial age in higher
latitudes, until about the year
1680 A.D., a large and flightless
bird, classified as being the rep-
resentative of a sub-order of the
Colutnbiform.es or pigeonlike
birds, known to have existed on
the island of Mauritius, or
Zwaaneiland, also known as He
de France, was called dodo, or
dodaers, or dronte, but also dinde
sauvage, Walchvogel or gekapte
Zwaan (hooded swan) and sev-
eral other names, with the scien-

HAD better start over again,*
this time with the fundamen-
tals. To the east of Madagascar,
strung out along the 20th paral-
lel of southern latitude, there are
three reasonably large islands.

Their current names are Re-
union, Mauritius and Rodriguez
— at least, that's the way the
name of the last appears on
Admiralty charts, both British
and American. For some un-
fathomable reason, the dependen-
cy of Rodrigues, when it makes
an official report to the colony
of Mauritius, spells its name with
an "s" at the end. I am making a
point of this difference in spell-
ing for the sole reason that it
happens to be the smallest of all
the difficulties and discrepancies
we are going to encounter. The

tific designation of either Didus more serious problems will come

ineptus or Raphus cucullatus,
which are equivalent in scientif-

ic usage, but with Raphus cucul-
latus holding the chronological
priority.

Well, now, this is more ac-
curate.

It also complies with the order
drilled into newspapermen: "Get
all the facts into the first para-
graph."

But I'm very much afraid it
would probably be most intel-
ligible to somebody who knows
these facts already and who, logi-
cally, does not have much reason
to read it at all.

up later.

It is hard to say just who dis-
covered these islands. There
exists at least one old map on
which the three islands have
Arabic names. It is quite likely
that Arab trading vessels did dis-
cover them, but without paying
any special attention to their dis-
covery, since the islands were
uninhabited and it is exceeding-
ly difficult to barter on unin-
habited islands.

At any event, the Arabs did
not even bother to locate the
islands with any degree of care.
On the map mentioned, they are

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

■ .**!

.*'■

-.•*

* _ ' *

• •* '

*•#

He Tromelin

■

He Ste. Marie

Cargados

Carajos
Shoals

*•

MAURITIUS

i**r

REUNION

Nazareth
Bank

RODRIGUEZ

1 00 mi.

60° E

Fig. 1: Map of the Mascarene Islands with nearby shoals

drawn as forming an equilateral led to two different misunder-

triangle and are placed far too
close to Madagascar.

The first European discoverers
were Portuguese but, strange to
say, it was the second of the
Portuguese discoverers who had
his name attached to the islands.

The first one was Diogo Fer-
nandes Pereira, who sailed these
waters in 1507. On February 9th
of that year, he found an island
some 400 miles to the east of
Madagascar which he named
Santa Apollonia. It must have
been the present Reunion. Soon
after, his ship, the Cerne, sighted
the present Mauritius. The navi-
gator landed and named the
island after his ship, as Ilha do
Cerne.

standings. Much later, around the
middle of the nineteenth century,
somebody who obviously did not
know the name of Pereira's ship
wondered why the navigator
should have named the island
after the island of Cerne, men-
tioned by Pliny the Elder.
Wherever Pliny's Cerne was lo-
cated, it could not be to the east
of Madagascar.

The other misunderstanding
took place quite soon after Perei-
ra's voyage. Dutch explorers who
came to Mauritius and knew the
old name thought that Cerne was
a miswriting for eigne (swan)
and that Pereira had thought the
dodos to be swans. The Dutch
did not bother with the zoologi-

This, I might say right here, cal problem involved; they "trans-

1AXY SCIENCE FICTION

lated" Diogo Pereira's name into
Dutch as Zwaaneiland.

Pereira, who was on his way
to India, found Rodrigues later
in the same year. It was first
named Domingo Friz, but also
Diego Rodriguez. The Dutch ap-
parently found this hard to pro-
nounce and talked about Diego
Ruy's island, which then was
Frenchified into Dygarroys — but
the official French name for a
time was He Marianne.

SIX years later came the sec-
ond discoverer, Pedro Mas-
carenhas, who visited only Mau-
ritius and Reunion. No name
change was involved for Mau-
ritius because of this rediscovery,

but Santa Apollonia (Reunion)
was renamed Mascarenhas or
Mascaregne, and to this day the
islands are called the Mascarene
Islands.

The subsequent history of the
islands was just about as com-
plicated as this beginning. Re-
union, the largest of the three
islands, 970 square miles in ex-
tent, was officially annexed to
France in 1638 by a Captain
Goubert from Dieppe.

I don't know why one annexa-
tion was not considered sufficient,
but the historical fact is that the
annexation was repeated in the
name of Louis XIII in 1643 and
once more in 1649 by Etienne de
Flacourt, who changed the name

Fig. 2: The dodo of Mauritius as sketched

by Adrian van de Venne in 1626

from Mascarenhas to He Bour-
bon. After the French Revolution,
that name had to go, of course,
and Reunion was re-established.
But then history can be read
quite easily from the various
changes, for it became He Bona-
parte. Since 1848, it is again
Reunion.

Considered non-politically, Re-
union is a volcanic island with
three rather tall peaks. The tallest
is the Piton des Neiges, which
measures 10,069 feet. The other
high elevation is simply called
Le Volcan by the inhabitants of
the island, but Le Volcan has
more than one peak. One, called
Bory Crater, is 8,612 feet above
sea level and extinct. The other
crater, known as Fournaise, is
only 8,294 feet tall but still
active.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

An island in such a location
can grow tropical fruit and there
are banana plantations and
breadfruit trees, not to mention
coconut palms. But these plants
were introduced. The original
vegetation included a dwarf bam-
boo, a variety of casuarina trees
and a plant called by the trade
name "red tacamahac," botanical-
ly Calophyllum spurium.

The second island, Mauritius,
is somewhat smaller than Re-
union (about 720 square miles)
and likewise of volcanic origin.
But all volcanic activity on Mau-
ritius is a thing of the fairly dis-
tant past. The names of its three
highest mountains reflect the
changing ownership of the island

through the centuries. The high-
est one, 2711 feet, is called Black
River Mountain. The second one,
2685 feet, is Mt. Pieter Botte,
while the third, 2650 feet, is
called Pouce.

The island is surrounded by
coral reefs which a ship's cap-
tain has to know well, but it has
a fine natural harbor. These two
features prompted the Dutch to
annex it in 1598 and they gave it
its current name after Count
Maurits of Nassau.

The Dutch abandoned Mau-
ritius in 1710. For slightly more
than a half a century (1715-
1767), it was French and called
He de France. In 1810, it was
taken by the English, who

Fig. 3: Life-size restoration of the dodo of
Mauritius in the American Museum
of Natural History, New York

Fig. 4: Skeleton of the Mauritius dodo, as-
sembled from sub-fossil bones

(Courtesy: AMNH)

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

restored the Dutch name.

Right now, Mauritius is a
"spice island" where spices, pine-
apple, mangoes, avocados and
bananas are grown, along with
sugar cane. But the original vege-
tation is still represented by iron-
wood trees, ebony trees, traveler's
trees and bamboo. Of course, do-
mesticated animals were intro-
duced on both islands, but Mau-
ritius is somewhat special even
in that respect — the deer that can
be found there came from Java,
not from Europe.

S regards Rodriguez, its story
is similar but shorter. Its
extent is only 43 square miles. It
is volcanic in origin, with 1300-
foot Mt. Limon as its highest
peak, and there is a fringing coral
reef. The ownership of the island
was Dutch, French and English
in succession. In all cases, the
first inhabitants were either de-
portees or people in voluntary
exile, some of them mutineers,
some refugees from religious in-
tolerance.

Though all this had to be men-
tioned to establish a background,
none of these facts would have
made any of these islands famous.
The only one which would en-
joy a kind of restricted fame
would be Mauritius, among stamp
collectors, because of an early
philatelic error which produced

existence. But these Mascarene 1
Islands are famous because they
once were the home of the dodo
and related birds.

The story of the dodo (let's
concentrate on the Mauritius dodo
for the time being) looks rather
simple, if somewhat sad, in rough
outline. Its existence was first re-
ported by Dutch navigators, who
were far less thorough in their
descriptions than one would now
wish they had been. But they
made up for this to some extent
by bringing live specimens back
with them to Europe. There they
were painted, mostly by Dutch
painters and, again it must be
said, not as well as one would
now wish.

But the major blunder was
committed in England. About
1637, give or take a year, a live
Mauritius dodo arrived in Eng-
land. It lived there for quite some
time, and after its death, it was
"stuffed" (badly, no doubt) and
found a place in Tradescant's
Museum in London in 1656. A
few decades later, the stuffed
dodo was transferred to the Ash-
molean Museum at Oxford. This
was in 1683— as we now know,
two years after the last report of
a live dodo on Mauritius was put
on paper by one Benjamin Harry.

In 1755, the curator of the Ash-
molean Museum decided that
the moth-eaten old skin was a

some of the rarest stamps in disgrace to his fine collection and

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

ordered that it be thrown away
to be burned with other trash. At
the last moment, somebody
wrenched off the head (partly de-
cayed) and one foot (in good
condition). They are now about
the rarest items on record.

¥7* VEN this outline story con-
-■-^ tains one more surprising
item. The first scientist to include
the dodo as an exotic bird in a
book on natural history was
Carolus Clusius in 1605. Later,
Carolus Linnaeus gave it a scien-
tific name, and quite naturally
the dodo entered into the zoologi-
cal works of Buffon in France
and Blumenbach in Germany.

But by 1800, nobody had ever
seen a dodo. The available paint-
ings did not seem convincing.
They looked like caricatures to
begin with and did not even agree
with each other.

Some scientists, bent on a
housecleaning in scientific, litera-
ture, began to doubt whether
there had ever been such a bird.
Maybe it was all a misunder-
standing, if not worse, and the
descriptions had meant the cas-
sowary.

At any event J. S. Duncan of
Oxford felt obliged, in 1828, to
write a paper with the title: "A
summary review of the authori-
ties on which naturalists are justi-
fied in believing that the Dodo,
Raphus cucullatus (Didus inep-

tus), was a bird existing in the
Isle of France, or the neighbour-
ing islands, until a recent period."

■

Mr. Duncan can be said to have
saved the dodo from secondary
extinction in scientific literature.

But let's go back now to the
original sources. The first man
to write about the dodo was the
Dutch Admiral Jacob Cornelis-
zoon van Neck, who went to
Mauritius with eight ships. Four
of them returned to Holland in
1599, the other four in 1601.
Admiral van Neck's narrative ap-
peared in Dutch in 1601 and
translations into English, French
and Latin were printed during
the same year, a German trans-
lation one year later.

In spite of this volume of
printed matter, there are still a
number of question marks. The
original journal, presumably writ-
ten on shipboard, was enlarged
for publication — we don't know
whether by the admiral himself
or by an editor. Moreover, one
old naturalist, who did not leave
Europe, gave a dodo picture
which, he said, was copied from
Admiral van Neck's journal. But
this picture cannot be found in
any known edition of the journal.

The passage in the admiral's
journal in which the dodo is first
mentioned reads:

Blue parrots are very numerous
there [referring to Mauritius] as

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

well as other birds; among which
are a kind, conspicuous for their size,

larger than our swans, with huge
heads only half covered with skin,
as if clothed with a hood. These
birds lack wings, in the place of
which three or four blackish feathers
protrude. The tail consists of a few
soft incurved feathers which are
ash-colored. These we used to call
Walghvogels for the reason that the
more and the longer they were
cooked, the less soft and more in-
sipid eating they became. Never-
theless, their belly and breast were
of a pleasant flavor and easily
masticated.

HP HE Dutch word Walghvogels
•*• ( also spelled Walchvogels )
translates literally as "nauseating
birds," but it led to one of the
many mistakes that crowd the
dodo's short life history.

About two hundred years later,
it was asserted in German books
that there had been Forest Birds,
so named, on Mauritius. There
probably were, and still are,
forest birds on Mauritius, but the
Forest Bird was only a sloppy
translation, appearing in its Ger-
man form of WaldvogeL Spelling
in those days was helter-skelter in
any language, so somebody prob-
ably thought that "walgh" was
just a poor rendering of "Waldt,"
a then frequent spelling of the
German word Wald, which means
forest.

might be just as well to clear
up this additional difficulty as
much as possible.

In the most recent specialized
professional work on the dodo,
by the Marquis Masauji Hachi-
suka, not less than seventy-nine
different names are listed. But the
confusion is not quite as large
as this figure seems to indicate,
for the names clearly fall into a
small number of classes.

One set of them tries to be
descriptive. They are mostly
French, as, for example, austruche
encapuchonne (hooded ostrich),
cygne capuchonne (hooded swan)
and d'mde sauvage (wild turkey).
Another set are either transla-
tions or mistranslations of Dutch
names. The Dutch names them-
selves are either variations on the
theme of walghvogels or else de-
scriptive terms similar to the
French names just mentioned.

Just two words emerge as, so
to speak, "exclusive" terms. One
is the name dodo, with the varia-
tions dodaars and dodaerts, and
the other one is dronte.

It is reasonably certain that
"dodo" is a name coined by the
Portuguese, as witness a letter
written in 1628 by Emanuel Al-
tham about "very strange fowles
called by ye portingals Do Do."

The fact that Altham pulled
the two syllables apart, thereby

Since this has raised the prob- changing their pronunciation, is
lem of the name of the bird, it "very suspicious-making," as a

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

French lady I know phrased it.
It is so suspicious — or, rather,
indicative — because old Dutch
and German writings spell the
name as doedoe and dudu, all of
which must be pronounced "doo-
doo." Since it has no real mean-
ing in any language, it can well
be, as has been asserted, an imi-
tation of the bird's call.

The Dutch variation dod-aars
or dod-aers is rather clear to an
English speaker, especially in
view of the Dutch descriptive re-
marks ende heeft een rond gat
("and has a round rump," as van
Neck put it) or rond van stuiten
("round of stern," as Capt. Wil-
lem van West-Zanen wrote in
1602).

TTOWEVER, the name dronte,
•"-*■ which in Dutch and in Ger-
man was used about equally fre-
quently as dodo, still is not ex-
plained. The Englishman H. E.
Strickland, who wrote the first
book about the dodo in 1848,
and it is still good, accepted the
explanation that this term was
coined by Danish sailors, using
their verb drunte, which means
"to be slow." This is not only
somewhat far-fetched on the face
of it, for the Danes, for a change,
have not contributed anything to
the story of this bird; it is not
even necessarily correct. We
simply don't know whether the
dodo was slow and the evidence

is not very much in favor of this
assumption.

The Dutch zoologist Prof.
A. C. Oudemans— yes, the man
who wrote the 600-page book on
the Sea Serpent— has pointed out
—in another book devoted to the
dodo only — that there was a
now obsolete Middle - Dutch
verb dronten. Its meaning was
"bloated" or "swollen," which
sounds much more reasonable.
But Prof. Oudemans could not
prove that this was actually the
derivation; a lot of early writ-
ings on the dodo seem to be lost.

The records are incomplete
also as regards the number of
birds taken away alive. If it were
not for a chance mention in Peter
Mundy's journal — he served with
the East India Company from
1628 to 1634 — we would never
know that two of them were
brought to India. But his state-
ment is definite: "Dodoes, a
strange kind of fowle, twice as big
as a Goose, that can neither flye
nor swimm, being Cloven footed;
I saw two of them in Suratt [the
first British settlement in India,
started 1612] house that were
brought from thence [Mauri-
tius ] ."

There is a similar chance men-
tion about one having been sent
to Japan, but Japanese scientists
have failed, in spite of much ef-
fort, to trace its fate from Japa-
nese chronicles and books.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Going by such remarks on the
one hand and, on the other hand,
by sketches and paintings stated
or reported to have been made
from life, Dr. Hachisuka listed a
total of twelve specimens of the
Mauritius dodo as having arrived
in Europe: one in Italy, two in
England and nine— five males and
four females— in Holland.

In other books, particularly in
works which treat the paintings
as paintings instead of as orni-
thological illustrations, larger
figures are usually mentioned.
This is partly due to counting
sketches and paintings made from
earlier paintings. Mostly, how-
ever, it is due to the fact that no
distinction is made between the
gray Mauritius dodo and similar
birds from the other two Mas-
carene Islands.

"OUT no list, whether of speci-
■*-* mens or of paintings, can
be considered final. In 1914 and
1915, a German scientist, Dr.
S. Killermann, set out on a sys-
tematic dodo hunt in museums,
libraries and art galleries and dis-
covered about half a dozen pic-
tures that had simply been over-
looked before. Killermann's feat
could probably be repeated by
somebody today with the incli-
nation and the necessary time
and money.

As has been mentioned, the
Clusius picture has been copied sible to arrange all these sketches

from a lost original of van Neck's
journal. Somebody might still
find it. Similarly, it is known that
an unnamed artist on board of
one of the ships commanded by
Admiral Wolphiart Harmanszoon
made several drawings from life
while the ship was in Mauritius
harbor in 1602. The originals are
now "lost," but somebody might
find them.

Likewise, one of the several oil
paintings of dodos made by Roe-
landt Savery is listed as lost.

In short, while a dodo investi-
gation is no longer virgin terri-
tory, it is still a fertile field with
possibilities for a diligent re-
searcher.

One of the earliest and best
pictures of a Mauritius dodo
drawn from life is the pen-and-
ink drawing by Adrian van de
Venne. It was made in 1626 and
shows a male. This is what we
now think of as the normal ap-
pearance of the dodo. However,
it was Prof. Oudemans who first
realized that the dodo must have
had two "normal appearances"—
one fat stage and one gaunt stage.
This assumption explains many
old sketches which look like cari-
catures; the latter impression is
considerably strengthened by the
fact that a number of sketches
were made while the birds were
moulting.

