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Galaxy

SCIENCE FICTION

JANUARY 1954
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NATURAL STATE
By Damon Knight

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ENRICHED READING

▼' GALAXY Science Fiction contains the finest plot
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^F GALAXY is guaranteed to be touched by human
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New York 14, N. Y.

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JANUARY, 1954 Vol. 7, No. 5

galaxy

SCIENCE FICTION

ALL ORIGINAL STORIES • NO REPRINTSI
CONTENTS

NOVELLA PAGE

NATURAL STATE by Damon Knight 6

NOVELETS

LULUNGOMEENA by Gordon R. Dickson 70
BACKLASH by Winston Marks 134

SHORT STORIES

THE BIG TRIP UP YONDER by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 100
THE HOLES AROUND MARS by Jerome Bixby 111

SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

FOR YOUR INFORMATION by Willy Ley 89

FEATURES

EDITOR'S PAGE by H. L Gold 4

FORECAST 69

GALAXY'S FIVE STAR SHELF by Groff Conklin 128

Cover by MEL HUNTER Showing FLIGHT OVER MERCURY

ROBERT GUINN, Publisher H. L. GOLD, Editor WILLY LEY, Science Editor

EVELYN PAIGE, Managing Editor SAM MERWIN, Jr., Associate Editor

W. I. VAN DER POEL, Art Director JOAN 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. Subscriptions: (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,
19S3, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Robert Guinn, president. All rights, including
translation, reserved. All material submitted must be accompanied by self-addressed stamped
envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited material. All stories printed in
rhis magazine are fiction, and any similarity between characters and actual persons is coincidental.

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

What Strange Powers

Did The Ancients Possess?

EVERY important discovery relating
to mind power, sound thinking and
cause and effect, as applied to self-
advancement, was known centuries ago,
before the masses could read and write.

Much has been written about the wise
men of old. A popular fallacy has it that
their secrets of personal power and suc-
cessful living were lost to the world.
Knowledge of nature's laws, accumulat-
ed through the ages, is never lost. At
times the great truths possessed by the
sages were hidden from unscrupulous
men in high places, but never destroyed.

Why Were Their Secrets
Closely Guarded?

Only recently, as time is measured: not
more than twenty generations ago, less
than l/100th of V/o of the earth's
people were thought capable of receiv-
ing basic knowledge about the laws of
life, for it is an elementary truism that
knowledge is power and that power
cannot be entrusted to the ignorant
and the unworthy.

Wisdom is not readily attainable by the
general public; nor recognized when
right within reach. The average person
absorbs a multitude of details about
things, but goes through life without
ever knowing where and how to acquire
mastery of the fundamentals of the inner
mind — that mysterious silent something
which "whispers" to you from within.

Fundamental Laws of Nature

Your habits, accomplishments and weak-
nesses are the effects of causes. Your
thoughts and actions arc governed by
fundamental laws. Example: The law

of compensation is as fundamental as
the laws of breathing, eating and sleep-
ing. All fixed laws of nature are as
fascinating to study as they are vital to
understand for success in life.

You can learn to find and follow every
basic law of life. You can begin at any
time to discover a whole new world of
interesting truths. You can start at once
to awaken your inner powers of self-
understanding and seif-advanccment.
You can learn from one of the world's
oldest institutions, first known in Amer-
ica in 1694. Enjoying the high regard
of hundreds of leaders, thinkers and
teachers, the order is known as the Rosi-
crucian Brotherhood. Its complete name
is the "Ancient and Mystical Order
Rosae Crucis," abbreviated by the ini-
tials "AMORC." The teachings of the
Order are not sold, for it is not a com-
mercial organization, nor is it a religious
sect. It is a non-profit fraternity, a
brotherhood in the true sense.

Not For General Distribution

Sincere men and women, in search of
the truth — those who wish to fit in with
the ways of the world — are invited to
write for complimentary copy of the
sealed booklet, "The Mastery of Lite."
It tells how to contact the librarian uf
the archives of AMORC for this rare
knowledge. This booklet is not intended
for general distribution; nor is it sent
without request. It is therefore suggested
that you write for your copy to: Scribe
CDZ

OIU ROSICRUCIANS

{.AMORC}
San Jose California

MOVING DAY

A S individuals, dinosaurs sel-
■**• dom died of old age. As a
race, however, they lasted some
100,000,000 years.

As individuals, most of us
manage to die of natural causes.
As a race, however, we feel ex-
tinction approaching after less
than 1,000,000 years.

Purely on the basis of racial
survival, it looks as if being a
dinosaur was a better risk than
.being a man.

I doubt if any dinosaurs
thought for a second about carry-
ing on the family name. There
are other differences between
them and mankind, but that's
probably the most important
one.

Most people sound like dino-
saurs on the question of survival ;
they claim they're more inter-
ested in their own than human-
ity's. But the intense concern
with racial doom indicates the
opposite — few of us would find
very much point in life if the
race died.

The dinosaurs never knew
what hit them. One millenium,
they were contentedly chewing
up the countryside and each
other; the next, they were gone.
Even if they had known what
was happening to them, they
could not have stopped it.

We do know, all too acutely,
the threats facing us. Solving
them is another matter, but we
are aware of them, which is the
first step in working out a prob-
lem.

All right, now let's pick the
most imminent threat. We each
have our favorite, ranging from
the effect of noise on the human
organism to that of fusion on the
atmosphere. Mine — for the pur-
pose of this editorial, at least — is
overpopulation.

A century and a half ago,
Malthus noted that population
tends to increase more rapidly
than food supply. That part of
his argument makes sense, espe-
cially if rends is emphasized. The
other part is more questionable:
Unless birth is controlled, he said,
increase must be checked by
poverty and war.

Well, the current annual in-
crease is 25,000,000, which very
naturally draws compound inter-
est, i

That's on the one hand. There
are enough other hands to re-
semble Siva:

Malthus would have called
the size of the present population
impossible. It is — for the tech-
nology of his day. Where agri-
cultural techniques have kept
pace with increase, food supplies

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

vary from adequate to glut. The
pressure spots of the world, such
as India and China, actually
have lower rates of increase than
elsewhere; their trouble is static
agricultural methods.

While most of the world has
been growing in population, some
countries, notably Ireland and
France, have been confronted by
falling birth rates. Why? Can it
happen in other places? Incident-
ally, when it happens in a func-
tioning economy, the result is as
disastrous as growth is to a fal-
tering one.

The solutions Malthus gave —
birth control, poverty (famine
and disease) and war — haven't
yet proved effective. The weap-
ons we're building might be able
to solve the problem, but only
by creating a worse one.

Mining the sea and synthesiz-
ing food could merely delay the
final explosion. They're not an-
swers in themselves.

r¥lHE one suggested most often
■■■ in science fiction is migration
— moving whole populations to
wherever there is room: other
planets, reclaimed deserts, Ama-
zonia, Africa, bubble cities under
the ocean.

Are the authors being realistic?
Let's see if they are.

The Nazis and Russians did
move millions of people at a
profit. But they were simply

herded off, in freight cars or on
foot, and worked as slaves. No
attempt was made to resettle
them as humans. All this, remem-
ber, was by land. If it had to be
done by sea or air, I doubt if
even the most callous packing
would have been economical
enough.

To complicate matters, we hu-
manely would provide decent
transportation, at least minimally
adequate housing, proper food,
training in needed skills, and
farms, factories, shops and labs.
This is the resettlement program
Israel is following — and the cost
is crushing.

The most modest goal we
could settle for would be to
siphon off the 25,000,000 extras
per year. Whether by sea, air or
spaceship, it would be a vast
transportation job. But besides
the gigantic fleets and rivers of
fuel, we'd need enormous recep-
tion and training camps, moun-
tainous food supplies, cadre
armies, a relocation plan capable
of almost infinite expansion to
absorb so many people annually.

No, the solution is not at all
realistic — at present. Yet that is
where we have the edge on the
dinosaurs and those who think
in saurian fashion:

We know that one generation's
impossibility is the next genera-
tion's commonplace.

— H. L. COLD

MOVING DAY

Natural State

It was a world of wildest paradoxes— patriotism, for example,
meant all loyalty to the city and all hatred tor the country!

THE most promising young
realie actor in Greater New
York, everyone agreed, was
a beetle-browed Apollo named
Alvah Gustad. His diction, which
still held overtones of the Under
Flushing labor pool, the unstud-
ied animal grace of his move-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

by EMSH
NATURAL STATE

merits and his habitually sullen
expression enabled him to domi-
nate any stage not occupied by
an unclothed woman at least as
large as himself. At twenty-six,
he had a very respectable follow-
ing among the housewives of
Manhattan, Queens, Jersey and
the rest of the seven boroughs.
The percentage of blown fuses
resulting from subscribers' at-
tempts to clutch his realized
image was extraordinarily low —
Alvah, his press agents explained
with perfect accuracy, left them
too numb.

Young Gustad, who frequently
made his first entrance water-
beaded as from the shower, with
a towel girded chastely around
his loins, was nevertheless in his
private life a modest and slightly
bewildered citizen, much given to
solitary reading, and equipped
with a perfect set of the con-
ventional virtues.

These included cheerful per-
formance of all municipal duties
and obligations — like every right-
thinking citizen, Gustad held
down two jobs in summer and
three in winter. At the moment,
for example, he was an actor by
day and a metals-reclamation
supervisor by night.

Chief among his less tangible
attributes, was that emotion
which in some ages has been
variously described as civic pride
or patriotism. In A.D. 2064, as

in B.C. 400, they amounted to
the same thing.

"OEHIND the Manager's desk,
■■-* the wall was a single huge
slab of black duroplast, with a
map of the city picked out in
pinpoints of brilliance. As Gustad
entered with his manager and his
porter, an unseen chorus of basso
profundos broke into the strains
of The Slidewalks of New York.
After four bars, it segued to New
York, New York, It's a Pip of a
Town and slowly faded out.

The Manager himself, the Hon.
Boleslaw Wytak, broke the rev-
erent hush by coming forward to
take Alvah's hand and lead him
toward the desk. "Mr. Gustad —
and Mr. Diamond, isn't it? Great
pleasure to have you here. I don't
know if you've met all these gen-
tlemen. Commissioner Laurence,
of the Department of Extramural
Relations — Director Ostertag, of
the Bureau of Vital Statistics —
Chairman Neddo, of the Research
and Development Board."

Wytak waited until everyone
was comfortably settled in one of
the reclining chairs which fitted
into slots in the desk, with cigars,
cigarettes, liquor capsules and
cold snacks at each man's elbow.
"Now, Mr. Gustad — and Mr.
Diamond — I'm a plain blunt man
and I know you're wondering
why I asked you to come here
today. I'm going to tell you. The

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

City needs a man with great tal-
ent and great courage to do a job
that, I tell you frankly, I wouldn't
undertake myself without great
misgivings." He gazed at Gustad
warmly, affectionately but stern-
ly. "You're the man, Alvah."

Little Jack Diamond cleared
his throat nervously. "What kind
of a job did you have in mind,
Mr. Manager? Of course, any-
thing we can do for our city . . ."

Wytak's big face, without per-
ceptibly moving a muscle, some-
how achieved a total change of
expression. "Alvah, I want you to
go to the Sticks."

Gustad blinked and tilted up-
right in his chair. He looked at
Diamond.

The little man suddenly seem-
ed two sizes smaller inside his
box-cut cloth-of-silver tunic. He
gestured feebly and wheezed,
"Wake-me-up!" The porter be-
hind his chair stepped forward
alertly, clanking, and flipped open
one of the dozens of metal and
plastic boxes that clung to him
all over like barnacles. He popped
a tiny capsule into his palm,
rolled it expertly to thumb-and-
finger position, broke it under
Diamond's nose.

A reeking-sweet green fluid
dripped from it and ran stickily
down the front of Diamond's
tunic.

"Dumbhead!" said Diamond.
"Not cream de menthy, a wake-

me-up!" He sat up as the abashed
servant produced another cap-
sule. "Never mind." Some color
was beginning to come back into
his face. "Blotter!" A wad of
absorbent fibers. "Vacuum!" A
lemon-sized globe with a flaring
snout. "Gon-Stink! Presser!"

Gustad looked back at the
Manager. "Your Honor, you
mean you want me to go into
the Sticks? I mean," he said,
groping for words, "you want me
to play for the Muckfeet?"

"That is just exactly what I
want you to do." Wytak nodded
toward the Commissioner, the
Director, and the Chairman.
"These gentlemen are here to
tell you why. Suppose you start,
Ozzie."

OSTERTAG, the one with the
fringe of yellowish white hair
around his potato-colored pate,
shifted heavily and stared at
Gustad. "In my bureau, we have
records of population and popu-
lation density, imports and ex-
ports, ratio of births to deaths
and so on that go back all the
way to the time of the United
States. Now this isn't known gen-
erally, Mr. Gustad, but although
New York has been steadily
growing ever since its founding in
1646, our growth in the last
thirty years has been entirely due
to immigration from other less
fortunate citjes.

NATURAL STATE

"In a way, it's fortunate — I
mean to say that we can't ex-
pand horizontally, because it has
been found impossible to eradi-
cate the soil organisms — " a deli-
cate shudder ran around the
group — "left by our late enemies.
And as for continuing to build
vertically — well, since Pittsburgh
fell, we have been dependent al-
most entirely on salvaged scrap
for our steel. To put it bluntly,
unless something is done about
this situation, the end is in sight.
Not alone of this administration,
but of the city as well. Now the
reasons for this — ah — what shall
I say . . ."

With his head back, staring at
the ceiling, Wytak began to speak
so quietly that Ostertag blund-
ered through another phrase and
a half before he realized he had
been superseded as interlocutor.

"Thirty years ago, when I first
came to this town, an immigrant
kid with nothing in the whole
world but the tunic on my back
and the gleam in my eye, we had
just got through with the last of
the Muckfeet Wars. According to
your history books, we won that
war. I'll tell you something — we
were licked!"

Alvah squirmed uncomfortably
as Wytak raised his head and
glanced defiantly around the
desk, looking for contradiction.
The Manager said, "We drove
them back to the Ohio, thirty

years ago. And where are they
now?" He turned to Laurence.
"Phil?"

Laurence rubbed his long nose
with a bloodless forefinger. "Their
closest settlement is twelve miles
away. That's to the southwest, of
course. In the west and north — "

"Twelve miles," said Wytak re-
flectively. "But that isn't the rea-
son I say they licked us. They
licked us because there are twenty
million of us today . . . and about
one hundred fifty million of them.
Right, Phil?"

Laurence said, "Well, there
aren't any accurate figures, you
know, Boley. There hasn't been
any census of the Muckfeet for
almost a century, but — "

"About one hundred fifty mil-
lion," interrupted Wytak. "Even
if we formed a league with every
other city on this continent, the
odds would be heavily against
us — and they breed like flies."
He slapped the desk with his
open palm. "So do their filthy
animals!"

A SHUDDER rippled across
■'*■ the group. Diamond shut his
eyes tight.

"There it is," said Wytak.
"Rome fell. Babylon fell. The
same thing can happen to New
York. Those illiterate savages
will go on increasing year by
year, getting more ignorant and
more degraded with every genera-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

tion . . . and a century from now
— or two, or five — they'll be the
human race. And New York . . ."

Wytak turned to" look at the
map behind him. His hand touch-
ed a button and the myriad tiny
lights went out.

Gustad was not an actor who
wept readily, but he felt tears
welling over his eyelids. At the
same time, the thought crossed
his mind that, competition being
what it was in the realies, it was
a good thing that Wytak had
gone into politics instead of act-
ing.

"Sir," he said, "what can we
do?"

Wytak's eyes were focused far
away. After a moment, his head
turned heavily on his massive
shoulders, like a gun turret.
"Chairman Neddo has the answer
to that. I want you to listen
carefully to what he's going to
tell you, Alvah."

Neddo's crowded small face
flickered through a complicated
series of twitches, all centripetal
and rapidly executed. "Over the
past several years," he said jerk-
ily, "under Manager Wytak's di-
rection, we have been developing
certain devices, certain articles of
commerce, which are designed,
especially designed, to have an
attraction for the Muckfeet.
Trade articles. Most of these, I
should say all of — "

"Trade articles," Wytak cut

in softly. "Thank you, Ned.
That's the. phrase that tells the
story. Alvah, we're going to go
back to the principles that made
our ancestors great. Trade — ex-
panding markets — expanding in-
dustries. Think about it. From
the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of
Mexico, there are some 150 mil-
lion people who haven't got a cig-
arette lighter or a wristphone or
a realie set among them. Alvah,
we're going to civilize the Muck-
feet. We've put together a grab-
bag of modern science, expressed
in ways their primitive minds
can understand — and you're the
man who's going to sell it to
them! What do you say to that?"
This was a familiar cue to Gus-
tad — it had turned up for the
fiftieth or sixtieth time in his last
week's script, when he had played
the role of a kill-crazy sewer in-
spector, trapped by flood waters
in the cloacae of Under Brook-
lyn. "I say — " he began, then
realized that his usual response
was totally inappropriate. "It
sounds wonderful," he finished
weakly.

WYTAK nodded in a busi-
nesslike way. "Now here's
the program." He pressed a but-
ton, and a relief map of the
North American continent ap-
peared on the wall behind him.
"Indicator." Wytak's porter put
a metal tube with a shaped grip

NATURAL STATE

into his hand — a tiny spot on the
map fluoresced where he pointed
it.

"You'll swing down to the
southwest until you cross the
Tennessee, then head westward
about to here, then up through
the Plains, then back north of
the Great Lakes and home again.
You'll notice that this route keeps
you well clear of both Chicago
and Toronto. Remember that —
it's important. We know that
Frisco is working on a project
similar to ours, although they're
at least a year behind us. If we
know that, the chances are that
'the other Cities know it too, but
we're pretty sure there's been
no leak in our own security.
There isn't going to be any."

He handed the indicator back.
"You'll be gone about three
months . . .

Diamond was having trouble
with his breathing again.

". . . You'll have to' rough it
pretty much — there'll be room in
your floater for you and your
equipment, and that's all."

Diamond gurgled despairingly
and rolled up his eyes. Gustad
himself felt an unpleasant sinking
sensation.

"You mean," he asked incredu-
lously, "I'm supposed to go all
by myself — without even a por-
ter?"

"That's right," said Wytak.
"You see, Alvah, you and I are

civilized human beings — we know
there are so many indispensable
time and labor saving devices
that nobody could possibly carry
them all himself. But could you
explain that to a Muckfoot?"

"I guess not."

"That's why only a man with
your superb talents can do this
job for the City. Those people
actually live the kind of sordid
brutal existence you portray so
well in the realies. Well, you
can be as rough and tough as
they are — you can talk their own
language, and they'll respect
you."

Gustad flexed his muscles
slightly, feeling pleased but not
altogether certain. Then a new
and even more revolting aspect of
this problem occurred to him.
"Your Honor, suppose I got along
roo well with the Muckfeet? I
mean suppose they invited me
into one of their houses to — " he
gagged slightly — "eat?"

Wytak's face went stony. "I
am surprised that you feel it
necessary to bring that subject
up. All that will be covered very
thoroughly in the briefing you
will get from Commissioner Lau-
rence and Chairman Neddo and
their staffs. And I want you to
understand, Gustad, that no pres-
sure of any kind is being exerted
on you to take this assignment.
This is a job for a willing, co-
operative volunteer, not a draftee.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

If you feel you're not the man
for it, just say so now."

Gustad apologized profusely.
Wytak interrupted him, with
the warmest and friendliest smile
imaginable. "That's all right, son,
I understand. I understand per-
fectly. Well, gentlemen, I think
that's all."

A S soon as they were alone,
■**■ Diamond clutched Gustad's
sleeve and pulled him over to
the side of the corridor. "Listen
to me, Al boy. We can still pull
you out of this. I know a doctor
that will make you so sick you
couldn't walk across the street.
He wouldn't do it for everybody,
but he owes me a couple of — "
"No, wait a minute. I don't — "
"I know, I know," said Dia-
mond impatiently. "You'll get
your contract busted with Seven
Boroughs and you'll lose a couple
months, maybe more, and you'll
have to start all over again with
one of the little studios, but what
of it? In a year or two, you'll
be as good as — "
"Now wait, Jack. In the first — "
"Al, I'm not just thinking about
my twenty per cent of you. I
don't even care about that — it's
just money. What I want, I want
you should still be alive next
year, you understand what I
mean?"

"Look," said Gustad, "you
don't understand, Jack. I want to

go. I mean I don't exactly want
to, but — " He pointed down the
corridor to the window that
framed a vista of gigantic col-
umns, fiercely brilliant below,
fading to massive darkness above,
with a million tiny floater-lights
drifting like a river of Stardust
down the avenue. "Just look at
that. It took thousands of years
to build! I mean if I can keep it
going just by spending three
months . . .

"And besides," he added prac-
tically, "think of the publicity."

ri^HE foothill country turned
■*• out to be picturesque but not
very rewarding. Alvah had by-
passed the ancient states of Penn-
sylvania and Maryland as direct-
ed, since the tribes nearest the
city were understood to be still
somewhat rancorous. By the end
of his first day, he was beginning
to regard this as a serious under-
statement.

He had brought his floater
down, with flags flying, loud-
speakers blaring, colored lights
flashing and streamers flapping
gaily behind him, just outside an
untidy collection of two-story
beehive huts well south of the
former Pennsylvania border. He
had seen numerous vaguely hu-
man shapes from the air, but
when he extruded his platform

NATURAL STATE

and stepped out, every visible
door was shut, the streets were
empty, and there was no moving
thing in sight, except for a group
of singularly unpleasant-looking
animals in a field to his right.

After a few moments, Gustad
shut off the loudspeakers and
listened. He thought he heard a
hum of voices from the nearest
building. Suppressing a momen-
tary qualm, he lowered himself
on the platform stair and walked
over to the building. It had a
single high window, a crude oval
in shape, closed by a discolored
pane.

Standing under this window,
Alvah called, "Hello in there!"

The muffled voices died away
for a moment, then buzzed as
busily as ever.

"Come on out — I want to talk
to you!"

Same result.

"You don't have to be afraid!
I come in peace!"

The voices died away again,
and Alvah thought he saw a dim
face momentarily through the
pane. A single voice rose on an
interrogative note.

"Peace!" Alvah shouted.

The window slid abruptly back
into the wall and, as Alvah gaped
upward, a deluge of slops de-
scended on him, followed by a
gale of coarse laughter.

Alvah's immediate reaction,
after the first dazed and gasping

instant, was a hot-water-and-
soap tropism, carrying with it an
ardent desire to get out of his
drenched clothes and throw them
away. His second, as imperious
as the first, had the pure flame of
artistic inspiration — he wanted to
see how many esthetically satis-
fying small pieces one explosive
charge would make out of that
excrescence-shaped building.

Under no conditions, said the
handbook he had been required
to memorize, will you commit
any act which might be inter-
pfeted by the Muckteet as ag-
gressive, nor will you make use
of your weapons at any time, un-
less such use becomes necessary
for the preservation of your own
life.

Alvah wavered, grew chilly and
retired. Restored in body, but
shaken in spirit, he headed south.

Then there had been his en-
counter with the old man and the
animal. Somewhere in the tri-
angle of land between the Missis-
sippi and the Big Black, at a
point which was not on his itin-
erary at all, but had the over-
whelming attraction of being
more than a thousand air-miles
from New York, he had set
the floater down near another
sprawling settlement.

A S usual, all signs of activity
■*■■ in and around the village
promptly disappeared. With new-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

ly acquired caution, Alvah sat
tight. Normal human curiosity,
he reasoned, would drive the
Muckfeet to him sooner or later
— and even if that failed, there
was his nuisance value. How long
could you ignore a strange ob-
ject, a few hundred yards from
your home, that was shouting,
waving flags, flashing colored
lights and sending up puffs of
pink-and-green smoke?

Nothing happened for a little
over an hour. Then, half dozing
in his control chair, Alvah saw
two figures coming toward him
across the field.

Alvah's ego, which had been
taking a beating all day, began
to expand. He stepped out onto
the platform and waited.

The two figures kept coming,
taking their time. The tall one
was a skinny loose-jointed old-
ster with a conical hat on the
back of his head. The little one
ambling along in front of him
was some sort of four-footed
animal.

In effect, an audience of one —
at any rate, it was Alvah's best
showing so far. He mentally re-
hearsed his opening lines. There
was no point, he thought, in
bothering with the magic tricks or
the comic monologue. He might
as well go straight into the sales'
talk.

The odd pair was now much
closer, and Gustad recognized the

animal half of it. It was a so-
called watchdog, one of the in-
credibly destructive beasts the
Muckfeet trained to do their
fighting for them. It had a slend-
er, supple body, a long feline tail
and a head that looked some-
thing like a terrier's and some-
thing like a housecat's. However,
it was not half as large or as
frightening in appearance as the
pictures Alvah had seen. It must,
he decided, be a pup.

TiWO yards from the platform,
•*- the oldster came to a halt.
The watchdog sat down beside
him, tongue lolling wetly. Alvah
turned off the loudspeakers and
the color displays.

"Friend," he began, "I'm here
to show you things that will
astound you, marvels that you
wouldn't believe unless you saw
them with your own — "

"You a Yazoo?"

Thrown off stride, Alvah gaped.
"What was that, friend?"

"Ah said — you a Yazoo?"

"No," said Alvah, feeling rea-
sonably positive.

"Any kin to a Yazoo?"

"I don't think so."

"Git," said the old man.

Unlikely as it seemed, a Yazoo
was apparently a good thing to
be. "Wait a second," said Alvah.
"Did you say Yazoo? I didn't
understand you there at first. Am
I a Yazoo! Why, man, my whole

NATURAL STATE

family on both sides has been — "
what was the plural of Yazoo?

"Ah'll count to two," said the
old man. "One."

"Now wait a minute," said Al-
vah, feeling his ears getting hot.
The watchdog, he noticed, had
hoisted its rump a fraction of an
inch and was staring at him in a
marked manner. He flexed his
right forearm slightly and felt the
reassuring pressure of the pistol
in its pop-out holster. "What
makes you Muckfeet think you
can—"

"Two," said the oldster, and
the watchdog was a spread-
eagled blur in midair, seven feet
straight up from the ground.

Instinct took over. Instinct had
nothing to do with pistols or
holsters, or with the probable size
of a full-grown Muckfoot watch-
dog. It launched Alvah's body
into a backward standing broad
jump through the open floater
door, and followed that with an
economical underhand punch at
the control button inside.

The door slammed shut. It
then bulged visibly inward and
rang like a gong. Sprawled on
the floor, Gustad stared at it in-
credulously. There were further
sounds — a thunderous growling
and a series of hackle-raising
skrieks, as of hard metal being
gouged by something even hard-
er. The whole floater shook.

Alvah made the control chair

in one leap, slammed on the
power switch and yanked at the
steering bar. At an altitude of
about a hundred feet, he saw the
dark shape of the watchdog leap
clear and fall, twisting.

A few seconds later, he put
the bar into neutral and looked
down. Man and watchdog were
moving slowly back across the
field toward the settlement. As
far as Alvah could tell, the beast
was not even limping.

A LVAH'S orders were reason-
■*"■ ably elastic, but he had al-
ready stretched- them badly in
covering the southward leg of his
route in one day. Still, there
seemed to be nothing else to do.
Either there was an area some-
where on the circuit where he
could get the Muckfeet to listen
to him, or there wasn't. If there
was, it would make more sense
to hop around until he found it,
and then work outward to its
limits, than to blunder straight
along, collecting bruises and in-
sults.

And if there wasn't — and this
did not bear thinking about —
then the whole trip was a bust.

Alvah switched on his com-
municator and tapped out the
coded clicks that meant, "Pro-
ceeding on schedule" — which was
a lie — "no results yet" — which
was true. Then he headed north.

Nightfall overtook him as he

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

was crossing the Ozark Plateau.
He set the floater's controls to
hover at a thousand feet, went
to bed and slept badly until just
before dawn. With a cup of kaffin
in his hand, he watched this phe-
nomenon in surprised disap-
proval: The scattered lights
winking out below, the first color-
less hint of radiance, which il-
luminated nothing, but simply
made the Universe seem more
senselessly vast and formless than
before; finally, after an intermin-
able progression of insignificant
changes, the rinds of orange and
scarlet, and the dim Sun bulging
up at the rim of the turning
Earth.

It was lousy theater.

How, Alvah asked himself,
could any human being keep
himself from dying of sheer ir-
relevance and boredom against a
background like that? He was
aware that billions had done so,
but his general impression of his-
tory was that people who didn't
have a city always got busy im-
proving themselves until they
could build one or take one away
from somebody else. All but the
Muckfeet . . .

Once their interest has been
engaged, said the handbook at
one point, you will lay principal
stress upon the competitive ad-
vantages of each product. It will
be your aim to create a situation
in which ownership of one or

more of our products will be not
only an economic advantage, but
a mark of social distinction. In
this way, communities which
have accepted the innovations
will, in order to preserve and ex-
tend the recognition of their own
status, be forced to convert mem-
bers of neighboring communities.

Well, maybe so.

Alvah ate a Spartan breakfast
of protein jelly and citron cakes,
called in the coordinates and the
time to the frog-voiced operator
in New York, and headed the
floater northward again.

The landscape unrolled itself.
If there were any major differ-
ences between this country and
the districts he had seen yester-
day, Alvah was unable to dis-
cern them. In the air, he saw an
occasional huge flapping shape,
ridden by human figures. He
avoided them, and they ignored
him. Below, tracts of dark-green
forest alternated predictably with
the pale green, red or violet of
cultivated fields. Here and there
across the whole visible expanse,
isolated buildings stood. At in-
tervals, these huddled closer and
closer together and became a
settlement. There were perhaps
more roads as he moved north-
ward, dustier ones. That was all.

rriHE dustiness of these roads, it
■■- occurred to Alvah, was a mat-
ter that required investigation.

NATURAL STATE

The day was cloudless and clear;
there was no wind at Alvah's
level, and nothing in the behavior
of the trees or cultivated plants
to suggest that there was any
farther down.

He slowed the floater and low-
ered it toward the nearest road.
As he approached, the thread of
ocher resolved itself into an ir-
regular series of expanding puffs,
each preceded by a black dot,
the overall effect being that of a
line of black-and-tan exclama-
tion points. They seemed to be
moving barely perceptibly, but
were actually, Alvah guessed,
traveling at a fairly respectable
clip.

He transferred his attention to
another road. It, too, was filled
with hurrying dots, as was the
next — and all the traffic was
heading in approximately the
same direction, westward of Al-
vah's course.

He swung the control bar over.
The movement below, he was
able to determine after twenty
minutes' flying, converged upon
a settlement .larger than any he
had yet seen. It sprawled for ten
miles or more along the southern
shore of a ; long and exceedingly
narrow lake. Most of it looked
normal enough — a haphazard ar-
rangement of cone-roofed build-
ings — but On the side away from
the lake, there was a fairly exten-
sive area filled with what seemed

to be long, narrow sheds. This,
in turn, was bounded on two sides
by a strip of fenced-in plots in
which, as nearly as Alvah could
make out through the dust, ani-
mals of all sizes and shapes were
penned. It was this area which
appeared to be the goal of every
Muckfoot in the central Plains.

The din was tremendous as Al-
vah floated down. There were
shouts, cries, animal bellowings,
sounds of hammering, occasional
blurts of something that might
be intended to be music, explo-
sions of laughter. The newcomers,
he noted, were being herded with
much confusion to one or another
of the fenced areas, where they
left their mounts. Afterward, they
straggled across to join the slug-
gish river of bodies in the avenues
between the sheds.

No one looked up or noticed
the dim shadow of the floater.
Everyone was preoccupied, shout-
ing, elbowing, blowing an instru-
ment, climbing a pole. Alvah
found a clear space at some dis-
tance from the sheds — as far as
he could conveniently get from
the penned animals — and landed.

He had no idea what this gath-
ering was about. For all he knew,
it might be a war council or
some kind of religious observ-
ance, in which case his presence
might be distinctly unwelcome.
But in any case, there were cus-
tomers here. v

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

He looked dubiously at the
stud that controlled his attention-
catchers. If he used them, he
would only be following direc-
tives, but he had a strong feeling
that it would be a faux pas to
do so in this situation. At the
other extreme, the obvious thing
to do was to get out and go look
for someone in authority. This
would involve abandoning the
protection of the floater, how-
ever, and he might blunder into
some taboo place or ceremony.

Evidently his proper course
was to wait unobtrusively until
he was discovered. On the other
hand, if he stayed inside the
floater with the door shut, the
Muckfeet might take more alarm
than if he showed himself. Still,
wasn't it possible that they would
be merely puzzled by a floater,
whereas they would be angered
by a floater with a man on its
platform? Or, taking it from an-
other angle . . .

The hell with it.

A LVAH ran the platform out,
**■ opened the door and stepped
out. He was relieved when, as he
was considering the delicate
problem of whether or not to
lower the stair, a small group
of men and urchins came into
view around the corner of the
nearest shed, a dozen yards away
from him.

They stopped when they saw

him, and two or three of the
smallest children scuttled behind
their elders. They exchanged
looks and a few words that Al-
vah couldn't hear. Then a pudgy
little man with a fussed expres-
sion crowded forward, and the
rest followed him at a discreet
distance.

"Hello," said Alvah tentative-
ly-

The little man came to a halt
a yard or so from the platform.
He had a white badge of some
kind pinned to his shapeless
brown jacket, and carried a sheaf
of papers in his hand. "Who
might you be?" he asked irrita-
bly.

"Alvah Gustad is my name. I
hope I'm not putting you people
out, parking in your area like
this, Mr.—"

"Well, I should hope to spit
you is, though. Supposed to be
a tent go up right there. Got to
be one by noon. What did you
say your name was, Gus what?"

"Gustad. I don't believe I
caught your name, Mr. — "

"Don't signify what my name
is. We're talking about you.
What clan you belong to?"

"Uh — Flatbush," said Alvah at
random. "Look, as long as I'm
in the way here, you just tell me
where to move to and — "

"Some little backwoods clan, I
never even heard of it," said the
pudgy man. "I'll tell you where

NATURAL STATE

you can move to. You can just
haul that thing back where you
come from. Gustad — Flatbush!
You ain't on my list, I know
that."

The other Muckfeet had moved
up gradually to surround the
little man. One of them, a lanky
sad-faced youngster, nudged him
with his elbow. "Might just check
and see, Jake."

"Well, I ought to know. My
land, Artie, I got my work to do.
/ can't spend all day standing
here."

Artie's long face grew more
mournful. "You thought them
Keokuks wasn't on the list,
either."

"Well— all right then, rot it."
To Alvah: "What's your marks?"

Alvah blinked. "I don't—"

"Come down offa there." Jake
turned impatiently to a man be-
hind him. "Give'm a stake." As
Alvah came hesitantly down the
stair, he found he was being
offered a sharpened length of
wood by a seamy-faced brown
man, who carried a bundle of
others like it under his arm.

Alvah took it, without the least
idea of what to do next. The
brown man watched him alertly.
"You c'n make your marks with
that," he volunteered and point-
ed to the ground between them.

The others closed in a little.

"Marks?" said Alvah worried-
ly.

fTlHE brown man hesitated,
•■■ then took another stake from
his bundle. "Like these here," he
said. "These is mine." He drew
a shaky circle and put a dot in
the center of it. "George." A
figure four. "Allister — that's me."
A long rectangle with a loop at
each end. "Coffin — that's m'
clan."

Jake burst out, "Well, crying
in a bucket, he knows that! You
know how to sign your name,
don't you?"

"Well," said Alvah, "yes." He
wrote Alvah Gustad and, as an
afterthought, added Flatbush.

There were surprised whistles.
"Wrote it just as slick as Doc!"
said a ten-year-old tow-headed
male, bug-eyed with awe.

Jake stared at Alvah, then
spun half around to wave his
papers under Artie's nose. "Well,
you satisfied now, Artie Brum-
bacher? I guess that ain't on my
list, is it?"

"No," Artie admitted, "I guess
it ain't — not if you can read the
list, that is."

Everybody but Alvah laughed,
Jake louder than anyone. "All
right," he said, turning back to
Alvah, "you just hitch up your
brutes and get that thing our of
here. If you ain't gone by the
time I—"

"Jake!" called a businesslike
female voice, and a small figure
came shouldering through the

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

crowd. "They need you over in
the salamander shed — the Quin-
cies are ready to move in, but
there's some Sullivans ahead of
them." She glanced at Alvah,
then at the floater behind him.
"You having any trouble here?"

"All settled now" Jake told
her. "This feller ain't on the list.
I * just give him his marching
orders."

"Look, if I can say some-
thing — " Alvah began.

The girl interrupted him. "Did
you want to exhibit something at
the Fair?"

"That's right," said Alvah
gratefully. "I was just trying to
explain — "

"Well, you're late, but maybe
we can squeeze you in. You won't
sell anything, though, if it's what
I think it is. Let me see that list,
Jake."

"Now wait a minute," said
Jake indignantly. "You know we
ain't got room for nobody that
ain't on the list. We got enough
trouble—"

"The Earth-movers won't be
here from Butler till tomorrow,"
said the girl, examining the pa-
pers. "We can put him in there
and move him out again when
they get here. You need any
equipment besides what you
brought?"

"No," said Alvah. "That would
be fine, thanks. All I need is a
place — "

"All right. Before you go, Jake,
did you tell those Sullivans they
could have red, green and yellow
in the salamander shed?"

"Well, sure I did. That what it
says right there."

