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SCIENCE FICTION

JANUARY 1952 VOL. XLVIII, NO. 5

NOVELETTE

that share of glory , by C. M. Kornbluih .... 9

SHORT NOVEL

telek, by Jack Vance 46

SHORT STORIES

the analogues, by Damon Knight 56

instinct, by Lester del Rey 106

sitting duck,6j> Oliver Saari 119

ARTICLES

machine ‘‘intelligence,’’

by Edmund C. Berkeley 82

hydroponics, by Carrol L. Klotzbach 96

READERS’ DEPARTMENTS

the editor’s page 6

in times to come 118

THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY 130

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY 131

BRASS TACKS 139

Editor Assistant Editor Adv. Mgr.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR. KAY TARRANT WALTER J. MC BRIDE

COVER BY ROGERS

Illustrations by Cartier, Rogers and van Dongen.

The editorial contents have not been published before, are protected by copyright and cannot be reprinted without publishers’ permission. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental.

Astounding SCIENCE FICTION published monthly by Street & Smith Publications, Incorporated at 575 Madi- son Avenue, New York 22, New York. Gerald H. Smith, President; Ralph R. Whittaker, Jr., Executive Vice President; Arthur P. Lawler, Vice President and Secretary; Thomas H. Kaiser, Treasurer. Copyright, 1 951, in U. S. A.; and Great Britain by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Entered as Second Class matter at the Post Office, New York, N. Y. Subscriptions $3.50 for one year and $6.00 for two years in United States and Possessions; $4.50 for one year and $7.75 for two years in Canada; $4.75 for one year and $8.00 for two years in Pan American Union, Philippine Islands and Spain. Elsewhere $5.00 for one year and $8.50 for two years. When possible allow four weeks for change of address. Give old address and new address when notifying us. We cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or art work. Any material submitted must include return postage. All subscriptions should be addressed to Subscription Dept., Street & Smith Publications, Incorporated, 304 East 45th Street, New York 17, New York.

$3.50 per Year in U. S. A. Printed in U. S. A.

NEXT ISSUE ON SALE JANUARY 16, 1952

35c per Copy

N is back!

At last you can obtain a copy of this rare science fiction classic

IN the eleven years since it was first written, A. E. van Vogt’s Sian has become one of science fiction’s legends and one of its rarities. Almost every reader of s-f has heard of this modern classic and could tell you, rather vague- ly, that it concerns a telepathic mutant race, hunted down and almost exter- minated by a frightened mankind. But very few have actually read Sian or own a copy of it. This is why:

Sian first appeared, in magazine form, in the fall of 1940. It was issued in book form, five years later, in a limited edition that was quickly sold out. Lately it has not been uncommon for readers to offer $10 or $15 for a copy; and there is at least one authen- ticated instance of a copy changing hands for $37.

Finally, Simon and Schuster’s own science fiction fans decided that some- thing should be done about this. We persuaded van Vogt to lend us his only copy — which we promised to return unscarred.

We found that Sian was even more exciting and provocative than we’d re- membered. We insisted that it be made available again to the $2.50 (rather

*

than just the $37) audience. Van Vogt thought that was a fine idea, too. And, being a perfectionist, he worked over the book again, revising, adapting, tightening, and polishing. The basic story is unchanged; it is just a bit more of a masterpiece, that’s all.

This brand new edition of Sian has just been published. With its past his- tory in mind, we thought we ought to give you fair warning so that you can make sure of a copy before it vanishes again. You can find it at your book- seller’s now. Or, if you prefer, send the coupon below, direct to the publishers.

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PROPOSED HISTORY

One of the major puzzles of history is the system of facts regarding the occurrence and disappearance of man’s empires. Briefly, the facts appear to be:

1. For about seventy-five thousand years, homo sapiens, in his present form, inhabited Earth, and had a low level of village-nomad tribe culture. This pattern continued, practically unchanged, spread over the entire planet, for millennia.

2. About seven thousand years ago, the first empire of man appeared. From a level, millennia-ancient cul- tural pattern, abruptly a totally new form of organization burst into sight.

3. The first empire fell. Thereafter a rapid sequence of empires rose and fell.

4. The empires came more and more rapidly, more and more widely spread.

5. At present we have a world- empire, in the sense of a world domi- nation of Western Technical culture.

I propose a new angle on solving the problem. The scientific method of

6

thought works by collecting data, or- ganizing it, and trying to set up an h)'pothesis or theory that will explain all the known facts, with a minimum of postulate. I propose one postulate:

Proposed: That homo superior ap- peared in the world about eight thousand years ago. That the mutation involved is purely mental. That it does not in- volve any physiologically recognizable characteristic. That the mutation is simply a greater ability to organize and apply facts.