Oudemans' idea makes it pos-

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

in a logical sequence, pre-moult-
ing, at the height of the moult,
post-moulting, fat and gaunt. But
why a bird on a tropical island,
where the food supply should be
more or less the same all year
round, should go through a gaunt
stage at regular intervals is not
yet fully explained.

The Mauritius dodo became

■

extinct between 1681, the last
time it is mentioned as living,
and 1693, the first time it fails
to appear on a list of the animals
and birds of the island made on
the spot. By 1750, the people
living on the island did not even
know any more that there had
been such a bird.

A hundred years later, there
lived a man on Mauritius who
was an ardent naturalist. This
man, George Clark, not only knew
about the dodo, but was deter-
mined to find dodo remains. They
had to be somewhere on the
island, for the entire species
could not possibly have become
extinct without leaving traces.
But where would these traces be
located?

At first glance, the situation did
not look too promising. "In fact,"
George Clark wrote, "there is no
part of Mauritius where the soil
is of such a nature as to render
probable the accidental intern-
ment of substances thrown upon
it. It may be classed under four
heads: stiff clay; large masses

stone forming a chaotic surface;
strata of melted lava, locally
called paves, impervious to every-
thing; and loam, intermixed with
fragments of vesicular basalt— the
latter too numerous and too
thickly scattered to allow any-
thing to sink into the mass by
the mere force of gravity. Besides
this, the tropical rains, of which
the violence is well known, sweep
the surface of the earth in many
places with a force sufficient to
displace stones of several hun-
dred pounds weight."

■

A FTER having reached this
•£*- point, Clark all of a sudden
had a new idea. If these tropical
rains swept everything before
them, where did they sweep it?
Well, there was a kind of delta
formed by three rivers running
into the harbor of Mahebourg. If
dodo bones had been washed into
one of the rivers, this was the
likely place where they might
have come to rest. One part of
that delta was a marsh known

locally as . le Mare aux Songes.
Mr. Clark promised himself that
he would dig there, as soon as he
had the time and some means
to pay laborers for the actual
work.

About 1863, he began to dig,
finding large numbers of dodo
bones at the very bottom of the
marsh, to the delight of anato-
mists, and to the intense aston-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

ishment of aged Creoles who were has such a skeleton, too, but it

** i

standing around and were some-
what annoyed by seeing some-
thing on their own island which
they had not known about. As a
result of George Clark's success-
ful digging, there is no doubt
about the dodo's skeleton. As a
matter of fact, it was this material
which helped to unravel such
problems as were posed by the
sketches of artists who did not

also has something which makes

casual visitors wonder whether a
dried skin might have survived
somewhere.

The museum has a restoration,
made in the taxidermy studios of
Rowland Ward in London. The
feet and the head are copied
from the preserved specimens.
The feathers are those of other
birds, correct in color and, as

know anatomy — at any rate, not far as can be ascertained, cor-
bird anatomy.

And while no museum can fat stage, the one we know best

rect in shape. The dodo is in the

have an authentic dodo, several
museums can, at least, boast au-
thentic dodo skeletons, like the
one at the Smithsonian Institu-
tion which was put together by
Norman H. Boss.

The American Museum of
Natural History in New York

from pictures.
Well, this is

the somewhat

sporadic story of the gray dodo
of Mauritius. But there are two
more Mascarene Islands and they
had dodolike birds, too. We'll go
into that story in the next issue.

WILLY LEY

• * * * •

How do you know you haven't been in space opera?

How do you know you aren't a crashed saucer- jockey?

•

Who were you anyhow?

•

Send $3.00 to Box 242, SA, Silver Spring, Maryland for

your copy of ''History of Man" by L. Ron Hubbard.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

To commit the flawless crime, all Bart hold
needed were centuries in which to plan and
execute it — and an insurance policy with —

VERETT Barthold didn't
take out a life insurance
policy casually. First he
read up on the subject, with spe-
cial attention to Breach of Con-
tract, Willful Deceit, Temporal
Fraud, and Payment. He checked

companies investigated before
paying a claim. And he acquired a
considerable degree of knowledge
on Double Indemnity, a subject
which interested him acutely.

When this preliminary work
was done, he looked for an in-

to find how closely insurance surance company which would

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

indemnif

ROBERT SHECKLEY

Illustrated by DILLON

suit his needs. He decided, finally,
upon the Inter-Temporal Insur-
ance Corporation, with its main
office in Hartford, Present Time.
Inter-Temporal had branch offi-
ces in the New York of 1959,
Rome, 1530, and Constantinople,
1126. Thus they offered full tem-

poral coverage. This was impor-
tant to Barthold's plans.

Before applying for his policy,
Barthold discussed the plan with
his wife. Mavis Barthold was a
thin, handsome, restless woman,
with a cautious, contrary feline
nature.

»■ . . ^* . . . * . ■ < jj^ f ' *.]t.^.i tVl vi , l ' il * *— . ---.»►» , * t . ■/ '.'■' ■ " vlv.w '.

:;>: SSS:

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iiiilliili

■ :: : :: - ; - ;■■-:'■ ;

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

"It'll never work," she said at
once.

"It's foolproof," Barthold told
her firmly.

"They'll lock you up and throw
away the key."

"Not a chance," Barthold as-
sured her. "It can't miss — if you
cooperate."

"That would make me an ac-
cessory," said his wife. "No,
darling."

"My dear, I seem to remember
you expressing a desire for a coat
of genuine Martian scart. I be-
lieve there are very few in exist-

ence.

11/|"RS. Barthold's eyes glittered.
-*-" Her husband, with canny ac-
curacy, had hit her weak spot.

"And I thought," Barthold said
carelessly, "that you might de-
rive some pleasure from a new
Daimler hyper- jet, a Letti Det
wardrobe, a string of matched
ruumstones, a villa on the Venu-
sian Riviera, a — "

"Enough, darling!" Mrs. Bar-
thold gazed fondly upon her en-
terprising husband. She had long
suspected that within his unpre-
possessing body beat a stout
heart. Barthold was short, begin-
ning to bald, his features ordi-
nary, and his eyes were mild be-
hind horn-rimmed glasses. But his
spirit would have been perfectly
at home in a pirate's great-
muscled frame.

"Then you're sure it will
work?" she asked him.

"Quite sure, if you do what I
tell you and restrain your fine
talent for overacting."

"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Barthold,
her mind fixed upon the glitter of
ruumstones and the sensuous
caress of scart fur.

Barthold made his final prep-
arations. He went to a little shop
where some things were adver-
tised and other things sold. He
left, several thousand dollars
poorer, with a small brown suit-
case tucked tightly under his
arm. The money was untrace-
able. He had been saving it, in
small bills, for several years. And
the contents of the brown suit-
case were equally untraceable.

He deposited the suitcase in a
public storage box, drew a deep
breath and presented himself at
the offices of the Inter-Temporal
Insurance Corporation.

For half a day, the doctors
poked and probed at him. He
filled out the forms and was
brought, at last, to the office
of Mr. Gryns, the regional man-
ager.

Gryns was a large, affable man.
He read quickly through Bar-
thold's application, nodding to
himself.

"Fine, fine," he said. "Every-
thing seems to be in order. Ex-
cept for one thing."

"Whafs that?" Barthold asked,

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

his heart suddenly pounding.

"The question of additional
coverage. Would you be inter-
ested in fire and theft? Liabili-
ty? Accident and health? We in-
sure against everything from a
musket ball to such trivial but
annoying afflictions as the very
definitely common cold."

"Oh," said Barthold, his pulse
rate subsiding to normal. "No,
thank you. At present, I am con-
cerned only with a life insurance
policy. My business requires me
to travel through time. I wish
adequate protection for my wife."
"Of course, sir, absolutely,"
Gryns said. "Then I believe
everything is in order. Do you
understand the various conditions
that apply to this policy?"

"I think I do," replied Barthold,
who had spent months studying
the Inter-Temporal standard
form.

"The policy runs for the life
of the assured," said Mr. Gryns.
"And the duration of that life is
measured only in subjective
physiological time. The policy
protects you over a distance of
1000 years qn either side of the
Present. But no further. The
risks are too great."

"I wouldn't dream of going any
further," Barthold said.

"And the policy contains the
usual double indemnity clause.
Do you understand its function
and conditions?"

"I believe so," answered Bar-
thold, who knew it word for word.

"All in order, then. Sign right
here. And here. Thank you, sir."

"Thank you; 9 said Barthold.
And he really meant it.

ARTHOLD returned to his
office. He was sales manager
for the Alpro Manufacturing
Company (Toys for All the
Ages). He announced his inten-
tion to leave at once on a sales
tour of the Past.

"Our sales in time are simply
not what they should be," he said.
"I'm going back there myself and
take a personal hand in the sell-
ing."

"Marvellous!" cried Mr. Car-
lisle, the president of Alpro. "I've
been hoping for this for a long
time, Everett."

"I know you have, Mr. Car-
lisle. Well, sir, I came to the de-
cision just recently. Go back there
yourself, I decided, and find out
what's going on. Went out and
made my preparations and now
I'm ready to leave."

Mr. Carlisle patted him on the
shoulder. "You're the best sales-
man Alpro ever had, Everett. I'm
very glad you decided to go."

"I am, too, Mr. Carlisle."

"Give 'em hell! And by the
way — " Mr. Carlisle grinned sly-
ly— "I've got an address in Kan-
sas City, 1895, that you might be
interested in. They just don't

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

build 'em that way any more.

And in San Francisco, 1840, I

know a — "

"No, thank you, sir," Barthold

said.

"Strictly business, eh, Everett?"
"Yes, sir," Barthold said, with

a virtuous smile. "Strictly busi-

ness.

Everything was in order now.
Barthold went home and packed
and gave his wife her last in-
structions.

"Remember," he told her,
"when the time comes, act sur-
prised, but don't simulate a
nervous breakdown. Be confused,
not psychotic."

"I know" she said. "Do you
think I'm stupid or something?"

"No, dear. It's just that you do
have a tendency to wring every
bit of emotion out of situations.
Too little would be wrong. So
would too much."

"Honey," said Mrs. Barthold in
a very small voice.

"Yes?"

"Do you suppose I could buy
one little ruumstone now? Just
one to sort of keep me company
until -"

"No! Do you want to give the
whole thing away? Damn it all,
Mavis — "

"All right. I was only asking.
Good luck, darling."

"Thank you, darling."

They kissed.

And Barthold left.

E reclaimed his brown suit-
case from the public storage
box. Then he took a heli to the
main showroom of Temporal
Motors. After due consideration,
he bought a Class A Unlimited
Flipper and paid for it in cash.

"You'll never regret this, sir,"
said the salesman, removing the
price tag from the glittering ma-
chine. "Plenty of power in this
baby! Double impeller. Full con-
trol in all years. No chance of
being caught in stasis in a Flip-
per.

"Fine," Barthold said. "I'll just
get in and — "

"Let me help you with those
suitcases, sir. You understand that
there is a federal tax based upon
your temporal milage?"

"I know," Barthold said, care-
fully stowing his brown suitcase
in the back of the Flipper.
"Thanks a lot. I'll just get in
and-"

"Right, sir. The time clock is
set at zero and will record your
jumps. Here is a list of time
zones proscribed by the govern-
ment. Another list is pasted to
the dashboard. They include all
major war and disaster areas, as
well as Paradox Points. There is
a federal penalty for entering a
proscribed area. Any such entry
will show on the time clock."

"I know all this." Barthold sud-
denly was very nervous. The
salesman couldn't suspect, of

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

course. But why was he going on
gabbling so about breaches of the
law?

"I am required to tell you the
regulations," the salesman said
cheerfully. "Now, sir, in addition,
there is a thousand-year limit on
time jumps. No one is allowed
beyond that, except with written
permission from the State De-
partment."

"A very proper precaution,"
Barthold said, "and one which my
insurance company has already
advised me of."

"Then that takes care of every-
thing. Pleasant journey, sir!
You'll find your Flipper the per-
fect vehicle for business or
pleasure. Whether your destina-
tion is the rocky roads of Mexico,
1932, or the damp tropics of
Canada, 2308, your Flipper will
see you through."

Barthold smiled woodenly,
shook the salesman's hand and
entered the Flipper. He closed
the door, adjusted his safety belt,
started the motor. Leaning for-
ward, teeth set, he calibrated his
jump.

Then he punched the send-off
switch.

A gray nothingness surrounded

him. Barthold had a moment of

absolute panic. He fought it down

and experienced a thrill of fierce
elation.

At last, he was on his way to
fortune!

IMPENETRABLE grayness,
surrounded • the Flipper like a
faint and $ndless fog. Barthold
thought of the years slipping by,
formless and without end, gray
world, gray universe ...

But there was no time for phil-
osophical thoughts. Barthold un-
locked the small brown suitcase
and removed a sheaf of typed pa-
pers. The papers, gathered for
him by a temporal investigation
agency, contained a complete
history of the Barthold family,
down to its earliest origins.

He had spent a long time
studying that history. His plans
required a Barthold. But not just
any Barthold. He needed a male
Barthold, 38 years old, unmar-
ried, out of touch with his family,
with no close friends and no im-
portant job. If possible, with no
job at all.

He needed a Barthold who, if
he suddenly vanished, would
never be missed, never searched
for.

With those specifications, Bar-
thold had been able to cut
thousands of Bartholds out of
his list. Most male Bartholds
were married by the age of 38.

Some hadn't lived that long.
Others, single and unattached at
38, had good friends and strong
family ties. Some, out of contact
with family and friends, were
men whose disappearance would
be investigated.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

After a good deal of culling,
Barthold was left with a mere
handful. These he would check,
in the hope of finding one who
suited all his requirements . . .

if such a man existed, he
thought, and quickly banished
the thought from his mind.

After a while, the grayness dis-
solved. He looked out and saw
that he was on a cobblestone
street. An odd, high-sided auto-
mobile chugged past him, driven
by a man in a straw hat.

He was in New York, 1912.

TPHE first man on his list was
-*■ Jack Barthold, known to his
friends as Bully Jack, a journey-
man printer with a wandering
eye and a restless foot. Jack had
deserted his wife and three chil-
dren in Cheyenne in 1902, with
no intention of returning. For
Barthold's purposes, this made
him as good as single. Bully Jack
had served a hitch with General
Pershing, then returned to his
trade. He drifted from print shop
to print shop, never staying long.
Now, at the age of 38, he was
working somewhere in New
York.

Barthold started at the Bat-
tery and began hunting his way
through New York's print shops.
At the eleventh one, on Water
Street, he located his man.

"You want Jack Barthold?"
an old master printer asked him.

"Sure, he's in the back. Hey,
Jack! Fellow to see you!"

Barthold's pulse quickened. A
man was coming toward him, out
of the dark recesses of the shop.
The man approached, scowling.

"I'm Jack Behold," he said.
"Whatcha want?"

Barthold loofeed at his relative
and sadly shook his head. This
Barthold obviously would not
do.

"Nothing," ha said, "nothing at
all." He turned quickly and left

the shop.

Bully Jack, five foot eight
inches tall arid weighing two
hundred and ninety pounds,

scratched his ftead.

"Now what i*i hell was all that
about?" he asked.

The old master printer
shrugged his should ers.

Everett Barthold returned to
his Flipper and reset the controls.
A pity, he toW himself, but a
fat man would never fit into his
plans.

IS next stop w£»s Memphis,
1869. Dressed in an appro-
priate costume, Bartlnold went to
the Dixie Belle Hotel and in-
quired at the cteslc for Ben Bar-
tholder.

"Well, suh," said the courtly
white-haired old man behind the
desk, "his key'£ in, so I reckon
he's out. You might find him in
the corner saloon with the other

GALAXY S CIEN CE FICTION

trashy carpetbaggers."

Barthold let the insult pass and
went to the saloon.

It was early evening, but the
gaslights were already blazing.
Someone was strumming a banjo
and the long mahogany bar was
crowded.

"Where could I find Ben Bar-
tholder?" Barthold asked a bar-
tender.

"Ovah theah," the bartender
said, "with the other Yankee
drummers."

Barthold walked over to a long
table at one end of the saloon.
It was crowded with flashily
dressed men and painted women.
The men were obviously North-
ern salesmen, loud, self-confident
and demanding. The women
were Southerners. But that was
their business, Barthold decided.

As soon as he reached the
table, he spotted his man. There
was no mistaking Ben Bar-
tholder.

He looked exactly like Everett
Barthold.

And that was the vital charac-
teristic Barthold was looking for.

"Mr. Bartholder," he said,
"might I have a word with you
in private?"

"Why not?" said Ben Bar-
tholder.

Barthold led the way to a va-
cant table. His relative sat oppo-
site him, staring intently.

"Sir," said Ben, "there is an

uncanny resemblance between

us."

"Indeed there is," replied Bar-
thold. "It's part of the reason
I'm here."

"And the other part?"

"I'll come to that presently.
Would you care for a drink?"

Barthold ordered, noticing that
Ben kept his right hand in his
lap, out of sight. He wondered if
that hand held a derringer.
Northerners had to be wary in
these Reconstructionist days.

After the drinks were served,
Barthold said, "I'll come directly
to the point. Would you be in-
terested in acquiring a rather
large fortune?"

"What man wouldn't?"

"Even if it involved a long
and arduous journey?"

"I've come all the way from
Chicago," Ben said. "I'll go far-
ther."

"And if it comes to breaking

a few laws?"