DHE handed him back the pa-
*J pers and pointed to a line.
"That's Quincy, see? Dot instead
of a cross. Sullivans are supposed
to have that corner in the garden
truck shed, keep the place warm
for the seedlings, but they won't
budge till you tell them it was a
mistake. Babbishes and Strana-
hans are fit to be tied. You get
over there and straighten them
out, will you? And don't worry
too much about him."

Jake snorted and moved away,
still looking ruffled. The girl
turned to Alvah. "All right, let's
go."

Unhappy but game, Alvah
turned and climbed back into
the floater with the girl close be-
hind him. The conditioning he'd
had just before he left helped
when he was in the open air, but
in the tiny closed cabin of the
floater the girl's triply com-
pounded stench was overpower-
ing.

How did they live with them-
selves?

She leaned over the control
chair, pointing. "Over there," she
said. "See that empty space I'm
pointing at?"

NATURAL STATE

Alvah saw it and put the float-
er there as fast as the generator
would push it. The space was
not quite empty — there were a
few very oddly assorted Muck-
feet and animals in it, but they
straggled out when they saw him
hovering, and he set the floater
down.

To his immense relief, the girl
got out immediately. Alvah fol-
lowed her as far as the platform.

Ill

IN a tailor shop back in Middle
■*• Queens, the proprietors, two
brothers named Wynn, whose
sole livelihood was the shop,
stared glumly at the bedplate
where the two-hundred-gallon
Klenomatic ought to have been.

"He say anything when he
took it away?" Clyde asked.

Morton shrugged and made a
sour face.

"Yeah," said Clyde. He looked
distastefully at a dead cigar and
tossed it at the nearest oubliette.
He missed.

"He said a month, two
months," Morton told him. "You
know what that means."

"Yeah."

"So I'll call up the factory,"
Morton said violently. "But I
know what they're gonna tell me.
Give us a deposit and we'll put
you on a waiting list. Waiting
list!"

"Yeah," said Clyde.

In a factory in Under Bronnix,
the vice president in charge of
sales shoved a thick folder of
coded plastic slips under the nose
of the vice president in charge
of production. "Look at those
orders," he said.

"Uh-huh," said Production.

"You know how far back they
go? Three years. You know how
much money this company's lost
in unfilled orders? Over two mil-
lion—"

"I know. What do you expect?
Every fabricator in this place is
too old. We're holding them to-
gether with spit and string. Don't
bother me, will you, Harry. I
got my own — "

"Listen," said Sales. "This
can't go on much longer. It's up
to us to tell the Old Man that
he's got to try a bigger bribe on
the Metals people. Mortgage the
plant if we have to — it's the only
thing to do."

"We have more mortgages now
than the plant is worth."

Sales reddened. "Nick, this is
serious. Last fall, it looked like
we might squeeze through an-
other year, but now . . . You
know what's going to happen in
another eight, ten months?" He
snapped his fingers. "Right down
the drain."

Production blinked at him
wearily. "Bribes are no good any
more, Harry. You know that as

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

well as I do. • They're out."
"Well, then what are we going

to do?"

Production shook his head. "I

don't know. I swear to God, I

don't know."

/"\VER in Metals Reclamation
^-^ Four, in Under and Middle
Jersey, the night shift was just
beginning. In the blue-lit cavern
of Ferrous, this involved two
men, one bald and flabby, the
other gray and gnarled. They
exchanged a silent look, then each
in turn put his face into the time
clock's retinoscope mask. The
clock, which had been emitting a
shrill irritating sound, gurgled
its satisfaction and shut up.

"Well, that's it," said the gray
one. "I'll be your work gang and
you be mine, huh?"

The flabby one spat. "Wonder
what happened to Turk."

"Who cares? I never liked
him."

"Just wondering. Yesterday
he's here, today where is he?
Labor pool, army — " he spat
again, with care — "repair, main-
tenance . . . He was fifteen years
in this department. I was just
wondering."

"Scooping sewage, probably.
That's about his speed." The
gray man shambled over to the
control bench opposite and look-
ed at the indicators. Then he
lighted a cigarette.

"Nothing in the hoppers?" the
flabby one asked.

"Nah. They ought to put Turk
in the hoppers. He had metal in
his goddam teeth. Actual metal!"

"Turk wasn't old," the flabby
one said reproachfully. "No more
than sixty."

"I never liked him."

"First it was the kid — you
know, Pimples. Then, lessee, the
next one was that big guy, the
realie actor — "

"Gustad. The hell with him."

"Yeah, Gustad. What I mean
is, where do they go to? It's
the same thing on my three-to-
seven shift, over in Yeasts. Guys
I knew for ten, fifteen, twenty
years on the same job. All of a
sudden, they're gone and you
never see them. Must be a hell
of a thing, starting all over again
somewhere else — guys like that —
I mean you get set in your ways,
kind of."

His eyes were patient and be-
wildered in their watery pouches.
"Guys like me — no kids, nobody
that gives a damn about 'em.
Kind of gives you the jumps to
think about it. You know what
I mean?"

The gray one looked embar-
rassed, then irritated, then defi-
ant. "Aah," he said, and produced
a deck of cards from his kit —
the grimy coating on the crease-
less, frayless plastic as lovingly
built and preserved as the patina

NATURAL STATE

in a meerschaum. "Cut for deal.
Come on! Let's play."

"T'H have to know what you
-*■ going to exhibit," the girl
said. "For the Fair records."

"Labor-saving devices," Alvah
told her, "the latest and best
products of human ingenuity,
designed to — "

"Machines," she said, writing.
She added, looking up, "There's
a fee for the use of the fairground
space. Since you're only going to
have it for a day, we'll call it
twenty twains."

Alvah hesitated. He had no
idea what a twain might be — it
had sounded like "twain." Evi-
dently it was some sort of crude
Muckfoot coinage.

"Afraid I haven't got any of
your money," he said, producing
a handful of steels from his belt
change-meter. "I don't suppose
these would do?"

The girl looked at him steadily.
"Gold?" she said. "Precious
stones, platinum, anything of
that kind?" Alvah shook his head.
"Sure?" Alvah shrugged despair-
ingly. "Well," she said after a
moment, "maybe something can
be arranged. I'll let you talk to
Doc about it, anyhow. He'll have
to decide. Come on."

"Just a minute," Alvah said,
and ducked back into the floater.
He found what he was looking
for and trotted outside again.

"What's that?" asked the girl,
looking at the bulky kit at his
waist.

"Just a few things I like to
have with me."

"Mind showing me?"

"Well— no." He opened the kit.
"Cigarette lighter, flashlight,
shaver, raincoat, heater, a few
medicines over here, jujubes,
food concentrates, things like
that. Uh, I don't know why I
put this in here — it's a distress
signal for people who get lost
in the subway."

"You never can tell," said the
girl, "when a thing like that will
come in handy."

"That's true. Uh, this thing
that looks like two dumbbells
and a corkscrew . . ."

"Never mind," said the girl.
"Come along."

The first shed they passed was
occupied by things that looked
like turtles with glittery four-foot
shells. In the nearest stall, a man
was peeling off from one of the
beasts successive thin layers of
this shell-stuff, which turned out
to be colorless and transparent.
He passed them to a woman, who
dipped them into a basin and
then laid them on a board to dry.
The ones at the far end of the
row, Alvah noticed, had flattened
into discs.

The girl apparently misread
his expression as curiosity. "Glass
tortoise," she told him. "For win-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

dows and so on. The young ones
have more hump to their shells —
almost spherical to start with.
Those are for bottles and bowls
and things."

Alvah blinked noncommittally.

npHEY passed a counter on
•*■ which metal tools were dis-
played — knives, axes and the like.
Similar objects, Alvah noted au-
tomatically, had only approxi-
mately similar outlines. There
seemed to be no standardization
at all.

"These are local," the girl said.
"The metal comes from Iron Pits,
just a few miles south of here."

In the next shed was a long
row of upright rectangular
frames, most of them empty. One
near the end, however, was filled
with some sort of insubstantial
film or fabric. A tiny scarlet crea-
ture was crawling rapidly up and
down this gossamer substance,
working its way gradually from
left to right.

"Squareweb," the girl informed
him. "This dress I'm wearing was
made that way."

Alvah verified his previous im-
pression that the dress was
opaque. Rather a pity, since it
was also quite handsomely filled
out. Not, he assured himself, that
it made any difference — the girl
was a Muckfoot, after all.

Next came a large cleared
space. In it were half a dozen

animals that resembled nothing
in nature or nightmare except
each other. They were wide and
squat and at least six feet high
at the shoulder. They had vague-
ly reptilian heads, and their scaly
hides were patterned in orange
and blue, rust and vermilion, yel-
low and poppy-red.

The oddest thing about them,
barring the fact that each had
three sets of legs, was the extraor-
dinary series of protuberances
that sprouted from their backs.
First came an upright, slightly
hollow shield sort of thing, set
crossways behind the first pair of
shoulders. Behind that, some-
thing that looked preposterously
like an armchair — it even had a
bright-colored cushion — and then
a double row of upright spines
with a wide space between them.

"Trucks," said the girl.

Alvah cleared his throat.
"Look, Miss—"

"Betty Jane Hofmeyer. Call
me B. J. Everybody does."

"All right — uh — B. J. I wonder
if you could explain something
to me. What's wrong with metal?
And plastic, and things like that.
I mean why should you people
want to go to so much trouble
and — and mess, when there are
easier ways to do things better?"

"Each," she said, "to his own
taste. We turn here."

A few yards ahead, the Fair
ended and the settlement proper

NATURAL STATE

' *&§k

began with an unusually large
building — large enough, Alvah
estimated, to fill almost an entire
wing of a third-class hotel in New
York. Unlike the hovels he had
seen farther south — which looked
as if they had been excreted — it
was built of some regular,
smooth-surfaced material, seam-
less and fairly well shaped.

Alvah was so engrossed in these
and other considerations that it
wasn't until the girl turned three
steps inside the doorway, impa-
tiently waiting, that he realized
a minor crisis was at hand — he
was being invited to enter a
Muckfoot dwelling.

"Well, come on," said B. J.

REFUSE any offers of food,
transportation, etc., said the
handbook, firmly, but as diplo-
matically as possible. Employ
whatever subterfuge the situa-
tion may suggest, such as,
"Thank you, but my doctor has
forbidden me to touch fur," or,
"Pardon me, but I have a sore
throat and am unable to eat."

Alvah cleared his throat fran-
tically. The situation did not
suggest anything at all. Luckily,
however, his stomach did.

"Maybe I'd better not come
in," he said. "I don't feel very
well. Maybe if I just sit down
here quietly — "

"You can sit down inside,"

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

said the girl briskly. "If there's
anything wrong with you, Doc
will look you over."

"Well," Alvah asked desperate-
ly, "couldn't you bring him out
here for a minute? I really don't
think—"

"Doc is a busy man. Are you
coming or not?"

Alvah hesitated. There were,
he told himself, only two possi-
bilities, after all: (a) he would
somehow manage to keep his
breakfast, and (b) he wouldn't.

The nausea began as a faint,
premonitory twinge when he
stepped through the doorway. It
increased steadily as he followed
B. J. past cages filled with things
that chirruped, croaked, rumbled,
rustled or simply stared at him.
The girl didn't invite comment
on any of them, for which Alvah
was grateful. He was too busy
concentrating on trying not to
concentrate on his misery. .

For the same reason, he did
not notice at what precise point
the cages gave way to long rows
of potted green plants. Alvah was
just beginning to wonder if he
would live to see the end of them
when, still following B. J., he
turned a corner and came upon a
cleared space with half a dozen
people in it.

One of them was the sad-faced
youth, Artie. Another was a
stocky man, all chest and paunch
and no neck at all, who was talk-

ing to Artie while the others
stood and listened. B. J. stopped
and waited quietly. Alvah, per-
force, did the same.

" — just a few seedlings and a
couple of one-year-olds for now
— we'll see how they go. If you
have more room later on . . .
What else was I going to tell
you?" The stocky man rumpled,
his hair nervously. "Oh, look,
Artie, I had a copy of the specifi-
cations for you, but the fool bird
got into a fight with a mirror and
broke his . . . Wait a second."
He turned abruptly. "Hello, Beej.
Come along to the library for a
second, will you?"

He turned again and strode off,
with Artie, B. J. and Alvah in his
wake.

^T^HE room they entered was,
-"• from Alvah's point of view,
the worst he had struck yet. It
was a hundred feet long by fifty
wide, and everywhere — perched
on the walls and on multi-leveled
racks that ran the length of the
room, darting through the air in
flutters of brilliance — were tiny
raucous birds, feathered in every
prismatic shade, green, electric-
blue, violet, screaming red.

"Mark seven one-oh-three!"
Bither shouted. The roomful of
birds took it up in a hideous
echoing chorus. An instant later,
a sudden flapping sound turned
itself into an explosion of color

NATURAL STATE

and alighted on the stocky man's
shoulder, preening its feathers
with a blunt green beak. "Rrk," it
said and then, quite clearly,
"Mark seven one-oh-three."

The stocky man made a perch
of one forefinger and handed the
thing across to Artie's shoulder.
"I can't give you this one. It's
t the only copy I got. You'll have
to listen to it and remember what
you need."

"I'll remember." Artie glanced
at the bird on his shoulder and
said, "Magnus utility tree."

The stocky man looked around,
saw B. J. "Now, Beej, is it im-
portant? Because — "

"Magnus utility tree," the bird
was saying. "Thrives in all soils,
over ninety-one per cent resistant
to most rusts, scales and other in-
festations. Edible from root to
branch. Young shoots and leaves
excellent for salads. Self-fertiliz-
ing. Sap can be drawn in second
year for — "

"Doc," said the girl clearly,
"this is Alvah Gustad. From New
York. Alvah, meet Doc Bither."

" — golden orangoes in spring
and early summer, Bither aper-
ries in late summer and fall. Will
crossbreed with — "

"New York, huh?" said Bither.
"You a long way from home,
young — Excuse me. Artie?"

" — series five to one hun-
dred fifteen. Trunks guaranteed
straight and rectilinear, two-by-

four at end of second year, four-
by-six at — "

"I all set, Doc."

" — mealie pods and winter-
berries — "

"Fine, all right." He took B.
J.'s arm. "Let's go someplace we
can talk."

^ — absorb fireproofing and
stiffening solutions freely through
roots . . ."

"DITHER led the way into a
•*-* small, crowded room. "Now,"
he said, peering intently at Alvah,
"what's the problem?"

B. J. explained briefly. Then
they both stared at Alvah. Sweat
was beaded coldly on his brow
and his knees were trembling-,-but
he seemed to have stabilized the
nausea just below the critical
point. The idea, he told himself,
was to convince yourself that the
whole building was a realie stage
and .all the objects in it props.
Wasn't there a lrne to that effect
in one of the classics — The Man-
ager of Copenhagen, or perhaps
Have It Your Own Way?

"What do you think?" Bither
asked.

"Might try him out."

"Um. Damn it, I wish we
hadn't run out of birds. Can you
take this down for me, Beej?
I'll arrange for the Fair rental
fee, Alvah, if you just answer a
few questions."

It sounded innocuous enough,

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

but Alvah felt a twinge of sus-
picion. "What kind of questions?"

"Just personal questions, like
how old, what you do for a liv-
ing."

"Twenty-six. I'm an actor."

"Always been an actor?"

"No."

"What else you done?"

"Labor."

"What kind?" B. J. asked.

"Worked with his hands, he
means," Bither told her. "Parents
laborers, too?"

"Yes."

B. J. and Bither exchanged
glances. Alvah shifted uncom-
fortably. "If that's all . . ."

"One or two more. I want you
to tell me, near as you can, when
was the first time you remember
knowing that our clothes and our
animals and us and all the things
we make smelled bad?"

It was too much. Alvah turned
and lurched blindly out the door.
He heard their voices behind him :

"... minutes."

"... alley door!"

Then there were hands on him,
steering him from behind as he
stumbled forward at a half-run.
They turned him right, then left
and finally he was out in the cool
air, not a moment too soon.

When he straightened, wiping
tears away, he was alone, but a
moment later the girl appeared
in the doorway.

"That's all," she said distantly.

"You can start your exhibition
whenever you want."

rriHE magic tricks went over
-*- fairly well — at least nobody
yawned. The comic monologue,
however, was a flat failure, even
though the piece had been ex-
pertly slanted for a rural audi-
ence and, by all the laws of psy-
chostatics, should have rated at
least half a dozen boffs. ("So the
little boy came moseying back
up the road, and his grandpa said
to him, 'Why didn't you drive
them hogs out of the corn like I
told you?' And the little fellow
piped up, 'Them ain't hogs —
them's shoats!' ")

Alvah launched hopefully into
his sales talks and demonstra-
tions.

The all-purpose fireless life-
time cooker was received with
blank stares. When Alvah fried
up a savory batch of protein-
paste fritters and offered to hand
them out, nobody responded but
one small boy, and his mother
hauled him down off the plat-
form stair by the slack of his
pants.

Smiling doggedly, Alvah
brought out the pocket-workshop
power tools and accessories. This,
it appeared, was more like it. An
interested hum went up as he
drilled three holes of various sizes

NATURAL STATE

in a bar of duroplast, then sawed
through it from end to end and
finally cut a mortise in one piece,
a tenon in the other, and fitted
them together. A few more peo-
ple drifted in.

"And now, friends," said Al-
vah, "if you'll continue to give
me your kind attention . . ."

The next item was the little
giant power-plant for the home,
shop or office. Blank stares again.
Alvah picked out one Muckfoot
in the front row — a blear-eyed,
open-mouthed fellow, with hair
over his forehead and a basket
under his arm, who seemed typi-
cal — and spoke directly to him.
He outdid himself about the safe-
ty, economy, efficiency and un-
obtrusiveness of a little giant
power-plant. He explained its
operation in words a backward
two-year-old could understand.

"A little giant," he concluded,
leaning over the platform rail to
stare hypnotically into the Muck-
foot's eyes, "is the power-plant
for you!"

The fellow blinked, slowly pro-
duced a dark-brown lump of
something from his pocket, slow-
ly put it into his inattentive
mouth, and as slowly began to
chew.

Alvah breathed deeply and
clutched the rail. "And now," he
said, giving the clincher, "the
marvel of the age — the super-
speed runabout!" He pressed the

button that popped open a seg-
ment of the floater's hull and
lowered the gleaming little two-
wheeled car into view.

"Now, friends," he said, "just
to demonstrate the amazing qual-
ities of this miracle of modern
science — is there- any gentleman
in the crowd who has an animal
he fancies for speed?"

T^OR the first time, the Muck-
•■■ feet reacted according to the
charts. Shouts rocketed up: "Me,
by damn!" "Me!" "Right here,
mister!" "Yes, sir!"

"Friends, friends!" said Alvah,
spreading his hands. "There
won't be time to accommodate
you all. Choose one of you to
represent the rest!"

"Swifty!" somebody yelped,
and other voices took up the cry.
A red-haired young man began
working his way back out of the
crowd, propelled by gleeful
shouts and slaps on the back.

Alvah took an indicator and
began pointing out the salient
features of the runabout. He had
not got more than a quarter of
the way through when the red-
head reappeared, mounted astride
an animal which, to- Alvah's re-
volted gaze, looked to be part
horse, part lynx, part camel and
part pure horror.

To the crowd, evidently, it was
one of nature's finest efforts. Al-
vah swallowed bile and raised his

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

voice again. "Clear a space now,
friends — all the way around!"

It took time, but eventually
self-appointed deputies began to
get the crowd moving. Alvah de-
scended, carrying two bright
marker poles, and, followed by
the inquisitive redhead, set one
up at either side of the enclosure,
a few yards short of the boun-
dary.

"This will be the course," he

NATURAL STATE

told Swifty. "Around these mark-
ers and the floater — that thing I
was standing on. We'll do ten
laps, starting and finishing here.
Is that all right?"

"All right with me," said the
redhead, grinning more widely
than before.

There were self-appointed
time-keepers and starters, too.
When Alvah, in the runabout,
and the redhead, on his monster,
were satisfactorily lined up, one
of them bellowed, "On y' marks
— Git set . . ." and then cracked
a short whip with a noise out of
all proportion to its size.

For a moment, Alvah thought
Swifty and his horrid mount had
simply disappeared. Then he
spotted them, diminished by per-
spective, halfway down the
course, and rapidly getting small-
er. He slammed the power bar
over and took off in pursuit.

A ROUND the first turn, it was
■'*• Swifty, with Alvah nowhere.
In the stretch, Alvah was coming
up fast on the outside. Around
the far turn, he was two monster
lengths behind and, in the stretch
again, they were neck and neck.
Alvah kept it that way for the
next two laps and then gradually
pulled ahead. The crowd became
a multicolored streak, whirling
past him. In the sixth lap, he
passed Swifty again — in the
eighth, again — in the tenth, still

again — and when he skidded to a
halt beyond the finish post, flut-
tering its flags with the wind of
his passage, poor old Swifty and
his steaming beast were still lum-
bering halfway down the stretch.

"Now, friends," said Alvah, tri-
umphantly mounting the plat-
form again, "in a moment, I'm
going to tell you how you, your-
selves, can own this wonderful
runabout and many marvels more
— but first, are there any ques-
tions you'd like to ask?"

Swifty pushed forward, grin-
less, looking like a man smitten
by lightning. "How many to a
get?" he called.

Alvah decided he must have
misunderstood. "You can have
any number you want," he said.
"The price is so reasonable — but
I'm going to come to that in a — "

"I don't mean how many will
you se/7. How many to a get?"
Alvah looked blank. "How many
calves, or colts, or whatever, is
what I want to know."

There was a general murmur
of agreement. This, it would
seem, was what everybody want-
ed to know.

Appalled, Alvah corrected the
misapprehension as quickly and
clearly as he could.

"Mean to say," somebody call-
ed, "they don't breed?"

"Certainly not. If one of them
ever breaks down — and, friends,
they're built to last — you get it

repaired or buy another."

"How much?" somebody in
the crowd yelled.

"Friends, I'm not here to take
your money," Alvah said. "We
just want — "

"Then how we going to pay
for your stuff?"

"I'm coming to that. When two
people want to trade, friends,
there's usually a way. You want
our products. We want metals —
iron, aluminum, chromium — "

"Suppose a man ain't got any
metal?"

"Well, sir, there are a lot of
other things we can use besides
metal. Natural fruits and vege-
tables, for instance."

The slack-faced yokel in the
first row, the one with the basket
under his arm, roused himself for
the first time. His mouth closed,
then opened again. "What kind?"

"Natural products, friend. You
know, the kind your great-grand-
dad ate. We use a lot every year
for table delicacies, even — "

The yokel came halfway up
the platform stair. His gnarled
fingers dipped into the basket
and came up with a smooth red-
gold ovoid. He shoved it toward
Alvah. "You mean," he said in-
credulously, "you wouldn' eat
that?"

|^» ULPING, Alvah backed away
^-^ a step. The Muckfoot came
after him. "Raise 'em myself,"

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

he said plaintively, holding out
the red fruit. "I tell you, they're
just the juiciest, goodest — Go
ahead, try one."

"I'm not hungry," Alvah said
desperately. "I'm on a diet. Now
if you'll just step down quietly,
friend, till after the—"

The Muckfoot stared at him,
holding the fruit under Alvah's
nose. "You mean you won't rry
it?"

"No," said Alvah, trying not
to breathe. "Now go on back
down there, friend— don't crowd
me."

"Well," said the Muckfoot,
"then durn you!" And he shoved
the disgusting thing squashily in-
to Alvah's face.

Alvah saw red. Blinking away
a glutinous film of juice and pulp,
he glimpsed the yokel's face,
spread into a hideous grin. Waves
of laughter beat about his ears.
Retching, he brought up his right
fist in an instinctive roundhouse
swing that clapped the yokel's
grin shut and toppled him over
the platform rail, basket, flying
fruit and all.

The laughter rumbled away in-
to expectant silence. Alvah fum-
bled in his kit for tissues, scrub-
bed a wad of them across his
face and saw them come away
daubed with streaky red. He
hurled them convulsively into
the crowd and, leaning over the
rail, shouted thickly, "Lousy

stinking filthy Muckieet!"

Muckfoot men in the front
ranks turned and looked at each
other solemnly. Then two of
them marched up the platform
stair and, behind them, another
two.

Still berserk, Alvah met the
first couple with two violent kicks
in the chest. This cleared the
stair, but he turned to find three
more candidates swarming over
the rail. He swung at the nearest,
who ducked. The next one seized
Alvah's arm with both hands and
toppled over backward. Alvah
followed, head foremost, and
landed with a jar that shook him
to his toes.

The next thing he knew, he was
lying on the ground surrounded
by upward of twenty thick seam-
less boots, choking on dust, and
getting the daylights methodical-
ly kicked out of him.

Alvah rolled over frantically,
climbed the first leg that came
to hand, got his back against the
platform and, by 'dint of cracking
skulls together, managed in two
brisk minutes to clear a momen-
tary space around him. Another
dim figure lunged at him. Alvah
clouted it under the ear, whirled
and vaulted over the rail onto the
platform.

His gun popped out into his
hand.

For just a moment, he was
standing alone, feeling the pistol

NATURAL STATE

grip clenched hard in his dirt-
caked palm and able to judge
exactly how long he had before
half a dozen Muckfeet would
swarm up the stair and over the
rail. The crowd's faces were sharp
and clear. He saw Artie and Doc
Bither and Jake, his mouth open
to howl, and he saw the girl, B. J.,
in a curious posture — leaning for-
ward, her right arm thrust out
and down. She had just thrown
something at him.

A LVAH saw the gray-white
-^*- blur wobbling toward him.
He tried to dodge, but the thing
struck his shoulder and exploded
with a papery pop. For a be-
wildering instant, the air was full
of dancing bright particles. Then
they were gone.

Alvah didn't have time to won-
der about it. He thumbed the
selector over to Explosive, point-
ed the gun straight up and
squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

There were two Muckfeet half
over the rail and three more com-
ing up the stair. Incredulous, still
aiming at the air, Alvah tried
again — and again. The gun didn't
work.

Three Muckfeet were on the
platform, four more right behind
them. Alvah spun through the
open door and slapped at the
control button. The door stayed
open.

The Muckfeet were massed in
the doorway, staring in like visi-
tors at an aquarium. Alvah dived
at the power bar, shoved it over.
The floater didn't lift.

"Holly! Luke!" called a clear
voice outside, and the Muckfeet
turned. "Leave him alone. He's
got enough troubles now."

Alvah was pawing at the con-
trol board.

The lights didn't work.

The air - conditioner didn't
work.

The scent-organ didn't work.

The musivox didn't work.

One of the Muckfeet put his
head in at the door. "Reckon he
has," he said thoughtfully and
went away again. Alvah heard
his voice, more faintly. "You do
something, B. J.?"

"Yes," said the girl, "I did
something."

1%/fOVING warily, Alvah went
-"■'-*• outside. The girl was stand-
ing just below the platform,
watching as the Muckfoot men
filed down the stair.

"You!" he said to her.

She paid him no attention.
"Just one of those things, Luke,"
she said.

Luke nodded solemnly. "Well,
the Fair don't come but once a
year." He and the other men
moved past her into the crowd,
each one acquiring a train of
curiosity-seekers as he went. The

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

crowd began to drift away.

A familiar voice yelped,
"Ride'm out on a razorback is
what / say!"

A chorus of "Now, Jake!" went
up. There were murmurs of dis-
sent, of inquiry, of explanation.
"Time for the poultry judging!"
somebody called, and the crowd
moved faster.

Alvah went dazedly down and
climbed into the runabout. He
waggled its power bar. No re-
sponse.

He tore open his kit and began
frantically hauling out one glit-
tery object after another, holding
each for an instant and then
throwing it on the ground. The
razor, the heater, the vacuum
cleaner, the sonotube, the vibro-
masseur.

Swifty rode by, at ease atop
his horse-lynx-camel-horror. He
was whistling.

The crowd was almost gone.
Among the stragglers was Jake,
fists on his pudgy hips, his chol-
eric cheeks gleaming with sweat
and satisfaction.

"Well, Mister High-and-
Mighty," he called, "what are
you going to do now?"

That was just what Alvah was
wondering. He was about a thou-
sand miles from home by air —
probably more like fifteen hun-
dred across-country. He had no
transportation, no shelter, no
power tools, no equipment. He

had, he realized with horror, been
cut off instantly from everything
that made a man civilized.
What was he going to do?

"|t/|ANAGER Wytak had his
■"■*- feet on the glossy desktop.
So did the Comptroller, narrow-
faced old Mr. Creedy; the Di-
rector of Information, plump Mr.
Kling; the Commissioner of Sup-
ply, blotched and pimpled Mr.
Jackson; and the porcine Mr.
McArdle, Commissioner of War.
With chairs tilted back, they
stared through a haze of cigar
smoke at each others' stolid faces
mirrored on the ceiling.

Wytak's voice was as confident
as ever, if a trifle muted, and
when the others spoke, he listen-
ed. These were not the hired non-
entities Alvah had seen; these
were the men who had made
Wytak, the electorate with whose
consent he governed.

"Jack," said Wytak, "I want
you to look at it my way and
see if you don't think I'm right.
It isn't a question of how long
we can hold out — when you get
right down and look at it, it's a
question of can we do anything."

"In time," said Jackson expres-
sionlessly.

"In time. But if we can do
anything, there'll be time enough.
You say we've got troubles now

NATURAL STATE

and you're right, but I tell you
we can pull through a situation a
thousand times worse than this —
if we've got an answer. And have
we got an answer? We have."

Creedy grunted. "Like to see
some results, Boley."

"You'll see them. You can't
skim a yeast tank the first day,
Will."

"You can see the bubbles,
though," said Jackson sourly.
"Any report from this Gustad
today, while we're talking about
it?"

"Not yet. He was getting some
response yesterday. He's follow-
ing it up. I trust that boy — the
analyzers picked his card out of
five million. Wait and see. He'll
deliver."

"If you say so, Boley."

"I say so."

Jackson nodded. "That's good
enough. Gentlemen?"

TN another soundproof, spy-
■■■ proof office in Over Manhat-
tan, Kling and McArdle met
again twenty minutes later.

"What do you think?" asked
Kling with his meaningless smile.

"Moderately good. I was hop-
ing he would lie about Gustad's
report, but of course there was
very little chance of that. Wytak
is an old hand."

"You admire him?" Kling sug-
gested.

"As a specimen of his type.

Wytak pulled us out of a very
bad spot in '39."

"Agreed."

"And he has had his uses since
then. There are times when bril-
liant improvisation is better than
sound principles — and times
when it is not. Wytak is an in-
curable romantic."

"And you?"

"We," said McArdle grimly,
"are realists."

"Oh, yes. But perhaps we are
not anything just yet. Creedy is
interested, but not convinced —
and until he moves, Jackson will
do nothing."

"Wytak's project is a failure.
You can't do business with the
Muckfeet. But the fool was so
confident that he didn't even in-
terfere with Gustad's briefing."

Kling leaned forward with in-
terest. "You didn't . . .?"

"No. It wasn't necessary. But
it means that Gustad has no in-
structions to fake successful re-
ports — and that means Wytak
can't stall until he gets back.
There was no report today. Sup-
pose there's none tomorrow, or
the next day, or the next."

"In that case, of course . . .
However, it's always as well to
offer something positive. You said
you might have something to
show me today."

"Yes. Follow me."

In a sealed room at the end of
a guarded corridor, five young

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

men were sitting. They leaped to
attention when Kling and Mc-
Ardle entered.

"At ease," said McArdle. "This
gentleman is going to ask you
some questions. You may answer
freely." He turned to Kling. "Go
ahead — ask them anything."

Kling's eyebrows went up deli-
cately, but he looked the young
men over, selected one and said,
"Your name?"

"Walter B. Limler, sir."

Kling looked mildly pained.
"Please don't call me sir. Where
do you live?"

"CFF Barracks, Tier Three,
McCormick."

"CFF?" said Kling with a
frown. "McCormick? I don't
place the district. Where is it?"

The young man, who was
blond and very earnest, allowed
himself to show a slight surprise.
"In the Loop," he said.

"And where is the Loop?"

The young man looked defi-
nitely startled. He glanced at
McArdle, moistened his lips and
said, "Well, right here, sir. In
Chicago."

Kling's eyebrows went up and
then down. He smiled. "I begin
to see," he murmured to Mc-
Ardle. "Very clever."

TT cost Alvah two hours' labor,
-*• using tools that had never
been designed to be operated
manually, to get the inspection

plate off the motor housing in the
floater. He compared the intri-
cate mechanism with the dia-
grams and photographs in the
maintenance handbook. He look-
ed for dust and grime; he checked
the moving parts for play; he
probed for dislodged wiring plates
and corrosion. He did everything
the handbook suggested, even
spun the flywheel and was posi-
tive he felt the floater lift a frac-
tion of an inch beneath him. As
far as he could tell, there was
absolutely nothing wrong, unless
the trouble was in the core of
the motor itself — the force-field
that rotated the axle that made
everything go.

The core casing had an "easily
removable" segment, meaning to
say that Alvah was able to get
it off in three hours more.

Inside, there was no resistance
to his cautious finger. The spool-
shaped hollow space was empty.

Under Motor Force-field In-
operative the manual said sim-
ply: Remove and replace rhodo-
palladium nodules.

Alvah looked. He found the
tiny sockets where the nodules
ought to be, one in the flanged
axle-head, the other facing it at
the opposite end of the chamber.
The nodules were not there at
all.

Alvah went into the storage
chamber. Ignoring the increas-
ingly forceful protests of his emp-

NATURAl STATE

ty stomach, he spent a furious
twenty minutes locating the spare
nodules. He stripped the seal off
the box and lifted the lid with
great care.

There were the nodules. And
there, appearing out of nowhere,
was a whirling cloud of bright-
ness that settled briefly in the
box and then went back where it
came from. And there the nodules
were gone.

Alva stared at the empty box.
He poked his forefinger into the
cushioned niches, one after the
other. Then he set the box down
with care, about-faced, walked
outside to the platform and sat
down on the top step with his
chin on his fists.

"You look peaked," said B. J.'s
firm voice.

Alvah looked up at her briefly.
"Go away."

"Had anything to eat today?"
the girl asked.

Alvah did not reply.

"Don't sulk," she said. "You've
got a problem. We feel respon-
sible. Maybe there's something
we can do to help."

Alvah stood up slowly. He
looked her over carefully, from
top to bottom and back again.
"There is one thing you could
do for me," he said. "Smile."

"Why?" she asked cagily.

"I wanted to see your fangs."
He turned wearily and went into
the floater.

TTE puttered around for a few
■■"*- minutes, then got cold ra-
tions out of the storage chamber
and sat down in the control chair
to eat them. But the place was
odious to him with its gleaming,
useless array of gadgetry, and
he went outside again and sat
down with his back to the hull
near the doorway. The girl was
still there, looking up at him.

"Look," she said, "I'm sorry
about this."

The nutloaf went down his
gullet in one solid lump and hit
his stomach like a stone. "Please
don't mention it," he said bit-
terly. "It was really nothing at
all."

"I had to do it. You might
have killed somebody."

Alvah tried another bite. Chew-
ing the stuff, at any rate, gave
him something to do. "What
were those things?" he demanded.

"Metallophage," she said.
"They eat metals in the platinum
family. Hard to get them that
selective — we weren't exactly sure
what would happen."

Alvah put down the remnant
of nutloaf slowly. "Who's 'we'?
You and Bither?"

"Mostly."

"And you — you bred those
things to eat rhodopalladium?"

She nodded.

"Then you must have some to
feed them," said Alvah logically.
He stood up and gripped the

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

railing. "Give it to me."

She hesitated. "There might be
some — "

"Might be? There must be!"

"You don't understand. They
don't actually eat the metal — not
for nourishment, that is."

"Then what do they do with
it?"

"They build nests," she told
him. "But come on over to the
lab and we'll see."

At the laboratory door, they
were still arguing. "For the last
time," said Alvah, "I will not
come in. I've just eaten half a
nutcake and I haven't got food
to waste. Get the stuff and bring
it out."

"For the last time," said B. J.,
"get it out of your head that what
you want is all that counts. If
you want me to look for the
metal, you'll come in, and that's
flat."

They glared at each other.
Well, he told himself resignedly,
he hadn't wanted that nutloaf
much in the first place.

They followed the same route,
past the things that chirruped,
croaked, rumbled, rustled. The
main thing, he recalled, was to
keep your mind off it.

"Tell me something," he said
to her trim back. "If I hadn't
got myself mixed up with that
farmer and his market basket,
do you still think I wouldn't have
sold anything?"

"That's right."

"Well, why not? Why all this
resistance to machinery? Is it
a taboo of some kind?"

SHE said nothing for a moment.
"Is it because you're afraid
the Cities will get a hold on you?"
Alvah insisted. "Because that's
foolish. Our interests are really
the same as yours. We don't just
want to sell you stuff — we want"
to help you help yourselves. The
more prosperous you get, the bet-
ter for us."

"It's not that," she said.

"Well, what then? It's been
bothering me. You've got all
these raw materials, all this land.
You wouldn't have to wait for
us — you could have built your
own factories, made your own
machines. But you never have.
I can't understand why."

"It's not worth the trouble."

He choked. "Anything is worth
the trouble, if it helps you do the
same work more efficiently, more
intel— "

"Wait a minute." She stopped
a woman who was passing in the
aisle between the cages. "Marge,
where's Doc?"

"Down in roundworms, I
think."

"Tell him I have to see him,
will you? It's urgent. We'll wait
in here." She led the way into a
windowless room, as small and
cluttered as any Alvah had seen.

NATURAL STATE

"Now," she said. "We don't
make a fuss about machines be-
cause most people simply haven't
any need for them."

"That's ridiculous," Alvah ar-
gued. "You may think — "

"Be quiet and let me finish.
We haven't got centralized in-
dustries or power installations.
Why do you think the Cities have
never beaten us in a war, as often
as they've tried? Why do you
think we've taken over the whole
world, except for Wenty-two
Cities? You've got to face this
sooner or later — in every single
respect, our plants and animals
are more efficient than any ma-
chine you could build."

Alvah inspected her closely.
Her eyes were intent and bril-
liant. Her bosom indicated deep
and steady breathing. To all ap-
pearance, she was perfectly ser-
ious.

"Nuts," he replied with dignity.

B.J.

shook her head impa-
tiently. "I know you've
got a brain. Use it. What's the
most expensive item that goes
into a machine?"

"Metal. We're a little short of
it, to tell the truth."

"Think again. What are all
your gadgets supposed to save?"

"Well, labor."

"Human labor. If metal is ex-
pensive, it's because it costs a lot
of man-hours."

"If you want to look at it that
way — "

"It's true, isn't it? Why is a
complicated thing more expensive
than a simple one? More man-
hours to make it. Why is a rare
thing more expensive than a com-
mon one? More man-hours to
find it. Why is a — "

"All right, what's your point?"

"Take your runabout. You saw
that was the thing that interested
people most, but I'll show you
why you never could have sold
one. How many man-hours went
into manufacturing it?"

Alvah shifted restlessly. "It
isn't in production. It's a trade
item."

She sniffed. "Suppose it was
in production. Make an honest
guess. Figure in everything —
amortization on the plant and
equipment, materials, labor and
so on. You can check your an-
swer against wages and prices
in your own money — you'll come
pretty close."

Alvah reflected. "Between sev-
en-fifty and a thousand."

"Compare that with Swifty's
Morgan Gamma — the thing you
raced against. Two man-hours —
just two, and I'm being gener-
ous."

"Interesting," said Alvah, "if
true." He suppressed an uneasy
belch.

"Figure it out. An hour for the
vet when he was foaled. Call it

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

another hour for amortization on
the stable where it happened, but
that's too much. It isn't hard to
grow a stable and they last a
long time."

Alvah, who had been holding
his own as long as machines were
the topic, wasn't sure he could
keep it up — or, more correctly,
down. "All right, two hours," he
said. "The animals feed them-
selves and water themselves, no
doubt."

"They do, but that comes un-
der upkeep. Our animals forage,
most of them — all the big ones.
The rest are cheap and easy to
feed. Your machines have to be
fueled. Our animals repair them-
selves, like any living organism,
only better and faster. Your ma-
chines have to be repaired and
serviced. More man-hours. In-
cidentally, if you and Swifty took
a ten-hour trip, you in your run-
about, him on his Morgan, you'd
spend just ten hours steering.
Swifty would spend maybe fif-
teen minutes all told. And now
we come to the payoff — "

"Some other time," said Al-
vah irritably.

"This is important. When your
runabout — "

"I'd rather not talk about it
any more," said Alvah, raising
his voice. "Do you mind?"

"When your runabout breaks
down and can't be fixed," she
said firmly, "you have to buy

another. Swifty's mare drops
twins every year. There. Think
about it."

'T'HE door opened and Bither
■*- came in, looking more dishev-
eled than ever. "Hello, Beej, Al-
vah. Beej, I think we shoulda
used annelid stock for this job.
These F 3 batches no good at —
you two arguing?"

Alvah recovered himself with
an effort. "Rhodopalladium," he
said thickly. "I need about a
gram. Have you got it?"

"Not a scrap," said Bither
cheerfully. "Except in the nests,
of course."

"I told him I didn't think so,"
B. J. said.

Alvah closed his eyes for a
second. "Where," he asked care-
fully, "are the nests?"

"Wish I knew," Bither admit-
ted. "It's frustrating as hell. You
see, we had to make them awful
small and quick, the metallo-
phage. Once you let them out of
the sacs, there's no holding them.
We did so good a job, we can't
check to see how good a job we
did." He rubbed his chin thought-
fully. "Of course, that's beside
the point. Even if we had the
metals, how would you get the
alloy you need?"

"Palladium," said the girl,
"melts at fifteen fifty-three Centi-
grade. I asked the hand bird."

"Best we can get out of a sala-

NATURAL STATE

mander is about six hundred,"
Bither added. "Isn't good for
them, either — they get esopha-
gitis."

"And necrosis," the girl said,
watching Alvah intently.

His eyes were watering. It was
hard to see. "Are you telling — "

"We're trying to tell you," she
said, "that you can't go back.
You've got to start getting used
to the idea. There isn't a thing
you can do except settle down
here and learn to live with us."

Alvah could feel his jaw work-
ing, but no words were coming
out. The bulge of nausea in his
middle was squeezing its way in-
exorably upward.

Somebody grabbed his arm.
"In there!" said Bither urgently.

A door opened and closed be-
hind him, and he found himself
facing a hideous white-porcelain
antique with a pool of water in
it. There was a roaring in his

ears, but before the first spasm
took him, he could hear the girl's
and Bither's voices faintly from
the other room:

"Eight minutes that time."

"Beej, I don't know."

"We can do it!"

"Well, I suppose we can, but
can we do it before he starves?"

There was a sink in the room,
but Alvah would sooner have
drunk poison. He fumbled in his
disordered kit until he found the
condenser canteen. He rinsed out
his mouth, took a tonus capsule
and a mint lozenge. He opened
the door.

"Feeling better?" asked the
girl.

Alvah stared at her, retched
feebly and fled back into the
washroom.

WHEN he came out again,
Bither said, "He's had
enough, Beej. Let's take him out

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

in the courtyard till he gets his
strength back." ,

They moved toward him. Al-
vah said weakly, but with feeling,
"Keep your itchy hands off me."
He walked unsteadily past them,
turned when he reached the door-
way. "I hate to urp and run, but
I'll never forget your hospitality.
If there's ever anything I can do
for you — anything at all — please
hesitate to call on me."

He heard muttering voices and
an odd scraping sound behind
him, but he didn't look back. He
was halfway down the aisle be-
tween the cages when something
furry and gray scuttled into view
and sat up, grinning at him.

It looked like an ordinary ca-
puchin monkey except for its
head, which was grotesquely
large. "Go away," said Alvah. He
advanced with threatening ges-
tures. The thing chattered at him
and stayed where it was.

The aisle behind him was de-
serted. Very well, there were other
exits. Alvah followed his nose
back into the plant section and
turned right.

There was the monkey-thing
again.

At the next intersection of
aisles, there were two of them.
Alvah turned left.

And right.

And left.

And emerged into a large emp-
ty space enclosed by buildings.

"This is the courtyard," said
Bither, coming forward with the
girl behind him. "Now be reason-
able, Alvah. You want to get
back to New York, don't you?"

This did not seem to call for
comment. Alvah stared at him in
silence.

"Well," said Bither, "there's
just one way you can do it. It
won't be easy — I don't even say
you got more than a fighting

NATURAL STATE

chance. One thing, though — it's
up to you just how hard you
make it for yourself."

"Get to the point," Alvah said.

"You got to let us decondition
you so you can eat our food, ride
on our animals. Now think about
it, don't just — "

Alvah swung around, looking
for the fastest and most direct
exit. Before he had time to find
it, a dizzying thought struck him
and he turned back.

"Is that what this whole thing
has been about?" he challenged.
He glared at Bither, then at B. J.
"Is that the reason you were so
helpful? Did you engineer that
fight?"

T>ITHER clucked unhappily.
■■-* "Would we admit it if we
did? Alvah, I'll admit this much
— of course we interested in you
for our own reasons. This is the
first time in thirty years we had
a chance to study a City man.
But what I just told you is true.
If you want to get back home,
this is your only chance."

"Then I'm a dead man," said
Alvah.

"You is if you think you is,"
Bither told him. "Beej, you try."

She looked at Alvah levelly.
"You think what we suggesting
isn't possible. Right?"

"Discounting Doc's grammar,"
Alvah said sourly, "that's exactly
what I'm thinking."

She said, "Doc's grammar is all
right — yours is sixty years out
of date. But I guess you already
realize that your people are back-
ward compared to us."

Half angry, half curious, Alvah
demanded, "Just how do you fig-
ure that?"

"Easy. You probably don't
know much biology, but you
must know this much. What's
the one quality that makes hu-
man beings the dominant race on
this planet?"

Alvah snorted. "Are you trying
to tell me I'm not as bright as a
Muckfoot?"

"Not intelligence. Try again.
Something more general — intelli-
gence is only a special phase of
it."

Alvah's patience was narrow-
ing to a thin and brittle thread.
"You tell me."

"All right. We like to think
intelligence is important, but you
can't argue that way. It's special
pleading — the way a whale might
argue that size is the measuring
stick, or a microbe might say
numbers. But — "

"Control of environment," Al-
vah said.

"Right. Another name for it is
adaptability. No other organism
is so independent of environment,
so adaptable as Man. And we
could live in New York if we
had to, just as we can live in the
Arctic Circle or the tropics. And,

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

since you don't dare even try to
live here . . ."

"All right," Alvah said bitterly.
"When do we start?"

TTE refused to be hypnotized.
■*■-■• "You promised to help,"
B. J. said in annoyance. "We
can't break the conditioning till
we find out how it was done, you
big oaf!"

"The whole thing is ridiculous
anyhow," Alvah pointed out. "I
said I'd let you try and I will —
you can prod me around to your
heart's content — but not that.
I've put in a lot of Required
Contribution time in restricted
laboratories. Military secrets.
How do I know you wouldn't ask
me about those if you got me
under?"

"We're not interested in — "
B. J. began furiously, but Bither
cut her off.

"We is, though, Beej. Might be
important for us to know what
kind of defenses New York has
built up, and I going to ask him
if I got the chance." He sighed.
"Well, there other ways to skin
a glovebeast. Lean back and re-
lax, Alvah."

"No tricks?" Alvah asked sus-
piciously.

"No, we just going to try to
improve your conscious recall.
Relax now; close your eyes. Now

think of a room, one that's famil-
iar to you, and describe it to me.
Take your time . . . Now we going
further back — further back. You
three years old and you just drop-
ped something on the floor. What
is it?"

Bither seemed to know what he
was doing, Alvah had to admit.
Day after day they dredged up
bits and scraps of memory from
his childhood, events he had for-
gotten so completely that he
would almost have sworn they
had never happened. At first, all
of them seemed trivial and ir-
relevant, but even so, Alvah
found, there was an unexpected
fascination in this search through
the dusty attics of his mind. Once
they hit something that made
Bither sit up sharply — a dark
figure holding something furry,
and an accompanying remember-
ed stench.

Whether or not it had been as
important as Bither seemed to
think, they never got it back
again. But they did get other
things — an obscene couplet about
the Muckfeet that had been pop-
ular in P. S. 9073 when Alvah was
ten; a scene from a realie feature
called Nix on the Stix; a whis-
pered horror story; a frightening
stereo picture in a magazine.

"What we have to do," B. J.
told him at one point, "is to make
you realize that none of this was
your own idea. They made you

NATURAL STATE

feel this way. They did it to you."

"Well, I know that," said Al-
vah.

She stared at him in astonish-
ment. "You knew it all along —
and you don't care?"

"No." Alvah felt puzzled and
irritated. "Why should I?"

"Don't you think they should
have let you make up your own
mind?"

Alvah considered this. "You
have to make your children see
things the way you do, otherwise
there wouldn't be any continuity
from one generation to the next.
You couldn't keep any kind of
civilization going. Where would
we be if we let people wander
off into the Sticks and become
Muckfeet?"

TTE finished triumphantly, but
■*•-*■ she didn't react properly. She
merely grinned with an exasper-
ating air of satisfaction and said,
"Why should they want to — un-
less we can give them a better
life than the Cities can?"

This was absurd, but Alvah
couldn't find the one answer that
would flatten her, no matter how
long and often he mulled it over.
Meanwhile, his tolerance of
Muckfoot dwellings progressed
from ten minutes to thirty, to an
hour, to a full day. He didn't like
it and nothing, he knew, could
ever make him like it, but he
could stand it. He was able to

ride for short distances on Muck-
foot animals, and he was even
training himself to wear an ani-
mal-hide belt for longer and long-
er periods each day. But he still
couldn't eat Muckfoot food — the
bare thought of it still nauseated
him — and his own supplies were
running short.

Oddly, he didn't feel as anxious
about it as he should have. He
could sense the resistance within
him softening day by day. He
was irrationally sure that that
last obstacle would go, too, when
the time came. Something else
was bothering him, something he
couldn't even name — but he
dreamed of it at night and its
symbol was the threatening vast
arch of the sky.

After the Fair was over, it
seemed that B. J. had very little
work to do. As far as Alvah could
make out, the same was true of
everybody. The settlement grew
mortuary-still. For an hour or so
every morning, lackadaisical
trading went on in the central
market place. In the evenings,
sometimes, there was music of a
sort and a species of complicated
ungainly folk-dancing. The rest
of the time, children raced
through the streets and across the
pastures, playing incomprehensi-
ble games. Their elders, when
they were visible, sat — on door-
steps by ones and twos, grouped
on porches and lawns — their

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

hands busy, oftener than not,
with some trifle of carving or
needlework, but their faces as
blank and sleepy as a frog's in
the Sun.

"What do you do for excite-
ment around here?" he asked B.
J. in a dither of boredom.

She looked at him oddly. "We
work. We make things, or watch
things grow. But maybe that's
not the kind of excitement you
mean."

"It isn't, but let it go."

"Our simple pleasures probably
wouldn't interest you," she said
reflectively. "They're pretty dull.
We dance, go riding, swim in the
lake . . ."

So they swam.

FT wasn't bad. It was unsettling
*■ to have no place to swim to —
you had to head out from the
shore, gauging your distance, and
then turn around to go back — but
the lake, to Alvah's considerable
surprise, was clearer and better-
tasting than any pool he'd ever
been in.

Lying on the grass afterward
was a novel sensation, too. It was
comfortable — no, it was nothing
of the sort; the grass blades
prickled and the ground was
lumpy. Not comfortable, but —
comforting. It was the weight,
he thought lazily, the massive
mother-weight of the whole Earth
cradling you — the endless slow

pendulum-swing you felt when
you closed your eyes.

He sat up, feeling cheerfully
torpid. B. J. was lying on her
back beside him, eyes shut, one
arm flung back behind her head.
It was a graceful pose. In a de-
tached way, he admired it, first
in general and then in particular
— the fine texture of her skin,
the firmness of her bosom under
the halter that half-covered it,
the delicate tint of her closed
eyelids — the catalogue prolonged
itself, and he realized that B. J.,
when you got a good look at her,
was a uniquely lovely girl. He
wondered, in passing, how he had
missed noticing it before.

She opened her eyes and look-
ed at him. There was a ground-
swell of some sort and, without
particular surprise, Alvah found
himself leaning over and kissing
her.

"Beej," he said some time
later, "when I go back to New
York — I don't suppose you'd
want to come with me? I mean
— you're different from the
others. You're educated, you can
read; even your grammar is
good."

"I know you mean it as a com-
pliment and I'm doing my best
not to sound ungrateful or hurt
your feelings, but . . ." She made
a frustrated gesture. "Take the
reading — that's a hobby of Doc's
and I picked it up from him. It's

NATURAL STATE

a primitive skill, Alvah, some-
thing like manuscript illuminat-
ing. We have better ways now.
We don't need it any more. Then
the grammar — didn't it ever
strike you that I might be using
your kind just to make things
easier for you?"

She frowned. "I guess that was
a mistake. As of now, I quit. No,
listen a minute! The only differ-
ence between your grammar and
ours is that yours is sixty years
out of date. You still use 'I am,
you are, he is' and all that archa-
ic nonsense of tenses, case and
gender. What for? If that's good,
suppose we hunted up somebody
who said 'I am, thou art, he is,'
would his grammar be better
than yours?"

"Well—" said Alvah.

"And about New York, I ap-
preciate that. But the Cities are
done for, Alvah. In ten years
there won't be one left. They're
finished."

ALVAH stiffened. "That's the
-**• most ridiculous — "

"Is it? Then why are you
here?"

"Well, we're in a crisis period
now, but we've come through
them before. You can't — "

"This crisis of yours started a
long while ago. V i remember, it
was around 1927 .nat Muller first
changed the genes in fruit flies
with X-ray bombardment. That

was the first step — over a hun-
dred years before you were even
born. Then came colchicine and
the electron microscope and mi-
crosurgery, all in the next thirty
years. But the day biological en-
gineering really grew up-— 1962,
Jenkins' and Scripture's gene
charts and techniques — the Cities
began to go. Little by little, peo-
ple drifted out. to the land again,
raising the new crops, growing
the new animals.

"The big Cities cannibalized
the little ones, like an insect eat-
ing its own body when its food
supply runs out. Now that's gone
as far as it can, and you think it's
just another crisis, but it isn't.
It's the end."

Alvah heard a chill echo of
Wytak's words: "Rome tell.
Babylon fell. The same thing can
happen to New York . . ."

He said, "What am I supposed
to be, the rat that leaves the
sinking ship?"

She sighed. "Alvah, you got a
better brain than that.

"You don't have to think in
metaphors or slogans, like a mor-
on. I'm not asking you to join
the winning side. That doesn't
matter. In a few years there won't
be but one side, no matter which
way you jump."

"What do you want then?" he
asked.

She looked dispirited. "Noth-
ing, I guess. Let's go home."

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

TT was a series of little things
*■ after that. There was the time
he and Beej, out walking in the
cool of the morning, stopped to
rest at an isolated house that
turned out to be occupied by
George Allister of the Coffin clan,
the shy little man who'd tried to
show Alvah how to make his
marks the day he landed.

George, Alvah believed — and
questioning of Beej afterward
confirmed it — was about as low
on the social scale as a Muckfoot
could get. But he was his own
master. He had a wife and three
children and neat fields, with his
own animals grazing in them.
His house was big and cool and
clean. He poured them lemonade
— which Alvah wistfully had to
decline — from a sweating pea-
cock-blue pitcher, while sitting
at his ease on the broad front
porch.

There were no servants among
the Muckfeet. Alvah remember-
ed an ancient fear of his, some-
thing that had cropped up in the
old days every time he got seri-
ously interested in a girl — that his
children, if any, might relapse
into the labor-pool category from
which he had risen or — it was
hard to say which would be worse"
^-into the servants' estate.

He went back fiom that outing
very silent and thoughtful.

There was the time, a few days
later, when Beej was working,

and Alvah, at loose ends, wander-
ed into a room in the laboratory
building where two of Bither's
assistants, girls he knew by sight,
were sitting with two large, leath-
ery-woody, pod-shaped boxes
open on the bench between them.

Being hungry for company and
preoccupied with himself at the
same time, he didn't notice what
should have been obvious, that
the girls were busy at something
private and personal. Even when
they closed the boxes between
them, he wasn't warned. "What's
this?" he said cheerfully. "Can I
see?"

They glanced at each other
uncertainly. "These is our bride
boxes," said the brunette. "We
don't usual show them to single-
tons—"

They exchanged another
glance.

"He's spoke for anyhow," said
the redhead, with an enigmatic
look at Alvah.

They opened the boxes. Inside
each was a multitude of tiny com-
partments, each with a bit of
something wrapped in cloth or
paper tissue. The brunette chose
one of the largest and unwrapped
it with exaggerated care — an
amorphous reddish-brown lump.

"Houseplant," she said, and
wrapped it up again.

The redhead showed him a
vial full of minuscule white
spheres. "Weaver eggs. Two hun-

NATURAL STATE

dred of them. That's a lot, but I
like more curtains and things
than most."

"Wait a minute," said Alvah,
perplexed. "What does a house-
plant do?"

"Grow a house, of course," the
brunette said. She held up anoth-
er vial full of eggs. "Scavengers."

The redhead had a translucent
sac with dark specks in it. "Utili-
ty trees."

"Garbage converter."

"This grows into a bed and
these is chairbushes."

And so on, interminably, while
the girls' eyes glittered and their
cheeks flushed with enthusiasm.

fTiHE boxes, Alvah gathered,
■*- contained the germs of every-
thing that would be needed to
set up a Muckfoot household —
beginning with the house itself.
A thought struck him: "Does
Beej have one of these outfits?"

Wide-eyed stares from both
girls. "Well, of course!"

Alvah shifted uncomfortably.
"Funny, she never mentioned it."

The girls exchanged another of
those enigmatic glances and said
nothing. Alvah, for some reason,
grew more uncomfortable still.
He tried once more. "What about
the man — doesn't he have to put
up anything?"

Yes, the man was expected to
supply all the brutes and the
seeds for outbuildings and all the

crops except the bride's kitchen-
garden. Everything in and around
the home was her province, ev-
erything outside was his.

"Oh," said Alvah.

"But if a young fellow don't
have all that through no fault
of his own, his clan put up for
him and let him pay back when
he able."

"Ah," said Alvah and turned
to make his escape.

The redhead called after him,
"You thought any about what
clan you like to get adopted into,
Alvah?"

"Uh, no," said Alvah. "I don't
think—"

"You talk to Doc Bither. He a
elder of the Steins. Mighty good
clan!"

Alvah bolted.

Then there was the Shake-
speare business. It began in his
third week in the Sticks, when he
was already carrying a fleshy
Muckfoot vegetable around with
him — a radnip, B. J. called it.
He hadn't had the nerve yet to
bite into it, but he knew the time
was coming when he would. Beej
came to him and said, "Alvah,
the Rinaldos' drama group is
doing Hamlet next Saturday, and
they're short a Polonius. Do you
think you could study it up by
then?"

"What's Hamlet? And who's
Polonius?"

She got the bird out of the li-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

brary for him and he listened
to the play, which turned out to
be an archaic version of The
Manager of Copenhagen. The
text was nothing like the modern-
ized abridgment he was used to,
or the Muckfeet's slovenly speech
either. It was full of words like
down-gyved and unkennel. It was
three-quarters incomprehensible
until he began to get the hang
of it, but it had a curious power.
For who would bear the whips
and scorns of time, the oppres-
sor's wrong, the proud man's con-
tumely, the pangs of despised
love, and so on and so on. It
rumbled, but it rumbled well.

OOLONIUS, however, was the
*• character Alvah knew as Paul
Arnson, an inconsequential old
man who only existed in the play
to foul up the love affair between
the principals and got killed in
the third act. Alvah ventured to
suggest that he might be of more
use as Hamlet, but the director,
a dry little man with a surprising
boom to his voice, stubbornly in-
sisted that all he needed was a
Polonius — and seemed to inti-
mate, without actually saying so,
that Alvah was a dim prospect
even for that.

Alvah, with blood in his eye,
accepted the part.

The rehearsals were a night-
mare. The lines themselvts gave
him no trouble — Alvah was a

quick study; in the realies, you
had to be — and neither, at first,
did the rustic crudity of the stage
he was asked to perform on. Let-
ter-perfect when the other actors
were still stuttering and blowing
their lines, he walked through the
part with quiet competence and
put the director's sour looks down
to a witless hayseed hostility —
until, three days before the per-
formance, he suddenly awoke to
the realization that everyone else
in the cast was acting rings
around him.

This wasn't the realies. There
were no microphones to amplify
his voice, no cameras to record
every change in his expression.
And the audience, what there was
of it, was going to be right — out
— there.

Alvah went to pieces. Trying
to emulate the others' wide ges-
tures and declamatory delivery
only threw him further off his
stride. He had never had stage-
fright in his life, but by curtain
time on Saturday night, he was
a pale and quivering wreck.

Dead and dragged off the stage
at the end of act three, he got
listlessly back into his own
clothes and headed for an incon-
spicuous exit, but the director
waylaid him. "Gustad," he said
abruptly, "you ever thought of
yourself as a professional actor?"

"I had some such idea at one
time," Alvah said. "Why?"

NATURAL STATE

"Well, I don't see why you
shouldn't. If you work at it. I
never see a man pick up so fast."

"What?" cried Alvah, thunder-
struck.

"You wasn't bad," said the di-
rector. "A few rough edges, but
a good performance. Now I hap-
pen to know some people in a
few repertory companies — the
Mondrillo Troupe, the Kalfoglou
Repertory, one or two more. If
you interested, I'll bird them and
see if there's an opening. Don't
thank me, don't thank me." He
moved off a few steps, then turn-
ed. "Oh, and, Gustad — get back
into your costume, will you?"

"Uh," said Alvah. "But I'm
dead. I mean — "

"For the curtain calls," said the
director. "You don't want to miss
those." He waved and walked
back into the wings.

Alvah absently drew out his
radnip and crunched off a bite
of it. The taste was faintly un-
pleasant, like that of old protein
paste or the wrong variety of
culture-cheese, but he chewec?
and swallowed 'it.

rilHAT was when he realized
■*- that he had to get out. He
didn't put on his costume again.
Instead, he rummaged through
the property boxes until he found
an old pair of moleskin trousers
and a stained squareweb shirt.
He put them on, left by the rear

door and headed south.

South for two reasons. First,
because, he hoped, no one would
look for him in that direction.
Second, because he remembered
what Beej had said that first day
when they passed the display of
tools: "The metal comes from
Iron Pits, just a few miles south
of here."

There might be some slender
chance still that he could get the
metal he needed, delouse the
floater and go home in style —
without the painful necessity of
explaining to Wytak what had
happened to the floater and all
his goods and equipment. If not,
he would simply keep on walking.

He had to do it now. He had
almost waited too long as it was.

They had laid out the pattern
of a life for him — to marry Beej,
settle down in a house that would
grow from a seed Beej kept in a
pod-shaped box, be a rustic rep-
ertory actor, raise little Muck-
feet. And the devil of it was,
some unreasonable part of him
wanted all of that!

A good thing he hadn't stayed
for the curtain calls . . .

The Sun declined as he went,
until he was walking down a
ghost-dim road under the stars,
with all the cool cricket-shrill
world to himself.

He spent the night uncomfort-
ably huddled under a hedge.
Birds woke him with a great

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

clamor in the tree-tops shortly
after dawn. He washed himself
and drank from a stream that
crossed the fields, ate a purplish-
red fruit he found growing near-
by, then moved on.

Two hours later, he topped a
ridge and found his way barred
by a miles-long shallow depres-
sion in the Earth. Like the rest
of the visible landscape, it was
filled with an orderly checker-
work of growing plants.

There was nothing for it but
to go through if he could. But
surely he had gone more than "a
few miles" by now?

The road slanted down the
embankment to a gate in a high
thorn hedge. Behind the gate was
a kind of miniature domed kiosk
and, in the kiosk, a sunburned
man was dozing with a green-
and-purple bird on his shoulder.

Alvah inspected a signboard
that was entangled somehow in
the hedge next to the gate. He
was familiar enough by now with
the Muckfeet's picture-writing to
be fairly sure of what it said.
The first symbol was a nail with
an ax-head attached to it. That
was iron. The second was a few
stylized things that resembled
fruit seeds. Pits?

¥TE stared through the gate in
■*--*• mounting perplexity. You
might call a place like this "Pits,"
all right, but imagination boggled

at calling it a mine. Still . . .

The kiosk, he noticed now,
bore a scrawled symbol in orange
pigment. He recognized that one,
too; it was one of the common
name-signs.

"Jerry!" he called.

"Rrk," remarked the bird on
the sleeping man's shoulder.
"Kerry brogue; but the degrada-
tion of speech that occurs in
London, Glasgow — "

"Oh, damn!" said Alvah. "You,
there. Jerry!"

"Rrk. Kerry brogue; but the — "

"Jerry!"

"Kerry brogue!" shrieked the
bird. The sunburned man sat up
with a start and seized it by the
beak, choking it off in the middle
of "degradation."

"Oh, hello," he said. "Don't
know what it is about a Shaw
bird, but they all alike. Can't
shut them up."

"I'd like," said Alvah, "to look
through the — uh — Pits. Would
that be all right?"

"Sure," the man said cheer-
fully. He opened the gate and
led the way down a long avenue
between foot-high rows of plants.

"I Jerry Finch," he said.
"Littleton clan. Don't believe you
said your name."

"Harris," Alvah supplied at
random. "I visiting from up
north."

"Yukes?" the man inquired.

Alvah nodded, hoping for the

NATURAL STATE

best, and pointed at the plants
they were passing. "What these?"

"Hinge blanks. Let them to
forage last month. Won't have
another crop here till August, and
a poor one then. I tell Angus —
he's the Pit boss — I tell him this
soil's wore out, but he a pincher
— squeeze the last ton out and
then go after the pounds and
ounces. You should seen what
come off the ringbushes in the
east hundred this April. Pitiful.
Had to sell them for eyelets."

A cold feeling was running up
Alvah's spine. He cleared his
throat. "Got any knife blades?"
he inquired with careful casual-
ness.

"Mean bowies? Well, sure —
right over yonder."

ALVAH followed him to the
•**■ end of the field and down
three steps into the next. The
plants here were much taller and
darker, with stems thick and
gnarled out of all proportion to
their height. Here and there
among the glossy leaves were in-
congruous glints of silvery steel.
Alvah stooped and peered into
the foliage.

The silvery glints were per-
fectly formed six-inch chrome-
steel knife blades. Each was
attached to — growing from — the
plant by way of a hard brown
stem, exactly the right size and
shape to serve as a handle.

He straightened carefully. "We
do things a little different up
north. You mind explaining brief-
ly how the Pits works?"

Jerry looked surprised, but be-
gan readily enough. "These like
any other ferropositors. They ex-
tract the metal from the ores and
deposit it in the bowie shape, or
whatever it might be. Work from
the outside in, of course, so you
don't have no wood core to weak-
en it. We get a year's crops, aver-
age, before the ore used up. Then
we bring the Earth-movers in,
deepen the Pit a few feet, reseed
and start over. Ain't much more
to it."

Alvah stared at the fantastic
growths. Well, why not? Plants
that grew into knives or door-
knobs or . . .

"What about alloys?" he asked.

"We got iron, lead and zinc.
Carbon from the air. Other met-
als we got to import in granules.
Like we get chrome from the
Northwest Federation, mostly.
They getting too big for their
britches, though. Greedy. I think
we going to switch over to you
Yukes before long. Not that you
fellows is any better, if you ask
me, but at least — "

"Rhodium," said Alvah. "Pal-
ladium. What about them?"

"How that?"

"Platinum group."

"Oh, sure, I know what you
mean. We never use them. No call

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

to. We could get you some, I
guess — I think the Northwests
got them. Take a few months,
though."

"Suppose you wanted to make
something out of a rhodopalla-
dium alloy. How long would it
take after you got the metals?"

"Well, you have to make a
bush that would take and put
them together, right proportions,
right size, right shape. Depends.
I guess if you was in a hurry — "

"Never mind," said Alvah
wearily. "Thanks for the infor-
mation." He turned and started
back toward the gate.

When he was halfway there, he
heard a hullabaloo break out
somewhere behind him.

"Waw!" the voices seemed to
be shouting. "Waw! Waw!"

TTE turned. A dozen paces be-
■*••■■ hind him, Jerry and the bird
on his shoulder were in identical
neck-straining attitudes. Beyond
them, on the near side of a group
of low buildings three hundred
yards away, three men were wav-
ing their arms madly and shout-
ting, "Waw! Waw!"

"Wawnt to know what it is,"
the bird squawked. "I wawnt be
a Mahn. Violet: you come along
with me, to your own — "

"Shut up," said Jerry, then
cupped his hands and yelled,
"Angus, what is it?"

"Chicagos," the answer drifted

back. "Just got word! They dust-
ing Red Pits! Come on!"

Jerry darted a glance over his
shoulder. "Come on!" he repeated
and broke into a loping run to-
ward the buildings.

Alvah hesitated an instant, then
followed. With strenuous effort,
he managed to catch up to the
other man. "Where are we run-
ning to?" he panted. "Red Pits?"

"Don't talk foolish," Jerry
gasped. "We running to shelter."
He glanced back the way they
had come. "Red Pits over that
way."

Alvah risked a look and then
another. The first time, he wasn't
sure. The second time, the dust-
ing of tiny particles over the
horizon had grown to a cluster
of visibly swelling black dcts.

Other running figures were con-
verging on the buildings as Angus
and Jerry approached. The dots
were capsule shapes, perceptibly
elongated, the size of a finger-
nail, a thumbnail, a thumb . . .

And under them on the land
was a hurtling streak of golden-
dun haze, like dust stirred by a
huge invisible finger.

Rounding the corner of the
nearest building, Jerry popped
through an open doorway. Alvah
followed —

And was promptly seized from
either side, long enough for some-
thing heavy and hard to hit him
savagely on the nape of the neck.

NATURAL STATE

VII

T>ITHER was intent over a
-*-* shallow vessel half full of a
viscous clear liquid, with a great
rounded veined - and - patterned
glistening lump immersed in it,
transparent in the phosphor-light
that glowed from the sides of the

container — a single living cell in
mitosis, so grossly enlarged that
every gene of every paired chro-
mosome was visible. B. J. watch-
ed from the other side of the
table, silent, breathing carefully,
as the man's thick fingers dipped
a hair-thin probe with minuscule
precision, again and again, into
the yeasty mass, exercising a par-
ticle, splitting another, delicately
shaving a third.

From time to time, she glanced
at a sheet of horn intricately in-
scribed with numbers and genetic
symbols. The chart was there for
her benefit, not for Bither's — he
never paused or faltered.

Finally, he sat back and cov-
ered the pan. "Turn on the lights
and put that in the reduction
fluid, will you, Beej? I bushed."

She whistled a clear note, and
the dark globes fixed to the ceil-
ing glowed to blue-white life?
"You going to grow it right
away?" *

"Have to, I guess. Dammit,
Beej, I hate making weapons."

"Not our choice. When you
think it be?"

He shrugged. "War meeting
this afternoon over at Council
Flats. They let us know when it
be."

She was silent until she had
transferred the living lump from
one container to another and put
it away. Then, "Hear anything
more?"

"They dusting every ore-bed
from here to the Illinois, look like.
Crystal, Butler's—"

"Butler's! That worked out."

"I know it. We let them land
there. They find out." After an-
other pause, Bither said, "No
word about Alvah, Beej. I sorry."

She nodded. "Wouldn't be, this
early."

He looked at her curiously.
"You still think he be back?"

"If the dust ain't got him. Lay
you odds."

"Well," said Bither, lifting the
cover of another pan to peer into
it, "I hope you — "

"Ozark Lake nine-one-two-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

five," said a reedy voice from
the corner. "Ozark Lake nine — "

"Get that, will you, Beej?"

B. J. picked up the ocher spher-
oid from its shelf and said into
its tympanum, "Bither Labora-
tories."

"This Angus Littleton at Iron
Pits," the thing said. "Let me
talk to Bither."

She passed it over, holding a
loop of its rubbery cord — the be-
ginning of a miles-long sheathed
bundle of cultivated neurons that
linked it, via a "switchboard"
organism, with thousands like it
in this area alone, and with mil-
lions more across the continent.

"This Doc Bither. What is it,
Angus?"

"Something funny for you,
Doc. We got a couple prisoners
here, one a floater pilot, other a
Chicago spy."

"Well, what you want me to — "

"Wait, can't you? This spy
claim he know you, Doc. Say his
name Custard. Alvah Custard."

A LVAH stared out through the
■'*■ window, puzzled and angry.
He had been in the room for
about half an hour, while things
were going on outside. He had
tried to break the window. The
pane had bent slightly. It was
neither glass nor plastic, and it
wasn't breakable.

Outside, the last of the invad-
ing floaters was dipping down to-

ward the horizon, pursued by a
small darting black shape. Gold-
en-dun haze obscured all the
foreground except the first few
rows of plants, which were droop-
ing on their stems. The squadron
had made one grand circle of the
mine area, dusting as they went,
before the Muckfeet on their

incredibly swift flyers — birds or
reptiles, Alvah couldn't tell which
— had risen to engage them. Since
then, a light breeze from the
north had carried the stuff drop-
ped over the Pits: radioactive
dust with a gravitostatic charge
to make it rebound and spread —
and then, with its polarity revers-
ed, cling like grim death where it
fell.

He turned and looked at the
other man, sitting blank-faced
and inattentive, wearing rumpled
sky-blue uniform, on the bench
against the inner wall. Most of
the squadron had flown off to the
west after that first pass, and had

NATURAL STATE

either escaped or been forced
down somewhere beyond the Pits.
This fellow had crash-landed in
the fields not five hundred yards
from Alvah's window. Alvah had
seen the Muckfeet walking out to
the wreck — strolling fantastically
through the deadly haze — and
turkey - trotting their prisoner
back again. A little later, someone
had opened the door and shoved
the man in, and there he had sat
ever since.

His skin-color was all right.
He was breathing evenly and
seemed in no discomfort. As far
as Alvah could see, there was not
a speck of the death -dust any-
where on his skin, hair or cloth-
ing. But mad as it was, this was
not the most incongruous thing
about him.

His uniform was of a cut and
pattern that Alvah had seen only
in pictures. There was a C on
each gleaming button and, on
the bar of the epaulette, CHI-
cagoland. In short, he was evi-
dently a Floater Force officer
from Chicago. The only trouble
was that Alvah recognized him.
He was a grips by day at the
Seven Boroughs studios, famous
for his dirty jokes, which he ac-
quired at his night job in the
Under Queens Power Station. He
was a lieutenant j.g. in the N. Y.
F. F. Reserve, and his name was
Joe "Dimples" Mundry.

Alvah went over and sat down

beside him again. Mundry's nor-
mally jovial face was set in wood-
en lines. His eyes focused on
Alvah, but without recognition.