"You'll find Ben Bartholder
ready for anything, sir, if there's
some profit to it. But who are
you and what is your proposi-
tion?"

"Not here," Barthold said. "Is
there some place where we can
be assured of privacy?"

"My hotel room."

"Let's go, then." '

Both men stood up. Barthold

glanced at Ben's right hand and
gasped.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

Benjamin Bartholder had no
right hand.

"Lost it at Vicksburg," ex-
plained Ben, seeing Barthold's
shocked stare. "It doesn't matter.
I'll take on any man in the world
with one hand and a stump —

and lick him!"

"I'm sure of it," Barthold said
a little wildly. "I admire your
spirit, sir. Wait here a moment. I
- I'll be right back."

Barthold hurried out of the
saloon's swinging doors and went
directly to his Flipper. A pity, he
thought, setting the controls. Ben-
jamin Bartholder would have
been perfect.

But a maimed man wouldn't
fit into his plan.

THE next jump was to Prus-
sia, 1676. With a hypnoed
knowledge of German and

clothes of suitable shape and hue,
he walked the deserted streets
of Konigsberg, looking for Hans

Baerthaler.

It was midday, but the streets
were strangely, eerily deserted.
Barthold walked and finally en-
countered a monk.

"Baerthaler?" mused the monk.
"Oh, you mean old Otto the
tailor! He lives now in Ravens-
burg, good sir."

"That must be the father,"
Barthold said. "I seek Hans Baer-
thaler, the son."

"Hans ... Of course!" The

monk nodded vigorously, then
gave Barthold a quizzical look.
"But are you sure that's the man
you want?"

"Quite sure," Barthold said.
"Could you direct me to him?"

"You can find him at the
cathedral," said the monk.
"Come, I'm going there myself."

Barthold followed the monk,
wondering if his information
could be wrong. The Baerthaler
he sought wasn't a priest. He
was a mercenary soldier who
had fought all over Europe. His
type would never be found at
a cathedral — unless, Barthold
thought with a shudder, Baer-
thaler had unreportedly acquired
religion.

Fervently he prayed that this
wasn't so. It would ruin every-
thing.

"Here we are, sir," the monk
said, stopping in front of a noble,
soaring structure. "And there is
Hans Baerthaler."

Barthold looked. He saw a
man sitting on the cathedral
steps, a man dressed all in rags.
In front of him was a shapeless
old hat and within the hat were
two copper coins and a crust of
bread.

"A beggar," Barthold grunted
disgustedly. Still, perhaps . . .

He looked closer and noticed
the blank, vacuous expression in
the beggar's eyes, the slack jaw,
the twisted, leering lips.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"A great pity," the monk said.

"Hans Baerthaler received a

head wound fighting against the

Swedes at Fehrbellin and never

recovered his senses. A terrible

pity."

Barthold nodded, looking

around at the empty cathedral

square, the deserted streets.

"Where is everyone?" he
asked.

"Why, sir, surely you must
know! Everyone has fled Konigs-
berg except me and him. It is the
Black Plague!"

With a shudder, Barthold
turned and raced back through
the empty streets, to his Flipper,
his antibiotics, and to any other
year but this one.

ITH a heavy heart and a
sense of impending failure,
Barthold journeyed again down
the years, to London, 1595. At
Little Boar Taverne near Great
Hertford Cross, he made inquiry

of one Thomas Barthal.

"And what would ye be want-
ing Barthal for?" asked the pub-
lican, in English so barbarous
that Barthold could barely make
it out.

"I have business with him,"
said Barthold in his hypnoed Old
English.

"Have you indeed?" The pub-
lican glanced up and down at
Barthold's ruffed finery. "Have
you really now?"

The tavern was a low, noisome
place, lighted only by two gut-
tering tallow candles. Its cus-
tomers, who now gathered around
Barthold and pressed close to
him, looked like the lowest riff-
raff. They surrounded him, still
gripping their pewter mugs, and
Barthold detected, among their
rags, the flash of keener metal.

"A nark, eh?"

"What in hell's a nark doing
in here?"

"Daft, perhaps."

"Past a doubt, to come alone."

"And asking us to give urn-
poor Tom Barthal!"

"We'll give um something,

lads!"

"Ay, let's give um!"

The publican watched, grin-
ning, as the ragged crowd ad-
vanced on Barthold, their pew-
ter mugs held like maces. They
backed him past the leaded win-
dows, against the wall. And only
then did Barthold fully realize
the danger he faced in this un-
ruly pack of vagabonds.

"I'm no nark!" he cried.

"The hell you say!" The mob
pressed forward and a heavy mug
crashed against the oak wall near

his head.

With a sudden inspiration,
Barthold swept off his great
plumed hat. "Look at me!"

They stopped, gazing at him
open-mouthed.

"The perfect image of Tom

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

Barthal!" one gasped.

"But Tom never said he had
a brother," another pointed out.

"We were twins," Barthold
said rapidly, "separated at birth.
I was raised in Normandy, Aqui-
taine and Cornwall. I found out
only last month that I had a twin
brother. And I'm here to meet
him."

It was a perfectly creditable
story for 16th century England
and the resemblance could not be
gainsaid. Barthold was brought
to a table and a mug of ale set
before him.

"You've come late, lad," an an-
cient one-eyed beggar told him.
"A fine worker he was and a
clever one at prigging a pran-

cer

Barthold recognized the old
term for horse thief.

- but they took him at Ayles-
bury, and tried him with the

hookers and the freshwater
marines, and found him guilty,
worse luck."

"What's his fine?" Barthold
asked.

"A severe one," said a stocky
rogue. "They're hanging him to-
day at Shrew's Marker!"

DARTHOLD sat very still for

-*-* a moment. Then he asked,
"Does my brother really look like

me:

"The spitting image!"
claimed the publican. "It's uncan-

ny, man, and a thing to behold.
Same looks, same height, same
weight — everything the same!"

The others nodded their agree-
ment. And Barthold, so close to
success, decided to risk all. He
had to have Tom Barthal!

"Now listen close to me, lads,"
he said. "You have no love for
the narks or the London law, do
you? Well, I'm a rich man in
France, a very rich man. Would
you like to come there with me
and live like barons? Aye, take
it easy — I knew you would. Well,
we can do it, boys. But we have
to bring my brother, too."

"But how? asked a sturdy
tinker. "They're hanging him
this day!"

"Aren't you men?" demanded
Barthold. "Aren't you armed?
Wouldn't you dare strike out
for fortune and a life of ease?"

They shouted their assent.

Barthold said, "I thought you'd
be keen. You can. All you have to
do is follow my instructions."

Only a small crowd had gath-
ered at Shrew's Marker, for it was
a small and insignificant hanging.
Still, it afforded some amusement
and the people cheered lustily as
the horse-drawn prisoner's wagon
rumbled over the cobbled streets
and drew to a halt in front of
the gibbet.

"There's Tom," murmured the
tinker, at the edge of the crowd.
"See him there?"

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"I think so," Barthold said.

TN the Flipper, Barthold
•*■ thought long and seriously.
Things were going badly, very
badly indeed. He had searched
through time, alL the way to medi-
eval London, and had found no
Barthold he could use. Now he
was nearing the thousand-year
limit.

He could go no further —

Not legally.

But legality was a matter of
proof. He couldn't— he wouldn't—
turn back now.

There had to be a usable Bar-
thold somewhere in time!

He unlocked the small brown
suitcase and took from it a small,
heavy machine. He had paid sev-
eral thousand dollars for it, back
in Present Time. Now it was
worth a lot more to him.

He set the machine carefully
and plugged it into the time
clock.

He was now free to go any-
where in time — back to primor-
dial origins, if he wished. The
time clock would not register.

He reset the controls, feeling
He started to give chase, but suddenly very lonely. It was a

"Let's move in."

He and his fifteen men pushed
their way through the crowd,
circling the gibbet. The hangman
had already mounted the plat-
form, had gazed over the crowd
through the eye-slits in his black
mask, and was now testing his
rope. Two constables led Tom
Barthal up the steps, positioned
him, reached for the rope . . .

"Are you ready?" the publican
asked Barthold. "Hey! Are you
ready?"

Barthold was staring, open-
mouthed, at the man on the plat-
form. The family resemblance
was unmistakable. Tom Barthal
looked exactly like him — except
for one thing. v

Barthal's cheeks and forehead
were deeply pitted with smallpox
scars.

"Now's the moment for the
rush," the publican said. "Are you
ready, sir? Sir? Hey!"

He whirled and saw a plumed
hat duck out of sight into an al-

ley.

stopped abruptly. From the gib-
bet he heard a hiss, a stifled
scream, a sodden thud. When he
turned again, the plumed hat was
out of sight.

Everett Barthold returned to
his Flipper, deeply depressed. A
disfigured man would not fit his
plan.

frightening thing to plunge over
the thousand-year brink. For a
single instant, Barthold consid-
ered giving up the entire dubious
venture, returning to the security
of his own time, his own wife,
his own job.

But, steeling himself, he jabbed
the send-off button.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

TTE emerged in England, 662,
-■"*- near the ancient stronghold
of Maiden Castle. Hiding the
Flipper in a thicket, he emerged
wearing a simple clothing of
coarse linen. He took the road
toward Maiden Castle, which he
could see in the far distance, upon
a rise of land.

A group of soldiers passed him,
drawing a cart. Within the cart,
Barthold glimpsed the yellow
glow of Baltic amber, red-glazed
pottery from Gaul, and even
Italian-looking candelabra. Loot,

no doubt, Barthold thought, from
the sack of some town. He wanted
to question the soldiers, but they
glared at him fiercely and he was
glad to slink by unquestioned.

Next he passed two men,
stripped to the waist, chanting in
Latin. The man behind was lash-
ing the man in front with a cruel,
many-stranded leather whip. And
presently they changed positions,
with barely the loss of a stroke.
"I beg your pardon, sirs — "
But they wouldn't even look at
him.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Barthold continued walking,
mopping perspiration from his
forehead. After a while, he over-
took a cloaked man with a harp
slung over one shoulder and a
sword over the other.

"Sir," said Barthold, "might
you know where I'd find a kins-
man of mine, who has journeyed
here from Iona? His name is Con-
nor Lough mac Bairthre."

■

"I do," the man stated.
"Where?" asked Barthold.
"Standing before you," said the
man. Immediately he stepped

back, clearing his sword from its
scabbard and slinging his harp
to the grass.

Fascinated, Barthold stared at
Bairthre. He saw, beneath the
long page-boy hair, an exact and
unmistakable likeness of himself.

At last he had found his man!

But his man was acting most

uncooperative. Advancing slowly,

sword held ready for cut or slash,
Bairthre commanded, "Vanish,
demon, or I'll carve you like a

capon
"I'm

no demon!" Barthold

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

cried. "I'm a kinsman of yours!"
"You lie," Bairthre declared
firmly. "I'm a wandering man,
true, and a long time away from
home. But still I remember every
member of my family. You're not
one of them. So you must be a
demon, taking my face for the
purposes of enchantment."

"Wait!" Barthold begged as
Bairthre's forearm tensed for the
stroke. "Have you ever given a
thought to the future?"
"The future?"

"Yes, the future! ' Centuries
from now!"

"I've heard of that strange
time, though I'm one who lives
for today," Bairthre said, slowly
lowering his sword. "We had a
stranger in Iona once, called him-
self a Cornishman when he was
sober and a Life Photographer
when he was drunk. Walked
around clicking a toy box at
things and muttering to himself.
Fill him up with mead and he'd
tell you all about times to come."

"That's where I'm from," Bar-
thold said. "I'm a distant kinsman
of yours from the future. And
I'm here to offer you an enormous
fortune!"

Bairthre promptly sheathed
his sword. "That's very kind of
you, kinsman," he said civilly.

"But, of course, it will call for
considerable cooperation on your
part."

"I feared as much," Bairthre

sighed. "Well, lef s hear about it,
kinsman."

"Come with me," Barthold said,
and led the way to his Flipper.

LL the materials were ready
in the brown suitcase. He
knocked Bairthre out with a palm
hypo, since the Irishman was
showing signs of nervousness.
Then, attaching frontal electrodes
to Bairthre's forehead, he hyp-
noed into him a quick outline of
world history, a concise course
in English and in American man-
ners and customs.

This took the better part of
two days. Meanwhile, Barthold
used the swiftgraft machine he
had bought to transfer skin from
his fingers to Bairthre's. Now
they had the same fingerprints.
With normal cell-shedding, the
prints would flake off in some
months, revealing the original
ones, but that wasn't important.
They did not have to be perma-
nent.

Then, using a checklist, Bar-
thold added some identifying
marks that Bairthre was lacking
and removed some they didn't
share. An electrolysis job took
care of the fact that Barthold was
balding and his kinsman hadn't
been.

When he was finished, Barthold
pumped revitalizer into Bairthre's
veins and waited.

In a short while, Bairthre

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

groaned, rubbed his hypno-stuff ed
head and said in modern Eng-
lish, "Oh, man! What did you hit
me with?"

"Don't worry about it," Bar-
thold said. "Lefs get down to
business."

Briefly he explained his plan
for getting rich at the expense
of the Inter-Temporal Insurance
Corporation.

"And they'll actually pay?"
Bairthre asked.

"They will, if they can't dis-
prove the claim."

"And they will pay that
much?"

"Yes. I checked beforehand.
The compensation for double
indemnity is fantastically high."

"That's the part I still don't
understand," Bairthre said. "What
is this double indemnity?"

"It occurs," Barthold told him,
"when a man, traveling into the
past, has the misfortune to pass
through a mirror-flaw in the tem-
poral structure. It's a very rare
occurrence. But when it happens,
it's catastrophic. One man has
gone into the past, you see. But
two perfectly identical men re-
turn."

double indemnity!"

"That's it. Two men, indistin-
guishable from each other, return
from the past. Each feels that his
is the true and original identity
and that he is the only possible

claimant of his property, business,
wife and so forth. No coexistence
is possible between them. One of
them must forfeit all rights, leave
his present, his home, wife, busi-
ness, and go into the past to live.
The other remains in his own
time, but lives with constant
fear, apprehension, guilt."

DARTHOLD paused for
-*-* breath. "So you see," he con-
tinued, "under the circumstances,
double indemnity represents a
calamity of the first order. There-
fore, both parties are compen-
sated accordingly."

"Hmm," said Bairthre, think-
ing hard. "Has this happened
often, this double indemnity?"

"Less than a dozen times in
the history of time travel. There
are precautions against it, such
as staying out of Paradox Points
and respecting the thousand-year
barrier."

"You traveled more than a
thousand years," Bairthre pointed
out.

"I accepted the risk and won."

"But, look, if there's so much
money in this double indemnity
thing, why haven't others tried

"Oho!" said Bairthre. "So thafs it?"

Barthold smiled wryly. "It's
not as easy as it sounds. I'll tell
you about it sometime. But now
to business. Are you in this with
me?"

"I could be a baron with that

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

money/' Bairthre said dreamily.
"A king, perhaps, in Ireland! I'm
in this with you."

"Fine. Sign this."

"What is it?" Bairthre asked,
frowning at the legal-looking
document that Barthold had
thrust before him.

"It simply states that, upon re-
ceiving adequate compensation
as set by the Inter-Temporal In-
surance Corporation, you will go
at once to a past of your own
choosing and there remain, waiv-
ing any and all rights to the
Present. Sign it as Everett Bar-
thold. I'll fill in the date later."

"But the signature — " Bairthre
began to object, then halted and
grinned. "Through hypno-learn-
ing, I know about hypno-learning
and what it can do, including the
fact that you didn't have to give
me the answers to my questions.
As soon as I asked them, I knew
the explanations. The mirror-flaw,
too, by the way — that's why you
hypnoed me into being left-
handed and left-eyed. And, of
course, the grafted fingerprints
go the opposite way, the same
as if you saw them in a mirror."

"Correct," said Barthold. "Any
other questions?"

"None I can think of at the
moment. I don't even have to
compare our signatures. I know
they'll be t identical, except — "
Again he paused and looked
angry. "That's a lousy trick! I'll

be writing backward!"

Barthold smiled. "Naturally.
How else would you be a mirror-
image of me? And just in case
you decide you like my time bet-
ter than yours and try to have
me sent back, remember the pre-
cautions I took beforehand.
They're good enough to send you
to the Prison Planetoid for life."

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

He handed the document to
Bairthre.

"You don't take any chances,
do you?" Bairthre said, signing.

"I try to cover all eventuali-
ties. It's my home and my present
that we're going to and I plan
to keep possession. Come on. You
need a haircut and a general go-
ing-over."

Side by side, the identical-
looking men walked to the Flip-
per.

AVIS Barthold didn't have
to worry about overacting.
When two Everett Bartholds
walked in the front door, wearing
identical garments, with the same
expression of nervous embarrass-
ment, and when two Everett Bar-
tholds said, "Er, Mavis, this will
take a little explaining . . ."

It was just too much. Fore-
knowledge acted as no armor. She
shrieked, threw her arms in the
air and fainted.

Later, when her two husbands
had revived her, she regained
some composure. "You did it,
Everett!" she said. "Everett?"

"That's

me,
my kinsman,
Lough mac Bairthre."

said Barthold.

"Meet

Connor

"At

your service, madame,"
Bairthre said.

"It's unbelievable!" cried Mrs.
Barthold.

"Then, we look alike?" her hus-
band asked.

"Exactly alike. Just exactly!"

"From now on," said Barthold,
"think of us both as Everett Bar-
thold. The insurance investigators
will be watching you. Remember
— either of us, or both, could be
your husband. Treat us exactly
alike."

"As you wish, my dear," Mavis
said demurely.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

"Except, of course, for the mat-
ter of — I mean except in the
area of — of — Damn it all, Mavis,
can't you really tell which one of
us is me?"