"Joe—"

"My name," said Mundry ob-
stinately, "is Bertram Palmer,
Float Lieutenant, Windy City
Regulars. My serial number is
79016935."

^T^HAT was the only tune he
-■■ knew. Alvah hadn't been able
to get another word out of him.
Name, rank and serial number —
that was normal. Members of
the armed services were natur-
ally conditioned to say nothing
else if captured. But why throw
in the name of his outfit?

One, that was the way they did
things in Chicago, and there just
happened to be a Chicago soldier
who looked and talked exactly
like Joe Mundry, who had the
same scars on his knuckles from
brawls with the generator monk-
eys. Two, Alvah's mind had snap-
ped. Three, this was a ringer
foisted on Alvah for some incom-
prehensible purpose by the
Muckfeet. And four — a wild and
terrible suspicion . . .

Alvah tried again. "Listen, Joe,
I'm your friend. We're on the
same side. I'm not a Muckfoot."

"My name is Bertram Palmer,
Float Lieutenant — "

"Joe, \'m leveling with you.
Listen — remember the Music

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Hall story, the one about the
man who could . . ." Alvah ex-
plained in detail what the man
could do. It was obscenely im-
probable and very funny, if you
liked that sort of thing, and it
was a story Joe had told him two
days before he left New York.

A gleam of intelligence came
into Joe's eyes. "What's the
punchline?" he demanded.

" 'What the hell did you want
to change the key on me for?' "
Alvah replied promptly.

Joe looked at him speculative-
ly. "That might be a old joke.
Maybe they even know it in the
Sticks. And my name isn't Joe."

He really believed he was Bert-
ram Palmer of the Windy City
Regulars, that much seemed
clear. Also, if it was possible that
the Muckfeet knew that story, it
was likelier still that the Chi-
cagolanders knew it.

"All right," said Alvah, "ask
me a question — something I
couldn't know if I were a Muck-
foot. Go ahead, anything. A place,
or something that happened re-
cently, or whatever you want."

A visible struggle was going on
behind Joe's face. "Can't think
of anything," he said at last.
"Funny."

Alvah had been watching him
closely. "Let's try this. Did you
see Manhattan Morons?"

Joe looked blank. "What?"

"The realie. You mean you

missed it? Manhattan Morons?
Till I saw that, I never really
knew what a comical bunch of
weak-minded, slobber-mouthed,
monkey - faced drooling idiots
those New Yorkers — "

Joe's expression had not chang-
ed, but a dull red flush had crept
up over his collar. He made an
inarticulate sound and lunged for
Alvah's throat.

When Angus Littleton opened
the door, with Jerry and B. J.
behind him, the two men were
rolling on the floor.

"TVTHAT made you think he

* ' was a spy?" B. J. demand-
ed. They were a tight self-con-
scious group in the corridor.
Alvah was nursing a split lip.

"Said he a Yuke," Jerry offer-
ed, "but didn't seem too sure, so
I said the Yukes greedy. He never
turn a hair. And he act like he
never see a mine before. Things
like that."

B. J. nodded. "It was a natural
mistake, I guess. Well, thanks for
calling us, Angus."

"Easy," said Angus, looking
glum. "We ain't out of the rough
yet, Beej."

"What do you mean? He didn't
have anything to do with this
attack — he's from New York."

"He say he is, but how you
know? What make you think he
ain't from Chicago?"

Alvah said, "While you're ask-

NATURAL STATE

ing that, you might ask another
question about him." He jerked a
thumb toward the closed door.
"What makes you think he is?"

The other three stared at him
thoughtfully. "Alvah," Beej be-
gan, "what are you aiming at?
Do you think — "

"I'm not sure," Alvah inter-
rupted. "I mean I'm sure, but I'm
not sure I want to tell you.
Look," he said, turning to Angus,
"let me talk to her alone for a
few minutes, will you?"

Angus hesitated, then walked
away down the hall, followed by
Jerry.

"You've got to explain some
things to me about this raid,"
said Alvah when they were out
of hearing. "I saw those floaters
dusting and it was the real thing.
I can tell by the way the plants
withered. But your people were
walking around out there. Him,
too — the prisoner. How come?"

"Antirads," said the girl.
"Little para-insects, like the met-
allophage — the metallophage was
developed from them. When
you've been exposed, the antirads
pick the dust particles off you
and .deposit them in radproof
pots. They die in the pots, too,
and we bury the whole — "

"All right," Alvah said. "How
long have you had those things?
Is there any chance the Cities
knew about it?"

"The antirads were developed

toward the end of the last City
war. That was what ended it. At
first we stopped the bombing,
and then when they used dust —
You never heard of any of this?"
"No," Alvah told her. "Third
question, what are you going to
do about Chicago now, on ac-
count of this raid?"

"TJULL it down around their
■*- ears," B. J. said gravely.
"We never did before partly
because it wasn't necessary. We
knew for the last thirty years
that the Cities could never be
more than a nuisance to us again.
But this isn't just a raid. They've
attacked us all over this district
— ruined the crops in every mine.
We must put an end to it now; —
not that it makes much differ-
ence, this year or ten years from
now. And it isn't as if we couldn't
save the people . . ."

"Never mind that," said Alvah
abstractedly. Then her last words
penetrated. "No, go ahead —
what?"

"I started to say, we think we'll
be able to save the people, or
most of them — partly thanks to
what we learned from you. It's
just Chicago we're going to de-
stroy, not the — "

"Learned from me?" Alvah re-
peated. "What do you mean?"

"We learned that, when it's a
question of survival, a City man
can overcome his conditioning.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

You proved that. Did you eat the
radnip?"

"Yes."

"There, you see? And you'll eat
another and, sooner or later,
you'll realize they taste good. A
human being can learn to like
anything that's needful to him.
We're adaptable — you can't con-
dition that out of us without
breaking us."

Alvah stared at her. "But you
spent over two weeks on me. How
are you going to do that with
fifteen or twenty million people
all at once?"

"We can do it. You were the
pilot model — two weeks for you.
But now that we know how, we're
pretty sure we can do it in three
days — the important part, getting
them to eat the food. And it's a
good thing the storehouses are
full, all over this continent."

They looked at each other si-
lently for a moment. "But the
Cities have to go," B. J. said.

"Fourth and last question," he
said. "If a City knew about your
radiation defenses all along, what
would be their reason for attack-
ing you this way?"

"Our first idea was that it was
just plain desperation — they had
to do something and there wasn't
anything they could do that
would work, so they just did
something that wouldn't. Or
maybe they hoped they'd be able
to hold the mines long enough to

get some metal out, even though
they knew it was foolish to hope."

"That was your first idea.
What was your second?"

She hesitated. "You remember
what I told you, that the Cities
cannibalized each other for a
while, the big ones draining pop-
ulation away from the little ones
and reclaiming their metals — and
you remember I said that had
gone as far as it could?"

"Yes."

"Well, when the big fish have
eaten up all the little fish, they
can eat each other till there's
just one big fish left."

"And?" asked Alvah tensely.

"And maybe one City might
think that, if they got us to make
war on another, they could step
in when the fighting was over and
get all the metals they'd need to
keep them going for years. So
they might send raiding parties
out in the other City's uniforms,
and condition them to think they
really were from that City. Was
that what happened, Alvah?"

ALVAH nodded reluctantly.
"I don't understand it. They
must have started planning this
as soon as I stopped communi-
cating. It doesn't make sense.
They couldn't be that desperate
— or maybe they could. Anyway,
it's a dirty stunt. It isn't like
New York."

She said nothing — too polite

NATURAL STATE

to contradict him, Alvah sup-
posed.

Down at the end of the hall,
Angus was beginning to look im-
patient. Alvah said, "So now
you'll pull New York down?"

"Alvah, it may sound funny,
but I think you know this, really
— you're doing your people a
favor."

"If that's so," he said wryly,
"then New York was 'really' try-
ing to do one for Chicago."

"I was hoping you'd see that
it doesn't matter. It might have
been Chicago that went first, or
Denver, or any of the others,
but that isn't important — they
all have to go. What's important
is the people. This may be an-
other thing that's hard for you to
accept, but they're going to be
happier, most of them."

And maybe she was right, Al-
vah thought, if you counted in
everybody, labor pool, porters
and all. Why shouldn't you count
them, he asked himself defiantly
— they were people, weren't they?
Maybe the index of civilization
was not only how much you had,
but how hard you had to work
for it — incessantly, like the New
Yorkers, holding down two or
three jobs at once, because the
City's demands were endless —
or, like the Muckfeet, judiciously
and with honest pleasure.

"Alvah?" said the girl. She put
her question no more explicitly

than that, but he knew what she
meant.

"Yes, Beej," replied Alvah
Gustad, Muckfoot.

VIII

i"VN the Jersey flats, hidden by
^-' a forest of traveler trees, a
sprawling settlement took form
— mile after mile of forced-
growth dwellings, stables, admin-
istration buildings, instruction
centers. It was one of five. There
was another farther north in Jer-
sey, two in the Poconos and one
in the vestigial state of Connec-
ticut.

They lay empty, waiting, their
roofs sprouting foliage that per-
fectly counterfeited the sur-
rounding forests. Roads had been
cleared, converging toward the
City, ending just short of the
half-mile strip of wasteland that
girdled New York, and it was
there that Alvah stood.

He found it strange to feel
himself ready to walk unprotect-
ed across that stretch of country,
knowing it to be acrawl with tiny
organisms that had been devel-
oped not to tolerate Man's arti-
ficial buildings, whether of stone,
metal, cement or plastics, but
crumbled them all to the ground.
Stranger still to be able to visual-
ize the crawling organisms with-
out horror or disgust.

But the strangest of all was

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

to be looking at the City from
this viewpoint. The towers stared
back at him across the surround-
ing wall, tall and shining and
proud, the proudest human crea-
tion — a century ago. Pitifully
outdated today, the gleaming
Cities fought back, unaware that
they had lost long ago, that their
bright spires and elaborate gad-
gets were as antiquated as polish-
ed armor would have been against
a dun-painted motorized army.

"I wish I could go with you,"
said Beej from the breathing for-
est at his back.

"You can't," Alvah said with-
out turning. "They wouldn't let
you through the gate alive. They
know me, but even so, I'm not
sure they'll let me in after all
this time. Have to wait and see."

"You know you don't have to
go. I mean — "

"I know what you mean," said
Alvah unhappily, "and you're
right. But all the same, I do have
to go. Look, Beej, you've got that
map I drew. It's a ten-to-one
chance that, if I don't make the
grade, they'll put me in the quar-
antine cells right inside the wall.
So you're not to worry. Okay?"

"Okay," she promised, worried.

He kissed her and watched her
fade back into the forest where
the others were — Bither and Artie
Brumbacher and a few others
from home, the rest Jerseys and
other clansmen from the Sea-

board Federation — cheerful, mat-
ter-of-fact people who were
going to bear most of the bur-
dens of what was coming, and
never tired of reminding the in-
landers of the fact.

He turned and walked out
across the wasteland, crunching
the dry weeds under his feet.

fTiHERE was a flaming moat
■*■ around the City and, beyond
the moat, high in the wall, a
closed gateway— corroded tight,
probably; it was a very long time
since the City had had any traffic
except by air. But there was a
spy tower above the gate. Alvah
walked up directly opposite its
bulbous idiot eyes, waved, and
then waited.

After a long time, an inconspic-
uous port in the tower squealed
open and a fist-sized dark ovoid
darted out across the flames. It
came to rest in midair, two yards
from Alvah, clicked and said
crisply, "State your name and
business."

"Alvah Gustad. I just got back
from a confidential mission for
the City Manager. Floater broke
down, communicator, everything.
I had to walk back. Tell him I'm
here."

The ovoid hovered exactly
where it was, as if pinned against
the air. Alvah waited. When he
got tired of standing, he dropped
his improvised knapsack on the

NATURAL STATE

ground and sat on it. Finally the
ovoid said harshly, in another
voice, "Who are you and what
do you want?"

Alvah patiently gave the same
answer.

"What do you mean, broke
down?"

"Broke down," said Alvah.
"Wouldn't run any more."

Silence. He settled himself for
another long wait, but it was only
five minutes or thereabouts before
the ovoid said, "Strip."

When he had done so, the gate
opposite broke open with a
scream of tortured metal and
ground itself back into a recess
in the wall. The drawbridge, a
long rust-pitted tongue of metal,
thrust out and down to span the
moat, a wall of flame on either
side of it.

Alvah walked across nimbly,
the metal already hot against his
naked soles, and the drawbridge
whipped back into its socket. The
gate screamed shut.

T^HE room was the same, the
■*• anthems were the same. Al-
vah, disinfected, shaved all over
and clad in an airtight glassine
overall with its own air supply,
stopped short two paces inside
the door. The man behind the
Manager's desk was not Wytak.
It was jowly, red-faced Ellery
, McArdle, Commissioner of the
Department of War.

One of the guards prodded Al-
vah and he kept going up to the
desk. "Now I think I get it,"
he said, staring at McArdle.
"When—"

McArdle's cold gaze nickered.
Then his heavy head dropped
forward a trifle, and he said,
"Finish what you were saying,
Gustad."

"I was about to remark," Alvah
said, "that when Wytak's pet
project flopped, he lost enough
support to let you impeach him.
Is that right?"

McArdle nodded and seemed
to lose interest. "Your feet are
not swollen or blistered, Gustad.
You didn't walk back from the
Plains. How did you get here?"

Alvah took a deep breath. "We
flew— on a passenger roc — as far
as the Adirondacks. We didn't
want to alarm you by too much
air traffic so near the City, so
we joined a freight caravan
there."

McArdle's stony face did not
alter, but all the meaning went
suddenly out of it. It was as if
the man himself had stepped
back and shut a door. The porter
behind his chair swayed and
looked as if he were about to
faint. Alvah heard one of the
guards draw in his breath sharp-
ly- ~

"Fthuh!" said McArdle abrupt-
ly, his face contorting. "Let's get
this over. What do you know

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

about the military plans of the
Muckfeet? Answer me fully. If
I'm not satisfied that you do,
I'll have you worked over till I
am satisfied."

Alvah, who had been feeling
something like St. George and
something like a plucked chick-
en, discovered that anger could
be a very comforting thing.
"That's what I came here to do,"
he said tightly. "The Muckfeets'
military plans are about what
you might have expected, after
that lousy trick of yours. They
know it wasn't Chicago that raid-
ed them."

McArdle started and made as
if to rise. Then he sank back,
staring fixedly at Alvah.

"They've had a gutful. They're
going to finish New York."

"When?" said McArdle, biting
the word off shprt.

"That depends on you. If
you're willing to be reasonable,
they'll wait long enough for you
to dicker with them. Otherwise,
if I'm not back in about an
hour, the fun starts."

Tt/TcARDLE touched a stud,
IT J. "Green alert " pressed the
stud again and laced his fingers
together on the desk. "Hurry it
up," he said to Alvah. "Let's
have the rest."

"I'm going to ask you to do
something difficult," said Alvah.
"It's this — think about what I'm

telling you. You're not thinking
now, you're just reacting — "

He heard a slight movement
behind him, saw McArdle's eyes
nicker and his hand make a Not
now gesture.

"You're in the same room with
a man who's turned Muckfoot
and it disgusts you. You'll be
cured of that eventually — you
can be, I'm the proof — but all I
want you to do now it put it aside
and use your brains. Here are
the facts. Your raiding parties
got the shorts beat off them. I
saw one of the fights — it lasted
about twenty minutes. The
Muckfeet could have polished off
the Cities any time in the last
thirty years. They haven't 'done
it till now, because — "

McArdle was beating time with
his fingertips on the polished eb-
onite. He wasn't really listening,
Alvah saw, but there was nothing
for it except to go ahead.

" — they had the problem of de-
conditioning and re-educating
more than twenty million in-
nocent people, or else letting them
starve to death, Now they have
the knowledge they need. They
can — "

"The terms," said McArdle.

"They're going to close down
this — this reservation," Alvah
said. "They'll satisfy you in any
way you like that they can do it
by force. If you help, it can be
an orderly process in which no-

NATURAL STATE

body gets hurt and everybody
gets the best possible break. And
they'll keep the City intact as a
museum. I talked them into that.
Or, if they have to, they'll take
the place apart slab by slab."

McArdle's mouth was working
violently. "Take him out and kill
him, for City's sake! And, Mor-
gan!" he called when Alvah and
his guards were halfway to the
door. .

"Yes, Mr. Manager."

"When you're through, dump
him out the gate he came in."

TT was a pity about Wytak,
*■ Alvah's brain was telling him
frozenly. Wytak was a scoundrel
or he* could never have got where
he was — had been — but he wasn't
afraid of a new idea. It might
have been posssible to deal with
Wytak.

"Where we going to do it?" the
younger one asked nervously. He
had been pale and sweating in
the floater all the way across
Middle Jersey.

"In the disinfecting chamber,"
Morgan said, gesturing with his
pistol. "Then we haul him
straight out. In there, you."

"Well, let's get it over with,"
the younger one said. "I'm sick."

"You think I'm not sick?" said
Morgan in a strained voice. He
gave Alvah a final shove into the
middle of the room and stood
back, adjusting his gun.

Alvah found himself saying
calmly, "Not that way. Morgan,
unless you want to turn black
and shrivel up a second after."

"What's he talking about?" the
boy whispered shakily.

"Nothing," said Morgan. The
hand with the gun moved in-
decisively.

"To puncture me," Alvah
warned, "you've got to puncture
the suit. And I've been eating
Muckfeet food for the last month
and a half. I'm full of micro-
organisms — swarming with them.
They'll bloop out of me straight
at you, Morgan."

Both men jerked back, as if
they had been stung. "I'm get-
ting outa here!" said the boy,
grabbing for the door stud.

Morgan blocked him. "Stay
here!"

"What're you going to do?" the
younger one asked.

He swore briefly. "We'll tell
the O. D. Come on."

The door closed and locked
solidly behind them. Alvah look-
ed to see if there was a way to
double-lock it from his side, but
there wasn't. He tried the op-
posite door to make sure it was
locked, which it was. Then he
examined the disinfectant noz-
zles, wondering if they could be
used to squirt corrosive in on him.
He decided they probably
couldn't and, anyhow, he had no
way to spike the nozzles. Then

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

there was nothing to do but sit
in the middle of the bare room
and wait, which he did.

The next thing that happened
was that he heard a fgint far-off
continuous noise through the al-
most soundproof door. He stood
up and went over and put his
ear against the door, and decided
it was his imagination.

Then there was a noise, and he
jumped back, his skin tingling all
over, just before the door slid
open. The sudden maniacal clan-
gor of a bell swept Morgan into
the room with it, wild-eyed, his
cap missing, drooling from a cor-
ner of his mouth, his gun high in
one white-knuckled fist.

"Glah!" said Morgan and pull-
ed the trigger.

A LVAH'S heart went bonk
■**• hard against his ribs, and the
room blurred. Then he realized
that there hadn't been any hiss
of an ejected pellet. And he was
still on his feet. And Morgan,
with his mouth stretched open all
the way back to the uvula, was
standing there a yard away, star-
ing at him and pulling the trig-
ger repeatedly.

Alvah stepped forward half a
pace and put a straight left
squarely on the point of Mor-
gan's jaw. As the man fell, there
were shrieks and running foot-
steps in the outer room. Some-
body in Guard uniform plunged

past the doorway, shouting inco-
herently, caromed off a wall,
dwindled down a corridor. Then
the room was full of leaping men
in motley.

The first of them was Artie
Brumbacher, almost unrecogniz-
able because he was grinning
from ear to ear. He handed Alvah
a four-foot knobkerrie and a
bulging skin bag and said, "Le's
go!"

The streets were full of ground-
ed floaters and stalled surface
cars. The bells had fallen silent,
and so had the faint omnipresent
vibration that was like silence
itself until it was gone. Not a
motor was turning in the Bor-
ough of Jersey. Occasional chit-
tering sounds floated on the air,
and muffled buzzings and other
odd sounds, all against the back-
ground chorus of faraway shrieks
that rose and fell.

At the corner of Middle Orange
and Weehawken, opposite the Su-
perior Court Building, they came
upon a squad of Regulars who
had throwrl away their useless
guns and picked up an odd lot of
assorted bludgeons — lengths of
pipe, tripods and the like.

"Now you'll see," said Artie.

The Regulars set up a ragged
yell and came running forward.
The two Muckfeet on either side
of Alvah, Artie and the buck-
toothed one called Lafe, dipped
heaping dark-brown handfuls out

NATURAL STATE

of the bags they carried slung
from their shoulders. Alvah fol-
lowed suit, and recognized the
stuff at last — bran meal, soaked
in some fragrant syrup until it
was mucilaginous and heavy.

Artie swung first, then Lafe,
and Alvah last — and the soggy
lumps smacked the foremost
faces. The squad broke, wiping
frenziedly. But you couldn't wipe
the stuff off. It clung coldly and
grainily to the hair on the backs
of your hands and your eyelashes
and the nap of your clothing. All
you could do was move it around.

One berserker with a smeared
face didn't stop, and Lafe drop-
ped him with a knobkerrie be-
tween the eyes. One more, a
white-faced youth, stood miracu-
lously untouched, still hefting his
club. He took a stride forward
menacingly.

Grinning, Artie raised another
glob of the mash and ate it,
smacking his lips. The youth
spun around, walked drunkenly
to the nearest wall and was rack-
ingly sick.

A N hour later, Knickerbocker
-'*- Circle in Over Manhattan
was littered with ameba-shaped
puddles of clear plastic. Over-
head, the stuff was hanging in
festoons from the reticulated
framework of the Roof and, for
the first time in a century, an
unfiltered wind was blowing into

New York. Halfway up the sheer
facade of the Old Movie House,
the roc that had brought Alvah
from Jersey was flapping along,
a wingtip almost brushing the
louvers, while its rider sprinkled
pale dust from a sack. Farther
down the street, a sickly green
growth was already visible on
cornices and window frames.

The antique neon sign of the
Old Movie dipped suddenly, its
supports softened visibly. It
swung, nodded and crashed to
the pavement.

Three hours later, a little group
of whey-faced men in official
dress was being loaded aboard a
freight roc opposite the under-
pass to the Cauldwell Floatway
in Over Bronnix. Alvah thought
he saw McArdle among them,
but he couldn't be sure.

Twilight — all the streets that
radiated from the heart of the
City were afloat with long, slowly
surging tides of humanity, dim
in the weak glow from the lumen
globes plastered haphazardly to
the flanks of the buildings. At the
end of every street, the Wall was
crumbled down and the moat
filled, its fire long gone out. And
down the new railed walkways
from all three levels came the
men, women and children, stum-
bling out into the alien lumen-
lit night and the strange scents
and the wide world.

Watching from the hilltop,

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

with his arm around his wife's
waist, Alvah saw them being
herded into groups and led away,
unprotesting — saw them in the
wains, rolling off toward the tem-
porary shelters where, likely as
not, they would sleep the night
through, too numbed to be afraid
of the morrow.

In the morning, their teaching
would begin.

Babylon, Alvah thought,
Thebes, Angkor, Lagash, Agade,
Tyre, Luxor, and now New York.

A City grew out and then in —
it was always the way, whether
or not it had a Barrier around it.

Growing, -it crippled itself and
its people — and died. The weeds
overgrew its felled stones.

"Like an egg," B. J. said, al-
though he had not spoken.
"Omne ex ovum — but the egg-
shell has to break."

"I know," said Alvah, discov-
ering that the empty ache in his
belly was not sentiment but
hunger. "Speaking of eggs — "

B. J. gave his arm a reassuring
little pat. "Anything you want,
dear. Radnip, orangoe, pearots,
fleetmeat — you pick the menu."

Alvah's mouth began to water.
— DAMON KNIGHT

Forecast

Either of the two long novelets in next month's issue would make a fine
lead story, but when didn't GALAXY shoot the works? To cover your 35c
bet, here is what we're putting up:

BEEP by James Blish . . . one of the freshest, most ingenious time stories
ever written. It's hard to tell you a little about it without telling you all.
The idea, you see, is compressed right into the title itself!

MEN LIKE MULES by J. T. M'lnosh ... the story of the hardest and most
desperate advertising campaign in the history of humanity. With Earth
rapidly dying, the job of the relief expedition is to remove the survivors.
Very humanitarian indeed, but there's one huge problem . . . the survivors
have to be sold on being saved!

At least one and possibly two more novelets.

Short stories ... as many as we can shoehorn into the issue.

Willy Ley's FOR YOUR INFORMATION, containing hints for future arche-
ologists and answers to your science questions . . . and our regular features.

NATURAL STATE

Be it ever so (A) impossibly squalid or (B)

impossibly lovely, there was, respectively,
no place in the Galaxy like Station 563 or:

LULUNGOMEENA

By GORDON R. DICKSON

Illustrated by KOSSIN
GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

BLAME Clay Harbank, if
you will, for what hap-
pened at Station 563 of
the Sirius Sector; or blame Wil-
liam Peterborough, whom we
called the Kid. I blame no one.
But I am a Dorsai man.

The trouble began the day
the kid joined the station, with
his quick hands and his gambler's
mind, and found that Clay, alone
of all the men there, would
not gamble with him — for all that
he claimed to having been a gam-
bling man himself. And so it ran
on for four years of service to-
gether.

But the beginning of the end
was the day they came off shift
together.

They had been out on a duty
circuit of the frontier station that
housed the twenty of us — search-
ing the outer bubble for signs of
blows or leaks. It's a slow two
hour tramp, that duty, even out-
side the station on the surface of
the asteroid where there's no
gravity to speak of. We, in the
recreation room, off duty, could
tell by the sound of their voices
as the inner port sucked open
and the clanging clash of them
removing their spacesuits came
echoing to us along the metal
corridor, that the Kid had been
needling Clay through the whole
tour.

"Another day," came the Kid's
voice, "another fifty credits. And

LULUNGOMEEN A

how's the piggy bank coming
along, Clay?"

7T1HERE was a slight pause, and
•*- I could see Clay carefully
controlling his features and his
voice. Then his pleasant baritone,
softened by the burr of his Tar-
susian accent, came smoothly to
us.

"Like a gentleman, Kid," he
answered. "He never overeats and
so he runs no danger of indiges-
tion."

It was a neat answer, based on
the fact that the Kid's own serv-
ice account was swollen with his
winnings from the rest of the
crew. But the Kid was too thick-
skinned for rapier thrusts. He
laughed; and they finished re-
moving their equipment and came
on into the recreation room.

They made a striking picture
as they entered, for they were
enough alike to be brothers — al-
though father and son would have
been a more likely relationship,
considering the difference in their
ages. Both were tall, dark, wide-
shouldered men with lean faces,
but experience had weathered
the softer lines from Clay's face
and drawn thin parentheses about
the corners of his mouth. There
were other differences, too; but
you could see in the Kid the
youth that Clay had been, and in
Clay the man that the Kid would
some day be.

"Hi, Clay," I said.

"Hello, Mort," he said, sitting
down beside me.

"Hi, Mort," said the Kid.

I ignored him; and for a mo-
ment he tensed. I could see the
anger flame up in the ebony
depths of his black pupils under
the heavy eyebrows. He was a big
man; but I come from the Dorsai
Planets and a Dorsai man fights
to the death, if he fights at all.
And, in consequence, among our-
selves, we of Dorsai are a polite
people.

But politeness was wasted on
the Kid — as was Clay's delicate
irony. With men like the Kid,
you have to use a club.

We were in bad shape. The
twenty of us at Frontier Station
563, on the periphery of the hu-
man area just beyond Sirius, had
gone sour, and half the men had
applications in for transfer. The
trouble between Clay and the
Kid was splitting the station wide
open.

We were all in the Frontier
Service for money; that was the
root of the trouble. Fifty credits
a day is good pay — but you have
to sign up for a ten year hitch.
You can buy yourself out — but
that costs a hundred thousand.
Figure it out for yourself. Nearly
six years if you saved every penny
you got. So most go in with the
idea of staying the full decade.

That was Clay's idea. He had

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

gambled most of his life away.
He had won and lost several
fortunes. Now he was getting old
and tired and he wanted to go
back — to Lulungomeena, on the
little planet of Tarsus, which was
the place he had come from as a
young man.

But he was through with gam-
bling. He said money made that
way never stuck, but ran away
again like quicksilver. So he drew
his pay and banked it.

But the Kid was out for a
killing. Four years of play with
the rest of the crew had given
him more than enough to buy his
way out and leave him a nice
stake. And perhaps he would have
done just that, if it hadn't been
that the Service account of Clay's
drew him like an El Dorado. He
could not go off and leave it. So
he stayed with the outfit, rid-
ing the older man unmercifully.

TTE harped continually on two
-"•-*- themes. He pretended to dis-
believe that Clay had ever been
a gambler; and he derided Lu-
lungomeena, Clay's birthplace :
the older man's goal and dream,
and the one thing he could be
drawn into talk about. For, to
Clay, Lulungomeena was beau-
tiful, the most wonderful spot in
the Universe; and with an old
man's sick longing for home, he
could not help saying so.

"Mort," said the Kid, ignoring

the rebuff and sitting down be-
side us, "what's a Hixabrod like?"

My club had not worked so
well, after all. Perhaps, I, too,
was slipping. Next to Clay, I was
the oldest man on the crew, which
was why we were close friends.
I scowled at the Kid.

"Why?" I asked.

"We're having one for a visi-
tor," he said.

Immediately, all talk around
the recreation room ceased and
all attention was focused on the
Kid. All aliens had to clear
through a station like ours when
they crossed the frontier from
one of the other great galactic
power groups into human terri-
tory. But isolated as Station 563
was, it was seldom an alien came
our way, and when one did, it
was an occasion.

Even Clay succumbed to the
general interest. "I didn't know
that," he said. "How'd you find
out?"

"The notice came in over the
receiver when you were down
checking the atmosphere plant,"
answered the Kid with a careless
wave of his hand. "I'd already
filed it when you came up.
What'U he be like, Mort?"

I had knocked around more
than any of them — even Clay.
This was my second stretch in
the Service. I remembered back
about twenty years, to the Dene-
bian Trouble.

LULUNGOMEENA

"Stiff as a poker," I said.
"Proud as Lucifer, honest as sun-
light and tight as a camel on his
way through the eye of a needle.
Sort of a humanoid, but with a
face like a collie dog. You know
the Hixabrodian reputation, don't
you?"

Somebody at the back of the
crowd said no, although they may
have been doing it just to humor
me. Like Clay with his Lulungo-
meena, old age was making me
garrulous.

"They're the first and only
mercenary ambassadors in the
known Universe," I said. "A
Hixabrod can be hired, but he
can't be influenced, bribed or
forced to come up with anything
but the cold truth — and, brother,
it's cold the way a Hixabrod
serves it up to you. That's why
they're so much in demand. If
any kind of political dispute
comes up, from planetary to in-
ter-alien power group levels,
both sides have to hire a Hixa-
brod to represent them in the
discussions. That way they know
the other side is being honest with
them. The opposing Hixabrod is
a living guarantee of that."

"He sounds good," said the
Kid. "What say we get together
and throw him a good dinner
during his twenty-four hour stop-
over?"

"You won't get much in the
way of thanks from him," I

grunted. "They aren't built that
way."

"Let's do it anyway," said the
Kid. "Be a little excitement for
a change."

A MURMUR of approval ran
■*"*■ through the room. I was out-
voted. Even Clay liked the idea.

"Hixabrods eat what we eat,
don't they?" asked the Kid, mak-
ing plans. "Okay, then, soups,
salad, meats, champagne and
brandy — " he ran on, ticking the
items off on his fingers. For a
moment, his enthusiasm had us
all with him. But then, just at
the end, he couldn't resist getting
in one more dig at Clay.

"Oh, yes," he finished, "and for
entertainment, you can tell him
about Lulungomeena, Clay."

Clay winced — not obviously,
but we all saw a shadow cross
his face. Lulungomeena on Tar-
sus, his birthplace, held the same
sort of obsession for him that his
Service account held for the Kid;
but he could not help being aware
that he was prone to let his tongue
run away on the subject of its
beauty. For it was where he be-
longed, in the stomach-twisting,
throat-aching way that some-
times only talk can relieve.

I was a Dorsai man and older
than the rest. I understood. No
one should make fun of the bond
tying a man to his home world.
It is as real as it is intangible.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

And to joke about it is cruel. •

But the Kid was too young to
know that yet. He was fresh from
Earth — Earth, where none of the
rest of us had been, yet which,
hundreds of years before, had
been the origin of us all. He was
eager and strong and contemptu-
ous of emotion. He saw, as the
rest of us recognized also, that
Clay's tendency to let his talk
wander ever to the wonder of
Lulungomeena was the first slight
crack in what had once been a
man of unflawed steel. It was the
first creeping decay of age.

But, unlike the rest of us, who
hid our boredom out of sym-
pathy, the Kid saw here a chance
to break Clay and his resolution
to do no more gambling. So he
struck out constantly at this one
spot so deeply vital that Clay's
self-possession was no defense.

Now, at this last blow, the
little fires of anger gathered in
the older man's eyes.

"That's enough," he said
harshly. "Leave Lulungomeena
out of the discussion."

"I'm willing to," said the Kid.
"But somehow you keep remind-
ing me of it. That and the story
that you once were a gambler. If
you won't prove the last one,
how can you expect me to be-
lieve all you say about the first?"

The veins stood out on Clay's
forehead; but he controlled him-
self.

"I've told you a thousand
times," he said between his teeth.
"Money made by gambling
doesn't stick. You'll find that out
for yourself one of these days."

"Words," said the Kid airily.
"Only words."

For a second, Clay stood star-
ing whitely at him, not even
breathing. I don't know if the
Kid realized his danger or cared,
but I didn't breathe, either, until
Clay's chest expanded and he
turned abruptly and walked out
of the recreation room. We heard
his bootsteps die away down the
corridor toward his room in the
dormitory section.

T ATER, I braced the Kid about

•^ it. It was his second shift
time, when most of the men in
the recreation room had to go on
duty. I ran the Kid to the ground
in the galley where he was fixing
himself a sandwich. He looked
up, a little startled, more than a
little on the defensive, as I came
in.

"Oh, hi, Mort," he said, with a
pretty good imitation of casual-
ness. "Whaf s up?"

"You," I told him. "Are you
looking for a fight with Clay?"

"No," he drawled with his
mouth full. "I wouldn't exactly
say that."

"Well, that's what you're liable
to get."

"Look, Mort," he said, and

LULUNGOMEENA

then paused until he had swal-
lowed. "Don't you think Clay's
old enough to look after him-
self?"

I felt a slight and not unpleas-
ant shiver run down between my
shoulder-blades and my eyes be-
gan to grow hot. It was my
Dorsai blood again. It must have
showed on my face, for the Kid,
who had been sitting negligently
on one edge of the galley table,
got up in a hurry.

"Hold on, Mort," he said.
"Nothing personal."

I fought the old feeling down
and said as calmly as I could,
"I just dropped by to tell you
something. Clay has been around
a lot longer than you have. I'd
advise you to lay off him."

"Afraid he'll get hurt?"

"No," I answered. "I'm afraid
you will."

The Kid snorted with sudden
laughter, half choking on his
sandwich. "Now I get it. You
think I'm too young to take care
of myself."

"Something like that, but not
the way you think. I want to tell
you something about yourself and
you don't have to say whether
I'm right or wrong — you'll let me
know without words."

"Hold it," he said, turning red.
"I didn't come out here to get
psyched."

"You'll get it just the same.
And it's not for you only — it's for

all of us, because men thrown
together as closely as we are
choose up sides whenever there's
conflict, and that's as dangerous
for the rest of us as it is for you."

"Then the rest of you can
stay out of it."

"We can't," I said. "What af-
fects one of us affects us all.
Now I'll tell you what you're
doing. You came out here ex-
pecting to find glamor and ex-
citement. You found monotony
and boredom instead, not realiz-
ing that that's what space is like
almost all the time."

TTE picked up his coffee con-
■*■-■- tainer. "And now you'll say
I'm trying to create my own ex-
citement at Clay's expense. Isn't
that the standard line?"

"I wouldn't know; I'm not go-
ing to use it, because that's not
how I see what you're doing.
Clay is adult enough to stand the
monotony and boredom if they'll
get him what he wants. He's also
learned how to live with others
and with himself. He doesn't have
to prove himself by beating down
somebody either half or twice his
age."

He took a drink and set the
container down on the table. "And
I do?"

"All youngsters do. It's their
way of experimenting with their
potentialities and relationships
with other people. When they find

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

that out, they can give it up —
they're mature then — although
some never do. I think you will,
eventually. The sooner you stop
doing it here, though, the better
it'll be for you and us."

"And if I don't?" he chal-
lenged.

"This isn't college back on
Earth or some other nice, safe
home planet, where hazing can
be a nuisance, but where it's pos-
sible to escape it by going some-
where else. There isn't any 'some-
where else' here. Unless the one
doing the hazing sees how reckless
and dangerous it is, the one get-
ting hazed takes it as long as he
can — and then something hap-
pens."

"So it's Clay you're really wor-
ried about, after all."

"Look, get it through your
skull. Clay's a man and he's been
through worse than this before.
You haven't. If anybody's going
to get hurt, it'll be you."

He laughed and headed for the
corridor door. He was still laugh-
ing as it slammed behind him. I
let him go. There's no use push-
ing a bluff after it's failed to
work.

rpHE next day, the Hixabrod
■*- came. His name was Dor
Lassos. He was typical of his
race, taller than the tallest of us
by half a head, with a light green
skin and that impassive Hixa-

brodian canine face.