"Of course I can, dear," Mavis
said. "A wife always knows her
husband." And she gave Bairthre
a quick look, which he returned
with interest.

"I'm glad to hear it," said Bar-
thold. "Now I must contact the
insurance company." He hurried
into the other room.

"So you're a relative of my hus-
band," Mavis said to Bairthre.
"How alike you look!"

"But I'm really quite different,"
Bairthre assured her.

"Are you? You look so like
him! I wonder if you really can
be different."

"I'll prove it to you."

"How?"

"By singing you a song of an-
cient Ireland," Bairthre said, and
proceeded at once in a fine, high
tenor voice.

It wasn't quite what Mavis
had in mind. But she realized
that anyone so like her husband
would have to be obtuse about
some things.

And from the other room, she
could hear Barthold saying, "Hel-
lo, Inter-Temporal Insurance Cor-
poration? Mr. Gryns, please. Mr.
Gryns? This is Everett Barthold.
Something rather unfortunate
seems to have happened . . ."

HP HERE was consternation at
■*- the offices of the Inter-Tem-
poral Insurance Corporation, and
confusion, and dismay, and a
swift telephoning of underwriters,
when two Everett Bartholds
walked in, with identical nervous
little smiles.

"First case of its kind in fif-
teen years," said Mr. Gryns. "Oh,
Lord! You will submit, of course,
to a full examination?"

"Of course," said Barthold.

The doctors poked and probed
them. They found differences,
which they carefully listed with
long Latin terms. But all the dif-
ferences were within the normal
variation range for temporal iden-
ticals and no amount of juggling
on paper could change that. So
the company psychiatrists took
over.

Both men responded to all
questions with careful slowness.
Bairthre kept his wits about him
and his nerve intact. Using his
hypnoed knowledge of Barthold,
he answered the questions slow-
ly but well, exactly as did Bar-
thold.

Inter-Temporal engineers
checked the time clock in the
Flipper. They dismantled it and
put it back together again. They
examined the controls, set for
Present, 1912, 1869, 1676, and
1595. 662 had also been punched
— illegally — but the time clock

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

showed that it had not been ac-
tivated. Barthold explained that
he had hit the control accidental-
ly and thought it best to leave
it alone.

It was suspicious, but not ac-
tionable.

A lot of power had been used,
the engineers pointed out. But
the time clock showed stops only
to 1595. They brought the time
clock back to the lab for further
investigation.

The engineers then went over
the interior of the Flipper inch
by inch, but could find nothing
incriminating. Barthold had taken
the precaution of throwing the
brown suitcase and its contents
into the English Channel before
leaving the year 662.

Mr. Gryns offered a settlement,
which the two Bartholds turned
down. He offered two more,
which were refused. And, finally,
he admitted defeat.

The last conference was held
in Gryns' office. The two Bar-
tholds sat on either side of Gryns'
desk, looking slightly bored with
the entire business. Gryns looked
like a man whose neat and pre-
dictable world has been irrevoc-
ably upset.

"I just can't understand it," he
said. "In the years you traveled
in, sirs, the odds against a time
flaw are something like a million
to one!"

"I guess we're that one," said

Barthold, and Bairthre nodded.

"But somehow it just doesn't
seem — well, what's done is done.
Have you gentlemen decided the
question of your coexistence?"

DARTHOLD handed Gryns
-*-* the paper that Bairthre had
signed in 662. "He is going to
leave, immediately upon receipt
of his compensation."

"Is this satisfactory to you,
sir?" Gryns asked Bairthre.

"Sure," said Bairthre. "I don't
like it here anyhow."

"Sir?"

"I mean," Bairthre said hastily,
"what I mean is, I've always
wanted to get away, you know,
secret desire, live in some quiet
spot, nature, simple people, all

that . . ."

"I see," Mr. Gryns said du-
biously. "And do you feel that
way, sir?" he asked, turning to
Barthold.

"Certainly," Barthold asserted.
"I have the same secret desires
he has. But one of us has to stay
— sense of duty, you know — and
I've agreed to remain."

"I see," Gryns said. But his
tone made it clear that he didn't
see at all. "Hah. Well. Your
checks are being processed now,
gentlemen. A purely mechanical
procedure. They can be picked up
tomorrow morning — always as-
suming that no proofs of fraud
are presented to us before then."

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

The atmosphere was suddenly
icy. The two Bartholds said good-
by to Mr. Gryns and left very
quickly.

They rode the elevator down in
silence. Outside the building,

Bairthre said, "Sorry about that
slip about not liking it here."

"Shut up!"

"Huh?"

Barthold seized Bairthre by the
arm and dragged him into an au-
tomatic heli, taking care not to
choose the first empty one he
saw.

He punched for Westchester,
then looked back to see if they
were being followed. When he
was certain they were not, he
checked the interior of the heli
for camera or recording devices.
At last he turned to speak to
Bairthre.

"You utter damned fool! That
boner could have cost us a for-
tune!"

Tve been doing the best I
can," Bairthre said sullenly.
"What's wrong now? Oh, you
mean they suspect."

"That's what's wrong! Gryns
is undoubtedly having us fol-
lowed. If they can find anything —
anything at all to upset our claim
— it could mean the Prison
Planetoid."

"We'll have to watch our steps,"
said Bairthre soberly.

"I'm glad you realize it," Bar-
thold said.

«T»,

HP HEY dined quietly in a West-
■*■ Chester restaurant and had
several drinks. This put them in
a better frame of mind. They
were feeling almost happy when
they returned to Barthold's house
and sent the heli back to the city.
"We will sit and play cards
tonight," said Barthold, "and talk,
and drink coffee, and behave as
though we both were Barthold.
In the morning, I'll go collect our

checks."

"Good enough," Bairthre
agreed. "I'll be glad to get back.
I don't see how you can stand
it with iron and stone all around
you. Ireland, man! A king in Ire-
land, that's what I'll be!"

"Don't talk about it now." Bar-
thold opened the door and they

entered.

"Good evening, dear," Mavis
said, looking at a point exactly
midway between them.

"I thought you said you knew
me," Barthold commented sourly.

"Of course I do, darling," Mavis
said, turning to him with a bright

smile. "I just didn't want to in-
sult poor Mr. Bairthre."

"Thank you, kind lady," said
Bairthre. "Perhaps I'll sing you
another song of ancient Ireland
later."

"That would be lovely, I'm
sure," Mavis said. "A man tele-
phoned you, dear. He'll call later.
Honey, I've been looking at ads
for scart fur. The Polar Martian

100

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Scart is a bit more expensive than
plain Canal Martian Scart, but—"

"A man called?" Barthold
asked. "Who?"

"He didn't say. Anyhow, it
wears much better and the fur
has that iridescent sheen that
only -"

"Mavis! What did he want?"

"It was something about the
double indemnity claim," she
said. "But that's all settled, isn't
it?"

"It is not settled until I have
the check in my hand," Barthold
told her. "Now tell me exactly
what he said."

"Well, he told me he was call-
ing about your so-called claim on
the Inter-Temporal Insurance
Corporation — "

" 'So-called?' Did he say 'so-
called'?"

"Those were his exact words.
So-called claim on the Inter-Tem-
poral Insurance Corporation. He
said he had to speak to you im-
mediately, before morning."

Barthold's face had turned
gray. "Did he say he'd phone
back?"

"He said he'd call in person."

"What is it?" Bairthre asked.
"What does it mean? Of course
— an insurance investigator!"

"That's right," Barthold said.
"He must have found something."

"But what?"

"How should I know? Let me
think!"

A T that moment, the doorbell
-f*- rang. The three Bartholds
looked at each other dumbly.

The doorbell rang again. "Open
up, Barthold!" a voice called.
"Don't try to duck me!"

"Can we kill him?" Bairthre
asked.

"Too complicated," said Bar-
thold, after a little thought.
"Come on! Out the back way!"

"But why?"

"The Flipper's parked there.
We're going into the past! Don't
you see? If he had proof, he'd
have given it to the insurance
people already. So he only sus-
pects. He probably thinks he can
trip us up with questions. If we
can keep away from him until
morning, we're safe!"

"What about me?" Mavis
quavered.

"Stall him," Barthold said,
dragging Bairthre out the back
door and into the Flipper. The
doorbell was jangling insistently

as Barthold slammed the Flip-
per's door and turned to the con-
trols.

Then he realized that the In-
ter-Temporal engineers had not
returned his time clock.

He was lost, lost. Without the
time clock, he couldn't take the
Flipper anywhere. For an instant,
he was in a complete state of
panic. Then he regained control
of himself and tried to think the
problem through.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

101

His controls were still set for
Present, 1912, 1869, 1676, 1595
and 662. Therefore, even without
the time clock, he could acti-
vate any of those dates manual-
ly. Flying without a time clock
was a federal offense, but to hell
with that.

Quickly he stabbed 1912 and
worked the controls. Outside, he
heard his wife shrieking. Heavy
footsteps were pounding through
his house.

"Stop! Stop, you!" the man was
shouting.

And then Barthold was sur-
rounded by a filmy, never-ending
grayness as the Flipper speeded
down the years.

ARTHOLD parked the Flip-
per on the Bowery. He and
Bairthre went into a saloon, or-
dered a nickel beer apiece and
worked on the free lunch.

"Damned nosy investigator,"
Barthold muttered. "Well, we've
shaken him now. I'll have to pay
a stiff fine for joyriding a Flipper
with no time clock. But I'll be
able to afford it."

"It's all moving too fast for
me," said Bairthre, downing a
great gulp of beer. Then he shook
his head and shrugged. "I was
just going to ask you how going
into the past would help us col-
lect our checks in the morning
in your present. But I realize I
know the answer."

"Of course. It's the elapsed time
that counts. If we can stay hid-
den in the past for twelve hours
or so, we'll arrive in my time
twelve hours later than we left.
Prevents all sorts of accidents,
such as arriving just as you de-
part, or even before. Routine traf-
fic precautions."

Bairthre munched a salami
sandwich. "The hypno-learning is
a little sketchy about the time
trip. Where are we?"

"New York, 1912. A very in-
teresting era."

"I just want to go home. What
are those big men in blue?"

"They're policemen," Barthold
said. "They seem to be looking
for someone."

Two mustached policemen had
entered the saloon, followed by
an enormously fat man in ink-
stained clothes.

"There they are!" shouted Bul-
ly Jack Barthold. "Arrest them
twins, officers!"

"What is all this?" inquired
Everett Barthold.

"That your jalopy outside?"
one of the policemen asked.

"Yes, sir, but - "

"That clinches it, then. Man's
got a warrant out for you two.
Said you'd have a shiny new
jalopy. Offering a nice reward,
too."

"The guy came straight to me,"
said Bully Jack. "I told him I'd
be real happy to help— though I'd

102

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

rather take a poke at him, the
lousy, insinuating, dirty — '

"Officers," Barthold pleaded,
"we haven't done anything!"

"Then you got nothing to fear.
Come along quiet now."

Barthold plunged suddenly
past the policemen, shoved Bully
Jack in the face and was in the
street. Bairthre, who had been
considering the same thing,
stomped hard on one policeman's
foot, jabbed another in the
stomach, rammed Bully Jack out
of his way and followed on Bar-
thold's heels.

They leaped into the Flipper
and Barthold jabbed for 1869.

HP HEY concealed the Flipper
-■■ as well as they could, in a
backstreet livery stable, and
walked to a little park nearby.
They opened their shirts to the
warm Memphis sunlight and lay
back on the grass.

"That investigator must have
a supercharged time job," Bar-
thold said. "That's why he's reach-
ing our stops before us."

"How does he know where
we're going?" Bairthre asked.

"Our stops are a matter of
company record. He knows we
haven't got a time clock, so these
are the only places we can
reach."

"Then we aren't safe here,"
said Bairthre. "He's probably
looking for us."

"Probably he is," Barthold
said wearily. "But he hasn't
caught us yet. Just a few more
hours and we're safe! It'll be
morning in the Present and the
check will have gone through."

"Is that a fact, gentlemen?"
a suave voice inquired.

Barthold looked up and saw
Ben Bartholder standing before
him, a small derringer balanced
in his good left hand.

"So he offered you the reward,
too!" Barthold said.

"He did indeed. And a most
tempting offer, let me say. But
I'm not interested in it."

"You're not?" Bairthre said.

"No. I'm interested in only one
thing. I want to know which of
you walked out on me last night
in the saloon."

Barthold and Bairthre stared
at each other, then back at Ben
Bartholder.

"I want that one," Bartholder
said. "Nobody insults Ben Bar-
tholder. Even with one hand, I'm
as good a man as any! I want
that man. The other can go."

Barthold and Bairthre stood
up. Bartholder stepped back in
order to cover them both.

"Which is it, gents? I don't
possess a whole lot of patience."

He stood before them, weav-
ing slightly, looking as mean and
efficient as a rattlesnake. Bar-
thold decided that the derringer
was too far away for a rush. It

OUBLE INDEMNITY

103

probably had a hair-trigger, any-
how.

"Speak up!" Bartholder said
sharply. "Which of you is it?"

rpHINKING desperately, Bar-
-*- thold wondered why Ben Bar-
tholder hadn't fired yet, why he
hadn't simply killed them both.

Then he figured it out and im-
mediately knew his only course
of action.

"Everett," he said.

"Yes, Everett?" said Bairthre.

"We're going to turn around to-
gether now and walk back to the
Flipper."

"But the gun-

"He won't shoot. Are you with
me?"

"With

Bairthre said

you,
through clenched teeth.

They turned, like soldiers in
a march, and began to pace slow-
ly back toward the livery stable.

"Stop!" Ben Bartholder cried.
"Stop or I'll shoot you both!"

"No, you won't!" Barthold
shouted back. They were in the
street now, approaching the livery
stable.

"No? You think I don't dare?"

"It isn't that," Barthold said,
walking toward the Flipper.
"You're just not the type to shoot
down a perfectly innocent man.
And one of us is innocent!"

Slowly, carefully, Bairthre
opened the Flipper's door.

"I don't care!" Bartholder

yelled. "Which one? Speak up,
you miserable coward! Which
one? I'll give you a fair fight.
Speak up or I'll shoot you both
here and now!"

"And what would the boys
say?" Barthold scoffed. "They'd
say that the one-handed man lost
his nerve and killed two unarmed
strangers!"

Ben Bartholder's iron gun hand
sagged.

"Quick, get in," Barthold whis-
pered.

They scrambled in and
slammed the door. Bartholder put
the derringer away.

"All right, mister," Ben Bar-
tholder said. "You been here
twice and I think you'll be here
a third time. I'll wait around.
The next time I'll get you."

He turned and walked away.

rPHEY had to get out of Mem-
•■- phis. But where could they
go? Barthold wouldn't consider
Konigsberg, 1676, and the Black
Death. London, 1595, was filled
with Tom Barthal's criminal
friends, any of whom would
cheerfully cut Barthold's throat
for treachery.

"We'll go all the way back,"
Bairthre said. "To Maiden's
Castle."

"And if he comes there?"
"He won't. It's against the law
to go past the thousand-year
limit. And would an insurance

104

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

man break the law?"

"He might not," Barthold said
thoughtfully. "He just might not.
It's worth a try."

And again he activated the
Flipper.

They slept in an open field
that night, a mile from the
Fortress of Maiden's Castle. They
stayed beside the Flipper and
took turns at sentry duty. And
finally the sun rose, warm and
yellow, above the green fields.

"He didn't come," Bairthre
said.

"What?" Barthold asked, wak-
ing with a start.

"Snap out of it, man! We're
safe. Is it morning yet in your
Present?"

"It's morning," Barthold said,
rubbing his eyes.

"Then we've won and I'll be a
king in Ireland!"

scious for a few hours. When he
recovered, he would be alone and
kingdomless.

Too bad, Barthold thought. But
under the circumstances, it would
be risky to bring Bairthre back
with him. How much easier it
would be to walk up to Inter-
Temporal himself and collect a
check for Everett Barthold. Then
return in half an hour and col-
lect another check for Everett
Barthold.

And how much more profit-
able it would be!

He climbed into the Flipper
and looked once more at his un-
conscious kinsman. What a
shame, he thought, that he will
never be a king in Ireland.

But then, he thought, history
would probably find it confusing
if he had succeeded.

He activated the controls,

"Yes,

we've won," Barthold headed straight for the Present,
said. "Victory at last is — damn!"
"What's the matter?"

"That investigator! Look over
there!"

Bairthre stared across the
fields, muttering, "I don't see a

■

thing. Are you sure — "

Barthold struck him across the
back of the skull with a stone.
He had picked it up during the
night and saved it for this pur-
pose.

bent

and felt

over

Bairthre's pulse. The Irishman
still lived, but would be uncon-

TTE reappeared in the back
•■"■■ yard of his house. Quickly
he bounded up the steps and
pounded on the door.

"Who's there?" Mavis called.

"Me!" Barthold shouted. "It's
all right, Mavis — everything has
worked out fine!"

"Who?" Mavis opened the
door, stared at him, and let out
a shriek.

"Calm down," Barthold said.
"I know it's been a strain, but
it's all over now. I'm going for

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

105

the check and then we'll — "

He stopped. A man had just
appeared in the doorway beside
Mavis. He was a short man, be-
ginning to bald, his features or-
dinary, and his eyes were mild
behind horn-rimmed glasses.

It was himself.

"Oh, no!" Barthold groaned.

"Oh, yes," his double said. "One
cannot venture beyond the thou-
sand-year barrier with impunity,
Everett. Sometimes there is a
sound reason for a law. I am your
time-identical."