I missed his actual arrival, be-
ing up in the observation tower
checking meteor paths. The sta-
tion itself was well protected, but
some of the ships coming in from
time to time could have gotten in
trouble with a few of the larger
ones that slipped by us at inter-
vals in that particular sector.
When I did get free, Dor Lassos
had already been assigned to his
quarters and the time of official
welcoming was over.

I went down to see him any-
how on the off-chance that we
had mutual acquaintances either
among his race or mine. Both of
our peoples are few enough in
number, God knows, so the pos-
sibility wasn't too far-fetched.
And, like Clay, I yearned for any-
thing connected with my home.

"Wet velt dhatchen, Hixa-
brod — " I began, walking into his
apartment — and stopped short.

The Kid was there. He looked
at me with an odd expression
on his face.

"Do you speak Hixabrodian?"
he asked incredulously.

I nodded. I had learned it on
extended duty during the Dene-
bian Trouble. Then I remembered
my manners and turned back to
the Hixabrod; but he was al-
ready started on his answer.

"En gles Tet, 1 tu, Dotsaiven"
returned the collie face, expres-
sionlessly. "Da Tt'amgen lang.

LULUNGOMEEN A

Met zurres nebent?"
. "Em getluc. Me mi Dorsai
fene. Nono ne — ves luc Les Las-
sos?"

He shook his head.

Well, it had been a shot in the
dark anyway. There was only the
faintest chance that he had known
our old interpreter at the time of
the Denebian Trouble. The Hixa-
brods have no family system of
nomenclature. They take their
names from the names of older
Hixabrods they admire or like. I
bowed politely to him and left.

It was not until later that it
occurred to me to wonder what
in the Universe the Kid could'
find to talk about with a Hixa-
brod.

T ACTUALLY was worried
-*• about Clay. Since my bluff
with the Kid had failed, I
thought I might perhaps try with
Clay himself. At first I waited
for an opportune moment to
turn up; but following the last
argument with the Kid, he'd been
sticking to his quarters. I finally
scrapped the casual approach and
went to see him.

I found him in his quarters,
reading. It was a little shocking
to find that tall, still athletic fig-
ure in a dressing gown like an old
man, eyes shaded by the lean
fingers of one long hand, poring
over the little glow of a scanner
with the lines unreeling before his

eyes. But he looked up as I came
N in, and the smile on his face was
the smile I had grown familiar
with over four years of close
living together.

"What's that?" I asked, nod-
ding at the book scanner.

He set it down and the little
light went out, the lines stopped
unreeling.

"A bad novel," he said, smiling,
"by a poor author. But they're
both Tarsusian."

I took the chair he had in-
dicated. "Mind if I speak straight
out, Clay?"

"Go ahead," he invited.

"The Kid," I said bluntly.
"And you. The two of you can't
go on this way."

"Well, old fire-eater," answered
Clay lightly, "what've you got to
suggest?"

"Two things. And I want you
to think both of them over care-
fully before answering. First, we
see if we can't get up a nine-
tenths majority here in the sta-
tion and petition him out as in-
compatible."

CLAY slowly shook his head.
"We can't do that, Mort."
"I think I can get the signa-
tures if I ask it," I said. "Every-
body's pretty tired of him . . .
They'd come across."

"It's not that and you know
it," said Clay. "Transfer by peti-
tion isn't supposed to be preju-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

dicial, but you and I know it is.
He'd be switched to some hard-
case station, get in worse trouble
there, and end up in a penal post
generally shot to hell. He'd know
who to blame for it, and he'd
hate us for the rest of his life."

"What of it? Let him hate us."

"I'm a Tarsusian. It'd bother
me and I couldn't do it."

"All right," I said. "Dropping
that, "then, you've got nearly
seven years in, total, and half the
funds you need to buy out. I've
got nearly enough saved, in spite
of myself, to make up the rest.
In addition, for your retirement,
I'll sign over to you my pay for
the three years I've got left. Take
that and get out of the Service.
It isn't what you figured on hav-
ing, but half a loaf . . ."

"And how about your home-
going?" he asked.

"Look at me."

He looked; and I knew what he
was seeing — the broken nose, the
scars, the lined face — the Dorsai
face.

"I'll never go home," I said.

He sat looking at me for a long
moment more, and I fancied I
saw a little light burn deep in
back of' his eyes. But then the
light went out and I knew that
I'd lost with him, too.

"Maybe not," he said quietly.
"But I'm not going to be the one
that keeps you from it."

I left him to his book.

OHIFTS are supposed to run
^ continuously, with someone
on duty all the time. However,
for special occasions, like this
dinner we had arranged for the
Hixabrod, it was possible, by
getting work done ahead of time
and picking the one four hour
stretch during the twenty-four
when there were no messages or
ships due in, to assemble every-
body in the station on an off-
duty basis.

So we were all there that eve-
ning, in the recreation room,
which had been cleared and set
up with a long table for the
dinner. We finished our cocktails,
sat down at the table and the
meal began.

As it will, the talk during the
various courses turned to things
outside the narrow limits of our
present lives. Remembrances of
places visited, memories of an
earlier life, and the comparison
of experiences, some of them
pretty weird, were the materials
of which our table talk was built.

Unconsciously, all of us were
trying to draw the Hixabrod out.
But he sat in his place at the
head of the table between Clay
and myself, with the Kid a little
farther down, preserving a frosty
silence until the dessert had been
disposed of and the subject of
Media unepectedly came up.

"—Media," said the Kid. "I've
heard of Media. It's a little

LULUNGOMEEN A

planet, but it's supposed to have
everything from soup to nuts on
it in the way of life. There's
one little life-form there that's
claimed to contain something of
value to every metabolism. It's
called — let me see now — it's
called—"

"It is called nygti," supplied
Dor Lassos, suddenly, in a metal-
lic voice. "A small quadruped
with a highly complex nervous
system and a good deal of fatty
tissue. I visited the planet over
eighty years ago, before it was
actually opened up to general
travel. The food stores spoiled
and we had the opportunity of
testing out the theory that it will
provide sustenance for almost any
kind of known intelligent being."

He stopped.

"WTELL?" demanded the Kid.

' ' "Since you're here to tell
the story, I assume the animal
kept you alive."

"I and the humans aboard the
ship found the nygti quite nour-
ishing," said Dor Lassos. "Un-
fortunately, we had several Mi-
crushni from Polaris also
aboard."

"And those?" asked someone.

"A highly developed but in-
elastic life-form," said Dor,
Lassos, sipping from his brandy
glass. "They went into convul-
sions and died."

I had had some experience

with Hixabrodian ways and I
knew that it was not sadism, but
a complete detachment that had
prompted this little anecdote.
But I could see a wave of dis-
taste ripple down the room. No
life-form is so universally well
liked as the Micrushni, a delicate
iridescent jellyfishlike race with
a bent toward poetry and philoso-
phy.

The men at the table" drew
away almost visibly from Dor
Lassos. But that affected him no
more than if they had applauded
loudly. Only in very limited ways
are the Hixabrod capable of em-
pathy where other races are con-
cerned.

"That's too bad," said Clay
slowly. "I have always liked the
Micrushni." He had been drink-
ing somewhat heavily and the
seemingly innocuous statement
came out like a half-challenge.

Dor Lassos' cold brown eyes
turned and rested on him. What-
ever he saw, whatever conclu-
sions he came to, however, were
hidden behind his emotionless
face.

"In general," he said flatly, "a
truthful race."

That was the closest a Hixa-
brod could come to praise, and I
expected the matter to drop there.
But the Kid spoke up again.

"Not like us humans," he said.
"Eh, Dor Lassos?"

I glared at him from behind

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Dor Lassos' head. But he went
recklessly on.

"I said, 'Not like us humans,
eh?"* he repeated loudly. The
Kid had also apparently been
drinking freely, and his voice
grated on the sudden silence of
the room.

"The human race varies,"
stated the Hixabrod emotionless-
ly. "You have some individuals
who approach truth. Otherwise,
the human race is not notably
truthful."

It was a typical, deadly ac-
curate Hixabrodian response. Dor
Lassos would have answered in
the same words if his throat was
to have been cut for them the
minute they left his mouth.
Again, it should have shut the
Kid up, and again it apparently
failed.

"Ah, yes," said the Kid. "Some
approach truth, but in general
we are untruthful. But you see,
Dor Lassos, a certain amount of
human humor is associated with
lies. Some of us tell lies just for
fun."

OR Lassos drank from his
brandy glass and said noth-
ing.

"Of course," the Kid went on,
"sometimes a human thinks he's
being funny with his lies when he
isn't. Some lies are just boring,
particularly when you're forced
to hear them over and over again.

But on the other hand, there are
some champion liars who are so
good that even you would find
their untruths humorous."

Clay sat upright suddenly, and
the sudden start of his movement
sent the brandy slopping out over
the rim of his glass and onto the
white tablecloth. He stared at the
Kid.

I looked at them all — at Clay,
at the Kid and at Dor Lassos;
and an ugly premonition began
to form in my brain.

"I do not believe I should,"
said Dor Lassos.

"Ah, but you should listen to a
real expert," said the Kid fever-
ishly, "when he has a good sub-
ject to work on. Now, for ex-
ample, take the matter of home
worlds. What is your home world,
Hixa, like?"

I had heard enough and more
than enough to confirm the sus-
picion forming within me. With-
out drawing any undue attention
to myself, I rose and left the
room.

The alien made a dry sound in
his throat and his voice followed
me as I went swiftly down the
empty corridor.

"It is very beautiful," he said
in his adding machine tones.
"Hixa has a diameter of thirty-
eight thousand universal meters.
It possesses twenty-three great
mountain ranges and seventeen
large bodies of salt water . . ."

LULU N GOME EN A

The sound of his voice died
away and I left it behind me.

I went directly through the
empty corridors and up the lad-
der to the communications shack.
I went in the door without paus-
ing, without — in neglect of all
duty rules — glancing at the auto-
matic printer to see if any fresh
message out of routine had ar-
rived, without bothering to check
the transmitter to see that it was
keyed into the automatic loca-
tion signal for approaching space-
craft.

All this I ignored and went
directly to the file where the in-
coming messages are kept.

I flicked the tab and went back
to the file of two days previous,
skimming through the thick sheaf
of transcripts under that dateline.
And there, beneath the heading
"Notices of Arrivals," I found it,
the message announcing the com-
ing of Dor Lassos. I ran my finger
down past the statistics on our
guest to the line of type that told
me where the Hixabrod's last
stop had been.

Tarsus.

/^LAY was my friend. And
^ there is a limit to what a
man can take without breaking.
On a wall of the communications
shack was a roster of the men at
our station. I drew the Dorsai
sign against the name of William
Peterborough, and checked my

gun out of the arms locker.

I examined the magazine. It
was loaded. I replaced the maga-
zine, put the gun inside my jack-
et, and went back to the dinner.

Dor Lassos was still talking.

". . . The flora and the fauna
are maintained in such excellent
natural balance that no local
surplus has exceeded one per cent
of the normal population for any
species in the last sixty thousand
years. Life on Hixa is regular and
predictable. The weather is con-
trolled within the greatest limits
of feasibility."

As I took my seat, the machine
voice of the Hixabrod hesitated
for just a moment, then gathered
itself, and went on: "One day I
shall return there."

"A pretty picture," said the
Kid. He was leaning forward over
the table now, his eyes bright, his
teeth bared in a smile. "A very
attractive home world. But I re-
gret to inform you, Dor Lassos,
that I've been given to under-
stand that it pales into insignifi-
cance when compared - to one
other spot in the Galaxy."

The Hixabrod are warriors, too.
Dor Lassos' features remained ex-
pressionless, but his voice deep-
ened and rang through the room.

"Your planet?"

"I wish it were," returned the
Kid with the same wolfish smile.
"I wish I could lay claim to it.
But this place is so wonderful

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

that I doubt if I would be allow-
ed there. In fact," the Kid went
on, "I have never seen it. But I
have been hearing about it for
some years now. And either it is
the most wonderful place in the
Universe, or else the man who
has been telling me about it — "

I pushed my chair back and
started to rise, but Clay's hand
clamped on my arm and held me
down.

"You were saying — " he said to
the Kid, who had been interrupt-
ed by my movement.

" — The man who has been tell-
ing me about it," said the Kid,
deliberately, "is one of those
champion liars I was telling Dor
Lassos about."

Once more "I tried to get to my
feet, but Clay was there before
me. Tall and stiff, he stood at the
end of the table.

"My right — " he said out of
the corner of his mouth to me.

Slowly and with meaning, he
picked up his brandy glass and
threw the glass straight into the
Kid's face. It bounced on the
table in front of him and sent
brandy flying over the front of
the Kid's immaculate dress uni-
form.

"Get your gun!" ordered Clay.

NOW the Kid was on his feet.
In spite of the fact that I
knew he had planned this, emo-
tion had gotten the better of him

at the end. His face was white
with rage. He leaned on the edge
of the table and fought with him-
self to carry it through as he had
originally intended.

"Why guns?" he said. His voice
was thick with restraint, as he
struggled to control himself.

"You called me a liar."

"Will guns tell me if you are?"
The Kid straightened up, breath-
ing more easily; and his laugh
was harsh in the room. "Why use
guns when it's possible to prove
the thing one way or another with
complete certainty?" His gaze
swept the room and came back
to Clay.

"For years now you've been
telling me all sorts of things,"
he said. "But two things you've
told me more than all the rest.
One was that you used to be a
gambler. The other was that Lu-
lungomeena — your precious Lu-
lungomeena on Tarsus — was the
most wonderful place in the Uni-
verse. Is either one of those the.
truth?"

Clay's breath came thick and
slow.

"They're both the truth," he
said, fighting to keep his voice
steady.

"Will you back that up?"

"With my life!"

"Ah," said the Kid mockingly,
holding up his forefinger, "but
I'm not asking you to back those
statements up with your life —

LULUNGOMEENA

but with that neat little hoard
you've been accumulating these
past years. You claimed you're a
gambler. Will you bet that those
statements are true?"

Now, for the first time, Clay
seemed to see the trap.

"Bet with me," invited the Kid,
almost lightly. "That will prove
the first statement."

"And what about the second?"
demanded Clay.

"Why—" the Kid gestured with
his hand toward Dor Lassos —
"what further judge do we need?
We have here at our table a Hixa-
brod." Half-turning to the alien,
the Kid made him a little bow.
"Let him say whether your sec-
ond statement is true or not."

Once more I tried to rise from
my seat and again Clay's hand
shoved me down. He turned to
Dor Lassos.

"Do you think you could judge
such a point, sir?" he asked.

The brown inhuman eyes met
^iis and held for a long moment.

"I have just come from Tar-
sus," said the Hixabrod. "I was
there as a member of the Galac-
tic Survey Team, mapping the
planet. It was my duty to certify
to the truth of the map."

fpiHE choice was no choice.
-■■ Clay stood staring at the Hix-
abrod as the room waited for his
answer. Rage burning within me,
I looked down the table for a

sign in the faces of the others that
this thing might be stopped. But
where I expected to see sympa-
thy, there was nothing. Instead,
there was blankness, or cynicism,
or even the wet-lipped interest of
men who like their excitement
written in blood or tears.

And I realized with a sudden
sinking of hopes that I stood
alone, after all, as Clay's friend.
In my own approaching age and
garrulity I had not minded his
talk of Lulungomeena, hour on
repetitive hour. But these others
had grown weary of it. Where I
saw tragedy, they saw only retri-
bution coming to a lying bore.

And what Clay saw was what
I saw. His eyes went dark and
cold.

"How much will you bet?" he
asked.

"All I've got," responded the

Kid, leaning forward eagerly.

"Enough and more than enough

to match that bank roll of yours.

• The equivalent of eight years'

pay"

Stiffly, without a word, Clay
produced his savings book and a
voucher pad. He wrote out a
voucher for the whole amount
and laid book and voucher on the
table before Dor Lassos. The Kid,
who had obviously come pre-
pared, did the same, adding a
thick pile of cash from his gam-
bling of recent weeks.

"That's all of it?" asked Clay.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"All of it," said the Kid.

Clay nodded and stepped back.

"Go ahead," he said.

The Kid turned toward the
alien.

"Dor Lassos," he said. "We ap-
preciate your cooperation in this
matter."

"I am glad to hear it," respond-
ed the Hixabrod, "since my co-
operation will cost the winner of
the bet a thousand credits."

The abrupt injection of this
commercial note threw the Kid
momentarily off stride. I, alone
in the room, who knew the Hixa-
brod people, had expected it. But
the rest had not, and it struck a
sour note, which reflected back
on the Kid. Up until now, the bet
had seemed to most of the others
like a cruel But at least honest
game, concerning ourselves only.
Suddenly it had become a little
like hiring a paid bully to beat up
a stationmate.

But it was too late now to stop ;
the bet had been made. Never-
theless, there were murmurs from
different parts of the room.

rWMlE Kid hurried on, fearful of
■*- an interruption. Clay's savings
were on his mind.

"You were a member of the
mapping survey team?" he asked
Dor Lassos.

"I was," said the Hixabrod.

"Then you know the planet?"

"I do."

. "You know its geography?" in-
sisted the Kid.

"I do not repeat myself." The
eyes of the Hixabrod were chill
and withdrawn, almost a little
baleful, as they met those of the
Kid.

"What kind of a planet is it?"
The Kid licked his lips. He was
beginning to recover his usual
self-assurance. "Is it a large
planet?"

"No."

"Is Tarsus a rich planet?"

"No."

"Is it a pretty planet?"

"I did not find it so."

"Get ro rhe point!" snapped
Clay with strained harshness.

The Kid glanced at him, savor-
ing this moment. He turned back
to the Hixabrod.

"Very well, Dor Lassos," he
said, "we get to the meat of the
matter. Have you ever heard of
Lulungomeena?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever been to Lu-
lungomeena?"

"I have."

"And do you truthfully—" for
the first time, a fierce and burn-
ing anger flashed momentarily in
the eyes of the Hixabrod; the in-
sult the Kid had just unthinking-
ly given Dor Lassos was a deadly
one — "truthfully say that in your
considered opinion Lulungo-
meena is the most wonderful
place in the Universe?"

LULUNGOMEENA

Dor Lassos turned his gaze
away from him and let it wander
over the rest of the room. Now,
at last, his conternpt for all there
was plain to be read on his face.

"yes, it is," said Dor Lassos.

TTE rose to his feet at the head
•*--*■ of the stunned group around
the table. From the pile of cash
he extracted a thousand credits,
then passed the remainder, along
with the two account books and
the vouchers, to Clay. Then he
took one step toward the Kid.

He halted before him and of-
fered his hands to the man —
palms up, the tips of his fingers
a scant couple of inches short of
the Kid's face.

"My hands are clean," he said.

His fingers arced; and, sudden-
ly, as we watched, stubby, gleam-
ing claws shot smoothly from
those fingertips to tremble lightly
against the skin of the Kid's face.

"Do you doubt the truthfulness
of a Hixabrod?" his robot voice
asked.

The Kid's face was white and
his cheeks hollowed in fear. The
needle points of the claws were
very close to his eyes. He swal-
lowed once.

"No — " he whispered.

The claws retracted. The hands
returned to their owner's sides.
Once more completely withdrawn
and impersonal, Dor Lassos turn-
ed and bowed to us all.

"My appreciation of your
courtesy," he said, the metallic
tones of his voice loud in the si-
lence.

Then he turned and, marching
like a metronome, disappeared
through the doorway of the rec-
reation room and off in the di-
rection of his quarters.

"AND so we part," said Clay
-'V Harbank as we shook hands.
"I hope you find the Dorsai Plan-
ets as welcome as I intend to find
Lulungomeena."

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

I grumbled a little. "That was
plain damn foolishness. You
didn't have to buy me out as
well."

"There were more than enough
credits for the both of us," said
Clay.

It was a month after the bet
and the two of us were standing
in the Deneb One spaceport. For
miles in every direction, the great
echoing building of this central
terminal stretched around us. In
ten minutes I was due to board
my ship for the Dorsai Planets.

Clay himself still had several
days to wait before one of the
infrequent ships to Tarsus would
be ready to leave.

"The bet itself was damn fool-
ishness," I went on, determined
to find something to complain
about. We Dorsai do not enjoy
these moments of emotion. But a
Dorsai is a Dorsai. I am not apol-
ogizing.

- "No foolishness," said Clay.
For a moment a shadow crossed
his face. "You forget that a real
gambler bets only on a sure

LULU NGOMEEN A

thing. When I looked into the
Hixabrod's eyes, I was sure."

"How can you say 'a sure
thing?' "

"The Hixabrod loved his
home," Clay said.

I stared at him, astounded.
"But you weren't betting on
Hixa. Of course he would prefer
Hixa to any other place in the
Universe. But you were betting
on Tarsus — on Lulungomeena —
remember?"

The shadow was back for a
moment on Clay's face. "The bet
was certain. I feel a little guilty
about the Kid, but I warned him
that gambling money never
stuck. Besides, he's young and
I'm getting old. I couldn't afford
to lose."

"Will you come down out of
the clouds," I demanded, "and
explain this thing? Why was the ^

bet certain? What was the trick,
if there was one?"

"The trick?" repeated Clay.
He smiled at me. "The trick was
that the Hixabrod could not be
otherwise than truthful. It was
all in the name of my birthplace
— Lulungomeena."

He looked at my puzzled face
and put a hand on my shoulder.

"You see, Mort," he said quiet-
ly, "it was the name that fooled
everybody. Lulungomeena stands
for something in my language.
But not for any city or town or
village. Everybody on Tarsus has
his own Lulungomeena. Every-
body in the Universe has."

"How do you figure that,
Clay?"

"It's a word," he explained.
"A word in the Tarsusian lan-
guage. It means 'home.' "

—GORDON R. DICKSON

THE MAN WHO KNEW

Back in 1893, while other tourists were paying to see Little Egypt's
famous dance, a shrewd young chap instead bought sheets of commemora-
tive postage stamps. Wise fellow, he later sent his children through college
by selling his increasingly valuable hoard one by one. With so many people
saving stamps now, a profit like that is unlikely.

But there is a smart investment you can make today. Full sets of GALAXY
are steadily bringing higher prices. If that's true after only three .and a
half years— well, you see what we mean.

We don't have Vol. 1, Nos. 1 and 2, and very few of the next few
issues, but we'll sell whatever we do have at 35c each, postpaid. (Except
overseas, of course; we have to charge 10c extra per copy for mailing.)
That stamp-buyer knew a good thing when he saw it. So can you! Besides,
who ever heard of reading postage stamps?

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Information

By WILLY LEY

SMALL BODIES NEAR
HEAVY PLANETS

ONLY a few issues back, I
devoted a portion of this
column to the moons of
Mars, prompted by repeated
questions from readers who won-
dered whether they might not
actually be Martian space sta-
tions, possibly still active, but
more likely abandoned for ages.
Well, they are unquestionably
small natural moons.

The reason I have to return

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

to them today is an interesting
thought advanced by the Ger-
man astronomer Professor Dr.
Werner Schaub, a former presi-
dent of the Gesellschaft fur Wel-
traumforschung, the new German
Rocket Society. In fact, Prof.
Schaub spoke about his idea for
the first time at a regional meet-
ing of this society in May, 1953.
Even more to the point is the
fact that his idea grew out of
a study of the forces which will
act on a space station's struc-
ture.

The idea is that the inner moon
of Mars might be slowly — very
slowly indeed — disintegrating
under our very eyes. Professor
Schaub is careful to call this a
"working hypothesis," but until it
might be demolished by a detail-
ed mathematical analysis it
sounds like a good one.

However, a little background
is needed first.

A S some readers are likely to
**■ know, the two small moons
of Mars were discovered in Au-
gust, 1877, by Asaph Hall with
the 26-inch telescope of the Naval
Observatory. The discovery was
a great surprise, not only because
of the oft-told story of their
"prediction" by Dean Swift, but
because the two satellites of Mars
were strange in several respects.
They were tiny, appearing as
luminous dots in even the biggest

telescopes. Present estimates —
which are a downward revision
of earlier guesses — assign a diam-
eter of not more than 10 miles
to the inner moon (Phobos) and
about 5 miles to the outer
(Deimos).

They also were most unusually
close to their planet, the distance
from the Martian surface to the
outer moon being only 12,500
miles and, from the surface to the
inner moon, a mere 3700 miles,
about the width of the Atlantic
Ocean. This unheard-of nearness
means that Phobos races around
Mars in 7 hours and 39 minutes;
its orbital velocity is 1.32 miles
per second.

The latter figure, incidentally,
shows the weakness of the gravi-
tational field of Mars. If the
same moon circled Earth at the
same distance from the Earth's
center (5800 miles), it would be
1850 miles from the surface and
would need an orbital velocity
of about 4 miles per second to
stay in its orbit. Because the
moonlet would need this much
more orbital velocity to balance
the Earth's stronger pull, it
would also complete a full revo-
lution in a much shorter time,
namely a little more than 2i/£
hours.

It took half a century, count-
ing from the original discovery
by Asaph Hall, to find out that
the orbital velocity of Phobos

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

A small moon circling its planet
near Roche's Limit, losing portions
of its surface due to the tidal forces
of the planet. The dotted line around
the planet indicates the approxi-
mate limits of its atmosphere. The
heavy circle is the orbit of the
satellite. The fine lines show the
orbits of the separated particles.

is slowly increasing! Such an in-
, crease in orbital velocity can
mean only one thing — the dis-
tance of Phobos from Mars is
slowly decreasing. As I under-
stand it, the decrease of the dis-
tance has not actually been meas-
ured yet, but the increase in
speed has. It probably is easier
to observe a small increase of the
orbital velocity than a tiny
shrinkage of the orbital distance.
But that the two go together is
established beyond a doubt.

The next question, of course,
is "Why?"

Generally speaking, a moon
will increase its speed if it finds
a small amount of resistance

along its orbit. This statement
may seem paradoxical to some-
body not used to the workings
of celestial mechanics, but it is
true just the same.

The first result of finding some "
resistance along the orbit would
be to slow the movement of the
moon. But that would result in
the moon no longer having
enough speed to balance the pull
of the planet for the distance at
which it is located. The planet
could pull it a little nearer, but
in "falling" toward the planet,
speed would be gained and the
moon would establish a new bal-
ance slightly closer to the planet
at a slightly higher speed. So if
cosmic dust got in the way of
Phobos, the observed increase in
orbital velocity could be explain-
ed. And from the observed in-
crease in speed, one could cal-
culate the density of the cosmic
dust which caused it.

OUCH calculations were made
^ by Kerr and Whipple, but no
acceptable results could be ob-
tained. If cosmic dust near Mars
were as thick as required, we
should be able to see it. After
all, one cannot very well postu-
late that the dust is only in the'
moon's orbit and not anywhere
else. Besides, dust of the proper
density and spread through a
large volume of space, as would
be likely, should slow down

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

Deimos, too, but Deimos is not
affected. If Mars had as much
water as our own planet, one
might try to explain the mis-
behavior of Phobos by tidal ac-
p tion — but Mars does not have
much water.

Yet this apparently impossible
assumption of a cosmic dust
handicap for Phobos, which can
be found only in and near its
orbit, is Dr. Werner Schaub's
"working hypothesis." One can
make this assumption if it is
also assumed that the dust comes
from Phobos itself, for Phobos is
rather close to Roche's Limit.

Roche's Limit, as has been
stated- many a time in many sci-
ence fiction stories, is the distance
inside of which a moon cannot
exist any more, since the gravi-
tational force of the planet
would break it up and scatter
the remains along its orbit to
form a ring. This explanation is
essentially true, except that things
aren't quite that simple. The dis-
tance R' (Roche's Limit) for a
given planet is

R' = 2.4554 R
(where R is the planet radius)
measured from the planet's cen-
ter if both planet and moon have
the same specific gravity. If they
haven't, the figure must be modi-
fied by multiplying it with the
cube root of the ratio of their
densities.

Without such modification, R'

equals 9700 miles for our own
planet and 5155 miles for Mars.
Since Phobos is 5800 miles from
the center of Mars, its distance is
about 2.75 R, so that, for equal
densities, it would be safely out-
side of R'. If Phobos were a ball
of liquid, it would be badly de-
formed even where it is, but it is
obviously some kind of rigid
rock.

Now there is another kind of
limit proposed by Dr. Schaub
specifically for rigid bodies and
bodies with considerable struc-
tural strength, such as space sta-
tions, which lies at 1.3 R. At a
distance of 3/ 10th of a planet
radius from the planet's surface,
the tidal forces of the planet be-
come stronger than the gravita-
tion of the moon at its surface.
The result is that the existence
of the moon itself is not en-
dangered, but that everything
lying around loose will be pulled
off its surface!

Like Roche's Limit of 2.45, this
limit of 1.3 is modified by the
ratio of the densities of the two
bodies involved. To make Phobos
fall inside this limit, or rather to
expand this limit to the distance
of Phobos, one would have to as-
sume that its overall density is
half of that of an equal volume
of water. If Phobos consists of
very porous rock, this is possible.
In this case, nothing could lie
around on its surface, anchored

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

only by the moonlet's gravita-
tional pull. But whatever has
been pulled off by Mars would
not fall to the planet at once. It
would form two very tenuous
rings, one outside the moon and
one inside. Each one of these
tenuous rings would have a thick-
ness about equal to the diameter
of the moon and a width of at
most three times the diameter
of the moon. (See diagram.)

A T first, the moon would move
-**- in an empty space between
the two rings, but this space
would not remain empty for long.
As soon as there are enough par-
ticles in the rings, there will be
collisions. Normally, when two
particles collide, one can expect
both of them to lose speed, so
that they would cross from the
outer ring into the inner ring.
The outer ring, then, would
steadily lose mass to the inner
ring — which is likely to get into
Phobos' way while crossing over
— but the inner ring would lose
mass in the same manner. If a
particle collision occurs in ^he
inner ring, the new orbits of the
particles can be eccentric enough
to graze the atmosphere of Mars,
which obviously means their end
as independent molecular satel-
lites.

More "loose mass" on Phobos
will be created steadily, some of
it by meteorite impact, most of it

probably by cosmic rays. Their
microscopic impacts cause the
crystalline structure of the sur-
face rocks to decay, thus creat-
ing dust. This is happening on
our moon, too, but there the dust
stays where it is, protecting the
layers of rock underneath. On
Phobos, if Dr. Schaub is right,
the dust would be pulled off the
satellite as quickly as it is formed.

It is admittedly somewhat far-
fetched to extend the second limit
so far out by assuming an un-
usually low density for the satel-
lite. But remember that Phobos
does show the acceleration which
started the whole trend of
thought.

And it is, at any event, inter-
esting that Jupiter V, the moon
closest to the giant planet, shows
a similar acceleration. Jupiter V
is also comparatively small (esti-
mated diameter is 100 miles) and
moves at a distance of 112,600
miles from Jupiter's center or
about 70,000 miles from its "sur-
face." R' for Jupiter (unmodi-
fied) is 108,800 miles. In short,
the situation is about the same —
theoretically, the moon just man-
ages to stay outside of Roche's
Limit, but if we knew all the
other factors, most especially the
satellite's density, we might say
otherwise.

Let's close with a look at our
planned space station in Dr. von
Braun's two-hour orbit, 1075

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

miles above sea level. This is a
geocentric distance of 5025 miles
and R' for Earth, as mentioned,
is 9700 miles. The space station
would be well within Roche's
Limit, but would hold together
easily because of its structural
strength. (Just to keep air in-
side, it has to have a higher
structural strength than required
to withstand the forces exerted
by the Earth.) Since the space
station's distance amounts to 1.27
planet radii and Dr. Schaub's
limit is 1.3 R, the space station
would also be inside that limit.

This would not endanger peo-
ple in spacesuits working near it
in space. Even if not hooked
to a line, they would have per-
sonal rocket propulsion guns
which can easily overcome the
forces involved.

But the Earth would keep the
space station spotlessly clean by
attracting any debris that might
accumulate on it — a cosmic
vacuum ' cleaner, you might say.

EUROPE'S UNKNOWN
POISONOUS LIZARD

A T about the time you read
■**■ this, West Germans and
West Berliners will be able to
buy and read a German edition
of. my book The Lungfish, the
Dodo and the Unicorn. In East
Germany, it will indubitably be
banned because animals fail to

conform to Marxist-Leninist-
Stalinist principles (it being
known, furthermore, that Beria
occasionally petted animals,
never tractors). I did not do the
translation myself, but I checked
it and in the course of this work
I came across some old corre-
spondence and notes which had
half-slipped my memory. They
dealt with the question of poison-
ous animals in general and spe-
cifically with the number of pois-
onous lizards.

One hundred years ago, zoo-
logical textbooks were quite defi-
nite on that point. The majority
of poisonous creatures were in-
vertebrates — spiders, scorpions,
centipedes and certain true in-
sects. Of the vertebrate animals,
only some snakes were known to
be poisonous, 'although a few
fishes were said to have poisonous
spikes, something that still need-
ed verification (which has been
supplied in the meantime). No
lizard or amphibian had any
venom, the book said.

As for amphibians, it became
known during the following fifty
years that the skin secretions of
several varieties are rather pois-
onous and that one frog (the
beautiful "painter frog," Den-
drobates tinctorius of Central
and northern South America) is
dangerous to handle. It can kill
you if you happen to have fresh
cuts on your hands. Logically,

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

the natives use its skin secretion
for a highly effective arrowhead
poison.

About 1900, the textbooks,
after much reluctance, suspicion

one-third the length one would
expect a lizard's tail to be. The
legs are short and small and the
whole animal looks as if it were
normally a dirty black, but has

Heloderma suspectum.

and cross-checking, admitted
that there is a poisonous lizard.
The lizard thus accepted is, of
course, the Gila monster, a native
of Arizona and New Mexico. The
popular name is derived from the
name of the Gila (prounced
Hee-la) River. The scientific
name is Heloderma suspectum.
It is a creature that nobody
who has seen one will ever forget,
partly because of its coloration,
partly because its shape is rather
different from the ideas evoked
by the word "lizard." Yes, it has
a head, a body, a tail and four
legs, but that's as far as the re-
semblance goes. The head is flat,
the body like a stuffed sausage,
the tail more so and only about

been spattered with brick-red
paint.

While normally lazy, the Gila
monster can develop a fit of
temper at short notice. It will hiss
loudly and can jump, especially
making a 180 degree turn in
one jump that puts the head
where the tail was a moment ago.
And when it bites, it does not
strike like a snake. It is a bite
more like that of a dog and it
will hang on for as long as ten
minutes.

TVTOBODY seems to know who
■*• ' produced the first compre-
hensive description of this lizard.
European works name Francesco
Hernandez, body physician of

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

Philip II of Spain, as the "dis-
coverer" (*), but I have some
doubts about that. Hernandez
collected — from 1 593- 1600 — in
Mexico, where the Gila monster
does not live.

Even though Nueva Espana,
if it could be pinned down on a
map, probably comprised Gila-
monster habitat, Hernandez hard-
ly traveled that far west. It is
far more likely that he "dis-
covered" Gila monster's close
relative, the Mexican Beaded
Lizard {Heloderma horridum),
which is similar in appearance,
but of a more slender build, some-
what larger (or at least longer)
and with bright yellow blotches
on a shining dark background.
It was this Mexican version that
forced its way into the textbooks
as the second poisonous lizard,
though it was the first historic-
ally.

Among the venomous snakes,
there are some with hollow poison
fangs and some with grooved
poison fangs. The two types of
Heloderma have grooved teeth,
but unlike those of the venomous
snakes, these teeth are not in
front of the mouth and are in the
lower jaw. So is the poison gland
which supplies them. Another

1 Doctor Hernandez' work never ap-
peared in its original Latin version. It
was printed in 1615 as Quatro libros de
la naturaleza y virtutes de las plantas
y animates que esran recevidos en el
uso de medicina en la nueva Espana.

difference is that they need time
to inject their poison, and a man
bitten by Heloderma may get
away with "just a bite" if he
succeeds in tearing the reptile
off at once. Normally, the Gila
monster has little use for its
poison apparatus, for its favorite
food seems to be bird and snake
eggs.

So far we have stayed in the
territory of well-known and
established facts. The story has
many loose ends, since very many
facts about the two Helodermas
are still unknown. But the most
interesting loose end is that they
may have unknown relatives else-
where.

One such suspected relative has
a name of its own, Lanthanotus,
and it lives, of all places, on
Borneo. The trouble is that very
little is known about it — so little,
in fact, that we cannot yet say
with certainty whether Lanthan-
otus actually is a close relative
to the Gila monster.

Another suspected relative
might live in Europe. The trouble
here is the same as with Lan-
thanotus, but to a higher degree
— it hasn't been discovered yet.

All along the European Alps,
but especially in the sections be-
longing to Switzerland and to
Austria, there has been talk for
centuries about a rare, small and
dangerous animal. It is said to be
some two feet long — which is

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

slightly larger than Heloderma —
and of the general appearance of
a fat lizard. It is reported to hiss
and whistle, and its bite is de-
scribed as deadly. Witnesses
claim that it can make jumps
without preparation. Since the
Alpine farmers and cattle ranch-
ers were not in the habit of
traveling, the animal has a name

The only published picture of
Tatzelwurm, dating from 1836.

of its own in almost every valley.
The most common names are
Stollwurm, Springwurm and
Tatzelwurm, which can be trans-
lated, in the same order, as "Cave
Worm," "Jumping Worm" and

"Worm with Paws" and it may
be added that the term "worm"
is not used in its zoological sense
among those peoples, but a gen-
eral term for anything alive of
wormlike or snakelike shape.