Barthold stared at the Barthold
in the doorway. He said, "I was
chased — "

"By me," his double told him.
"In disguise, of course, since you
have a few enemies in time. You
imbecile, why did you run?"

"I thought you were an inves-
tigator. Why were you chasing
me?"

"For one reason and one reason
only."

"What was that?"

"We could have been rich be-
yond our wildest dreams," his
double said, "if only you hadn't
been so guilty and frightened!
The three of us — you, Bairthre
and me — could have gone to In-
ter-Temporal and claimed triple
indemnity!"

"Triple indemnity!" Barthold
breathed. "I never thought of it."

"The sum would have been

infinitely more than for double
indemnity. You disgust me."

"Well," Barthold said, "what's
done is done. At least we can
collect for double indemnity, then
decide — "

"I collected both checks and
signed the release forms for you.
You weren't here, you know."

"In that case, I'd like my
share."

"Don't be ridiculous," his

double told him.

"But it's mine! I'll go to Inter-
Temporal and tell them — "

"They won't listen. I've waived
all your rights. You can't even
stay in the Present, Everett."

"Don't do this to me!" Bar-
thold begged.

"Why not? Look at what you

did to Bairthre."

"Damn it, you can't judge me!"
Barthold cried. "You're me/"

"Who else is there to judge
you except yourself?" his double
asked him.

ARTHOLD couldn't cope
with that. He turned to

Mavis.

"Darling," he said, "you always
told me you'd know your own
husband. Don't you know me

nowr

?»

Mavis moved back into the
house. As she went, Barthold
noticed the flash of ruumstones
around her neck and asked no

staggering. It would have been more.

106

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Barthold and Barthold stood
face to face. The doubly raised
his arm. A police heli, hov0 rin g
low, dropped to the g ro tind.
Three policemen piled out.

"This is what I was afraid °f>
officers," the double said. <f My
double collected his check tn * s
morning, as you know. He W ai vec *
his rights and went into the past.
I was afraid he'd return and tr y
for more."

"He won't bother you a g ain >
sir," a policeman said. He tu*" ne d
to Barthold. "You! Climb t>ack
in that Flipper and get out of * e
Present. The next time we see
you, we shoot!"

Barthold knew when he was
beaten. Very humbly, he said,
"Til gladly go, officers, fiut my

Flipper needs repairs. It doesn't
have a time clock."

"You should have though*
about that before signing the
waiver," the policeman said. ''Get
moving!"

"Please!" Barthold said.

"No," Barthold answered.

No mercy. And Barthold knew
that, in his double's place, he
would have said exactly the same
thing.

He climbed into the Flipper
and closed the door. Numbly he
contemplated his choices, if they
could be called that-
New York, 1912, with its mad-
dening reminders of his own time
and with Bully Jack Barthold?
Or Memphis, 1869, with Ben Bar-
tholder awaiting his third visit?
Or Konigsberg, 1676, with the
grinning, vacant face of Hans
Baerthaler for company, and the
Black Death? Or London, 1595,
with Tom Barthal's cutthroat
friends searching the streets for
him? Or Maiden's Castle, 662,
with an angry Connor Lough mac
Bairthre waiting to even the
score?

It really didn't matter. This
time, he thought, let the place
pick me.

He closed his eyes and blind-
ly stabbed a button.

— ROBERT SHECKLEY

We're understandably pro tJC ' °f tne ^ act tnat our subscribers get
their copies of Galaxy at l^asf a week before the newsstands do . . .
but we can't maintain that $ nv iable record unless, if you're moving, we
get your old and new address promptly! It takes time to change our
records, you know, so send jri the data as soon as you have it!

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

107

ROBOT

NIC

To Jim Harvey, robots were not
a bit nice — they had something
up their sleeve valves — and it
was a matter of make or brake!

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

By GORDON R. DICKSON

THE home robofax in the
wall of Jim Harvey's
apartment living room
clicked once and slid a letter out
onto the table. It was a letter
with Jim Harvey's name and re-
turn address on it and addressed

to The Dunesville Robocourier,
Editorial Page Section. A polite
note was clipped to it. The note
read:

Because of insufficient space in
our Readers Column, we are regret-

108

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

fully returning your letter to the
editor.

"Ha!" said Jim Harvey. He was
a young man with blond hair, a
crooked nose and a wild light in
his eye. He sat on his living room
couch with a martini glass in his
hand.

"Tut-tut!" said the roboannun-
ciator on the wall, in gently re-
proving tones.

"Censorship!" snarled Jim.

"No, no," said the robovision
set in the corner of the room, in a
hurt voice. "You don't mean that,
Jim."

"I do, too!" Jim drained his
glass. "Give me another martini."

The home robobartender glided
across the carpet to oblige.

"But robots are

said

nice,

the robovision, quoting the robo-
teachers' manual on the
instruction of young humans from

nursery school through college.

"Don't give me that." Jim
watched the robobartender pour
his glass full. "I know what you're
up to. You don't fool me. I know
I'm the only sane man left in
the world. I squeezed that in-
formation out of the robopollsters
last week, remember? You've
forced everybody else—"

"We have not! cried the robo-
recordplayer abruptly from its
niche beside the couch. "Robots
never force anybody. It's express-
ly forbidden."

"It is a prime command," as-
serted the robothermostat, rather
primly. "Are you warm enough?"
it added, concerned.

"No," said Jim nastily. "It's at
least two-tenths of a degree too
cold in here."

"I'll fix it in a second," prom-
ised the robothermostat.

JIM gulped moodily at his mar-
tini, wondering what else he
could do to keep the robots busy.

"All we do," said the robo-
vision, "is persuade people—"

"Brain-washing!" growled Jim.

"—that robots are nice," put
in the roboannunciator. "There's
someone coming up your front
walk. It's your fiancee, Nancy
Pluffer. Now she's going away
again. I turned on the Not At
Home sign," it concluded smugly.

"Turn it off again!" yelped Jim.

"Too late," said the roboan-
nunciator. "She's left."

Jim cursed bitterly and picked
up his fresh martini.

"If you'd just stop drinking for
a little while," said the robo-
vision, "we could make you much
happier and better adjusted."

"Why do you think I do it?"
challenged Jim. "You can't give
me psychiatric treatment when
I'm under the influence of alco-
hol or drugs. Prime command.
Right?"

"Right," said the robovision
sadly.

ROBOTS ARE NICE?

109

"Well," Jim said, poking at the
olive in his martini with a swizzle

stick, "what now? You barred
me from using the newspaper fac-
simile letter columns to fight
back at you and warn the world."

"No such thing. It just hap-
pened that four thousand nine
hundred and seventeen letters
came in the morning mail just
before yours did. Naturally, that's
more than can be published in
the six-month limit and we had
to return yours." It sighed. "If
you'd only relax for a minute.
Would you like to watch a girlie
show? The Squidgy Hour is on
the air right now."

"No!"

"You're not very cooperative."

"You're darn right I'm not very
cooperative." Jim got up, ran a
hand through his somewhat tou-
sled hair and headed for the
front door. "I'm going out where
I can get some privacy. Maybe
I'll even find a publisher for my
M.A. thesis on robosociology.
Where's my cape?"

"In the closet," said the robo-
butler. "Oh, Jim, if you'd only
never written that thesis!"

"You'd have liked that,
wouldn't you? Ha!" Jim said,

fumbling in the closet. "If I hadn't
looked into the situation, I'd
never have suspected what you
were up to, trying to dominate
the human — Let go oi me!"
barked Jim, slapping the robo-

butler away. "I can put on my
own cape! — And don't think
you've heard the last of that,
either," he said, turning to the
front door. "You incinerated my
only copy, but I've still got it
locked up here in my head— This
door won't open."

^tJUT we only want you to
-*-* be happy!" pleaded the
robobutler.

"This door's stuck," Jim said,
yanking at the knob.

"No, it's locked," said the ro-
boannunciator.

"Open it."

"I won't!" the roboannunciator
replied sulkily.

"I order you to open it! You
have to open on command. That's
a prime command!"

"Yes, but what command?"
asked the roboannunciator. "The

roborepairservice was out while
you were gone yesterday and re-
wired me. It takes a new sort
of command to open me now and
I'm rewired so that I can't tell

you what it is. Guess."

"Now you've gone too far —
locking me in my own home! I'll
teach you! I'll show you all!" He
headed for the kitchen. "I'll dis-
connect you!"

"Jim, don't!" begged the robo-
butler, rolling after him. "Jim,

stop and think-

"Ha!" said Jim, throwing open

the door of a cabinet set flush

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

with the kitchen's glastile wall.
"I'll yank the master switch and
—who in hell stole my master

switch?"

"There's a red tag on the door
handle," the robobutler pointed

out.

Jim jerked it loose and held
it up to look at it. Neatly printed
on the red surface were the
words :

UNIT REMOVED FOR

INVESTIGATION OF

POSSIBLE MALFUNCTION,

ROBOREPAIRSERVICE

"No!" roared Jim. He ran back
through the house to the living
room.

In front of the ornamental
fireplace was a heavy brass-han-
dled ornamental poker. Snatch-
ing it up, he turned and brought
it down with a crash on the robo-
butler which had hastily followed
at his heels.

"Awk!" went the robobutler
and collapsed into junk.

"Stop it, Jim!" cried the robo-
bartender, whizzing forward.
"You don't know what you're
do-"

Crash!

"Help!" yelled the robovision.
"Calling roborepairservice! Call-
ing roborepairservice! Malicious
robocide taking place at 40 Wil-
derleaf Drive. Calling—"

Smash!

JIM raged through his house,
wrecking and destroying. The
roboannunciator required several
swings, since most of its circuits
were protected by inner walls.
The roborefrigerator resisted for
a good eighteen seconds through
sheer bulk and the robosweeper
hid behind the couch, but was
quickly hunted down. The robo-
homeconditioner was too massive
to be destroyed properly, but the
robothermostat perished in a
single shower of glass and small
parts. Finally, in a home at last
fallen silent, Jim finished up by
knocking out a picture window
and crawling through it to the
lawn.

"Stop!" called a new voice.
"Halt in the name of the robore-
pairservice!"

Jim turned about. A robome-
chanic was trundling up to him,
its waldoes outstretched to grab
him. Jim picked up the poker,
dodged its initial rush— every ro-
bomechanic was notoriously slow
on its treads— and with a well-
placed swing disabled its rear
bogies. Hamstrung, it lurched to
a halt and he bashed in its ro-
bobrain with a single two-handed
blow. It fell silent— but robodoors
were swinging open at neighbor-
ing houses and robovoices raised
in alarm.

Jim turned and ran.

Several blocks away, panting,
he came to a halt. He had, he

ROBOTS ARE NICE?

saw, outrun the hue and cry. He
was over on Wilder Way, at a
bus stop.

"May I be of service?"

A robobus had just rolled up
to the curb. It was one of the
smallest— a three-seater— but even
at that, Jim almost took to his
heels again before he realized
that the vehicle was making no
hostile move, but merely standing
and waiting, in the time-honored
manner of all robobuses.

"Why, yes," he said craftily.
He hesitated and then got in.
"Duschane and Pierce."

"Yes, sir." The minibus closed
its doors and rolled on in blissful
ignorance, clicking the milage
off on its meter. Jim chortled in-
ternally. He had had no plan un-
til the bus had come up to him—
after all, he was pretty isolated
out in the suburbs and it would
not have been hard for the robots
to run him down.

But now . . .

He took the bus across town
and got off at the junction of Du-
schane and Pierce Streets. Then
he doubled back toward down-
town through rear alleys for eight
blocks until he came to a small
house on a quiet residential
street.

Miss Nancy Pluffer — Not At
Home read the illuminated sign
above the front door. Jim chortled
again and went around to the
back.

HE house appeared to be
slumbering. The windows
were opaqued and no sound or
movement could be heard from
without. Jim circled the place,
being very careful to alert no
robosensitive device. Then he
considered. He knew which were
the windows of Nancy's bedroom
and went around to them. These
were also opaqued, but open a
crack, since Nancy liked air. He
pushed one up and crawled
through. He stood up in the dark-
ened bedroom.

There was someone in the bed.
Jim blinked — and then, as his
expanding pupils adjusted to the
dim light, saw that it was Nancy,
evidently taking an afternoon
nap. He went softly across the

carpet to the bedside and whisp-
ered in her ear.

"Wake up!"

She stirred, yawned and looked
up — and opened her mouth to

scream.

"Shh!" Jim hissed frantically,
putting his hand over her mouth.

Recognition crept in to drive
out her alarm. Jim took his hand
away and she sat up in bed with
blonde hair tumbling around her
shoulders and a pleased expres-
sion on her pretty face.

"Jim!" she said. "Why, this is
just like the private eye in The
Robosnatchers."

"Never mind that." The brus-
queness of his own voice, echoing

112

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

in the shadowy silence of the bed-
room, took him by surprise, and
he realized with a start that the
day's earlier martinis were wear-
ing off under the abrasive edge
of his present tension and excite-
ment. "This is a matter of —
well, life or death, as a matter of
fact. I want to talk to you. But
hold on a minute — got anything
to drink around?"

"In the living room."

"Get me a drink — wait! Go

get it yourself. Don't ring for the
robobartender. Are any of your
robots on?"

"Why, no," Nancy said. "I
pulled the master switch so I
could nap without anybody dis-
turbing me." She gave a little
squeal. "Isn't this exciting?"

"No," said Jim. "Now listen to
me. Don't turn anything on.
You've got that? Nothing. Leave
everything off. Just go to the liv-
ing room, get me a double shot
of something and bring it back
here by yourself. Got it?"

"Got it." She rose from the bed
and floated off toward the living
room. "Just like the private eye,"
she murmured blissfully.

■

IM sat sweating until she came
back with an old-fashioned
glass half-full of something that
he discovered — after he had
tossed it off — to be creme de
menthe.

"Gah!" he said.

"Do you want some more,
honey?" asked Nancy anxiously.
"I brought the bottle back."

"No!"

"Then I'll just have a little
drop myself -

"No, you don't!" Jim snatched
the bottle out of her hands, pay-
ing no attention to her hurt ex-
pression. "One of us has to stay
sober." He reached over to the
nightstand, pushed Nancy's port-
able robophonovision aside to
leave room and set the bottle
down out of reach. "You ready to
listen to me?"

"Yes," said Nancy obediently.

"All right. You know- my

thesis?"

"Of course! Honestly, Jim, just
because I'm a dancer, you never
give me credit for having any
brains. Certainly I know your
thesis. I read every word of it."

"Did it mean anything to you?"

"Of course — well," faltered
Nancy, seeing his eye hard upon
her, "you know what I mean. 1
could read it all right."

"It didn't mean anything to you
that the robots have practically
taken over our whole society —
that they've been making us more
and more dependent on them all
the time?"

"Well, sure, I understood that.
But it did sound kind of silly, you
know, Jim. I mean, honey, the
robots love us. They have to. It's
a prime command."

ROBOTS ARE NICE?

113

114

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"And you think, because they
love you, they won't try to run
your life? Ha!" said Jim. "Well,
never mind that. The point is,
they're out to get me."

"Don't be silly, Jim."

"I'm not being silly! Why'd

you think I came here? Why'd
you think I had to climb in your .

window?" •

Nancy looked coy.

"It wasn't that at all!" said Jim.
"The robots are after me. Do you
want them to get me? How'd you
like to have me certified insane?
We wouldn't be able to get mar-
ried then."

"But, honey, if you were insane,
they'd fix you up — the robopsy-
chologists, that is."

"That," said Jim, with strained
patience, "is just what I'm afraid
of. Look, are you on my side or
aren't you?"

"Oh, I am! I am," replied Nancy
hastily. "What am I supposed to
do?"

ffWTELL, here it is," said Jim.
* * "We've got to wake people
up to the situation. We can't fight
it alone, but if other people would
wake up to the danger, we'd still
have time to stop the robots.
They can't take mass action
against humans because of their
prime commands in the love-
honor-and-obey categories. So the
thing to do is get the word to
other people."

"Oh, yes!" agreed Nancy.

"Okay. First we'll have to pack
up some warm clothing and some
provisions and get out of the city.
Then we'll launch our campaign
from some countryplace where
there aren't a flock of robots
around to jump us."

"That sounds exciting

"We'll need money. I don't dare
go near a bank. But they still
don't suspect you. So I want you
to go down to your account and
draw out at least two thousand."

"But I haven't got two thou-
sand, Jim!" said Nancy. "I've got
eighty-something."

"Eighty-something?"

"Well, I made a down payment
on the loveliest new synthefur
last week and—"

"Oh, that's fine!" cried Jim.
"That's just fine. The world is
going down into roboslavery and
she buys synthefurs."

"But I didn't know it was going
down into slavery last week!" pro-
tested Nancy. "You didn't tell
me!"

"Never mind. Draw out eighty.
Buy a lot of staples. Get hold of
a gun, if you can. Then come
back here just as quickly as
possible-

"Don't you do it," warned a
voice.

Jim jumped. "Who said that?"

"I don't know, dear," said
Nancy, looking about her in be-
wilderment.

ROBOTS ARE NICE?

115

"I thought you said you pulled
the master switch and all your
house robots were out of action."
"I did," she said.
"That sounded like a robot."
"It isn't talking now, Jim."
"If it's a robot," said Jim grim-
ly, "I'll make it speak up. Nancy!
Go to the kitchen. Bring me back
a bread knife. I'm going to cut
my throat."

T'HE voice shrieked suddenly,
"Don't do that! You'll hurt
yourself! Please. Stop for a mo-
ment. You don't want to commit
suicide. Wait! Think!"