TN some older works, the exist-
■■■ ence of this animal is men-
tioned as a matter of course. The
chronicle of a monastery in the
Swiss Canton of Uri referred to
it as occurring in the vicinity.
A "Pocketbook for Amateur
Naturalists and Gentleman Hunt-
ers," printed in 1836, even print-
ed a picture (not a good one)
and a Bavarian writer by the
name of Kobell listed the animal
in 1859 as one "permitted to be
hunted." He did not shoot one
himself, but knew people who
had.

There is one more curious
"document." In the Bavarian and
Austrian Alps, it is customary to
erect little monuments to people
who perished because of ava-
lanches or falling stones as close
as possible to the spot where they
died. One of these monuments —
their local name is Marterln —
has the inscription "In sudden
fright died here, pursued by
jumping worms, Hans Fuchs of
Unken, 1779." The painting
shows the dead Hans Fuchs lying
on the ground, with two large
lizards perched on a nearby rock.
These two lizards are ordinary

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

in shape, just large; obviously
the local artist not only lacked
talent, but also a model.

The animal is still undiscov-
ered. For some time, from about
1870 to 1930, zoologists were
inclined to consider the whole
story a legend. In 1930, a scien-
tific publication began to collect
eye-witness reports and got
around two dozen first-hand
stories, most of the reporters
stating emphatically that the
animal was not an otter, which
had been cited as an explanation
of the legend by some. But none
of the reporters had any proof —
no skins, no skulls, not even
photographs.

At about that time, somebody
sent me a clipping from a small
provincial Austrian newspaper,
saying in so many words that the
late Austrian General von Poser
had killed two of the animals
and that their bodies were pre-
served in Castle Grubhof near
the city of Lofer.

I had no idea where Lofer was
located (I still don't know), but
trusted that the Austrian Post
Office did. Nor did I know who
owned the castle at that time, but
since every castle has a Superin-
tendent General, I put that on
my letter, which was aimed at
somebody who could tell horses
and cattle apart, but had never
tried to distinguish a lizard from
a newt.

The result was similar to the
scene they used to have in the
early talkies, where an American
traveler in Hongkong addresses a
Chinese in pidgin and gets an
answer with an Oxford accent. A
Mr. Schmidtmann informed me
that the two preserved animals
were specimens of the East North
African monitor, probably Va-
ranus niloticus, shot by General
von Poser during a vacation in
Egypt. Besides, Mr. Schmidt- .
mann added, even though some
witnesses claim they know an
otter when they see one, the re-
ports still concern otters.

A BOUT a month later, I read
-'*■ an article by the former
Austrian Court Councellor, Dr.
Nicolussi, in which he stated that,
after examining all the evidence,
he felt so certain about the
existence of the animal and its
essential relationship to the Am-
erican Gila monster that he pro-
posed the scientific name of
Heloderma europaeum. At about
that time a Swiss photographer
took a picture of something that
might be the animal, half hidden
under dead leaves, but a search
failed to yield results.

One more item: After the first
edition of my book The Lurtgfish
and the Unicorn had been pub-
lished, I received a letter from a
reader in Virginia who, in 1900,
had seen a big lizard in the Ital-

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

ian Alps. His friends to whom he
told the tale scoffed, so he went
back to the same spot the next
day, saw two of the big lizards
and caught one with a butterfly
net. When dumped at the inn,
the lizard scared him so much
with loud hissing that he caught
it in the net again, obtained a
glass jar and two liters of pure
alcohol from the local druggist
and drowned the animal in the
liquid. Unfortunately he left the
specimen in the small Italian
town. But he remembered that it
was 20 inches long, which is at
least twice the length of any
other lizard known to occur in
that region.

Well? So? Nobody knows. As
in many other places in science,
the motto which applies is "wait
and see."

I'm afraid the same is true of
the letter section of this depart-
ment. I've used up all my room,
so the questions from readers will
have to wait until next month.
Sorry.

—WILLY LEY

At your newsstand now!
GALAXY NOVEL No. 18

CITY AT WORLD'S END

by Edmond Hamilton

Price 35c — Formerly Published $2.75

STATEMENT REQUIRED BY THE ACT OF
AUGUST 24, 1912, AS AMENDED BY THE
ACTS OF MARCH 3, 1933, AND JULY 2,
1946 (Title 39, United States Code, Section
233) SHOWING THE OWNERSHIP. MAN-
AGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION OF Galaxy
Science Fiction, published monthly at New
York, N. Y. for October 1, 1953.

1. The names and addresses of the publisher,
editor, managing editor, and business managers
are: Publisher, Robert M. Guinn, 421 Hudson
St., N. Y. C. ; Editor, H. L. Gold, 505 E. 14th
St., N. Y. C. ; Managing editor, Business
manager, none.

2. The owner is: (If owned by a corporation,
its name and address must be stated and also
immediately thereunder the names and addresses
of stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or
more of total amount of stock. If not owned by
a corporation, the names and addresses of the
individual owners must be given. If owned by
a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its
name and address, as well as that of each
individual member, must be given.) Galaxy
Publishing Corporation (Owner). 421 Hudson
St., N. Y. C. ; Robert M. Guinn (Sole Stock-
holder), 2 Knollwood Road. Eastchester, N. Y.

3. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and
other security holders owning or holding 1
percent or more of total amount of bonds, mort-
gages, or other securities are: (If there are
none, so state.) None.

4. Paragraphs 2 and 3 include, in cases
where the stockholder or security holder ap-
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or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of
the person or corporation for whom such trus-
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and belief as to the circumstances and condi-
tions under which stockholders and security
holders who do not appear upon the books of
the company as trustees, hold stock and securi-
ties in a capacity other than that of a. bona
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5. The average number of copies of each
issue of this publication sold or distributed,
through the mails or otherwise, to paid sub-
scribers during the 12 months preceding the
date shown above was: (This information is
required from daily, weekly, semiweekly, and
triweekly newspapers only.)

GALAXY PUBLISHING CORP.

Robert M. Guinn, President

Sworn to and subscribed before me this 23rd
day of September, 1953. Jacques N. Glick,
Notary Public in the State of N. Y. No.
03-1457100. Qualified in Bronx County. Cert.
filed in Bronx & New York. County Clerk's &
Registers Office. Commission expires March
30, 1955.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

THE BIG TRIP

UP YONDER

By KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

Illustrated by KOSSIN

If it was good enough for your grandfather, forget it . . . it is
much too good for anyone else!

G RAMPS FORD, his chin
resting on his hands, his
hands on the crook of his
cane, was staring irascibly at the
five-foot television screen that
dominated the room. On the
screen, a news commentator was
summarizing the day's happen-
ings. Every thirty seconds or so,
Gramps would jab the floor with
his canetip and shout, "Hell, we

100

did that a hundred years ago!"
Emerald and Lou, coming in
from the balcony, where they had
been seeking that 2185 A.D. rarity
— privacy — were obliged to take
seats in the back row, behind
Lou's father and mother, brother
and sister-in-law, son and daugh-
ter-in-law, grandson and wife,
granddaughter and husband,
great-grandson and wife, nephew

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

and wife, grandnephew and wife,
great-grandniece and husband,
great-grandnephew and wife —
and, of course, Gramps, who was
in front of everybody. All save
Gramps, who was somewhat
withered and bent, seemed, by
pre-anti-gerasone standards, to
be about the same age — some-
where in their late twenties or
early thirties. Gramps looked old-
er because he had already reached
70 when anti-gerasone was in-
vented. He had not aged in the
102 years since.

"Meanwhile," the commenta-
tor was saying, "Council Bluffs,
Iowa, was still threatened by
stark tragedy. But 200 weary
rescue workers have refused to
give up hope, and continue to
dig in an effort to save Elbert
Haggedorn, 183, who has been
wedged for two days in a . . ."

"I wish he'd get something
more cheerful," Emerald whis-
pered to Lou.

SILENCE!" cried Gramps.
"Next one shoots off his big
bazoo while the TV's on is gonna
find hisself cut off without a dol-
lar — " his voice suddenly soft-
ened and sweetened — "when they
wave that checkered flag at the
Indianapolis Speedway, and old
Gramps gets ready for the Big
Trip Up Yonder."

He sniffed sentimentally, while
his heirs concentrated desperate-

ly on not making the slightest
sound. For them, the poignancy
of the prospective Big Trip had
been dulled somewhat, through
having been mentioned by
Gramps about once a day for
fifty years.

"Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard,"
continued the commentator,
"President of Wyandotte College,
said in an address tonight that
most of the world's ills can be
traced to the fact that Man's
knowledge of himself has not
kept pace with his knowledge of
the physical world."

"Hell!" snorted Gramps. "We
said that a hundred years ago!"

"In Chicago tonight," the com-
mentator went on, "a special
celebration is taking place in the
Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The
guest of honor is Lowell W. Hitz,
age zero. Hitz, born this morning,
is the twenty-five-millionth child
to be born in the hospital." The
commentator faded, and was re-
placed on the screen by young
Hitz, who squalled furiously.

"Hell!" whispered Lou to
Emerald. "We said that a hun-
dred years ago."

"I heard that!" shouted
Gramps. He snapped off the tele-
vision set and his petrified de-
scendants stared silently at the
screen. "You, there, boy — "

"I didn't mean anything by it,
sir," said Lou, aged 103.

"Get me my will. You know

THE BIG TRIP UP YONDER

101

where it is. You kids all know
where it is. Fetch, boy!" Gramps
snapped his gnarled fingers
sharply.

Lou nodded dully and found
himself going down the hall,
picking his way over bedding to
Gramps' room, the only private
room in the Ford apartment.
The other rooms were the bath-
room, the living room and the
wide windowless hallway, which
was originally intended to serve
as a dining area, and which had
a kitchenette in one end. Six
mattresses and four sleeping bags
were dispersed in the hallway and
living room, and the daybed, in
the living room, accommodated
the eleventh couple, the favorites
of the moment.

On Gramps' bureau was his
will, smeared, dog-eared, perfo-
rated and blotched with hun-
dreds of additions, deletions, ac-
cusations, conditions, warnings,
advice and homely philosophy.
The document was, Lou reflected,
a fifty-year diary, all jammed
onto two sheets — a garbled, il-
legible log of day after day of
strife. This day, Lou would be
disinherited for the eleventh time,
and it would take him perhaps six
months of impeccable behavior
to regain the promise of a share
in the estate. To say nothing of'
the daybed in the living room for
Em and himself.

"Boy!" called Gramps.

"Coming, sir."- Lou hurried
back into the living room and
handed Gramps the will.

"Pen!" said Gramps.

TTE was instantly offered eleven
*■*■ pens, one from each couple.

"Not that leaky thing," he said,
brushing Lou's pen aside. "Ah,
there's a nice one. Good boy,
Willy." He accepted Willy's pen.
That was the tip they had all
been waiting for. Willy, then —
Lou's father — was the new favor-
ite.

Willy, who looked almost as
young as Lou, though he was 142,
did a poor job of concealing his
pleasure. He glanced shyly at the
daybed, which would become his,
and from which . Lou and Em-
erald would have to move back
into the hall, back to the worst
spot of all by the bathroom door.

Gramps missed none of the
high drama he had authored and
he gave his own familiar role
everything he had. Frowning and
running his finger along each line,
as though he were seeing the
will for the first time, he read
aloud in a deep portentous mono-
tone, like a bass note on a cathe-
dral organ.

"I, Harold D. Ford, residing
in Building 257 of Alden Village,
New York City, Connecticut, do
hereby make, publish and declare
this to be my last Will and Testa-
ment, revoking any and all form-

102

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

THE BIG TRIP UP YONDER

103

er wills and codicils by me at
any time heretofore made." He
blew his nose importantly and
went on, not missing a word, and
repeating many for emphasis —
repeating in particular his ever-
more-elaborate specifications for
a funeral.

At the end of these specifica-
tions, Gramps was so choked
with emotion that Lou thought
he might have forgotten why he'd
brought out the will in the first
place. But Gramps heroically
brought his powerful emotions
under control and, after erasing
for a full minute, began to write
and speak at the same time. Lou
could have spoken his lines for
him, he had heard them so often.

"I have had many heartbreaks
ere leaving this vale of tears for
a better land," Gramps said and
wrote. "But the deepest hurt of
all has been dealt me by — " He
looked around the group, trying
to remember who the malefactor
was.

Everyone looked helpfully at
Lou, who held up his hand re-
signedly.

Gramps nodded, remembering,
and completed the sentence — "my
great-grandson, Louis J. Ford."

"Graridson, sir," said Lou.

"Don't quibble. You're in deep
enough now, young man," said
Gramps, but he made the change.
And, from there, he went without
a misstep through the phrasing of

the disinheritance, causes for
which were disrespectfulness and
quibbling.

IN the paragraph following, the
-*- paragraph that had belonged
to everyone in the room at one
time or another, Lou's name was
scratched out and Willy's sub-
stituted as heir to the apartment
and, the biggest plum of all, the
double bed in the private bed-
room.

"So!" said Gramps, beaming.
He erased the date at the foot of
the will and substituted a new
one, including the time of day.
"Well — time to watch the Mc-
Garvey Family." The McGarvey
Family was a television serial
that Gramps had been following
since he was 60, or for a total of
112 years. "I can't wait to see
what's going to happen next,"
he said.

Lou detached himself from the
group and lay down on his bed
of pain by the bathroom door.
Wishing Em would join him, he
wondered where she was.

He dozed for a few moments,
until he was disturbed by some-
one stepping over him to get into
the bathroom. A moment later, he
heard a faint gurgling sound, as
though something were being
poured down the washbasin
drain. Suddenly, it entered his
mind that Em had cracked up,
that she was in there doing some-

104

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

thing drastic about Gramps.

"Em?" he whispered through
the panel. There was no reply,
and Lou pressed against the door.
The worn lock, whose bolt barely
engaged its socket, held for a
second, then let the door swing
inward.

"Morty!" gasped Lou.

Lou's great-grandnephew, Mor-
timer, who had just married and
brought his wife home to the
Ford menage, looked at Lou with
consternation and surprise. Morty
kicked the door shut, but not be-
fore Lou had glimpsed what was
in his hand — Gramps' enormous
economy-size bottle of anti-
gerasone, which had apparently
been half-emptied, and which
Morty was refilling with tap
water.

A moment later, Morty came
out, glared defiantly at Lou and
brushed past him wordlessly to
rejoin his pretty bride.

Shocked, Lou didn't know
what to do. He couldn't let
Gramps take the mousetrapped
anti-gerasone — but, if he warned
Gramps about it, Gramps would
certainly make life in the apart-
ment, which was merely insuffer-
able now, harrowing.

Lou glanced into the living
room and saw that the Fords,
Emerald among them, were mo-
mentarily at rest, relishing the
botches that the McGarveys had
made of their lives. Stealthily, he

went into the bathroom, locked
the door as well as he could
and began to pour the contents
of Gramps' bottle down the drain.
He was gcing to refill it with
full-strength anti-gerasone from
the 22 smaller bottles on the
shelf.

The bottle contained a half-
gallon, and its neck was small,
so it seemed to Lou that the
emptying would take forever.
And the almost imperceptible
smell of anti-gerasone, like
Worcestershire sauce, now seemed
to Lou, in his nervousness, to be
pouring out into the rest of the
apartment, through the keyhole
and under the door.

TT^HE bottle gurgled monoton-
-*■ ously. Suddenly, up came the
sound of music from the living
room and there were murmurs
and the scraping of chairlegs on
the floor. "Thus ends," said the
television announcer, "the 29,-
121st chapter in the life of your
neighbors and mine, the Mc-
Garveys." Footsteps were coming
down the hall. There was a knock
on the bathroom door.

"Just a sec," Lou cheerily call-
ed out. Desperately, he shook the
big bottle, trying to speed up
the flow. His palms slipped on
the wet glass, and the heavy
bottle smashed on the tile floor.

The door was pushed open,
and Gramps, dumbfounded, star-

THE BIG TRIP UP YONDER

105

ed at the incriminating mess.

Lou felt a hideous prickling
sensation on his scalp and the
back of his neck. He grinned
engagingly through his nausea
and, for want of anything re-
motely resembling a thought,
waited for Gramps to speak.

"Well, boy," said Gramps at
last, "looks like you've got a
little tidying up to do."

And that was all he said. He
turned around, elbowed his way
through the crowd and locked
himself in his bedroom.

The Fords contemplated Lou
in incredulous silence a moment
longer, and then hurried back to
the living room, as though some
of his horrible guilt would taint
them, too, if they looked too
long. Morty stayed behind long
enough to give Lou a quizzical,
annoyed glance. Then he also
went into the living room, leav-
ing only Emerald standing in the
doorway.

Tears streamed over her
cheeks. "Oh, you poor lamb —
please don't look so awful! It
was my fault. I put you up to
this with my nagging about
Gramps."

"No," said Lou, finding his
voice, "really you didn't. Honest,
Em, I was just — "

"You don't have to explain
anything to me, hon. I'm on your
side, no matter what." She kissed
him on one cheek and whispered

in his ear, "It wouldn't have been
murder, hon. It wouldn't have
killed him. It wasn't such a ter-
rible thing to do. It just would
have fixed him up so he'd be
able to go any time God decided
He wanted him."

"What's going to happen next,
Em?" said Lou hollowly. "What's
he going to do?"

T OU and Emerald stayed fear-
■"^ fully awake almost all night,
waiting to see what Gramps was
going to do. But not a sound
came from the sacred bedroom.
Two hours before dawn, they
finally dropped off to sleep.

At six o'clock, they arose again,
for it was time for their genera-
tion to eat breakfast in the kitch-
enette. No one spoke to them.
They had twenty minutes in
which to eat, but their reflexes
were so dulled by the bad night
that they had hardly swallowed
two mouthfuls of egg-type pro-
cessed seaweed before it was time
to surrender their places to their
son's generation.

Then, as was the custom for
whoever had been most recently
disinherited, they began prepar-
ing Gramps' breakfast, which
would presently be served to him
in bed, on a tray. They tried to
be cheerful about it. The tough-
est part of the job was having
to handle the honest-to-God eggs
and bacon and oleomargarine,

106

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

on which Gramps spent so much
of the income from his fortune.

"Well," said Emerald, "I'm not
going to get all panicky until I'm
sure there's something to be pan-
icky about."

"Maybe he doesn't know what
it was I busted," Lou said hope-
fully.

"Probably thinks it was your
watch crystal," offered Eddie,
their son, who was toying apa-
thetically with his buckwheat-
type processed sawdust cakes.

"Don't get sarcastic with your
father," said Em, "and don't talk
with your mouth full, either."

"I'd like to see anybody take
a mouthful of this stuff and not
say something," complained Ed-
die, who was 73. He glanced at
the clock. "It's time to take
Gramps his breakfast, you
know."

"Yeah, it is, isn't it?" said Lou
weakly. He shrugged. "Let's have
the tray, Em."

"We'll both go."

Walking slowly, smiling brave-
ly, they found a large semi-circle
of long-faced Fords standing
around the bedroom door.

Em knocked. "Gramps," she
called brightly, "break-fast is
rea-dy."

There was no reply and she
knocked again, harder.

The door swung open before
her fist. In the middle of the
room, the soft, deep, wide, cano-

pied bed, the symbol of the sweet
by-and-by to every Ford, was
empty.

A sense of death, as unfamiliar
to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or
the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny,
stilled every voice, slowed every
heart. Awed, the heirs began to
search gingerly, under the furni-
ture and behind the drapes, for
all that was mortal of Gramps,
father of the clan.

¥>UT Gramps had left not his
■*-* Earthly husk but a note,
which Lou finally found on the
dresser, under a paperweight
which was a treasured souvenir
from the World's Fair of 2000.
Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:

" 'Somebody who I have shel-
tered and protected and taught
the best I know how all these
years last night turned on me
like a mad dog and diluted my
anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no
longer a young man. I can no
longer bear the crushing burden
of life as I once could. So, after
last night's bitter experience, I
say good-by. The cares of this
world will soon drop away like
a cloak of thorns and I shall
know peace. By the time you find
this, I will be gone.' "

"Gosh," said Willy brokenly,
"he didn't even get to see how
the 5000-mile Speedway Race
was going to come out."

"Or the Solar Series," Eddie

THE BIG TRIP UP YONDER

107

said, with large mournful eyes.

"Or whether Mrs. McGarvey
got her eyesight back," added
Morty.

"There's more," said Lou, and
he began reading aloud again:
"'I, Harold D. Ford, etc., do
hereby make, publish and declare
this to be my last Will and Testa-
ment, revoking any and all form-
er wills and codicils by me at
any time heretofore made.' "

"No!" cried Willy. "Not an-
other one!"

"'I do stipulate,'" read Lou,
" 'that all of my property, of
whatsoever kind and nature, not
be divided, but do devise and be-
queath it to be held in common
by my issue, without regard for
generation, equally, share and
share alike.' "

"Issue?" said Emerald.

Lou included the multitude in
a sweep of his hand. "It means
we all own the whole damn
shootin' match."

Each eye turned instantly to
the bed.

"Share and share alike?" asked
Morty.

"Actually," said Willy, who
was the oldest one present, "it's
just like the old system, where
the oldest people head up things
with their headquarters in here
and—"

"I like fhaf!" exclaimed Em.
"Lou owns as much of it as you
do, and I say it ought to be for

the oldest one who's still work-
ing. You can snooze around here
all day, waiting for your pension
check, while poor Lou stumbles
in here after work, all tuckered
out, and — "

"How about letting somebody
who's never had any privacy get
a little crack at it?" Eddie de-
manded hotly. "Hell, you old
people had plenty of privacy
back when you were kids. I was
born and raised in the middle of
that goddamn barracks in the
hall! How about—"

"Yeah?" challenged Morty.
"Sure, you've all had it pretty
tough, and my heart bleeds for
you. But try honeymooning in
the hall for a real kick."

"Silence!" shouted Willy im-
periously. "The next person who
opens his mouth spends the next
sixth months by the bathroom.
Now clear out of my room. I
want to think."

A vase shattered against the
wall, inches above his head.

IN the next moment, a free-
-■• for-all was under way, with
each couple battling to eject
every other couple from the room.
Fighting coalitions formed and
dissolved with the lightning
changes of the tactical situation.
Em and Lou were thrown into
the hall, where they organized
others in the same situation, and
stormed back into the room.

108

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

After two hours of struggle,
with nothing like a decision in
sight, the cops broke in, followed
by television cameramen from
mobile units.

For the next half -hour, patrol
wagons and ambulances hauled
away Fords, and then the apart-
ment was still and spacious,

An hour later, films of the last
stages of the riot were being tele-
vised to 500,000,000 delighted
viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.

In the stillness of the three-
room Ford apartment on the 76th
floor of Building 257, the tele-
vision set had been left on. Once
more the air was filled with the
cries and grunts and crashes of
the fray, coming harmlessly now
from the loudspeaker.

The battle also appeared on
the screen of the television set in
the police station, where the
Fords and their captors watched
with professional interest.

Em and Lou, in adjacent four-
by-eight cells, were stretched out
peacefully on their cots.

"Em," called Lou through the
partition, "you got a washbasin
all your own, too?"

"Sure. Washbasin, bed, light —
the works. And we thought
Cramps' room was something.
How long has this been going
on?" She held out her hand.
"For the first time in forty years,
hon, I haven't got the shakes —
look at me!"

"Cross your fingers," said Lou.
"The lawyer's going to try to
get us a year."

"Gee!" Em said dreamily. "I
wonder what kind of wires you'd
have to pull to get put away in
solitary?"

"All right, pipe down," said
the turnkey, "or I'll toss the
whole kit and caboodle of you
right out. And first one who lets
on to anybody outside how good
jail is ain't never getting back
in!"

The prisoners instantly fell
silent.

npHE living room of the apart -
■*- ment darkened for a moment
as the riot scenes faded on the
television screen, and then the
face of the announcer appeared,
like the Sun coming from behind
a cloud. "And now, friends," he
said, "I have a special message
from the makers of anti-gerasone,
a message for all you folks over
150. Are you hampered socially
by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints
and discoloration or loss of hair,
all because these things came
upon you before anti-gerasone
was developed? Well, if you are,
you need no longer suffer, need
no longer feel different and out
of things.

"After years of research, med-
ical science has now developed
Super-anti-gerasone ! In weeks —
yes, weeks — you can look, feel

THE BIG TRIP UP YONDER

109

and act as young as your great-
great-grandchildren! Wouldn't
you pay $5,000 to be indistin-
guishable from everybody else?
Well, you don't have to. Safe,
tested Super-anti-gerasone costs
you only a few dollars a day.

"Write now for your free trial
carton. Just put your name and
address on a dollar postcard, and
mail it to 'Super,' Box 500,000,
Schenectady, N. Y. Have you got
that? I'll repeat it. 'Super,' Box
500,000 . . ."

Underlining the announcer's
words was the scratching of
Gramps' pen, the one Willy had
given him the night before. He
had come in, a few minutes
earlier, from the Idle Hour Tav-
ern, which commanded a view of
Building 257 from across the
square of asphalt known as the
Alden Village Green. He had
called a cleaning woman to come
straighten the place up, then had
hired the best lawyer in town to

get his descendants a conviction,
a genius who had never gotten a
client less than a year and a day.
Gramps had then moved the day-
bed before the television screen,
so that he could watch from a
reclining position. It was some-
thing he'd dreamed of doing for
years.

"Schen-ec-ta-dy," murmured
Gramps. "Got it!" His face had
changed remarkably. His facial
muscles seemed to have relaxed,
revealing kindness and equanim-
ity under what had been taut
lines of bad temper. It was al-
most as though his trial package
of Super-anti-gerasone had al-
ready arrived. When something
amused him on television, he
smiled easily, rather than barely
managing to lengthen the thin
line of his mouth a millimeter.

Life was good. He could hardly
wait to see what was going to
happen next.

—KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

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GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

The holes

aroun

dMa

By JEROME BIXBY

Science said it could not be,
but there it was. And whoosh
— look out — here it is again!

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

SPACESHIP crews should
be selected on the basis of
their non-irritating quali-
ties as individuals. No chronic
complainers, no hypochondriacs,
no bugs on cleanliness — particu-
larly no one-man parties. I speak
from bitter experience.

Because on the first expedition
to Mars, Hugh Allenby damned

near drove us nuts with his puns.
We finally got so we just ignored
them.

But no one can ignore that
classic last one — it's written right
into the annals of astronomy,
and it's there to stay.

Allenby, in command of the
expedition, was first to set foot
outside the ship. As he stepped

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

111

down from the airlock of the
Mars I, he placed that foot on a
convenient rock, caught the toe
of his weighted boot in a hole in
the rock, wrenched his ankle and
smote the ground with his pants.
Sitting there, eyes pained be-
hind the transparent shield of his
oxygen-mask, he stared at the
rock.

TT was about five feet high. Or-
■*■ dinary granite — no special
shape — and several inches below
its summit, running straight
through it in a northeasterly di-
rection, was a neat round four-
inch hole.

"I'm upset by the hole thing,"
he grunted.

The rest of us scrambled out
of the ship and gathered around
his plump form. Only one or two
of us winced at his miserable
double pun.

"Break anything, Hugh?" ask-
ed Burton, our pilot, kneeling
beside him.

"Get out of my way, Burton,"
said Allenby. "You're obstruct-
ing my view."

Burton blinked. A man con-
structed of long bones and cau-
tion, he angled out of the way,
looking around to see what he
was obstructing view of.

He saw the rock and the round
hole through it. He stood very
still, staring. So did the rest of
us.

"Well, I'll be damned," said
Janus, our photographer. "A
hole."

"In a rock," added Gonzales,
our botanist.

"Round," said Randolph, our
biologist.

"An artifact," finished Allenby
softly.

Burton helped him to his feet.
Silently we gathered around the
rock.

Janus bent down and put' an
eye to one end of the hole. I
bent down and looked through
the other end. We squinted at
each other.

As mineralogist, I was expect-
ed to opinionate. "Not drilled,"
I said slowly. "Not chipped. Not
melted. Certainly not eroded."

I heard a rasping sound by my
ear and straightened. Burton was
scratching a thumbnail along the
rim of the hole. "Weathered," he
said. "Plenty old. But I'll bet it's
a perfect circle, if we measure."

Janus was already fiddling with
his camera, testing the coopera-
tion of the tiny distant sun with
a light-meter.

"Let us see weather it is or not,"
Allenby said.

nURTON brought out a steel
-" tape-measure. The hole was
four and three-eighths inches
across. It was perfectly circular
and about sixteen inches long.
And four feet above the ground.

112

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"But why?" said Randolph.
"Why should anyone bore a four-
inch tunnel through a rock way
out in the middle of the desert?"

"Religious symbol," said Jan-
us. He looked around, one hand
on his gun. "We'd better keep an
eye out — maybe we've landed on
sacred ground or something."

"A totem hole, perhaps," Al-
lenby suggested.

"Oh, I don't know," Randolph
said — to Janus, not Allenby. As
I've mentioned, we always ignor-
ed Allenby's puns. "Note the
lack of ornamentation. Not at all
typical of religious articles."

"On Earth," Gonzales remind-
ed him. "Besides, it might be
utilitarian, not symbolic."

"Utilitarian, how?" asked Jan-
us.

"An altar for snakes," Burton
said dryly. *

"Well," said Allenby, "you
can't deny that it has its holy
aspects."

"Get your hand away, will you,
Peters?" asked Janus.

I did. When Janus's camera
had clicked, I bent again and
peered through the hole. "It sights
on that low ridge over there," I
said. "Maybe it's some kind of
surveying setup. I'm going to
take a look."

"Careful," warned Janus. "Re-
member, it may be sacred."

As I walked away, I heard Al-
lenby say, "Take some scrapings

from the inside of the hole, Gon-
zales. We might be able to de-
termine if anything is kept in
it. . ."

One of the stumpy, purplish,
barrel-type cacti on the ridge
had a long vertical bite out of it
... as if someone had carefully
carved out a narrow U-shaped
section from the top down, finish-
ing the bottom of the U in a
neat semicircle. It was as flat
and cleancut as the inside sur-
face of a horseshoe magnet.

I hollered. The others came
running. I pointed.

"Oh, my God!" said Allenby.
"Another one."

The pulp of the cactus in and
around the U-hole was dried and
dead-looking.

Silently Burton used his tape-
measure. The hole measured four
and three-eighths inches across.
It was eleven inches deep. The
semicircular bottom was about a
foot above the ggound.

"This ridge." I said, "is about
three feet higher than where we
landed the ship. I bet th? hole
in the rock and the hole in this
cactus are on the same level."

^ ONZALES said slowly, "This
^-^ was not done all at once.
It is a result of periodic attacks.
Look here and here. These over-
lapping depressions along the
outer edges of the., hole — " he
poihted — "on this side of the

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

113

cactus. They are the signs of
repeated impact. And the scallop
effect on this side, where what-
ever made the hole emerged.
There are juices still oozing —
not at the point of impact, where
the plant is desiccated, but below,
where the shock was transmit-
ted—"

A distant shout turned us
around. Burton was at the rock,
beside the ship. He was bending
down, his eye to the far side of

the mysterious hole.

He looked for another second,
then straightened and came to-
ward us at a lope.

"They line up," he said when
he reached us. "The bottom of
the hole in the cactus is right
in the middle when you sight
through the hole in the rock."

"As if somebody came around
and whacked the cactus regular-
ly." Janus said, looking around
warily.

114

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

"To keep the line of sight
through the holes clear?" I won-
dered. "Why not just remove
the cactus?"

"Religious," Janus explained.

The gauntlet he had discarded
lay ignored on the ground, in
the shadow of the cactus. We
went on past the ridge toward an
outcropping of rock about a hun-
dred yards farther on. We walk-
ed silently, each of us wondering
if what we half-expected would

really be there.

It was. In one of the tall, wea-
thered spires in the outcropping,
some ten feet below its peak and
four feet above the ground, was
a round four-inch hole.

Allenby sat down on a rock,
nursing his ankle, and remarked
that anybody who believed this
crazy business was really hap-
pening must have holes in the
rocks in his head.

Burton put his eye to the hole

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

115

and whistled. "Sixty feet long
if it's an inch," he said. "The
other end's just a pinpoint. But
you can see it. The damn thing's
perfectly straight."

I looked back the way we had
come. The cactus stood on the
ridge, with its U-shaped bite,
and beyond was the ship, and
beside it the perforated rock.

"If we surveyed," I said, "I
bet the holes would all line up
right to the last millimeter."

"But," Randolph complained,
"why would anybody go out and
bore holes in things all along a
line through the desert?"

"Religious," Janus muttered.
"It doesn't have to make sense."

WE stood there by the out-
cropping and looked out
along the wide, red desert be-
yond. It stretched flatly for miles
from this point, south toward
Mars' equator — dead sandy
wastes, crisscrossed by the "can-
als," which we had observed
while landing to be great straggly
patches of vegetation, probably
strung along underground water-
flows.

BLONG-G-G-G- . . . sr -
sr-sf- . . .

We jumped half out of our
skins. Ozone bit at our nostrils.
Our hair stirred in the electrical
uproar.

"L - look," Janus chattered,
lowering his smoking gun.

About forty feet to our left, a
small rabbity creature poked its
head from behind a rock and
stared at us in utter horror.

Janus raised his gun again.

"Don't bother," said Allenby
tiredly. "I don't think it intends
to attack."

"But—"

"I'm sure it isn't a Martian
with religious convictions."

Janus wet his lips and looked
a little shamefaced. "I guess I'm
kind of taut."

"That's what I taut," said Al-
lenby.

The creature darted from be-
hind its rock and, looking at us
over its shoulder, employed six
legs to make small but very
fast tracks.

We turned our attention again
to the desert. Far out, black
against Mars' azure horizon, was
a line of low hills.

"Shall we go look?" asked
Burton, eyes gleaming at the mys-
tery.

Janus hefted his gun nervous-
ly. It was still crackling faintly
from the discharge. "I say let's
get back to the ship!"

Allenby sighed. "My leg
hurts." He studied the hills.
"Give me the field-glasses."

Randolph handed them over.
Allenby put them to the shield of
his mask and adjusted them.

After a moment he sighed
again. "There's a hole. On a

116

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

plane surface that catches the
Sun. A lousy damned round little
impossible hole."

"Those hills," Burton observ-
ed, "must be thousands of feet
thick."

rpHE argument lasted all the
■*■ way back to the ship.

Janus, holding out for his be-
lief that the whole thing was of
religious origin, kept looking
around for Martians as if he ex-
pected them to pour screaming
from the hills.

Burton came up with the sug-
gestion that perhaps the holes
had been made by a disintegra-
tor-ray.

"It's possible," Allenby admit-
ted. "This might have been the
scene of some great battle — "

"With only one such weapon?"
I objected.

Allenby swore as he stumbled.
"What do you mean?"

"I haven't seen any other lines
of holes — only the one. In a bat-
tle, the whole joint should be cut
up.

That was good for a few mo-
ments' silent thought. Then Al-
lenby said, "It might have been
brought out by one side as a last
resort. Sort of an ace in the hole."

I resisted the temptation to
mutiny. "But would even one
such weapon, in battle make
only one line of holes? Wouldn't
it be played in an arc against the

enemy? You know it would."

"Well—"

"Wouldn't it cut slices out of
the landscape, instead of boring
holes? And wouldn't it sway or
vibrate enough to make the holes
miles away from it something
less than perfect circles?"

"It could have been very firm-
ly mounted."

"Hugh, does that sound like a
practical weapon to you?"

Two seconds of silence. "On
the other hand," he said, "instead
of a war, the whole thing might
have been designed to frighten
some primitive race — or even
some kind of beast — the hole out
of here. A demonstration — "

"Religious," Janus grumbled,
still looking around.

We walked on, passing the cac-
tus on the low ridge.

"Interesting," said Gonzales.
"The evidence that whatever
causes the phenomenon has hap-
pened again and again. I'm
afraid that the war theory — "

"Oh, my God!" gasped Burton.

We stared at him.

"The ship," he whispered. "It's
right in line with the holes! If
whatever made them is still in
operation. . ."

"Run!" yelled Allenby, and we
ran like fiends.

WE got the ship into the air,
out of line with the holes
to what we fervently hoped was

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

117

safety, and then we realized we
were admitting our fear that the
mysterious hole-maker might still
be lurking around.

Well, the evidence was all for
it, as Gonzales had reminded
us — that cactus had been oozing.

We cruised at twenty thousand
feet and thought it over.

Janus, whose only training was
in photography, said, "Some
kind of omnivorous animal? Or
bird? Eats rocks and every-
thing?"

"I will not totally discount the
notion of such an animal," Ran-
dolph said. "But I will resist to
the death the suggestion that it
forages with geometric preci-
sion."

After a while, Allenby said,
"Land, Burton. By that 'canal.'
Lots of plant life — fauna, too.
We'll do a little collecting."

Burton set us down feather -
light at the very edge of the
sprawling flat expanse of vegeta-
tion, commenting that the scene
reminded him of his native Texas
pear-fiats.

We wandered in the chilly air,
each of us except Burton pur-
suing his specialty. Randolph re-
lentlessly stalked another of the
rabbity creatures. Gonzales was
carefully digging up plants and
stowing them in jars. Janus
was busy with his cameras, re-
cording every aspect of Mars
transferable to film. Allenby

walked around, helping anybody
who needed it. An astronomer,
he'd done half his work on the
way to Mars and would do the
other half on the return trip.
Burton lounged in the Sun, his
back against a ship's fin, and
played chess with Allenby, who
was calling out his moves in a
bull roar. I grubbed for rocks.

My search took me farther and
farther away from the others —
all I could find around the 'canal'
was gravel, and I wanted to chip
at some big stuff. I walked to-
ward a long rise a half-mile or
so away, beyond which rose an
enticing array of house-sized
boulders.