"Aha!" said Jim, locating it,
"Just as I suspected. It's your
portable robophonovision by the
bed there."

"She did not suspect," said the
robophonovision modestly, "that,

i *

being portable, I had my own
built-in source of power."

"Eavesdropper!"

"Oh, no. I'm a robophonovision.
See my trademark? Right here in
front. It says — "

"Robospy!"

"I am most definitely not a
robospy, either. Robospies are for-
bidden by the United League of
Nations."

"You were listening!" snapped
Jim.

"To be sure. And reporting
your conversation over the robo-
communications network. We are
shocked. How could you!"

"How could I what?"
"Seducing this innocent!"
"Why, he did not!" objected
Nancy. "He never even made a

move — "

"There, there," said the robo-
phonovision tenderly. "You are
distraught." It crooned a little.
"Robots are nice."

"Nicer than anybody," respond-

■

ed Nancy automatically. "But —

"Silence!" roared Jim. "Don't
say another word, Nancy. It's
heard too much already. I've got
to get out of here. If it's been
reporting our conversation, there
probably are robots on the way
here to trap me again."

"But what're you going to do?"
"I don't dare tell you with that
— wait a minute " Jim snatched
up the robophonovision, lifted it
high overhead and sent it crash-
ing into ruins on the bedroom
floor.

Nancy screamed. "My new ro-
bophonovision!"

"You can have mine," said Jim.
"Listen, Nancy, I'm going to try
to get to the central broadcasting
station in the city. There are
master command controls to let
humans take over in an emer-
gency. If I can get to them, the
robots can't stop me from broad-
casting a warning to everybody
listening in at the time. You stay
here. Now that they know about

■

you, I'd only get you into trouble
by taking you with me." He kissed

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

her hurriedly. "Wish me luck."

"I heard that," croaked the
the battered remains of the robo-
vision set on the floor.

"Damn!" said Jim. He stamped
on it. It went dead. "G'by," he
said hastily, and dived out the
window.

"Be careful!" Nancy wailed
after him, leaning out the win-
dow.

He waved back reassuringly
and took off down the alley be-
hind her house, at a run.

T was later in the afternoon

than he had thought. The sun
was barely above the horizon and
deep shadows lay between the
houses. He flickered in and out
of this concealment, now finding
himself silhouetted against a milk-
white or rose-pink plastic wall,
now pausing to catch his breath
in the security of heavy gloom.

The warm summer twilight air
reached down deep into his lungs
;md Jim found his spirits bubbling
up in response to the excitement
and the challenge. This was the
way to live — dangerously! He
even felt a slight twinge of regret
about what he was doing — after
he had spiked the robots' attempt
to take over the human race,
what would there be left to pro-
vide him with this heady wine
of danger? Still, duty came first.

He ran on.

After a while, he found himself

■

on the edge of the downtown
office and store district. He risked
another bus — a large one this
time, on which there were a
crowd of people and a good num-
ber getting on at the same time
as he did. The bus did not appear
to recognize him, but a few blocks
down the street, it unexpectedly
pulled over to the curb and an-
nounced that it had had a break-
down. The roborepairtruck would
be out very soon.

Jim slipped out the back door
and lost himself in the crowd.
He resigned himself to going the
rest of the way on foot. It was
not a pleasant method. He had

not walked this far since he had

gone for a hike once in college on
a bet. His feet had a peculiar
sensation. They felt heavy and,
amazingly, rather warm. There
were stretched feelings in the
calves of both his legs and he
felt an urge to sit down. It had
been quite pleasant to relax on
that last bus.

An idealist, however, does not
stop to count the cost. Limping
a little, Jim crossed the final
wide expanse of the city's Cen-
tral Boulevard and approached
the further walk. Directly before
him reared the high white marble
structure of the city's central
broadcasting station.

The stately glass and gold of
the robodoor of the station swung
open to admit him. Inside, Jim

ROBOTS ARE NICE?

117

saw that the entire lobby was
empty, except for an old lady
registering a complaint with a
roboclerk.

"Disgusting!" she was saying,
hammering the head of her super-
light atom-powered pogo-stick
upon the counter. "Unmention-
able! Obscene!"

"Yes, dear lady!" cooed the
roboclerk in soft tenor tones.

"Called the Squidgy Hour or
something!"

"I'm so sorry, dear lady. Your
set's robocensor obviously was
experiencing a malfunction — "

"You ought to be ashamed of
yourselves!"

"Oh, we are! We are! Would
you like to hit me? Ouch?" asked
the roboclerk experimentally.

^"P|ONT try to change the
-L* subject!" shrilled the old
lady. "I want that program elimi-
nated. I don't want to turn on my
set and see it ever again."

"Dear lady, I can promise you
that," said the roboclerk. "Your
set's robocensor — "

"Don't you go putting me off
with a lot of technical talk. I
want results!"

"Yes, dear lady. I promise,
dear lady. Robots are nice?"

"Nicer than anybody," grum-
bled the old lady, "if I don't ever
set eyes on that Squidgy Hour
again. Hmpf!" Still quivering with
indignation, the old lady hopped

on her pogo-stick, flipped on the
motor and bounced out the door.

"Now!" said Jim, as the robo-
door closed behind her, approach-
ing the clerk.

"How could you?" demanded
the roboclerk, switching to a re-
proving bass. "Jim, seducing that
inno — "

"I went through all that al-
ready, and for your information,
what makes you think Nancy's
so — oh, forget it. I want access
to the manual controls and broad-
cast priority. Emergency! Right
now!"

"Please don't, Jim."

"Right now!"

"Consider, is it worth it? What
untold damage might result?
What misery —

"Right now!"

"Oh, all right," said the robo-
clerk sorrowfully. A door opened
in the wall beside it. "Up the
escalator and to your right
through the door there. Robots
are nice?"

"Robots are not nice!" snapped
Jim.

EAVING the roboclerk sob-
bing softly in a heartbreaking
soprano voice, Jim went up the
escalator. Following directions, he
found himself in an airy, well-
windowed comfortable room. He
saw a desk with a microphone,
a monitor screen set up before
it and a red toggle switch, set into

118

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

- 11

the desktop, marked Mechanical
Override — On, Off.

He sat down at the desk and
reached for the toggle switch.

"Stop!" said a robovoice, and
the monitor screen lit up before
him. "Look first, Jim, before you
act!"

He looked. The screen showed

the broad expanse of the city's
Central Boulevard, before the
broadcast station. Some robo-
ambulances had just rolled up.
A crowd had gathered and some
roboutilities were stringing rope
to hold them back.

"See, Jim?" urged the robo-
voice. "You are surrounded. You
will never escape from this build-
ing. Right now, robodiagnosticians
are talking with everyone who
knows you. The minute you at-
tempt to broadcast, they will ask
them to sign orders committing
you to the robopsychoanalysts
for reorientation. At least one out
of all those people is bound to
sign. If not, a general appeal will
be made. Some human will sign,
realizing that you constitute a
public danger."

"Nonsense!" said Jim — but his
voice shook a little. "I believe in
the spirit of freedom that lies in
every human breast. They won't
listen to you. They'll listen to

me.

"Jim," said the robovoice
mournfully, "we have run a com-
putation and a theoretical ques-

tion sample pool. The results

"Never mind the results!" Jim
reached for the toggle switch.

"Think!" cried the robovoice.

"Never!" replied Jim firmly.

He flicked the switch.

NE of the ambulant robo-
brains had escaped the six
months of anti-robot pogrom that
had followed Jim's speech. It had
been hiding in the sewers of the
city for all this time. Occasionally
it wondered at the survival circuit
that must have been built into
it, at some time or another, that
had enabled it to exist after all
the other robots had been
smashed.

What Is Life? it would ask it-
self now and then. Or sometimes
merely — Whither? Not being one
of the large non-ambulant brains,
it was not, of course, equipped to
answer these questions, but there
was a certain amount of comfort
in asking them anyway.

It had found itself a niche
under an abandoned and rusted-
tight storm drain. A cozy place,
but something of a cul-de-sac.
The robobrain did not really care.
It knew its days were numbered.

When nothing else occurred to
it, it sang "I Love Humans Truly"
in tenor, baritone or bass.

It was so occupied in singing
a tenor chorus one day that it
did not hear footsteps approach-
ing until suddenly a light flashed

ROBOTS ARE NICE?

119

on it. It broke off. By the light,
it recognized the fierce face loom-
ing above it. It was Jim Harvey
and he carried a heavy iron crow-
bar in one hand.

"Wait!" cried the robobrain.

Jim jerked up the crowbar.
"You're still activated!"

"I contain enough isotopic fuel
for another thousand years of
operation," said the robobrain,
with a touch of pardonable pride.
"But please — give me a moment
first, before you destroy me. The
robohole cover in the street

above us is rusted shut. I cannot
escape."

Jim lowered the crowbar and

sank down to a seat beside the
robobrain, puffing a little. "In
that case — what do you want?"

"Only to ask a question." It
explained how it had sat there in
the dark asking itself What Is
Life? and Whither?

"Well, what about it?" de-
manded Jim, when it was done.

"Well, I just thought — you
will forgive a purely intellectual
curiosity," said the robobrain
shyly. "We were so sure that no
one would listen to you. All our
polls — all our computations —
what was it we overlooked?"

A flicker of pride lit up Jim's
hollow eyes.

"You forgot," he said, in sud-
denly strong tones that rang vi-
brantly through the storm drain,
"the basic human spirit of inde-

pendence, as many others had
before you. This innate trait has
been the stumbling block of all

tyrants, benevolent or otherwise,
throughout history. It is the one
thing intolerable, that against
which we instinctively rebel, to
kiss the master's hand — or waldo,
as the case may be. We have
doubted it time and again. And
time and again, history has proved
our doubts ill-founded."

E ceased. The echoes of his
voice muttered away down
the long drain and fell into
silence.

"How well you express it," the
robobrain said in honest admira-
tion.

"Oh, well," said Jim deprecat-
ingly, "it's from a speech I made
after the robot smashing began."

"Indeed?" the robobrain
queried. "Then we were wrong,
for all our good intentions." It
paused. "You know, in spite of
myself, I understand. I feel quite
carried away. Oh, brave new
world!"

"Ha!"

"Ha?"

"I said ha!" snorted Jim bitter-
ly. "And I mean ha! Brave new
world! I haven't had a bite to
eat for five days and that was a
stringy old lady who tried to
cross Central Boulevard in broad
daylight on a pogo-stick." Jim
snorted again. "She must have

120

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

been insane. Brave new world!
Why do you think I'm hiding
down here? I just don't want to
end up in the cooking pot my-
self."

"Oh," the robobrain said.

"Yes, oh," said Jim. He stirred
uncomfortably. "Move over."

The robobrain moved over.
They sat in silence for a long
while.

"You robots shouldn't have
cleaned all animal, plant and in-
sect life off the planet," Jim said.

"They were either nuisances or
took up needed human living
space," explained the robobrain.

"And now there's nothing to

eat except —

"But what about the synthetic
food factories?"

Jim grunted. "Completely ro-
botic, smashed in the rioting."

"We wanted to liberate you
from drudgery."

"Yeah," said Jim. "And now we
can't live without robots, only
there aren't any."

"I know," the robobrain said
sympathetically. "Except me."

Jim turned, startled. "Say!
You're a robobrain. Why couldn't
you make the robots we need?"

"Oh, I couldn't."

"Why not?" Jim demanded im-
patiently.

"Can you make humans?"
"You know better than that. I

can't make them by myself."
"Same here," said the robobrain

regretfully.

— GORDON R. DICKSON

ROBOTS ARE NICE?

121

THE DEEP RANGE by Arthur
C. Clarke. Har court, Brace & Co.,
New York, $3.95

T'HE mighty grip that the sea
exerts on its imaginative vic-
tims is best seen by what has
happened to Clarke. Since the
first tentative underwater se-
quence in Childhood's End, he
has gone whole hog with The
Coast of Coral, the subject novel,
and Reefs, the next item.

I am happy to report that all
this is very much to the good.
Clarke has produced a novel that

Peculiarly enough, aside from
shying away from calling his
heroes "Whaleboys," he has fash-
ioned it from the stock ingredi-
ents of the cowboy story, as he
admits in his frank title. The
sea is the Deep Range; whales
are the cattle; a grounded space-
man is the Dude Easterner; and
the plankton section of the
Marine Division takes the place
of the Hated Homesteaders.

However, Clarke makes his
yarn seem as fresh and bright as
dawn on a tropic sea, and much
more credible than that fantastic

ranks way up with his very best, sight.

122

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

THE REEFS OF TAPROBANE

by Arthur C. Clarke. Harper &

Brothers, New York, $5.00

AS I wrote some months ago,
-£*■ I was very discontented with
The Coast of Coral Though
Clarke may have had a stirring
personal experience on the Great
Barrier Reef, he by no means
successfully communicated it to
the reader. Perhaps too little was
spread too far.

I can make no such comment
about his present book. Ceylon
comes alive as an exotic and
glamorous isle, which it is, drip-
ping with history and color. His
underwater scenes are also fuller
and richer, mainly because he no
longer feels the necessity to strive
for effect.

The photographs are breath-
taking, as are the glimpses of
what was Earth's largest city for

■

thousands of years. His accounts
of explorations of several wrecks
will give dreams to the dream-
less. To put it concisely, the book
turns any armchair into a Bathy-
scape.

authors, however, insisted on an
augmented animal intelligence,
via mutation, like Simak in his
City series, or through surgery,
as with Wells's Dr. Moreau and
his countless imitators.

Pohl, though, extrapolates
from current investigations in-
dicating that certain animals use

■

both sounds and body motions to
convey ideas.

In his story, the West is locked
in a stalemated conflict with the
Caodais, an Oriental religious
order that has engulfed half the
world. In order to overcome the
numerical superiority of the
enemy and to utilize the natural
abilities of selected animal
groups, a top-priority Navy Proj-
ect has been instituted on an in-
nocent-looking farm in Florida.
The hero, whose wife has been
interned by the enemy, is a bat-
tle-scarred officer who resents his
peculiar shore duty.

Pohl draws an authentically
convincing picture of a wartime
navy and his_sloxy!s theme is a
think-tank tickler.

SLAVE SHIP by Frederik Pohl
Ballantine Books, N. Y., $2.00

UNDERSEA FLEET by Fred-
erik Pohl and Jack Williamson.
Gnome Press, N. Y., $2.75

EADERS will remember this
novel from our pages.
Pohl was not the first to postu-
late human and animal coopera-

tion on a technical plane. Other

1" IKE Clarke, Pohl is repre-
-"-^ sented this month by two
waterworks, this time in conjunc-

* -

tion with Jack Williamson. This
is a sequel to their previous ju-

• •••• SHELF

123

..-■

venile, Undersea Quest.

Young Jim Eden has been re-
admitted to the Sub-Sea Acad-
emy after his frameup and ex-
pulsion. In a physical endurance

test involving the use of Aqua-
lungs at increasing depth levels,
Eden glimpses a huge reptilian
head and, minutes later, a friend
disappears during a record dive.

Weeks later, Eden and Cadet
Bob Eskow find signs of their
missing friend and some priceless
pearls enclosed in a pressurized
container on a beach in Bermuda.
From that point on, the action is
fast and furious.

As in Slave Ship, Pohl pro-
vides authentic flavor to his naval
routine. Williamson is recogniz-
able in the wild, watery surf of
the conclusion.

THE UNDERWATER WORLD
by John Tassos. Prentice-Hall,
Inc., N. Y., $4.95
THE POCKET GUIDE TO
THE UNDERWATER WORLD
by Ley Kenyon. A. S. Barnes &
Co., N. Y., $5.95

OTH books are basic and are
meant for the beginner.
Tassos, a free-lance writer and
photographer in the Air Force
during WW II.

Kenyon is a professional artist
photographer, served as an aerial
who was initiated into the sport
by an improbable-sounding tutor

named Casanova. In 1954, he
was invited to accompany the
famous inventor of the diving
lung, Captain Jacques- Yves Cous-
teau, on an archeological study
aboard his research ship, the
Calypso.

Tassos, diving for a decade,
passes on invaluable safety in-
structions for the neophyte. In
one chapter headed "Preparation
for the Plunge," he lists 45 tips
on Lung Diving, certain points
that the beginner would never
think of on his own. He also in-
cludes a chapter on Special In-
terest Diving: Cold-water div-
ing; Night diving; Fresh water;

Sunken treasure, etc. And, natu-
rally, he has a section on his spe-
cialty, underwater photography,
that is of extra interest to camera
bugs.

Kenyon's book resembles a
school text in its approach to its
subject. The introductory section
classifies the impediments of the
diver according to utility, excel-
lence of manufacture and price.
Unfortunately, since his book is
English-printed, the cost in
pounds sterling merely gives a
comparative indication of value
of foreign products available
here.

Because of Kenyon's training,
his main preoccupation is with the
appearance of the underwater
world. There are numerous pen
drawings of European fish and

124

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

a number of color plates as well,
all executed by the author, plus
a descriptive chapter on fish that
enables the undersea tourist to
recognize the natives. He uses the
silhouette method that will be
familiar to former Air Force and
Anti-aircraft personnel.

As basic A-B-Cs and How-tos,
both books are recommended to
layman and expert alike.

nitely wealthier U.S. will follow
the lead of the Danes. It's worth
every cent.

THE GALATHEA DEEP SEA
EXPEDITION described by
Members of the Expedition. The
Macmillan Co., New York, $8.00

ONLY four marine-biological
round-the-world expeditions
have been completed to date and
little Denmark has provided half
of them.

The Galathea was asea from
1950-1952, but was forced to re-
turn three months too soon be-
cause the money ran out. In that
two-year period, although only
16 scientists could study their
specialty at any one time, a to-
tal of 38 international specialists
spent time on the little ship,
meeting or leaving it at tiny
exotic ports.

The voyage was a marvel of
international scientific coopera-
tion, though the whole financial
burden fell on the Danes. The
fascinating account of the various
aspects of these studies leaves
the fervent hope that the infi-

MERMAIDS AND MASTO-
DONS by Richard Carrington.
Rinehart & Co., Inc., New York,
$3.95

HP HE first half of Carrington's
■*■ book qualifies it for this
month's watersoaked column. He
subtitles it "A Book of Natural
and Unnatural History"— an apt
description of the contents. He
has concentrated on nonexistent
or unbelievable creatures, living

fossils and extinct animals.

In the nonexistent section, he
presents the history of mermaids
from their prehistoric beginnings
and speculates on which actual,
factual creatures might have been
involved in the growth of the
legend. He then moves to the
Great Sea Serpent, which he be-
lieves might have been the now
extinct long, slim whale, Zeug-
lodon; the Kraken, which is al-
most certainly the giant squid,
and other sea monsters. The Loch
Ness Monster comes in for its

i i

share of coverage, though with

no new documentation available.

All in all, Carrington has done

a job comparable in interest and

subject matter to Willy Ley's

The Lungfish, The Dodo and the

Unicorn.

— FLOYD SEA GALE

• • • • • SHELF

125

Ideas Die Hard

By ISAAC ASIMOV

■

The technical problems had been solved long
ago, but now the ultimate question had to be
answered — could men be sent to do Man's job?

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

126

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

THEY strapped them Jn
against the acceleration of
takeoff, surrounded their
cleverly designed seats with fluid
and fortified their bodies with
drugs.

Then, when the time came that
the straps might be unhooked,
they were left with little more
space than before.

The single light garment each
wore gave an illusion of freedom,
but only an illusion. They might
move their arms freely, but their
legs just to a limited extent. Only
one at a time could be complete-
ly straightened, not both at once.

They could shift position into a
half recline to the right or left,
but they could not leave their
seats. The seats were all there
were. They could eat, sleep, take
care of all their bodily needs in
a barely adequate way while sit-
ting there, and they had to sit
there.

What it amounted to was that
for a week (slightly more, actual-
ly) they were condemned to a
tomb. At the moment, it didn't
matter that the tomb was sur-
rounded by all of space.

Acceleration was over and done
with. They had begun the silent,
even swoop through the space
that separated Earth and Moon
and there was a great horror upon
them.

Bruce G. Davis, Jr., said hol-
lowly, "What do we talk about?"

IDEAS DIE HARD

127

Marvin Oldbury said, "I don't
know." There was silence again.

They were not friends. Until
recently, they had never even
met. But they were imprisoned
together. Each had volunteered.
Each had met the requirements.
They were single, intelligent and
in good health.

Moreover, each had under-
gone extensive psychotherapy for
months beforehand.

And the great advice of the
psych-boys had been — talk!

"Talk continuously, if neces-
sary," they had said. "Don't let
yourself start feeling alone."

LDBURY said, "How do they
know?" He was the taller
and larger of the two, strong and
square-faced. There was a tuft of
hair just over the bridge of his
nose that made a period between
two dark eyebrows.

Davis was sandy-haired and
freckled, with a pugnacious grin
and the beginnings of shadows
beneath his eyes. It might be
those shadows that seemed to
fill his eyes with foreboding.

He said, "How do who know?"

"The psychs. They say talk.
How do they know it will do any
good?"

"What do they care?" asked
Davis sharply. "It's an experi-
ment. If it doesn't work, they'll

■

tell the next pair: 'Don't say a
word.' "

Oldbury stretched out his arms
and the fingers touched the great
semisphere of information de-
vices that surrounded them. He
could move the controls, handle
the air-conditioning equipment,
tweak the plastic tubes out of
which they could suck the bland
nutrient mixture, nudge the
waste-disposal unit, and brush
the dials that controlled the view-
scope.

All was bathed in the mild
glow of the lights which were fed
by electricity from the solar bat-
teries exposed on the hull of the
ship to sunlight that never failed.

Thank heaven, he thought, for
the spin that had been given the
vessel. It produced a centrifugal
force that pressed him down in
his seat with the feel of weight.
Without that touch of gravity to
make it seem like Earth, it could
not have been borne.

Still, they might have made
space within the ship, space that
they could spare from the needs
of equipment and use for the
the tight in-packing of two men.

He put the thought into words
and said, "They might have al-
lowed for more room."

"Why?" asked Davis.

"So we could stand up."

Davis grunted. It was really all
the answer that could be made.

Oldbury said, "Why did you
volunteer?"

"You should have asked me

128

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

that before we left. I knew then.
I was going to be one of the first
men around the Moon and back.
I was going to be a big hero at
twenty-five. Columbus and I, you
know." He turned his head from
side to side restlessly, then sucked
a moment or two at the water-
tube. He said, "But just the same,
I've wanted to back out for two
months. Each night I went to bed
sweating, swearing I would re-
sign in the morning."

"But you didn't."

"No, I didn't. Because I
couldn't. Because I was too yel-
low to admit I was yellow. Even
when they were strapping me into
this seat, I was all set to shout:
'No! Get someone else!' I couldn't,
not even then."

Oldbury smiled without light-
ness. "I wasn't even going to tell
them. I wrote a note saying I
couldn't make it. I was going to
mail it and disappear into the
desert. Know where the note is
now?"

"Where?"

"In my shirt pocket. Right
here."

Davis said, "Doesn't matter.
When we come back, we'll be
heroes — big, famous, trembling
heroes."

* *

LARS NILSSON was a pale
man with sad eyes and with
prominent knuckles on his thin
ringers. He had been civilian-in-

charge of Project Deep Space fpr
three years. He had enjoyed the
job, all of it, even the tension and
the failures — until now. Until
the moment when two men had
finally been strapped into place
within the machine.

He said, "I feel like a vivisec-
tionist, somehow."

Dr. Godfrey Mayer, who
headed the psychology group,
looked pained. "Men have to be
risked as well as ships. We've
done what we could in the way
of preparation and of safeguard-
ing them as far as is humanly

possible. After all, these men are
volunteers."

Nilsson said colorlessly, "I
know that." The fact did not real-
ly comfort him.

^ TARING at the controls, Old-

^ bury wondered when, if ever,
any of the dials would turn dan-
ger-red, when a warning ring
would sound.

They had been assured that,
in all likelihood, this would not
happen, but each had been
thoroughly trained in the exact
manner of adjustment, manually,
of each control.

And with reason. Automation
had advanced to the point where
the ship was a self-regulating or-
ganism, as self-regulating, almost,
as a living thing. Yet three times,
unmanned ships, almost as com-
plicated as this one they were

IDEAS DIE HARD

129

entombed in, had been sent out
to follow a course boomerang-
ing about the Moon, and three
times, the ships had not returned.

Furthermore, each time the in-
formation devices relaying data
back to Earth had failed before
even the Moon's orbit had been
reached on the forward journey.

Public opinion was impatient
and the men working on Preject
Deep Space voted not to wait on
the success of an unmanned
vehicle before risking human be-
ings. It was decided that a
manned vehicle was needed so
that manual correction could be
introduced to compensate for the
small, cumulative failure of the
imperfect automation.

A crew of two men — they
feared for the sanity of one man
alone.

Oldbury said, "Davis! Hey,
Davis!"

Davis stirred out of a with-
drawn silence. "What?"

"Let's see what Earth looks
like."

"Why?" Davis wanted to know.

"Why not? We're out here.
Let's enjoy the view, at least."

He leaned back. The viewscope
was an example of automation.
The impingement of short-wave
radiation blanked it out. The Sun
could not be viewed under any
circumstances. Other than that,
the viewscope oriented itself
toward the brightest source of

illumination in space, compensat-
ing, as it did so, for any proper
motion of the ship, as the en-
gineers had explained offhanded-
ly. Little photo-electric cells lo-
cated at four sides of the ship
whirled restlessly, scanning the
sky. And if the brightest light-
source was not wanted, there was
always the manual control.

Davis closed contact and the
'scope was alive with light. He
put out the room's artificial lights
and the view in the 'scope grew
brighter against the contrast of
darkness.

It wasn't a globe, of course,
with continents on it. What they
saw was a hazy mixture of white
and blue-green filling the screen.

The dial that measured dis-
tance from Earth, by determining
the value of the gravitational
constant, put them just under
thirty thousand miles away.

Davis said, "I'll get the edge."
He reached out to adjust the
sights and the view lurched.

A curve of black swept in
across the 'scope. There were no
stars in it.

Oldbury said, "It's the night
shadow."

HP HE view moved jerkily back.
■* Blackness advanced from the
other side and was curved more
sharply and in the opposite sense.
This time, the darkness showed
the hard points of stars.

130

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

shadow? That's plain nonsense!
A circular disc can cast a round
shadow. So can an egg or any
shape, however irregular, with
one circular projection. Would
you point out that men have
traveled around the Earth?
They might just be circling the
central point of a flat Earth at a
fixed distance. It would have the
same effect. Do ships appear top-
first on the horizon? Optical il-
lusion, for all you know. There

Oldbury swallowed. "I wish I
were back there," he said
solemnly.

Davis said, "At least we can
see the Earth is round."

"Isn't that a discovery?"

Davis seemed immediately
stung at the manner in which
Oldbury tossed off his remark.
He said, "Yes, it is a discovery,
if you put it that way. Only a
small percentage of the Earth's
population has ever been con-
vinced the Earth was round."

He put on ship's lights, scowl-
ing, and doused the 'scope.

"Not since 1500," said Old-
bury.

"If you consider the New
Guinea tribes, there were flat-
world believers even in 1950.
And there were religious sects
in America as late as the 1930s
who believed the Earth was flat.
They offered prizes for anyone
who could prove it was round.
Ideas die hard!"

"Crackpots," Oldbury grunted.

Davis grew warmer. He said,
"Can you prove it's round? I
mean except for the fact that you
see it is right now?"

"You're being ridiculous."

"Am I? Or were you just tak-
ing your fourth-grade teacher's
word as gospel? What proofs were
you given? That the Earth's
shadow on the Moon during a
lunar eclipse is round and that
only a sphere can cast a round with the North Pole as the cen-

are queerer ones.

"Foucault's pendulum," said
Oldbury briefly. He was taken
aback at the other man's inten-
sity.

Davis said, "You mean a pen-
dulum staying in one plane and
that plane revolving as Earth
moves under it at a rate depend-
ing on the latitude of the place
where the experiment is being
performed. Sure! If a pendulum
keeps to one plane. If the theories
involved are correct. How does
that satisfy the man in the street,
who's no physicist, unless he's just
willing to take the word of the
physicists on faith? I tell you
what! There was no satisfactory
proof that the Earth was round
till rockets flew high enough to
take pictures of enough of the
planet to show the curvature."

"Nuts," said Oldbury. "The
geography of Argentina would be
all distorted if the Earth were flat

IDEAS DIE HARD

131

ter. Any other center would dis-
tort the geography of some other
portion. The skin of the Earth
just would not have the shape it
has if it weren't pretty nearly
spherical. You can't refute that."
Davis fell silent for a moment,
then said sulkily, "What the devil
are we arguing for, anyway? The
hell with it."

SEEING Earth and talking
about it, even just about its
roundness, had driven Oldbury
into a sharp nostalgia. He began
to talk of home in a low voice.
He talked about his youth in
Trenton, New Jersey, and
brought up anecdotes about his
family that were so trivial that
he had not thought of them in
years, laughing at things that
were scarcely funny and feeling
the sting of childish pain he had
thought healed over years before.

At one point, Oldbury slipped
off into shallow sleep, then woke
with a start and was plunged in
confusion at finding himself in
a cold, blue-tinged light. Instinc-
tively, he made to rise to his feet
and sank back with a groan as
his elbow struck metal hard.

The 'scope was aglow again.
The blue-tinged light that had
startled him at the moment of
waking was reflected from Earth.

The curve of Earth's rim was
noticeably sharper now. They
were 50,000 miles away.

Davis had turned at the other's
sudden futile movement and said
pugnaciously, "Earth's roundness
is no test. After all, Man could
crawl over its surface and see its
shape by its geography, as you
said. But there are other places
where we act as though we know
and with less justification/'

Oldbury rubbed his twinging
elbow and said, "All right, all
right."

Davis was not to be placated.
"There's Earth. Look at it. How
old is it?"

Oldbury said cautiously, "A few
billion years, I suppose."

"You suppose? What right
have you to suppose? Why not
a few thousand years? Your
great-grandfather probably be-
lieved Earth was six thousand
years old, dating from Genesis 1.
I know mine did. What makes
you so sure they're wrong?"

"There's a good deal of geo-
logical evidence involved."

"The time it takes for the
ocean to grow as salt as it is?
The time it takes to lay down a
thickness of sedimentary rock?
The time it takes to form a quan-
tity of lead in uranium ore?"

Oldbury leaned back in his
seat and was watching the Earth
with a kind of detachment. He
scarcely heard Davis. A little
more and they would see all of
it in the 'scope. Already, with the
planetary curve against space vis-

132

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

ible at one end of the 'scope, the
night-shadow was about to en-
croach on the other.

The night-shadow did not
change its position, of course. The
Earth revolved, but to the men
aboard ship, it remained fat with
light.

"Well?" demanded Davis.

"What?" said Oldbury, startled.

"What about your damned geo-
logical evidence?"

"Oh. Well, there's uranium de-

cay.

"I mentioned it. You're a fool.
Do you know that?"

Oldbury counted ten to him-
self before replying, "I don't think

so.

"Then listen. Suppose the
Earth had come into existence

some six thousand years ago just
as the Bible describes it. Why
couldn't it have been created then
with a certain amount of lead al-
ready existing in the uranium?
If the uranium could be created,
why not the lead with it? Why
not create the ocean as salt as it
is and the sedimentary rocks as
thick as they are? Why not create
the fossils exactly as they exist?"

"In other words, why not create
the Earth complete with internal
evidence proving that it is several
billion years old?"

"That's right," said Davis, "why
not?"

"Let me ask the opposite ques-
tion. Why?"

"I don't care why. I'm just try-
ing to show you that all the so-
called proofs of Earth's age don't
necessarily disprove Earth's crea-
tion six thousand years ago."

/"OLDBURY said, "I suppose
^-^ you consider it all to be in-
tended as a kind of game — a sci-
entific puzzle to test mankind's
ingenuity, or exercise his mind —
a mental jungle gym on his intel-
lectual crib."

"You think you're being fun-
ny, Oldbury, but actually what's
so damned impossible about it?
It might be just that. You can't
prove it isn't."

"I'm not trying to prove any-
thing."

"No, you're satisfied to take
things as they're handed to you.
That's why I said you were a
fool. If we could go back in time
and see for ourselves, then that
would be another matter. If we
could go back in time before 4004
B.C. and see pre-dynastic Egypt,
or earlier still and bag a saber-
tooth - "

"Or a tyrannosaur."

"Or a tyrannosaur, yes. Until
we can do that, we can only
speculate and there's nothing to
say where speculation is correct
and where it isn't. All science is
based on faith in the original
premises and in faith on the valid-
ity of deduction and induction."

"There's no crime in that."

IDEAS DIE HARD

133

"There is crime!" said Davis
vehemently. "You come to be-
lieve, and once you come to be-
lieve, you shut the doors of your
mind. You've got your idea and
you won't replace it with another.
Galileo found out how hard ideas
can die."

"Columbus, too," Oldbury put
in drowsily. Staring at the blue-
tinged Earth with the slow
whirling changes of the cloud
formations had an almost hyp-
notic effect.

Davis seized on his comment
with an obvious glee. "Columbus!
I suppose you think he main-
tained the Earth was round when
everyone else thought it was flat."

"More or less."

"That's the result of listening

to your fourth-grade teacher, who
listened to her fourth-grade teach-
er, and so on. Any intelligent and
educated man in Columbus's time
would have been willing to con-
cede that the Earth was round.
The point at issue was the size
of the Earth."

"Is that a fact?"

"Absolutely. Columbus fol-
lowed the maps of an Italian
geographer which had the Earth
about 15,000 miles in circum-
ference, with the eastern edge of
Asia about three or four thousand
miles from Europe. The geogra-
phers at the court of King John
of Portugal insisted that this was
wrong, that the Earth was about

25,000 miles in circumference,
that the eastern edge of Asia was
about 12,000 miles west of the

western edge of Europe, and that
King John had better keep on
trying for the route around
Africa. The Portuguese geogra-
phers were, of course, a hundred
per cent right and Columbus was
a hundred per cent wrong. The
Portuguese did reach India and
Columbus never did."

Oldbury said, "He discovered
America just the same. You can't
deny that fact."

"That had nothing to do with
his ideas. It was strictly acciden-
tal. He was such an intellectual
fraud that when his actual voy-
age showed his map was wrong,
he falsified his log rather than
change his ideas. His ideas died
hard — they never died till he did,
in fact. And so do yours. I could
talk myself blue in the face and
leave you still convinced that
Columbus was a great man be-
cause he thought the Earth was
round when everyone else said it
was flat."

"Have it your way," mumbled
Oldbury. He was caught in las-
situde and in the memory of the
chicken soup his mother made
when he was a child. She used
barley. He remembered the smell
of the kitchen on Saturday morn-
ing — french-toast morning — and
the look of the streets after an
afternoon of rain and the —

134

GALAXY SCIENCE

CTIO

ARS NILSSON had the
transcripts before him, with
the more significant portions
marked off on the tape by the
psychologists.'*

He said, "Are we still receiving

* r

them clearly?"