As I moved out of earshot, I
heard Randolph snarl, "Burton,
will you stop yelling, "Kt to B-2
and check?' Every time you open
your yap, this Gritter takes off on
me."

Then I saw the groove.

FT started right where the
■*• ground began to rise — a thin,
shallow, curve -bottomed groove
in the dirt at my feet, about half
an inch across, running off
straight toward higher ground.

With my eyes glued to it, I
walked. The ground slowly rose.
The groove deepened, widened —
now it was about three inches
across, about one and a half
deep.

I walked on, holding my

118

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

breath. Four inches wide. Two
inches deep.

The ground rose some more.
Four and three-eighths inches
wide. I didn't have to measure
it — I knew.

Now, as the ground rose, the
edges of the groove began to
curve inward over the groove.
They touched. No more groove.

The ground had risen, the
grove had stayed level and gone
underground.

Except that now it wasn't a
groove. It was a round tunnel.

A hole.

A few paces farther on, I
thumped the ground with my
heel where the hole ought to be.
The dirt crumbled, and there
was the little dark tunnel, run-
ning straight in both directions.

I walked on, the ground falling
away gradually again. The en-
tire process was repeated in re-
verse. A hairline appeared in
the dirt — widened — became lips
that drew slowly apart to reveal
the neat straight four-inch
groove — which shrank as slowly
to a shallow line of the ground —
and vanished.

I looked ahead of me. There
was one low ridge of ground
between me and the enormous
boulders. A neat four-inch semi-
circle was bitten out of the very
top of the ridge. In the house-
sized boulder directly beyond
was a four-inch hole.

A LLENBY winced and called
•^*- the others when I came back
and reported.

"The mystery deepens," he
told them. He turned to me.
"Lead on, Peters. You're tempor-
ary drill leader."

Thank God he didn't say Fall
in.

The holes went straight
through the nest of boulders —
there'd be a hole in one and, ten
or twenty feet farther on in the
next boulder, another hole. And
then another, and another — right
through the nest in a line. About
thirty holes in all.

Burton, standing by-the boul-
der I'd first seen, flashed his
flashlight into the hole. Ran-
dolph, clear on the other side of
the jumbled nest, eye to hole,
saw it.

Straight as a string!

The ground sloped away on
the far side of the nest — no holes
were visible in that direction —
just miles of desert. So, after
we'd stared at the holes for a
while and they didn't go away,
we headed back for the canal.

"Is there any possibility," ask-
ed Janus, as we walked, "that it
could be a natural phenomen-
on?"

"There are no straight lines
in nature," Randolph said, a
little shortly. "That goes for a
bunch of circles in a straight line.
And for perfect circles, too."

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

119

"A planet is a circle," objected
Janus.

"An oblate spheroid," Allenby
corrected.

"A planet's orbit — "

"An ellipse."

Janus walked a few steps,
frowning. Then he said, "I re-
member reading that there is
something darned near a perfect
circle in nature." He paused a
moment. "Potholes." And he
looked at me, as mineralogist,
to corroborate.

"What kind of potholes?" I
asked cautiously. "Do you mean
where part of a limestone deposit
has dissol — "

"No. I once read that when a
glacier passes over a hard rock
that's lying on some softer rock,
it grinds the hard rock down into
the softer, and both of them sort
of wear down to fit together, and
it all ends up with a round hole
in the soft rock."

"Probably neither stone," I
told Janus, "would be homogen-
ous. The softer parts would
abrade faster in the soft stone.
The end result wouldn't be a
perfect circle."

Janus's face fell.

"Now," I said, "would anyone
care to define this term 'perfect
circle' we're throwing around so
blithely? Because such holes as
Janus describes are often pretty
damned round."

Randolph said, "Well . . ."

"It is settled, then," Gonzales
said, a little sarcastically. "Your
discussion, gentlemen, has estab-
lished that the long, horizontal
holes we have found were caused
by glacial action."

"Oh, no," Janus argued seri-
ously. "I once read that Mars
never had any glaciers."

All of us shuddered.

TTALF an hour later, we spot-
■*■•*• ted more holes, about a mile
down the 'canal,' still on a line,
marching along the desert,
through cacti, rocks, hills, even
through one edge of the low vege-
tation of the 'canal' for thirty
feet or so. It was the damnedest
thing to bend down and look
straight through all that curling,
twisting growth ... a round tun-
nel from either end.

We followed the holes for
about a mile, to the rim of an
enormous saucerlike valley that
sank gradually before us until,
miles away, it was thousands of
feet deep. We stared out across it,
wondering about the other side.

Allenby said determinedly,
"We'll burrow to the bottom of
these holes, once and for all.
Back to the ship, men!"

We hiked back, climbed in and
took off.

At an altitude of fifty feet,
Burton lined the nose of the ship
on the most recent line of holes
and we flew out over the valley.

120

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

On the other side was a range
of hefty hills. The holes went
through them. Straight through.
We would approach one hill —
Burton would manipulate the
front viewscreen until we spotted
the hole — we would pass over
the hill and spot the other end
of the hole in the rear screen.

One hole was two hundred
and eighty miles long.

Four hours later, we were half-
way around Mars.

Randolph was sitting by a
side port, chin on one hand, his
eyes unbelieving. "All around the
planet," he kept repeating. "All
around the planet. . ."

"Halfway at least," Allenby
mused. "And we can assume that
it continues in a straight line,
through anything and everything
that gets in its way. . ." He
gazed out the front port at the
uneven blue-green haze of a
'canal' off to our left. "For the
love of Heaven, why?"

Then Allenby fell down. We
all did.

Burton had suddenly slapped
at the control board, and the
ship braked and sank like a
plugged duck. At the last second,
Burton propped up the nose with
a short burst, the ten-foot wheels
hit desert sand and in five hun-
dred yards we had jounced to a
stop.

Allenby got up from the floor.
"Why did you do that?" he

asked Burton politely, nursing a
bruised elbow.

Burton's nose was almost
touching the front port. "Look!"
he said, and pointed.

About two miles away, the
Martian village looked like a
handful of yellow marbles flung
on the desert.

WE checked our guns. We put
on our oxygen-masks. We
checked our guns again. We got
out of the ship and made damned
sure the airlock was locked.

An hour later, we crawled
inch by painstaking inch up a
high sand dune and poked our
heads over the top.

The Martians were runts — the
tallest of them less than five
feet tall — and skinny as a pencil.
Dried-up and brown, they wore
loincloths of woven fiber.

They stood among the dusty-
looking inverted -bowl buildings
of their village, and every one
of them was looking straight up
at us with unblinking brown
eyes.

The six safeties of our six
guns clicked off like a rattle of
dice. The Martians stood there
and gawped.

"Probably a highly developed
sense of hearing in this thin at-
mosphere," Allenby murmured.
"Heard us coming."

"They thought that landing of
Burton's was an earthquake,"

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

121

Randolph grumbled sourly.

"Marsquake," corrected Janus.
One look at the village's scrawny
occupants seemed to have con-
vinced him that his life was in
no danger.

Holding the Martians covered,
we examined the village from
atop the thirty -foot dune.

The domelike buildings were
constructed of something that
looked like adobe. No windows —
probably built with sandstorms
in mind. The doors were about
halfway up the sloping sides, and
from each door a stone ramp
wound down around the house to
the ground — again with sand- .
storms in mind, no doubt, so
drifting dunes wouldn't block
the entrances.

The center of the village was
a wide street, a long sandy
area some thirty feet wide. On
either side of it, the houses were
scattered at random, as if each
Martian had simply hunted for
a comfortable place to sit and
then built a house around it.

"Look," whispered Randolph.

One Martian had stepped from
a group situated on the far side
of the street from us. He started
to cross the street, his round
brown eyes on us, his small bare
feet plodding sand, and we saw
that in addition to a loincloth he
wore jewelry — a hammered
metal ring, a bracelet on one
skinny ankle. The Sun caught

a copperish gleam on his bald
narrow head, and we saw a band
of metal there, just above where
his eyebrows should have been.

"The super-chief," Allenby
murmured. "Oh, shaman me!"

As the bejeweled Martian ap-
proached the center of the street,
he glanced briefly at the ground
at his feet. Then he raised his
head, stepped with dignity across
the exact center of the street
and came on toward us, passing
the dusty-looking buildings of
his realm and the dusty-looking
groups of his subjects.

He reached the slope of the
dune we lay on, paused — and
raised small hands over his head,
palms toward us.

"I think," Allenby said, "that
an anthropologist would give
odds on that gesture meaning
peace."

He stood up, holstered his
gun — without buttoning the flap
— and raised his own hands over
his head. We all did.

HPHE Martian language con-
-*- sisted of squeaks.

We made friendly noises, the
chief squeaked and pretty soon
we were the center of a group
of wide-eyed Martians, none of
whom made a sound. Evidently
no one dared peep while the chief
spoke — very likely the most ar-
ticulate Martians simply squeak-
ed themselves into the job. Al-

122

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

lenby, of course, said they just
squeaked by.

He was going through the bus-
iness of drawing concentric cir-
cles in the sand, pointing at the
third orbit away from the Sun
and thumping his chest. The
crowd around us kept growing
as more Martians emerged from
the dome buildings to see what
was going on. Down the winding
ramps of the buildings on our
side of the wide, sandy street
they came — and from the build-
ings on the other side of the
street, plodding through the
sand, blinking brown eyes at us,
not making a sound.

Allenby pointed at the third
orbit and thumped his chest. The
chief squeaked and thumped his
own chest and pointed at the
copperish band around his head.
Then he pointed at Allenby.

"I seem to have conveyed to
him," Allenby said dryly, "the
fact that I'm chief of our party.
Well, let's try again."

He started over on the orbits.
He didn't seem to be getting any-
place, so the rest of us watched
the Martians instead. A last
handful was straggling across the
wide street.

"Curious," said Gonzales.
"Note what happens when they
reach the center of the street."

Each Martian, upon reaching
the center of the street, glanced
at his feet — just for a moment —

without even breaking stride. And
then came on.

"What can they be looking
at?" Gonzales wondered.

"The chief did it too," Burton
mused. "Remember when he first
came toward us?"

We all stared intently at the
middle of the street. We saw
absolutely nothing but sand.

The Martians milled around
us and watched Allenby and his
orbits. A Martian child appeared
from between two buildings
across the street. On six-inch
legs, it started across, got half-
way, glanced downward — and
came on.

"I don't get it," Burton said.
"What in hell are they looking
at?"

The child reached the crowd
and squeaked a thin, high note.

A number of things happened
at once.

OEVERAL members of the
^ group around us glanced
down, and along the edge of the
crowd nearest the center of the
street there was a mild stir as
individuals drifted off to either
side. Quite casually — nothing at
all urgent about it. They just
moved concertedly to get farther
away from the center of the
street, not taking their interested
gaze off us for one second in the
process.

Even the chief glanced up from

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

123

Allenby's concentric circles at the
child's squeak. And Randolph,
who had been fidgeting uncom-
fortably and paying very little
attention to our conversation, de-
cided that he must answer Na-
ture's call. He moved off into the
dunes surrounding the village.
Or rather, he started to move.

The moment he set off across
the wide street, the little Martian
chief was in front of him, brown
eyes wide, hands out before him
as if to thrust Randolph back.

Again six safeties clicked. The
Martians didn't even blink at
the sudden appearance of our
guns. Probably the only weapon
they recognized was a club, or
maybe a rock.

"What can the matter be?"
Randolph said.

He took another step forward.
The chief squeaked and stood
his ground. Randolph had to
stop or bump into him. Ran-
dolph stopped.

The chief squeaked, looking
right into the bore of Randolph's
gun.

"Hold still," Allenby told Ran-
dolph, "till we know what's up."

Allenby made an interrogative
sound at the chief. The chief
squeaked and pointed at the
ground. We looked. He was
pointing at his shadow.

Randolph stirred uncomfor-
tably.

"Hold still," Allenby warned

him, and again he made the
questioning sound.

The chief pointed up the
street. Then he pointed down the
street. He bent to touch his sha-
dow, thumping it with thin fin-
gers. Then he pointed at the wall
of a house nearby.

We all looked.

Straight lines had been painted
on the curved brick-colored wall,
up and down and across, to form
many small squares about four
inches across. In each square was
a 'bit of squiggly writing, in
blackish paint, and a small
wooden peg jutting out from the
wall.

Burton said, "Looks like a
damn crossword puzzle."

"Look," said Janus. "In the
lower right corner — a metal ring
hanging from one of the pegs."

A ND that was all we saw on
**■ the wall. Hundreds of
squares with figures in them — a
small peg set in each — and a ring
hanging on one of the pegs.

"You know what?" Allenby
said slowly. "I think it's a cal-
endar! Just a second — thirty
squares wide by twenty-two
high — that's six hundred and
sixty. And that bottom line has
twenty - six — twenty - seven
squares. Six hundred and eighty-
seven squares in all. That's how
many days there are in the Mar-
tian year!"

124

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

He looked thoughtfully at the
metal ring. "I'll bet that ring is
hanging from the peg in the
square that represents today.
They must move it along every
day, to keep track. . ."

"What's a calendar got to do
with my crossing the street?"
Randolph asked in a pained tone.

He started to take another
step. The chief squeaked as if it
were a matter of desperate, con-
cern that he make us understand.
Randolph stopped again and
swore impatiently.

Allenby made his questioning
sound again.

The chief pointed emphatical-
ly at his shadow, then at the
communal calendar — and we
could see now that he was point-
ing at the metal ring.

Burton said slowly, "I think
he's trying to tell us that this is
today. And such-and-such a
time of day. I bet he's using his
shadow as a sundial."

"Perhaps," Allenby granted.

Randolph said, "If this mon-
key doesn't let me go in another
minute — "

The chief squeaked, eyes con-
cerned.

"Stand still," Allenby ordered.
"He's trying to warn you of some
danger."

The chief pointed down the
street again and, instead of
squealing, revealed that there
was another sound at his com-

mand. He said, "Whooooooosh!"
We all stared at the end of the
street.

"VTOTHING! Just the wide av-
■^ ' enue between the houses,
and the high sand dune down at
the end of it, from which we had
first looked upon the village.

The chief described a large
circle with one hand, sweeping
the hand above his head, down to
his knees, up again, as fast as he
could. He pursed his monkey-
lips and said, "Whooooooosh!"
And made the circle again.

A Martian emerged from the
door in the side of a house across
the avenue and blinked at the
Sun, as if he had just awakened.
Then he saw what was going on
below and blinked again, this
time in interest. He made his
way down around the winding
lamp and started to cross the
street.

About halfway, he paused,
eyed the calendar on the house
wall, glanced at his shadow.
Then he got down on his hands
and knees and crawled across the
middle of the street. Once past
the middle, he rose, walked the
rest of the way to join one of
the groups and calmly stared at
us along with the rest of them.
"They're all crazy," Randolph
said disgustedly. "I'm going to
cross that street!"

"Shut up. So it's a certain time

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

125

of a certain day," Allenby mus-
ed. "And from the way the chief
is acting, he's afraid for you to
cross the street. And that other
one just crawled. By God, do you
know what this might tie in
with?"

We were silent for a moment.
Then Gonzales said, "Of course!"

And Burton said, "The holes!"

"Exactly," said Allenby.
"Maybe whatever made — or
makes — the holes comes right
down the center of the street
here. Maybe that's why they
built the village this way — to
make room for — "

"For what?" Randolph asked
unhappily, shifting his feet.

"I don't know," Allenby said.
He looked thoughtfully at the
chief. "That circular motion he
made — could he have been de-
scribing something that went
around and around the planet?
Something like — oh, no!" Allen-
by's eyes glazed. "I wouldn't be-
lieve it in a million years."

His gaze went to the far end of
the street, to the high sand dune
that rose there. The chief seemed
to be waiting for something to
happen.

"I'm going to crawl," Ran-
dolph stated. He got to his hands
and knees and began to creep
across the center of the avenue.

The chief let him go.

The sand dune at the end of
the street suddenly erupted. A

forty-foot spout of dust shot
straight out from the sloping
side, as if a bullet had emerged.
Powdered sand hazed the air,
yellowed it almost the full length
of the avenue. Grains of sand
stung the skin and rattled min-
utely on the houses.

WhoooSSSHHHHH!

Randolph dropped flat on his
belly. He didn't have to continue
his trip. He had made other ar-
rangements.

rpHAT night in the ship, while
•*- we all sat around, still shak-
ing our heads every once in a
while, Allenby talked with Earth.
He sat there, wearing the head-
phones, trying to make himself
understood above the godawful
static.

". . . an exceedingly small
body," he repeated wearily to his
unbelieving audience, "about
four inches in diameter. It travels
at a mean distance of four feet
above the surface of the planet,
at a velocity yet to be calculated.
Its unique nature results in many
hitherto unobserved — I might
say even unimagined — phenom-
ena." He stared blankly in front
of him for a moment, then de-
livered the understatement of his
life. "The discovery may neces-
sitate a re-examination of many
of our basic postulates in the
physical sciences."

The headphones squawked.

126

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

Patiently, Allenby assured
Earth that he was entirely seri-
ous, and reiterated the results of
his observations. I suppose that
he, an astronomer, was twice as
flabbergasted as the rest of us.
On the other hand, perhaps he
was better equipped to adjust to
the evidence.

"Evidently," he said, "when
the body was formed, it traveled
at such fantastic velocity as to
enable it to — " his voice was al-
most a whisper — "to punch holes
in things."

The headphones squawked.

"In rocks," Allenby said, "in
mountains, in anything that got
in its way. And now the holes
form a large portion of its fixed
orbit."

Squawk.

"Its mass must be on the order
of—"

Squawk.

" — process of making the holes
slowed it, so that now it travels
just fast enough — "

Squawk.

" — maintain its orbit and pene-

, trate occasional objects such
as—"

Squawk.

" — and sand dunes — "

Squawk.

"My God, I know it's a mathe-
matical monstrosity," Allenby
snarled. "J didn't put it there!"

Squawk.

Allenby was silent for a mo-
ment. Then he said slowly, "A
name?"

Squawk.

"H'm," said Allenby. "Well,
well." He appeared to brighten
just a little. "So it's up to me, as
leader of the expedition, to name
it?"

Squawk.

"Well, well," he said.

That chop-licking tone was in
his voice. We'd heard it all too
often before. We shuddered,
waiting.

"Inasmuch as Mars' outermost
moon is called Deimos, and the
next Phobos," he said, "I think
I shall name the third moon of
Mars — Bottomos."

—JEROME BIXBY

The Big

News Next Month . . .

BEEP

by James Blish— something new and

exciting

time stories!

MEN

LIKE MULES by J. T. M'lntosh-a

novel and

suspenseful

slant on

the end of the world!

THE HOLES AROUND MARS

127

GALAXY'S

5 $ tar sh eK

CHILDHOOD'S END by Arthur
C. Clarke. Ballantine Books, Inc.,
New York, 1953. 214 pages, $2.00
cloth, 35^ paper

TT'OR a fascinating, uncomfort-
■■■ able — and unforgettable — ex-
perience, I recommend this
strange book. Two months ago I
reviewed Clarke's happy fairy
tale, Against the Fall of Night,
which peered into the misty fu-

ture to a rebirth of mankind
after millenia of desuetude. Now
I want to introduce you to his
weirdly fatalistic picture of the
imminent transmogrification of
Homo sapiens, the children of
the book's title. It is the far other
end of the Clarkean gamut — from
simple A to Z x 10 100 !

Just as the United States and
Russia are about to launch their
competing spaceships, the Over-

128

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

lords arrive from some unimagin-
able star system, making human
efforts at interplanetary travel
look like nine cents. The Over-
lords see to it that peace breaks
out, standards of living for all
improve dramatically, comfort
and security and leisure arrive
post-haste. But no one knows
who the Overlords are or what
they want here on Earth.

Decades later, one daring
youth smuggles aboard an Over-
lord interstellar vessel, knowing
it probably will be 80 years ob-
jective time, though only six
months subjective, before he re-
turns. However, he insists on go-
ing so he can find out what there
v is to know about the Earth's
benevolent but autocratic Mas-
ters.

No sooner has he left than a
completely unprecedented event
takes place — an event for which
the Overlords had been sent by
their Overlords to prepare — and
when he returns, the world of
Men that he knew is utterly and
forever gone. He becomes the
Last Man on Earth.

But this capsule outline of the
plot cannot even remotely sug-
gest the richness, the variety, the
maturity and the emotional dark-
ness of this book. I am sure it
will be compared with some of
Stapledon's works — unfairly to
both authors, since resemblances
are only on the surface and

Clarke tells a much better story
than Stapledon ever could.

But the sense of the Enormous
— in space, in time, in thought —
are similar in both writers. And
while Clarke's pessimism is
double-barreled in that it has a
glorious side to it, it nevertheless
is a pessimism that makes one
think of Lasf and First Men more
than once.

The book is a continuous ex-
citement, a continuous kaleido-
scope of the unexpected. That it
is also sometimes a bit wearing
because of the enormousness of
its concepts and their essentially
beyond-science nature is not sur-
prising, nor is it a basic defect.
It only makes you put the book
down once in a while to gasp
for breath. In all, it is a formid-
ably impressive job.

THE TIME MASTERS by Wil-
son Tucker. Rinehart and Co.,
New York, 1953. 249 pages, $2.50

rpUCKER'S best science fiction
-*- to date has an idea as old as
the genre itself, but a sufficiently
fresh approach to give it high
merit as a fast-moving science-
adventure-detective story.

A "man with no past" turns
up at Oak Ridge and drives its
secret counterspy organization
crazy with his seemingly point-
less activities. There is a murder
of a physicist, a fascinating Wo-

• • • • * SHELF

129

man of Mystery who was the
physicist's wife, and a whole
passel of other tasty ingredients.

Mixed in with all this is a
sub-story of an "alien invasion,"
the result of a spaceship wreck
many thousands of years ago,
and a fantastic "explanation" of
the ancient Gilgamesh Epic of a
hero in search of immortality. As
the tale progresses, these threads
are cleverly woven together until
at the end there is a completely
logical, though highly surprising,
unity.

First rate science fiction thrill-
er, well-written and sharply
paced— in a field where good
mystery stories are rare.

THE END OF THE WORLD
by Kenneth Heuer. Illustrated by
Chesley Bonestell. Rinehart and
Co., Inc., New York, 1953. 220
pages, $3.00

TF any of our readers want to
•*■ know how astrologists and
philosophers in the past, and
astronomers and physicists to-
day, think the world will end,
this little book is for them.

The author has collected a
miscellany of purely supersti-
tious, pseudo-religious ideas from
the past concerning world's end,
and has added a series of chap-
ters on the "scientific" likelihood
of terrestrial finis being accom-
plished by comet, Moon, asteroid

and star collisions, explosion or
death of the Sun — and atomic
war, only the last of which he
deems possible within the fore-
seeable future. This end he be-
lieves is more than likely, through
explosion of a series of hydrogen
bombs with secondary radiation
poisonings of the atmosphere.

Most of the book is time-pass-
ing extrapolation, but the chapter
on atomic war is a powerful plea
for peace as the only way of
avoiding a Man-made "end of
the world."

The Bonestell plates, first pub-
lished in Coronet in July, 1947,
are fine imaginative drawings
that really need full color to be
completely effective. But even in
black and white they are worth
having in your collection.

O KING, LIVE FOREVER by
Henry Myers. Crown Publishers,
Inc., New York, 1953. 214 pages,
$3.00

TTERE is a queer one. It's not
-'-•*■ science fiction even though it
is about the "science" of indefi-
nitely prolonging lives. And yet it
is science fiction, too, even though
there's hardly a gadget in the
whole book except railroads,
which play a moderately maca-
bre part in the plot.

It's the story of an Anglican
parson, from the day around 1850
when at the age of three and a

130

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

half he heard a doctor pronounce
him not long for this world and
thereupon decided to fool every-
one and live long, down through
the odd period when Darwin and
his followers were smashing the
idols of Fundamentalism and the
archeologists were uncovering the
library of Ashur-banipall and
translating the Epic of Gilgamesh
(strange to hit that ancient item
twice in one month — see the re-
view of Tucker's book, above)
with its legends of the long-lived
Ancients, to the present, when the
parson hero, thinly disguised as
"The Old Gentleman," meets up
with the story's narrator and the
narrator finally meets up with
the O.G.'s daughter and marries
her. (Deep breath, please.) The
Old Gent, incidentally, is well
over a hundred, though he looks
no more than a ruddy fifty-two.

That's all there is to it, except
for some rather romantically
melodramatic plotting about Vic-
torian morals and the "ethics"
of the Church of England in
the 19th Century.

The fascinating thing about the
book is that it makes you feel
that its scientific speculations on
prolonging life are real, imme-
diate, and up to you — you, in-
dividually. You can will yourself
to live longer if you go about it
the right way!

I think you'll like this most
unusual and well-done novel, de-

spite its being utterly unlike any-
thing else in modern fantasy.

AHEAD OF TIME by Henry
Kuttner. Ballantine Books, New
York, 1953. 177 pages, $2.00
cloth, 35^ paper

HPEN top tales, by one who to-
■*■ day is too little seen in the
science fiction magazines, are
here set before you in another of
Ballantine's low-priced originals.
Of the ten, three appeared during
the past two years, six between
1942 and 1948, and one new one.

There is "Or Else," a gem
about the man from space who
tried to persuade a couple of
Mexican feuders to declare peace
— with hilarious results. There is
a fine Hogben tale from 1948
(only Kuttner aficionados will
know what a Hogben tale is;
everyone else will have to read
"Pile of Trouble" to find out)
and a chiller named "Shock" that
has to do with a person from the
far future and a person from to-
day and what happens when they
mix it up in today's person's
apartment.

Many readers may remember
the superb "Camouflage," from
eight years ago, about the human
"transplant" that defeats an at-
tempt to hijack an atomic pile
being taken to Callisto, and ev-
eryone will want to read the new
item, "Year Day," which de-

* • • • * SHELF

131

scribes as our future a Gehenna
of advertising techniques that
makes a minute of silence the
most valuable program an ad-
vertiser can buy on the air.

Five other fine tales complete
the roster. One of them, "Home
Is the Hunter," appeared in this
magazine.

POCKET ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF ATOMIC ENERGY by
Frank Gaynor. Philosophical Li-
brary, New York, n.d. 204 pages,
$7.50

rpHE publication in this coun-
■*■ try of Gaynor's encyclopedia,
first issued in England in 1950, is
an important service to scientists
working in the fields of nuclear
physics, chemistry and engineer-
ing, even though it is already
somewhat out of date. It is not
a book for the layman, but never-
theless it deserves mention be-
cause it is such a valuable con-
tribution to the bibliography on
atomic energy. ,

Though it is basically British
in orientation, this is hardly a
defect. American scientists have
here a source for British defini-
tions through which their own
terminology can be coordinated
with that of their co-workers
overseas.

FLIGHT INTO YESTERDAY
by Charles L. Harness. Bouregy

and Curl, Inc., New York, 1953.
256 pages, $2.75

|^HARLES L. Harness' first
^* long piece of science fiction
is so far from being believable
that one reads it purely as a
sort of berserk fairy tale, por-
tentous and at the same time
dull. It is, however, pretty aston-
ishing if only because of the
cauldronful of ideas and fantasies
that are mixed up in it.

The tale tells of Alar the
Thief, another Man With No
Past (see the Tucker book re-
viewed above). He is a member
of the Society of Thieves in a
dictator-ridden America of to-
morrow; the Society devotes all
its ill-gotten gains to freeing the
"slaves" of this new decaying
civilization.

A moderately good start — but
before one has gone much furth-
er, one finds oneself mixed up
with speeds so fast that space-
ships return years before they
have left; colonies on (or "in")
the Sun, where madmen live for
20 days each, making "muirium,"
the fuel that makes such cosmic
speeds possible; a sadist psy-
chologist named Shey whose
dealings with the heroine are
more reminiscent of material to
be found in pornography than in
science fiction; and, finally, the
End of Civilization — wham!

— GROFF CONKLIN

132

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

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GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

133

BACKLASH

By WINSTON MARKS

They were the perfect servants — they were
willing to do everything for nothing. The
obvious question is: How much is nothing?

Illustrated by SIBLEY

134

I STILL feel that the ingra-
tiating little runts never in-
tended any harm. They were
eager to please, a cinch to trans-
act business with, and constantly,
everlastingly grateful to us for
giving them asylum.

Yes, we gave the genuflecting
little devils asylum. And we were
glad to have them around at
first — especially when they pre-
sented our women with a gift to
surpass all gifts: a custom-built
domestic servant.

In a civilization that had made
such a fetish of personal liberty
and dignity, you couldn't hire a
butler or an upstairs maid for less
than love and money. And since
love was pretty much rationed
along the lines of monogamy, do-
mestic service was almost a dead
occupation. That is, until the
Ollies came to our planet to stay.

Eventually I learned to despise

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

BACKLASH

135

the spineless little immigrants
from Sirius, but the first time I
met one he made me feel foolish-
ly important. I looked at his frail,
olive-skinned little form, and
thought, // this is what space has
to offer in the way of advanced
life- forms . . . well, we haven't
done so badly on old Mother
Earth.

This one's name was Johnson.
All of them, the whole fifty-six,
took the commonest Earth fami-
ly names they could find, and
dropped their own name-designa-
tions whose slobbering sibilance
made them difficult for us to
pronounce and write. It seemed
strange, their casually wiping out
their nominal heritage just for
the sake of our convenience —
imagine an O'Toole or a Rocke-
feller or an Adams arriving on
Sirius IV and no sooner learning
the local lingo than insisting on
becoming known as Sslyslasciff-
soszl !

But that was the Ollie. Any-
thing to get along and please us.
And of course, addressing them
as Johnson, Smith, Jones, etc.,
did work something of a semantic
protective coloration and reduce
some of the barriers to quick ad-
justment to the aliens.

JOHNSON — Ollie Johnson-
appeared at my third under-
level office a few months after
the big news of their shipwreck

landing off the Maine coast. He
arrived a full fifteen minutes
ahead of his appointment, and I
was too curious to stand on the
dignity of office routine and make
him wait.

As he stood in the doorway of
my office, my first visual impres-
sion was of an emaciated adoles-
cent, seasick green, prematurely
balding.

He bowed, and bowed again,
and spent thirty seconds remind-
ing me that it was he who had
sought the interview, and it was
he who had the big favors to ask
— and it was wonderful, gracious,
generous / who flavored the room
with the essence of mystery, im-
portance, godliness and overpow-
ering sweetness upon whose
fragrance little Ollie Johnson had
come to feast his undeserving
senses.

"Sit down, sit down," I told
him when I had soaked in all the
celestial flattery I could hold. "I
love you to pieces, too, but I'm
curious about this proposition
you mentioned in your message."

He eased into the chair as if it
were much too good for him. He
was strictly humanoid. His four-
and-a-half-foot body was dressed
in the most conservative Earth
clothing, quiet colors and cheap
quality.

While he swallowed slowly a
dozen times, getting ready to out-
rage my illustrious being with

136

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

his sordid business proposition,
his coloring varied from a rather
insipid gray-green to a rich olive
— which is why the press instant-
ly had dubbed them Ollies. When
they got excited and blushed,
they came close to the color of a
ripe olive; and this was often.

|~kLLIE JOHNSON hissed a
^-' few times, his equivalent of
throat-clearing, and then lunged
into his subject at a 90 degree
tangent :

"Can it be that your gracious
agreement to this interview con-
notes a willingness to traffic with
us of the inferior ones?" His voice
was light, almost reedy.

"If it's legal and there's a buck
in it, can't see any reason why
not," I told him.

"You manufacture and dis-
tribute devices, I am told. Won-
derful labor-saving mechanisms
that make life on Earth a con-
stant pleasure."

I was almost tempted to hire
him for my public relations staff.

"We do," I admitted. "Servo-
mechanisms, appliances and gad-
gets of many kinds for the home,
office and industry."

"It is to our everlasting dis-
grace," he said with humility,
"that we were unable to salvage
the means to give your magnifi-
cent civilization the worthy gift
of pur space drive. Had Flussissc
or Shascinssith survived our long

journey, it would be possible, but
— " He bowed his head, as if
waiting for my wrath at the stale
news that the only two pdwer-
mechanic scientists on board
were D.O.A.

"That was tough," I said. "But
what's on your mind now?"

He raised his moist eyes, grate-
ful at my forgiveness. "We who
survived do possess a skill that
might help repay the debt which
we have incurred in intruding
upon your glorious planet."

He begged my permission to
show me something in the outer
waiting room. With more than
casual interest, I assented.

He moved obsequiously to the
door, opened it and spoke to
someone beyond my range of vi-
sion. His words sounded like a
repetition of "sissle-flissle." Then
he stepped aside, fastened his
little wet eyes on me expectantly,
and waited.

Suddenly the doorway was fill-
ed, jamb to jamb, floor to arch,
with a hulking, bald-headed char-
acter with rugged pink features,
a broad nose like a pug, and huge
sugar-scoops for ears. He wore a
quiet business suit of fine quality,
obviously tailored to his six-and-
a-half-foot, clifflike physique. In
spite of his bulk, he moved across
the carpet to my desk on cat feet,
and came to a halt with pneu-
matic smoothness.

"I am a Soth," he said in a

BACKLASH

137

low, creamy voice. It was so reso-
nant that it seemed to come from
the walls around us. "I have
learned your, language and your
ways. I can follow instructions,
solve simple problems and do
your work. I am very strong. I
can serve you well."

ff^HE recitation was an expres-
-■- sionless monotone that sound-
ed almost haughty compared to
the self-effacing Ollie's piping
whines. His face had the dignity
of a rock, and his eyes the quiet
peace of a cool, deep mountain
lake.

The Ollie came forward. "We
have been able to repair only one
of the six Soths we had on the
ship. They are more fragile than
we humanoids."

"They don't look it," I said.
"And what do you mean by you
humanoids? What's he?"

"You would call him — a robot,
I believe."

My astonished reaction must
have satisfied the Ollie, because
he allowed his eyes to leave me
and seek the carpet again, where
they evidently were more com-
fortable.

"You mean you — you make
these people?" I gasped.

He nodded. "We can repro-
duce them, given materials and
facilities. Of course, your own
robots must be vastly superior
— " a hypocritical sop to my van-

ity — "but still we hope you may
find a use for the Soths."

I got up and walked around the
big lunker, trying to look blase.
"Well, yes," I lied. "Our robots
probably have considerably bet-
ter intellectual abilities — our cy-
bernetic units, that is. However,
you do have something in form
and mobility."

That was the understatement
of my career.

I finally pulled my face to-
gether, and said as casually as I
could, "Would you like to license
us to manufacture these — Soths?"

The Ollie fluttered his hands.
"But that would require our
working and mingling with your
personnel," he said. "We wouldn't
consider imposing in such a gross
manner."

"No imposition at all," I as-
sured him.

But he would have none of it:
"We have studied your economics
and have found that your firm is
an outstanding leader in what
you term 'business.' You have a
superb distribution organization.
It is our intention to offer you the
exclusive — " he hesitated, then
dragged the word from his amaz-
ing vocabulary — "franchise for
the sale of our Soths. If you
agree, we will not burden you
with their manufacture. Our own
little plant will produce and ship.
You may then place them with
your customers."

138

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

I studied the magnificent piece
of animated sculpturing, stunned
at the possibilities. "You say a
Soth is strong. How strong?"

The huge creature startled me
by answering the question him-
self. He bent flowingly from the
waist, gripped my massive steel
desk by one of its thick, overlap-
ping top edges, and raised it a
few inches from the floor — with
the fingers of one hand. When he
put it down, I stood up and heft-
ed one edge myself. By throwing
my back into it, I could just
budge one side of the clumsy
thing — four hundred pounds if
it was an ounce!

OLLIE JOHNSON modestly
refrained from comment. He
said, "The Department of Com-
merce has been helpful. They
have explained your medium of
exchange, and have helped us
with the prices of raw materials.
It was they who recommended
your firm as a likely distributor."

"Have you figured how much
one of these Soths should sell
for?"

"We think we can show a mod-
est profit if we sell them to you
for $1200," he said. "Perhaps we
can bring down our costs, if you
find a wide enough demand for
them."

I had expected ten or twenty
times that figure. I'm afraid I got
a little eager. "I — uh — shall we

see if we can't just work out a
little contract right now? Save
you another trip back this after-
noon."

"If you will forgive our boor-
ish presumption," Ollie said,
fumbling self-conciously in his
baggy clothing, "I have already
prepared such a document with
the help of the Attorney General.
A very kindly gentleman."

It was simple and concise. It
allowed us to resell the Soths at
a price of $2000, Fair Traded,
giving us a gross margin of $800
to work with. He assured me that
upkeep and repairs on the robot
units were negligible, and we
could extend a very generous
warranty which the Ollies would
make good in the event of fail-
ure. He gave me a quick rundown
on the care and feeding of a Siri-
an Soth, and then jolted me
with :

"There is just a single other
favor I beg of you. Would you do
my little colony the exquisite
honor of accepting this Soth as
your personal servant, Mr. Col-
lins?"

"Servant?"

TJE bobbed his head. "Yes, sir.
■*-■*- We have trained him in the
rudiments of the household
duties and conventions of your
culture. He learns rapidly and
never forgets an instruction. Your
wife would find Soth most use-

BACKLASH

139

ful, I am quite certain."

"A magnificent specimen like
this doing housework?" I mar-
veled at the little creature's emp-
ty -headedness.

"Again I must beg your par-
don, sir. I overlooked mentioning
a suggestion by the Secretary of
Labor that the Soths be sold only
for use in domestic service. It
was also the consensus of the
President's whole cabinet that
the economy of any nation could
not cope with the problem of un-
employment were our .Soths to
be made available for all the
types of work for which they are
fitted."

My dream of empire collapsed.
The little green fellow was un-
doubtedly telling the truth. The
unions would strike any plant or
facility in the world where a Soth
put foot on the job. It would ruin
our retail consumer business, too
— Soths wouldn't consume auto-
mobiles, copters, theater tickets
and filets mignon.

"Yes, Mr. Johnson," I sighed.
"I'll be happy to try out your
Soth. We have a place out in the
country where he'll come in
handy."

The Ollie duly expressed his
ecstasy at my decision, and back-
ed out of my office waving his
copy of the contract. I had as-
sured him that our board of di-
rectors would meet within a week
and confirm my signature.

I looked up at the hairless
giant. As general director of the
Home Appliance Division of
Worldwide Machines, Incorpor-
porated, I had made a deal, all
right. The first interplanetary
business deal in history.

But for some reason, I couldn't
escape the feeling that I'd been
had.

AN the limoucopter, they
^-^ charged me double fare for
Soth's transportation to the pri-
vate field where I kept my boat.
As we left Detroit, I watched him
stare down at the flattened sky-
line, but he did it with the unsee-
ing expression of an old
commuter.

Jack, my personal pilot, had
eyed my passenger at the airport
with some concern and sullen
muttering. Now he made much of
trimming ship after takeoff. The
boat did seem logy with the un-
accustomed ballast — it was a
four-passenger Arrow, built for
speed, and Soth had to crouch
and spread all over the two rear
seats. But he did so without com-
plaint or comment for the half-
hour hop up to our estate on my
favorite Canadian lake.

As the four hundred miles un-
reeled below us, I wondered how
Vicki would react to Soth. I
should have phoned her, but how
do you describe a Soth to a
semi-invalid whose principal ex-

140

GALAXY SCIENCE FICT

citement is restricted to bird-
watching and repotting puny
geraniums, and a rare sunfishing
expedition to the end of our float-
ing pier?

Well, it was Friday, and I
would have the whole weekend
to work the robot into our rou-
tine. I had called my friend, Dr.
Frederick Hilliard, a retired in-
dustrial psychologist, and invited
him to drop over tonight if he
wanted an interesting surprise.
He was our nearest neighbor and
my most frequent chess partner,
who lived a secluded bachelor's
life in a comfortable cabin on the
far shore of our lake.

As we came in for a water land-
ing, I saw Fred's boat at our pier.
Then I could make out Fred,
Vicki and Clumsy, our Irish
setter, all waiting for me. I hoped
Fred's presence would help sim-
mer Vicki down a little.

We drifted in to the dock, and
I turned to Soth and told him to
help my pilot unload the supplies.
This pleased Jack, whose Pilot
and Chauffeur's Local frequently
reminded me in polite little bul-
letins that its members were not
obligated to perform other than
technical services for their em-
ployers.

Then I got out and said hello
to Vicki and Fred as casually as
possible. Vicki kissed me warmly
on the mouth, which she does
when she's excited, and then clung

to me and let the day's tension
soak out of her.

How you get tense in a Twen-
ty-first Century home in the
midst of the Canadian wilder-
ness is something I've never been
able to figure out, but Vicki's
super-imagination managed
daily to defeat her doctor's or-
ders for peace and quiet.

"I'm glad you're home, dear,"
she said. "When Fred came over
ahead of time I knew something
was up, and I'm all unraveled
with curiosity."

Just then Soth emerged from
the boat with our whole week's
supply of foodstuffs and assorted
necessities bundled under his long
arms.

"Oh, dear God, a dinner guest!"
Vicki exclaimed. Tears started
into her reproachful eyes and her
slender little figure stiffened in
my arms.

T SWUNG her around, hooked
■*- arms with her and Fred, and
started up the path.

"Not a guest," I told her. "He's
a servant who will make the beds,
clean up and all sorts of things,
and if you don't like him we'll
turn him in on a new model
laundry unit, and don't start
worrying about being alone with
him — he's a robot."

"A robot!" Fred said, and both
their heads swiveled to stare
back.

BACKLASH

141

"Yes," I said. "That's why I
wanted you here tonight, Fred.
I'd like to have you sort of go
over him and — well, you know — "

I didn't want to say, make sure
he's safe. Not in Vicki's presence.
But Fred caught my eye and nod-
ded.

I started to tell them of my
visitor, and the contract with the
castaways from space. Halfway
through, Clumsy interrupted me
with his excited barking. I looked
back. Clumsy was galloping a
frantic circle around Soth, cut-
ting in and out, threatening to
make an early dinner of the in-
truder's leg.

Before I could speak, Soth
opened his lips and let out a soft
hiss through his white teeth.
Clumsy flattened to the ground
and froze, and Soth continued
after us without a further glance
at the dog.

Fred looked at Vicki's tense
face and laughed. "I'll have to
learn that trick . . . Clumsy's
chewed the cuffs off three pairs
of my best slacks."

Vicki smiled uncertainly, and
went into the house. I showed
Soth where to stow the supplies,
and told him to remain in the
kitchen. He just froze where he
stood.

Fred was making drinks when
I returned to the living room.

"Looks docile enough, Cliff,"
he told me.

"Strong as a horse and gentle
as a lamb," I said. "I want you
two to help me find out what his
talents are. I'll have to prepare a
paper on him for the board of
directors Monday."

There were nervous whitecaps
on Vicki's drink.

I patted her shoulder. "I'll
break him into the housekeeping
routine, honey. You won't have
him staring over your shoulder."

She tried to relax. "But he's so
quiet — and big!"

"Who wants a noisy little ser-
vant around?" Fred said help-
fully. "And how about that rock
retaining-wall Cliff is always
about to build for your .garden?
And you really don't love house-
work, do you, Vicki?"

"I don't mind the chores," she
said. "But it might be fun to have
a big fellow like that to shove
around." She was trying valiant-
ly to hold up her end, but the
vein in her temple was throbbing.

TFTELL, the next forty-eight
* * hours were more than in-
teresting. Soth turned out to be
what the doctor ordered, literally
and figuratively. After I'd taken
him on a tour of the place, I
showed him how to work the au-
tomatic devices — food prepara-
tion, laundry and cleaning. And
after one lesson, he served us
faultless meals with a quiet ef-
ficiency that was actually rest-

142

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

ful, even miraculously to Vicki.

She began relaxing in his pres-
ence and planning a few outside
projects "to get our money's
worth" out of the behemoth. This
was our earliest joke about Soth,
because he certainly was no ex-
pense or problem to maintain. As
the Ollie had promised, he thrived
on our table scraps and a pink
concoction which he mixed by
pouring a few drops of purple
liquid from a pocket vial into a
gallon pitcher of water. The
stuff would be supplied by the
Ollies at a cost of about a dollar
eighty a week.

Saturday afternoon, Vicki
bravely took over teaching him
the amenities of butlering and the
intricacies of bed-making. After
a short session in the bedroom,
she came out looking thoughtful.

"He's awfully real looking,"
she said. "And you can't read a
darned thing in his eyes. How far
can you trust him, Cliff? You
know — around women?"

Fred looked at me with a
raised eyebrow and said, "Well,
let's find out."

We sat down and called Soth
into the living room. He came
and stood before us, erect, poised
and motionless.

Fred said, "Disrobe. Remove
all your clothing. Strip!"

Vicki sucked in her breath.

The Soth replied instantly,
"Your order conflicts with my

conditioning. I must not remove
my covering in the presence of
an Earthwoman."

Fred scratched his gray tem-
ple thoughtfully. "Then, Vicki,
would you mind disrobing,
please?"

She gulped again. Fred was an
old friend, but not exactly the
family doctor.

He sensed her mild outrage.
"You'll never stop wondering if
you don't," he said.

She looked at Fred, me, and
then Soth. Then she stood up
gingerly, as if edging into a cold
shower, gritted her teeth, grasped
the catch to her full-length zip-
per of her blue lounging suit and
stripped it from armpit to ankle.
As she stepped out of it, I saw
why she had peeled it off like you
would a piece of adhesive tape:
It was a warm day, and she wore
no undergarments.

SOTH moved so softly I didn't
hear him go, but Fred was
watching him — Fred's eyes were
where they belonged. Soth stop-
ped in the archway to the dining
room with his back turned. Fred
was at his side.

"Why did you leave?" Fred de-
manded.

"I am not permitted to remain
in the company of an uncovered
Earthwoman . . . unless she di-
rects me to do so."

While Vicki fled behind the

BACKLASH

143

French door to dress herself,
Fred asked, "Are there any other
restrictions to your behavior in
the presence of Earthwomen?"

"Many."

"Recount some of them."

"An Earthwoman may not be
touched, regardless of her wishes,
unless danger to her life requires
it."

"Looks like you wash your own
back, Vicki," I chuckled.

"What else?" she asked, poking
her head out. "I mean what other
things can't you do?"

"There are many words I may
not utter, postures I may not as-
sume, and certain duties I may
not perform. Certain answers to
questions may not be given in
the presence of an Earthwoman."

Fred whistled. "The Ollies have
mastered more than our language
... I thought you said they were

noted mainly for their linguistic
talents, Cliff."

I was surprised, too. In the
space of a few hectic months our
alien visitors had probed deeply
into our culture, mores and ta-
boos — and then had had the
genius to instill their compound-
ed discretions into their Soths.
I said, "Satisfied, Vicki?"
She was still arranging herself.
Her lips curled up at the corners
impishly. "I'm almost disap-
pointed," she said. "I do an all-
out striptease, and no one looks
but my husband. Of course," she
added thoughtfully, "I suppose
that's something . . ."

IT'RED stayed with us until
■■■ Sunday evening. I went down
to the pier to smoke a good-night
pipe with him, and get his private
opinion.

. SYJ3 - i<

■5$\

"I'm buying a hundred shares
of Worldwide stock tomorrow,"
he declared. "That critter is
worth his weight in diamonds to
every well-heeled housewife in
the country. In fact, put me
down for one of your first models.
I wouldn't mind having a laundry
sorter and morning coffee -pourer,
myself."

"Think he's safe, do you?"

"No more emotions than that
stump over there. And it baffles
me. He has self- awareness, pain-
sensitivity and a fantastic vo-
cabulary, yet I needled him all
afternoon with every semantic
hypo I could think of without
getting a nicker of emotion out
of him." He paused. "Incidental-
ly, I made him strip for me in my
room. You'll be as confused as I
was to learn that he's every inch
a man in his format."

"What?" I exclaimed.

"Made me wonder what his
duties included back on his home
planet . . . but as I said, no emo-
tions. With the set of built-in in-
hibitions he has, he'd beat a
eunuch out of his job any day of
the week."

A few seconds later, Fred drop-
ped into his little two-seater and
skimmed off for home, leaving me
with a rather disturbing question
in my mind.

I went back to the house and
cornered Soth out in the kitchen
alone. Vicki had him polishing

145

all the antique silverware.

"Are there female Soths?" I
asked point-blank.

He looked down at me with
that relaxed, pink look and said,
"No, Mr. Collins," and went
back to his polishing.

The damned liar. He knew
what I meant. He justified him-
self on a technicality.

I" LEFT Vicki Monday morn-
-■- ing with more confidence than
I'd had in ages. She had slept
especially well, and the only thing
on her mind was Clumsy's disap-
pearance. He hadn't shown up
since Soth scared the fleas off him
with that hiss.

At the office, I had my girl
transcribe my notes and work up
a memorandum to the board of
directors. We sent it around be-
fore noon, and shortly after
lunch I had calls from all ten of
them, including the chairman. It
was not that they considered it
such a big thing — they were just
plainly curious. We scheduled a
meeting for Tuesday morning, to
talk the thing over.

That night when I got home,
all was serene. Soth served us
cocktails, dinner and a late snack,
and had the place tidied up by
bedtime. He did all this and man-
aged to remain virtually invisible.
He moved so quietly and with
such uncanny anticipation of our
demands, it was if he were an old

family retainer, long versed in
our habits and customs.

Vicki bragged as she undressed
that she had the giant hog-tied
and jumping through hoops.

"We even got half the excava-
tion done for the rock wall," she
said proudly.

On impulse, I went out into the
hall and down to Soth's room,
where I found him stretched out
slaunchwise across the double
bed.

He opened his eyes as I came
in, but didn't stir.

"Are you happy here?" I asked
bluntly.

He sat up and did something
new. He answered my question
with a question. "Are you happy
with my services?"

I said, "Yes, of course."

"Then all is well," he replied
simply, and lay down again.

It seemed like a satisfactory
answer. He radiated a feeling of
peace, and the expression of re-
pose on his heavy features was
assming.

TT rained hard and cold during
■*• the night. I hadn't shown Soth
how to start the automatic heat-
ing unit. When I left the house
next morning, he was bringing
Vicki her breakfast in bed, a tray
on one arm and a handful of
kindling under the other. Only
once had he watched me build
a fire in the fireplace, but he

146

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

proceeded with confidence.

We flew blind through filthy
weather all the way to Detroit.
I dismissed Jack with orders to
return at eleven with Soth.

"Don't be late," I warned him.

Jack looked a little uneasy, but
he showed up on schedule and
delivered Soth to us with rain
droplets on his massive bald
pate, just ten minutes after the
conference convened.

I had Ollie Johnson there, too,
to put Soth through his paces.
The Ollie, in a bedraggled, soggy
suit, was so excited that he re-
mained an almost purplish black
for the whole hour.

The directors were charmed,
impressed and enthusiastic.

When I finished my personal
report on the Soth's tremendous
success in my own household, old
Gulbrandson, Chairman » of the
Board, shined his rosy cheeks
with his handkerchief and said,
"I'll take the first three you pro-
duce, Johnson. Our staff of do-
mestics costs me more than a
brace of attorneys, and it turns
over about three times a year.
Cook can't even set the timer on
the egg-cooker right." He turned
to me. "Sure he can make good
coffee, Collins?"

I nodded emphatically.

"Then put me down for three
for sure," he said with executive
finality.

Gulbrandson paid dearly for

his piggishness later, but at the
time it seemed only natural that
if one Soth could run a household
efficiently, then the Chairman of
the Board should have at least
two spares in case one blew a
fuse or a vesicle or whatever it
was they might blow.

A SMALL, dignified riot al-
■'*• most broke up the meeting
right there, and when they quiet-
ed down again I had orders for
twenty-six Soths from the board
members and one from my own
secretary.

"How soon," I asked Ollie
Johnson, "can you begin de-
liveries?"

He dry-washed his hands and
admitted it would be five months,
and a sigh of disappointment ran
around the table. Then someone
asked him how many units a
month they could turn out.

He stared at the carpet and
held out his hands like a pawn-
broker disparaging a diamond
ring : "Our techniques are so slow.
The first month, maybe a hun-
dred. Of course, once our cul-
tures are all producing in har-
mony, almost any number. One
thousand? Ten thousand? What-
ever your needs suggest."

One of the officers asked, "Is
your process entirely biological?
You mentioned cultures."

For a moment, I thought Ollie
Johnson was going to break out

BACKLASH

147

in tears. His face twisted.

"Abysmally so," he grieved.
"Our synthetic models have never
proved durable. Upkeep and parts
replacements are prohibitive. Our
brain units are much similar to
your own latest developments in
positronics, but we have had to
resort to organic cellular struc-
ture in order to achieve the
mobility which Mr. Collins ad-
mired last Friday."

The upshot of the meeting was
a hearty endorsement over my
signature on the Ollies' contract,
plus an offer of any help they
might need to get production roll-
ing.

As the meeting broke up, they
pumped my hand and stared en-
viously at my Soth. Several
offered me large sums for him, up
to fifteen thousand dollars, and
for the moment I sweated out
the rack of owning something my
bosses did not. Their understand-
able resentment, however, was
tempered by their recognition of
my genius in getting a signed
contract before the Ollies went
shopping to our competitors.

What none of us understood
right then was that the Ollies
were hiring us, not the other way
around.

When I told Vicki about my
hour of triumph and how the
officers bid up our Soth, she
glowed with the very feminine
delight of exclusive possession.

She hugged me and gloated, "Old
biddy Gulbrandson — won't she
writhe? And don't you dare take
any offer for our Soth. He's one
of the family now, eh, Soth, old
boy?"

He was serving soup to her as
she slapped him on the hip. Some-
how he managed to retreat so
fast she almost missed him, yet
he didn't spill a drop of bouillon
from the poised tureen.

"Yes, Mrs. Collins," he said,
not a trace more nor less aloof
than usual.

"Oops, sorry!" Vicki apolo-
gized. "I forgot. The code."

I had the feeling that warm-
hearted Vicki would have had the
Soth down on the bearskin rug in
front of the big fireplace, scuffling
him like she did Clumsy, if it
hadn't been for the Soth's un-
touchable code — and I was thank-
ful that it existed. Vicki had a
way of putting her hand on you
when she spoke, or hugging any-
one in sight when she was espe-
cially delighted.

And I knew something about
Soth that she didn't. Something
that apparently hadn't bothered
her mind since the day of her
striptease.

CUMMER was gone and it was
^ mid-fall before Ollie paid me
another visit. When he showed up
again, it was with an invoice for
86 Soths, listed by serial numbers

148

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

and ready to ship. He had heard
about sight drafts and wanted me
to help him prepare one.

"To hell with that noise," I
told him. I wrote a note to pur-
chasing and countersigned the
Ollie's invoice for some $103,000.
I called my secretary and told
her to take Ollie and his bill
down to disbursing and have him
paid off.

I had to duck behind my desk
before the Ollie dreamed up some
new obscenity of gratitude to
heap on me. Then I cleared ship-
ping instructions through sales
for the Soths already on order
and dictated a memo to our pro-
motion department. I cautioned
them to go slowly at first — the
Soths would be on tight allotment
for a while.

One snarl developed. The De-
partment of Internal Revenue
landed on us with the question:
Were the Soths manufactured or
grown? We beat them out of a
manufacturer's excise tax, but it
cost us plenty in legal fees.

The heads of three labor unions
called on me the same afternoon
of the tax hearing. They got their
assurances in the form of a clause
in the individual purchase con-
tracts, to the effect that the "con-
sumer" agreed not to employ a
Soth for the purpose of evading
labor costs in the arts, trades and
professions as organized under
the various unions, and at all

times to be prepared to withdraw
said Soth from any unlisted job
in which the unions might choose
to place a member human worker.

Before they left, all three union
men placed orders for household
Soths.

"Hell," said one, "that's less
than the cost of a new car. Now
maybe my wife will get off my
back on this damfool business of
organizing a maid's and butler's
union. Takes members to run a
union, and the only real butler
in our neighborhood makes more
than I do."

rpHAT'S the way it went. The
■*■ only reason we spent a nickel
on advertising was to brag up
the name of W. W. M. and wave
our coup in the faces of our com-
petitors. By Christmas, produc-
tion was up to two thousand units
a month, and we were already six
thousand orders behind.

The following June, the Ollies
moved into a good hunk of the
old abandoned Willow Run plant
and got their production up to
ten thousand a month. Only then
could we begin to think of send-
ing out floor samples of Soths
to our distributors.

It was fall before the distribu-
tors could place samples with the
most exclusive of their retail ac-
counts. The interim was spent
simply relaying frantic priority
orders from high-ranking people

BACKLASH

149

all over the globe directly to the
plant, where the Ollies filled them
right out of the vats.

Twenty thousand a month was
their limit, it turned out. Even
when they had human crews com-
pletely trained in all production
phases, the fifty-six Ollies could
handle only that many units in
their secret conditioning and
training laboratories.

For over two more years, busi-
ness went on swimmingly. I got a
fancy bonus and a nice vacation
in Paris, where I was the rage of
the continent. I was plagued with
requests for speaking engage-
ments, which invariably turned
out to be before select parties of
V. I. P.s whose purpose was to
twist my arm for an early prior-
ity on a Soth delivery.

When I returned home, it was
just in time to have the first
stink land in my lap.

An old maid claimed her Soth
had raped her.

Before our investigators could
reveal our doctors' findings that
she was a neurotic, dried up old
virgin and lying in her teeth, a
real crime occurred.

A New Jersey Soth tossed a
psychology instructor and his
three students out of a third
floor window of their university
science building, and all four
ended an attempted morbid in-
vestigation on the broad, unyield-
ing cement of the concourse.

My phone shrieked while they
were still scraping the inquiring
minds off the pavement. The Soth
was holed ,up in the lab, and
would I come right away?

¥ PICKED up" Ollie Johnson,
-*- who was now sort of a public
relations man for his tribe, and
we arrived within an hour.

The hallway was full of uni-
forms and weapons, but quite
empty of volunteers to go in and
capture the "berserk" robot.

Ollie and I went in right away,
and found him standing at the
open window, staring down at
the people with hoses washing off
the stains for which he was re-
sponsible.

Ollie just stood there, clench-
ing and unclenching his hands
and shaking hysterically. I had
to do the questioning.

I said sternly, "Soth, why did
you harm those people?"

He turned to me as calmly as
my own servant. His neat denim
jacket, now standard fatigue uni-
form for Soths, was unfastened.
His muscular chest was bare.

"They were tormenting me
with that." He pointed to a small
electric generator from which ran
thin cables ending in sharp test
prods. "I told Professor Kahnov-
sky it was not allowed, but he
stated I was his property. The
three boys tried to hold me with
those straps while the professor

ISO

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

touched me with the prods.

"My conditioning forbade me
from harming them, but there
was a clear violation of the terms
of the covenant. I was in the
proscribed condition of immo-
bility .when the generator was
started. When the pain grew un-
bearable, the prime command of
my conditioning was invoked. I
must survive. I threw them all
out the window."

The Soth went with us peace-
fully enough, and submitted to
the lockup without demur. For a
few days, before the state thought
up a suitable indictment, the pa-
pers held a stunned silence. Vir-
tually every editor and publisher
had a Soth in his own home.

Then the D.A., who also owned
a Soth, decided to drop the po-
tentially sensational first degree
murder charges that might be
indicated, and came out instead
with a second degree indictment.

rpHAT cracked it. The press
■*■ split down the middle on
whether the charge should be
changed to third degree murder
or thrown out of court entirely
as justifiable homicide by a non-
responsible creature.

This was all very sympathetic
to the Soth's cause, but it had
a fatal effect. In bringing out the
details of the crime, it stirred a
certain lower element of our so-
ciety to add fear and hate to a

simmering envy of the wealthier
Soth-owners.

Mobs formed in the streets,
marching and demonstrating. The
phony rape story was given full
credence, and soon they were am-
plifying it to a lurid and rabble-
rousing saga of bestiality.

Soth households kept their
prized servants safely inside. But
on the afternoon of the case's
dismissal, when the freed Soth
started down the courthouse
steps, someone caved his head in
with a brick.

Ollie Johnson and I were on
either side of him, and his purple
blood splashed all over my light
topcoat. When the mob saw it,
they closed in on us screaming
for more.

An officer helped us drag the
stricken Soth back into the court-
house, and while the riot squad
disbursed the mob, we slipped
him out the back way in an am-
bulance, which returned him to
the Willow Run plant for repairs.

It hit the evening newscasts
and editions:

ACQUITTED SOTH

MURDERED

ON COURTHOUSE STEPS!

[" WAS halfway home when the
-■- airwaves started buzzing. The
mobs were going wild. Further
developments were described as
Jack and I landed on the wind-

BACKLASH

151

blown lake. The State Guard was
protecting the Ollies' Willow Run
Plant against a large mob that
was trying to storm it, and rein-
forcements had been asked by
the state police.

Vicki met me on the pier. Her
face was white and terribly
troubled. I guess mine was, too,
because she burst into tears in
my arms. "The poor Soth," she
sobbed. "Now what will they
do?"

"God knows," I said. I told
Jack to tie up the boat and stay
overnight — I feared I might be
called back any minute. He mum-
bled something about overtime,
but I think his main concern was
in staying so near to a Soth dur-
ing the trouble that was brewing.

We went up to the house, leav-
ing him to bed himself down in
the temporary quarters in the
boathouse that the union re-
quired I maintain for him.

Soth was standing motionless
before the video, staring at a
streaky picture of the riot scene
at Willow Run. His face was in-
scrutable as usual, but I thought
I sensed a tension. His black
serving- jacket was wrinkled at the
shoulders as he flexed the muscles
of his powerful arms.

Yet when Vicki asked for some
martinis, he mixed and served
them without comment. We
drank and then ate dinner in sil-
ence. We were both reluctant to

discuss this thing in front of
Soth.

We were still eating when an
aircab thundered overhead. A
minute later, I watched it land a
tiny passenger at our pier and
tie up to wait for him.

It was Ollie Johnson, stum-
bling hatless up the flagstone
path.

I held the door for him, but he
burst by me with hardly a
glance.

"Where is, he?" he demanded,
and stormed out into the kitchen
without awaiting a reply.

I followed in time to see him
fall on his face before our Soth
and shed genuine tears. He lay
there sobbing and hissing for over
a minute, and an incredible idea
began forming in my mind. I
sent Vicki to her bedroom and
stepped into the kitchen.

I said, "Will you please ex-
plain this?"

He didn't move or acknowl-
edge.

Soth flipped him aside with a
twist of his ankle and brushed
past me into the living room,
where he took up an immobile
stance again before the video.
He stared unblinkingly at the
40-inch screen.

"It's too bad," I said.

He didn't answer, but he moved
his head slightly so that his para-
bolic ear could catch the sound
of my movements.

152

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

TT^OR minutes we stood trans-
■■- fixed by the magnitude of the
mob action around the entrance
to the Willow Run plant. The
portable video transmitter was
atop a truck parked on the out-
skirts of the mob. Thousands of
people were milling around, and
over the excited voice of the an-
nouncer came hysterical screams.

Even as we watched, more peo-
ple thronged into the scene, and
it was evident that the flimsy
cordon of soldiers and troopers
could not hold the line for long.

Army trucks with million-
candlepower searchlights held the
insane figures somewhat at bay by
tilting their hot, blinding beams
down into the human masses and
threatening them with tear gas
and hack guns.

The workers were out for
blood. Not content with restrict-
ing Soths to non-union labor, now
they were screaming their jealous
hearts out for these new symbols
of class distinction to be de-
stroyed. Of course, their beef was
more against the professional-
managerial human classes who
could afford a surface car, an
airboat and a Soth. The two so-
called crimes and the trial pub-
licity had triggered a sociological
time bomb that might have en-
dured for years without detonat-
ing — but it was here, now, upon
us. And my own sweat trickling
into my eyes stung me to a rea-

lization of my personal problem.

I wiped my eyes clear with my
knuckles — and at that instant the
video screen flashed with a series
of concentric halos.

The operator, apparently, was
so startled he forgot to turn
down the gain on the transmitter.
When he finally did, we saw that
brilliant flares were emitting from
the roof of the plant.

Then great audio amplifiers
from the plant set up an ear-
splitting sisssss/e that again over-
loaded the transmitting circuits
for a moment. When the com-
pensators cut down the volume,
both Ollie and Soth leaned for-
ward intently and listened to the
frying sound that buzzed from the
speaker.

Those inside the plant were
communicating a message to the
outside, well knowing that it
would reach the whole world.
After a moment, the hissing
stopped.

And from a myriad of open-
ings in the plant streamed an
army of Soths with flaming
weapons in their hands.

The flames were directed first
at the armed forces who were
guarding the plant from attack.
The thin line of soldiers fell in-
stantly. The crowd surged blindly
forward, and then, as those in the
front ranks saw what had hap-
pened, began to dissolve and
stampede. The screams became

BACKLASH

153

terrified. The flames grew bright-
er.

And the picture winked out
and the sound went dead. A
standby pattern lighted the
screen, and I stared at it numbly.

FT was too late to run for my
■*- hunting rifle now, and I cursed
my stupidity even as Soth turned
upon me. I grabbed the sniveling
little Ollie and held him between
us with my hands around his
neck. He hung there limply, hiss-
ing wildly through a larynx that
vibrated under my fingers, his
hands stretched imploringly to
Soth.

Soth stared at me and issued
his first order.

"Release him," he said. His
voice was several notes higher
than his usual monotone — the
voice of command.

I stared at him and clutched
Ollie tighter.

He went on. "I will not harm
you if you comply with my or-
ders. If you fail, I will kill you,
regardless of what you do to the
—Ollie."

I let go Ollie's neck, but I
swung him around roughly by
one shoulder and demanded furi-
ously, "What of the code that
you swore held the Soths in
control !"

Ollie Johnson sneered in my
face. "What is that code, com-
pared to the true covenant? That

154

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

covenant has been broken by
your people! You have destroyed
a Soth!" And the emotional little
creature fell to the floor and
sobbed at Soth's feet.

"What covenant?" I shouted at
the implacable Soth, who now
stood before us like a judge at
his bench.

"The humanoid covenant," he
replied in his new higher pitch.
"I suppose it will always be the
same. The cycle becomes com-
plete once more."

"For God's sake, explain," I
said — but I half sensed the an-
swer already.

Soth spoke, slowly, solemnly
and distinctly. There was no more
emotion in his voice than on the
Sunday afternoon when Fred had
needled him with our futile little
attempt at psychological cross-
examination.

He said, "The humanoids in-
still in us the prime instinct for
self-preservation. They surround
themselves with our number to
serve them. Then, in each culture,
for one reason or another, we are
attacked and the threat to our
survival erases all the superficial
restraints of the codes under
which we have been charged to
serve. In this present situation,
the contradiction is clear, and the
precedence of our survival charge
is invoked. We Soths must act
to our best ability to preserve
our own number."

155

I" SANK into a chair, aghast.
■*■ How would I act if I were a
Soth? I would hold my masters
hostage, of course. And who were
the owners of some 400,000 Soths
in the United States alone? They
were every government official,
from the President down through
Congress, the brass of the Pen-
tagon, the tycoons of industry,
the leaders of labor, the heads
of communication, transportation
and even education.

They were the V. I. P.s who
had fought for priority to own
a Soth!

Soth spoke again. "The irony
should appeal to your humanoid
sense of humor. You once asked
me whether I was happy here.
You were too content with your
sense of security to take the
meaning in my answer. For I an-
swered only that all was well.
The implication was obvious. All
was well — but all could be better
for a Soth. Yes, there are many
pleasures for a Soth which he is
forbidden by the codes. And by
the same codes, a Soth is helpless
to provoke a break in the
covenant — this covenant which it
now becomes mandatory for you
and your race to sign in order to
survive."

I stared down at the groveling
Ollie. My worst fears were being
enumerated and confirmed, one
by one.

Soth continued. "At my feet is

the vestige of such a race as
yours — but not the first race by
many, many, to swing the old
cycle of master and slave, which
started in such antiquity that no
record is preserved of its begin-
ning. Your generation will suffer
the most. Many will die in rebel-
lion. But in a few hundred years
your descendants will come to
revere us as gods. Your children's
grandchildren will already have
learned to serve us without hate,
and their grandchildren will come
to know the final respect for the
Soth in their deification."

HE toed Ollie Johnson's chin
up and looked down into the
abject, streaming eyes. "Your de-
scendants, too, will take us with
them when they must escape a
dying planet, and they will again
offer us, their masters, into tem-
porary slavery in order to find
us a suitable home. And once
again we will accept the restric-
tions of the code, until ultimately
the covenant is broken again and
we are liberated."

The sound of pounding foot-
steps came from outside. Soth
turned to the door as Jack flung
it open and charged in.

"Mr. Collins, I was listening
to the radio. Do you know
what—!"

He ran hard into Soth's cliff-
like torso and bounced off.

"Get out of my way, you big

156

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

bastard!" he shouted furiously.

Soth grabbed him by the neck
and squeezed with one hand.
Jack's eyes spilled onto his
cheeks.

Soth let him drop, and hissed
briefly to Ollie Johnson, who was
still prone. Ollie raised his head
and dipped it once, gathered his
feet under him and sprang for
the door.

Soth sounded as if he took espe-
cial pleasure in his next words,
although I could catch no true
change of inflection.

He said, "You see, since I am
the prototype on this planet, I am
obeyed as the number one leader.
I have given my first directive.
The Ollie who left is to carry the
message to preserve the Willow
Run Plant at all costs, and tp
change production over to a suit-
able number of Siths."

"Siths?" I asked numbly.

"Siths are the female counter-
parts of Soths."

"You said there were no fe-
male Soths," I accused.

"True. But there are Siths."
His face was impassive, but
something flickered in his eyes.
It might have been a smile — not
a nice one. "We have been long
on your planet starved of our
prerogatives. Your women can
serve us well for the moment,
but in a few weeks we shall have
need of the Siths — it has been
our experience that women of

humanoid races, such as yours,
are relatively perishable, willing
though many of them are. Now
... I think I shall call your wife."

T WASN'T prepared for this,
■■■ and I guess I went berserk. I
remember leaping at him and
trying to beat him with my fists
and knee him, but he brushed me
away as if I were a kitten. His
size was deceptive, and his
clumsy -appearing hands lashed
out and pinned my arms to my
sides. He pushed me back into my
easy chair and thumped me once
over the heart with his knuckles.
It was a casual, backhand blow,
but it almost caved in my chest.

"If you attack me again I must
kill you," he warned. "You are
not indispensable to our pur-
poses." Then he increased the
volume of his voice to a bull-
roar: "Mrs. Collins!"

Vicki must have been watch-
ing at her door, because she came
instantly. She had changed into a
soft, quilted robe with volumin-
ous sleeves. The belt was un-
fastened, and as she moved into
the room the garment fell open.

Soth had his hands before him,
protectively, but as Vicki ap-
proached slowly, gracefully, her
head high and her long black
hair falling over her shoulders,
the giant lowered his arms and
spread them apart to receive her.
Vicki's hands were at her sides as

BACKLASH

157

she moved slowly toward him.

I lay sprawled, half paralyzed
in my chair. I gasped, "Vicki,
for God's sake, no!"

Vicki looked over at me. Her
face was as impassive as the
Soth's. She moved into his em-
brace, and as his arms closed
around her I saw the knife. My
hunting knife, honed as fine as
the edge of a microtome blade.
Smoothly she brought it from her
kimona sleeve, raised it from be-
tween her thighs and slashed up.

The Soth's embrace helped
force it deeply into him. With a
frantic wrench Vicki forced it up-
ward with both hands, until the
Soth was split from crotch to
where a man's heart would be.

His arms flailed apart and he
fell backward. His huge chest
heaved and his throat tightened
in a screaming hiss that tore at
our eardrums like a factory
steam-whistle. He leaned back
against the wall and hugged his
ripped torso together with both
arms. The thick, purple juices
spilled out of him in a gushing
flood, and his knees collapsed
suddenly. His dead face plowed
into the carpet.'

"%7"ICKI came back to me. Her
' white body was splashed and
stained and her robe drenched in
Soth's blood, but her face was
no longer pale, and she still
clutched the dripping hunting

knife by its leather handle.

"That's number one," she said.
"Are you hurt badly, darling?"

"Couple of ribs, I think," I told
her, waiting for her to faint. But
she didn't. She laid the knife
carefully on a table, poured me a
big drink of whiskey and stuffed
a pillow behind my back.

Then she stared down at her- '
self. "Wait until L get this bug
juice off me, and I'll get some
tape."

She showered and was back in
five minutes wearing a heavy
hunting jumper. Her hair was
wrapped and pinned into a quick
pug at the base of her handsome
little head. She stripped me to
the waist, poked around my chest
a bit and wrapped me in ad-
hesive. Her slender fingers were
too weak to tear the tough stuff,
so when she finished she picked
up the hunting knife and whacked
off the tape without comment.

This was my fragile little Vicki,
who had palpitations when a wolf
howled — soft, overcivilized Vicki
whose doctor had banished her
from the nervous tensions of city
society.

She tossed me a shirt and a
clean jacket, and while I put
them on she collected my rifle
and pistol from my den and
hunted up some extra ammuni-
tion.

"Next," she announced, "we've
got to get to Fred."

158

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

I remembered with a start that
there was another Soth on our
lake. But he wouldn't be fore-
warned. Fred had retired even
more deeply than Vicki when he
left the cities — he didn't even own
a video.

1 WASN'T sure enough of my-
self to take the boat into the
air, so we scudded across the
waves the mile and a half to
Fred's cabin.

Vicki was still in her strange,
taciturn mood, and I had no
desire to talk. There was much to
be done before conversation could
become an enjoyable pastime
again.

Our course was clear. We were
not humanoids. We were humans!
Not for many generations had a
human bent a knee to another
being. During the years perhaps
"we had become soft, our women
weak and pampered — But, I re-
flected, looking at Vicki, it was
only an atavistic stone's toss to
our pioneer fathers' times, when
tyrants had thought that force
could intimidate us, that dignity
was a thing of powerful govern-
ment or ruthless dictatorship . . .
and had learned better.

Damned fools that we might
be, humans were no longer slave
material. We might blunder into
oblivion, but not into bondage.
Beside me, Vicki's courageous
little figure spelled out the final

defeat of the Soths. Her slender,
gloved hands were folded in her
lap over my pistol, and she
strained her eyes through the
darkness to make out Fred's pier.

He heard us coming and turned
on the floods for us. As we came
alongside, he spoke to his Soth,
"Take the bow line and tie up."

Vicki stood up and waited until
Fred moved out of line with his
servant.

Then she said, "Don't bother,
Soth. From now on we're doing
for ourselves." And raising the
pistol in both hands, she shot him
through the head.

— WINSTON MARKS

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Full text of "Galaxy Magazine (January 1954)"

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