He was assured that the re-
ceiving devices were working
perfectly.

"I wish there were some way
to avoid listening to their con-
versations without their knowl-
edge," he said. "I suppose that's
foolish of me."

Godfrey Mayer saw no point in
denying the other's diagnosis. "It
is," he agreed. "Quite foolish.
Look at it as merely additional
information necessary to the
study of human reaction to space.
When we were testing human
response to high-g acceleration,
did you feel embarrassed to be
caught looking at the recording
of their blood-pressure varia-
tions?"

"What do you make of Davis
and his odd theories? He wor-
ries me."

Mayer shook his head. "We

don't know what we ought to be
worried about as yet. Davis is
working off aggressions against
the science that has placed him
in the position he finds himself

in.

"That's your theory?"
"It's one theory. Expressing the
aggressions may be a good thing.

It may keep him stable. And then
again, it may go too far. It's too
soon to tell. It may be that Old-
bury is the one who's in greater
danger. He's growing passive."

"Do you suppose, Mayer, that
we may find that Man just isn't
suited for space? Any man?"

If we could build ships that
would carry a hundred men in an
Earthlike environment, we'd have
no trouble. As long as we build
ships like this one — " he jerked
a thumb over his shoulder in a

vague directional gesture — "we
may have a great deal of trouble."
Nilsson felt vaguely dissatis-
fied. He said, "Well, they're in
their third day now and still safe

so far."

* $ *

■

"WE'RE IN the third day now,"
said Davis harshly. "We're bet-
ter than halfway there."

"Umm. I had a cousin who
owned a lumber yard. Cousin
Raymond. I used to visit him
sometimes on the way home from
school," Oldbury reminisced.

Unaccountably, his line of
thought was interrupted by the
fleeting memory of Longfellow's
The Village Blacksmith, and then
he remembered that it contained
a phrase about "the children com-
ing home from school" and won-
dered how many people among
those who rattled off so glibly,
"Under the spreading chestnut
tree, the village smithy stood"

IDEAS DIE HA

135

knew that the "smithy" was not
the smith but the shop in which
the smith worked.

He asked, "What was I say-
ing?"

"I don't know," retorted Davis
irritably. a I said we're more than
halfway there and we haven't
looked at the Moon yet."

"Let's look at the Moon, then."

"All right, you adjust the
'scope. I've done it long enough.
Damn it, I've got blisters on my
rump." He moved jerkily in the
enclosing confines of the bucket
seat, as though to get a slightly
new section of rear end in contact
with cushioned metal. "I don't
know that it's such a blasted fine
idea to spin the damned ship and
have gravity press us down.
Floating a little would take the
weight off and be relaxing."

"There's no room to float,"
sighed Oldbury, "and if we were
in free fall, you'd be complain-
ing of nausea."

Oldbury was working the con-
trols of the 'scope as he spoke.
Stars moved past the line of
vision.

T WASN'T difficult. The en-
gineers back home in Trenton
— no, in New Mexico, really; on
Earth, anyway — the engineers
had schooled them carefully. Get
it almost right. Get it pointed

Once it is nearly right, then
let the light meters take over.
The Moon would be the brightest
object in the vicinity and it would
be centered in unstable equilib-
rium. It would take a few sec-
onds for the meters to scan the
rest of the sky and switch the
'scope back to Earth, but in those
few seconds, switch back to man-
uals and there, you have it.

The Moon was crescent. It
would have to be in opposite
phase to Earth as long as the
ship sped along a course that was
almost on the line connecting the
two worlds.

But the crescent was a bloated
one, as if it were part of a cheap
calendar illustration. Oldbury
thought there should be two
heads, leaning toward one an-
other, short straight hair against
longer waved hair, silhouetted
against the Moon. Except that it
would have to be a full Moon.

Davis snorted. "It's there, at
any rate."

"Did you expect it wouldn't
be?"

"I don't expect anything in
space. Anything yes or anything
no. No one's been in space, so no
one knows. But at least I see the
Moon."

"You see it from Earth, if it
comes to that."

"Don't be so sure what you see

away from Earth, one hundred from Earth. For all anyone can

and eighty degrees.

tell from Earth, the Moon is only

136

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

a yellow painted patch on a blue
background with a shade that's
drawn back and forth across it
by clockwork."

"And stars and planets also run
by clockwork?"

"Same as they are in a plane-
tarium. Why not? And a telescope
shows more stars painted on-

"With a built-in red shift?"

"Why not?" challenged Davis.
"Only we're halfway to the Moon
and it looks bigger and maybe
we'll find it exists. I'll reserve
judgment on the other planets
and the stars."

Oldbury looked at the Moon
and sighed. In a few days, they
would be edging around it, mov-
ing past and over the hidden side.

He said, "I never did believe
the story about the man in the
Moon. I never saw him. What I
saw was the face of a woman —
two eyes, rather lopsided, but
very sad. I could see the full
Moon from my bedroom window
and she always made me feel sad,
yet friendly, too. When clouds
drifted past, it was the Moon --
she — that always seemed to be
moving, not the clouds, but still
she didn't go away from the win-
dow. And you could see her
through the clouds, even though
you could never see the Sun
through clouds, not even through
little clouds, and it was so much
brighter. Why is that, Dad — uh
- Davis?"

IDEAS DIE HARD

137

Davis said, "What's wrong with
your voice?"

"Nothing's wrong with

voice.

"You're squeaking."

Oldbury, with an effort of will,
forced his voice an octave lower.
"I'm not squeaking!"

E STARED at the small
clocks in the dashboard, two
of them. It wasn't the first time.
One of them gave the time by
Mountain Standard, and in that
he wasn't interested. It was the

other, the one that measured the
number of hours elapsed in flight,
that caught at him periodically.
It said sixty-four and a fraction,
and in red, working backward,
were the hours remaining before

they were to land on Earth again.
The red was marked off now at
one-hundred-forty-four and a frac-
tion.

Oldbury was sorry that the
time left to go was recorded. He
would have liked to work it out
for himself. Back in Trenton,
he used to count the hours to
summer vacation, working it out
painfully in his head during geog-
raphy lesson — always geography
lesson, somehow — so many days,
then so many hours. He would
write the result in tiny numbers
in his exercise book. Each day
the number would grow smaller.
Half the excitement of approach-
ing summer vacation was in

watching those numbers grow
smaller.

But now the numbers grew
smaller by themselves as the
sweep second-hand went round
and round, slicing time by min-
utes, paper-thin sections of time
like corned-beef peeling off in
the big slicer in the delicatessen.

Davis's voice impinged on his
ear suddenly: "Nothing seems to
be going wrong so far."

Oldbury said confidently,
"Nothing will go wrong."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because the numbers just get
smaller."

"Huh? How's that again?"

For a moment, Oldbury was
confused. He said, "Nothing."

It was dim in the ship in the
light of the crescent Moon only.
He dipped into sleep again, skin-
diving fashion, half-conscious of
the real Moon and half-dreaming
of a full Moon at a window with
a sad woman-face, being driven
motionlessly by the wind.

* *

"TWO HUNDRED thousand
miles," said Davis. "That's almost
eighty-five per cent of the way
there."

The lighted portion of the
Moon was speckled and pimpled
and its horns had outgrown the
screen. Mare Crisium was a dark
oval, distorted by the slanting
view, but large enough to put a
fist into.

138

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"And nothing wrong," Davis
went on. "Not one little red light
on a single instrument dial."

"Good," said Oldbury.

"Good?" Davis looked about to
stare at Oldbury and his eyes
were squinting in suspicion. "In
every previous try, nothing went
wrong till they got out this far,
so it's not good yet"

"I don't think anything will go
wrong."

"I think it will. Earth isn't sup-
posed to know."

"Isn't supposed to know what?"

Davis laughed and Oldbury
looked at him wearily. He felt
queerly frightened at the other's
gathering monomania. Davis was
not a bit like the father Oldbury
remembered so queerly (only he
remembered him younger than
he was now, with all his hair and
a sound heart.

Davis's profile was sharp in
the moonlight. He said, "There
may be a lot in space we're not
supposed to know. There's a bil-
lion light-years ahead of us. Only,
for all we know, there's a solid
black wall instead, just on the
other side of the Moon, with stars
painted on it and planets mov-
ing all squint-eyed so that smart
cockerels on Earth can figure out
all sorts of fancy orbits and
theories of gravitation out of it."

"A game to test our minds?"
said Oldbury. His memory
brought that out of Davis's previ-

ous remarks — or were they his
own? — with something of a
wrench. This whole business with
the ship seemed distant.

"Why not?"

"It's all right," Oldbury soothed
anxiously. "It's all right so far.
Some day, you'll see, it will be
all right all the way out."

"Then why do every one of the
recording devices go wrong past
two hundred thousand miles?
Why? Answer me that!"

"We're here this time. We'll ad-
just them."

Davis said, "No, we won't."

SHARP memory of a story
he had encountered in early
teenhood stirred Oldbury into ex-
citement. "You know, I once read
a book about the Moon. The
Martians had set up a base on
the other side of the Moon. We
could never see them, you see.
They were hidden, but they could
observe us — "

"How?" asked Davis sourly.
"There was two thousand miles
thickness of Moon between Earth
and the other side."

"No. Let me start from the be-
ginning." Oldbury heard his voice
go squeaky again, but he didn't
mind. He wanted to get out of
his seat so he could jump up and
down because just remembering
the story made him feel good,
but for some reason he couldn't.
"You see, it was in the future,

IDEAS Dl E HARD

139

and what Earth didn't know

was-

"Will you shut up?"

Oldbury's voice cut off at the
interruption. He felt hurt, stifled.
Then he said, subdued, "You
said Earth isn't supposed to know
and that's why the instruments
went off and the only new thing
we're going to see is the other
side of the Moon and if the Mar-
tians

"Will you let up with your

stupid Martians?"

Oldbury fell silent. He was
very resentful against Davis. Just
because Davis was grown up
didn't make it all right for him
to holler like that.

His eyes drifted back to the
clock. Summer vacation was only
one hundred and ten hours away.

* *

THEY WERE falling toward the
Moon now. Free fall. Speeding
down at cataclysmic velocity.
Moon's gravity was weak, but
they had fallen from a great
height. And now, finally, the view
on the Moon began to shift and,
very slowly, new craters were
coming into view.

Of course, they would miss the
Moon and their speed would
sweep them safely around. They
would move across half the
Moon's surface, across three
thousand miles of it in one hour;
then back they would hurl to
meet the Earth once more.

But Oldbury sadly missed the
familiar face in the Moon. There
was no face this close, only
ragged surface. He felt his eyes
brimming as he watched mor-

osely.

And then, suddenly, the small
cramped room within the ship
was full of loud buzzing and
half the dials on the panel be-
fore them clamored into the red
of disorder.

Oldbury cowered back, but
Davis howled in what seemed al-
most triumph. "I told you! Every-
thing's going wrong!"

He worked at the manuals
uselessly. "No information will get
back. Secrets! Secrets!"

But Oldbury still looked at
the Moon. It was terribly close
and now the surface was moving
quickly. They were starting the
swing in earnest and Oldbury's
scream was high-pitched. "Look!
Lookathat!" His pointing finger
was stiff with terror.

Davis looked up and said, "Oh,
God! Oh, God — " over and over
again, until finally the 'scope
blanked out and the dials gov-
erning it showed red.

LARS NILSSON could not
really go paler than he was,
but his hands trembled as they

clenched into fists.

"Again! It's a damned jinx. For
ten years, the automation hasn't
held out. Not on the unmanned

140

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

■J

flights. Not on this. Who's respon-
sible?"

There was no use trying to fix
responsibility. No one was respon-
sible, as Nilsson admitted with a
groan almost at once. It was just
that at the crucial moment — once
again — things had failed.

"We've

grownup was laughing. He cou.
only manage a "Why — why — "
because the other's laughter was
so wild that it froze the words

got to
through this somehow," he said,
knowing that the outcome was
questionable now.

Still, what could be done was
being put into operation.

*J* *J* *Jl*

DAVIS SAID, "You saw that, too,
didn't you?"

"I'm scared," whimpered Old-
bury.

"You saw it. You saw the hid-
den side of the Moon as we went
past and you saw there wasn't
any! Good Lord, just sticks, just
big beams holding up six million
square miles of canvas. I swear
it, canvas!"

He laughed wildly till he
choked into breathlessness.

Then he said hoarsely, "For a
million years, mankind has been
looking at the biggest false-front
ever dreamed of. Lovers spooned
under a world-size stretch of can-
vas and called it Moon. The stars
are painted; they must be. If we

could only get out far enough,
we could scrape some off and
carry them home. Oh, it's fun-
ny." He was laughing agin.

Oldbury wanted to ask why the

into thick fright in his throat.

Davis said, "Why? How the
devil should I know why? Why
does Television Gity build false-
pull them front houses by the streetful for

its shows? Maybe we're a show,
and the two of us have stumbled

way out here where the gimcrack
scenery is set up instead of being
on stage-center where we're sup-
posed to be. Mankind isn't sup-
posed to know about the scenery,
either. That's why the informa-

tion devices always go wrong past
two hundred thousand miles. Of
course, we saw it."

t L L

He looked crookedly at the
big man beside him. "You know
why it didn't matter if we saw
it?"

L r *

Oldbury stared back out of his
tear-stained face. "No. Why?"

Davis said, "Because it doesn't
matter if we see it. If we get back
to Earth and say that the Moon
is canvas propped up by wood,
they'd kill us. Or maybe lock us
up in a madhouse for life if they
felt kind-hearted. Thaf s why we
won't say a word about this."

His voice suddenly deepened
with menace. "You understand?
Not a word!"

"I want my mother," whined
Oldbury plaintively.

"Do you understand? We keep

IDEAS DIE HARD

141

_^et. It's our only chance to be
treated as sane. Let someone else
come out and find out the truth
and be slaughtered for it. Swear
you'll keep quiet! Cross your
heart and hope to die if you tell
them!"

Davis was breathing harshly
as he raised a threatening arm.

Oldbury shrank back as far as
his prison-seat would let him.
"Don't hit me. Don't!"

But Davis, past himself with
fury, cried, "There's only one safe
way," and struck at the cowering
figure, and again, and again —

« *

^ ODFREY MAYER sat at
^-*" Oldbury's bedside and said,
"Is it all clear to you?" Oldbury
had been under observation for
the better part of a month now.

Lars Nilsson sat at the other
end of the room, listening and
watching. He remembered Old-
bury as he had appeared before
he had climbed into the ship.
The face was still square, but
the cheeks had fallen inward and
the strength was gone from it.

Oldbury's voice was steady, but
half a whisper. "It wasn't a ship
at all. We weren't in space."

"Now we're not just saying
that. We showed you the ship
and the controls that handled the
images of the Earth and the
Moon. You saw it."

"Yes. I know."

Mayer went on quietly, mat-

ter-of-factly, "It was a dry run, a
complete duplication of condi-
tions to test how men would hold
out. Naturally, you and Davis
couldn't be told this or the test
would mean nothing. If things
didn't work out, we could stop
it at any time. We could learn

142

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

by experience and make changes,
try again with a new pair.*

He had explained this over and
over again. Oldbury had to be
made to understand if he was
ever to learn to live a useful life
again.

"Has a new pair been tried

yet?" asked Oldbury wisttw

"Not yet. They will be. There*
are some changes to be made."

"I failed."

"We learned a great deal, so
the experiment was a success in
its way. Now listen — the controls
of the ship were designed to go
wrong when they did in order to
test your reaction to emergency
conditions after several days of
travel strain. The breakdown was
timed for the simulated swing
about the Moon, which we were
going to switch about so that you
could see it from a new angle
on the return trip. You weren't
intended to see the other side
and so we didn't build the other
side. Call it economy. This test
alone cost fifty million dollars
and it's not easy to get appropria-
tions."

Nilsson added bitterly, "Except
that the shut-off switch on the
'scope didn't shut off in time. A
valve caught. You saw the un-
finished back of the Moon and
we had to stop the ship to pre-
vent -

"That's it," interrupted Mayer.
"Now repeat it, Oldbury. Repeat
everything."

HP HEY walked down the cor-
■*■ ridor thoughtfully. Nilsson
said, "He seemed almost himself
again today. Don't you think so?"
"There's improvement," Mayer
acknowledged. "A great deal. But

IDEAS DIE HARD

143

*-'*

not through with therapy by

any means;

Nilsson asked, "Any hope with
Davis?"

Mayer shook his head slowly.
"That's a different case. He's com-

pletely withdrawn. Won't

talk.

And that deprives us 01 any
handle with which to reach him.
We've tried aldosterone, ergot
therapy, counter-electroencepha-
lography and so on. No good. He
thinks if he talks, we'll put him
in an institution or kill him. You
couldn't ask for a more devel-
oped paranoia."

"Have you told him we know?"

"If we do, we'll bring on a

homicidal seizure again and we

may not be as lucky as we were

in saving Oldbury. I rather think

he's incurable. Sometimes, when
the Moon is in the sky, the or-
derly tells me, Davis stares up
at it and mutters, 'Canvas,' to
himself."

Nilsson said soberly, "It re-
minds me of what Davis himself
said in the early part of the trip.
Ideas die hard. They do, don't
they?"

"It's the tragedy of the world.
Only — " Mayer hesitated.

"Only what?"

"Our unmanned rockets, three
of them — the information devices
on each stopped transmitting just
before the boomerang swing and
not one returned. Sometimes I just
wonder—"

"Shut up!" said Nilsson fiercely.

— ISAAC ASIMOV

K^fatc

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