Let’s study the consequences of this single postulate.

First, when homo superior was born, it represented the eventuation of a mutation that homo sapiens was capa- ble of, and thus the appearance of an individual homo superior simply proved that such mutations could occur. Thus, the first homo superior need not be considered a unique individual. Hemo- philia, one of the well-known muta- tions Man is subject to, occurs spon- taneously, and not once, but many times.

However, let us allow the appear-

A STOUN D ING SCIENCE-FI CTI O \

ance of homo superior. In that time, human civilization was at a village level, communication was very poor, and there was strong inbreeding in each little tribal group. No one indi- vidual, however strong, could change the way of life of the whole village. Not at once, that is — but his genes, spread throughout the village by the inbreeding characteristic of the cul- tural level, would change things.

A century — two centuries — maybe five centuries, and the village would reach what we might call a critical concentration of homo superior genes. The village changes — its pattern of culture changes, and the tribe sets out to organize a greater area, a larger horizon. The First Empire probably wasn’t very large — maybe a dozen villages were attacked and forced into the new pattern, and a staff of satraps, governors, chieftains, or whatever they may have been called® sent from the original village to rule them. Communication between the villages was set up and main- tained. The old tribal inbreeding broken down . . .

And the empire crashed. No critical concentration of homo superior genes because of the new dilution. Back to the village level of culture, back to inbreeding — and reconcentration of those new', powerful characteristics! Now a dozen villages are concentrat- ing the genes. And now — well, the next time, a dozen villages of homo superior start out and set up a real empire.

PROPOSED HISTORY

And, by improving communications, dilute themselves out of the concentra- tion of organizational genes they need. And the new empire crashes. More spectacularly this time; it rose a lot higher, and a lot wider, before it went down.

The cycle of history is under way. The empires rise, spread, dilute their concentration of superior genes, and fall. The failure of communications after the fall allows reconcentration, re-inbreeding, and a new empire’s rise. But each empire, in its heyday, spreads wider the new, strong genes of homo superior; each empire is larger. Empires rise, then, not one at a time, after lapses of centuries, but two, three — half a dozen at a time, warring with each other. Finally Rome rises, embracing many old empires, spreads wider than ever — and never quite falls. For now, the strong, new genes have been so widely spread that total reversion to the village level never quite returns. Homo sapiens, the serf, doesn’t move around much, but the higher concentration of homo superior genes in the aristocracy group gets well spread. And gradually, the recon- centration of the genes leads to revolu- tion— and the development of the world empire of Man.

Simultaneously, similar develop- ments of independent empires have occurred in the Far East, in Africa, South America, and elsewhere. Homo superior is a mutation of which homo sapiens is capable; it can, and does,

7

rise spontaneously in any area.

But now, the cycle of history is perhaps finished; with the world- wide distribution of homo superior genes reaching the necessary critical level, and surpassing that critical level-for- empire, we are entering a new phase. The technological phase,' where the concentration of homo superior genes is great enough to support a technical empire. And, too, homo superior must, himself, be open to mutation . . .

This suggestion — by the introduc- tion of one postulate — that homo su- perior has already appeared — does seem to explain most of the observed data of history. I am not a sufficiently practiced student of history to de- velop the detailed nature of the pro- posal, nor of its ramifications. I pro- pose it as a speculation of interest to many readers. And I add one more ramification that is, I think, of the highest interest. At last, race prejudice makes good, sound sense. But on a basis that will be the total despair of all professional race-haters! For the idea, if true, means that there are two true races of man; homo sapiens and homo superior. But that there is no such thing as a pure-bred homo su- perior, since, by the nature of things, homo superior inevitably has always crossbred with homo sapiens. There is only a greater or lesser degree of hybridization. We are, all of us, mon- grel half-breeds, part sapiens, part superior. And Kipling was right : “But there is neither border nor breed nor

8

birth, when two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the Earth.”

For homo superior has no physio- logical distinguishing marks. As an early philosopher said, “By their fruits, ye shall know them.” True; thus, and only thus, shall ye know them! Not by place of birth, education, body build, blood type or skin.

George Washington was, obviously, possessed of a great share of homo superior genes. And George Washing- ton Carver, one of the great agricul- tural chemists of world history, was also of the same fine breed — though he happened to have a black skin. I claim some kinship to George Wash- ington Carver, some right to claim that I, too, have a certain strain of homo superior, and prefer to minimize the kinship with the white-skinned, but fruitless “white trash” of the world.

Because there is no distinguishing mark save their own accomplishments, no presently-accepted basis of “race” distinction makes any important sense whatsoever. Homo superior is here — but only by his works can you find him. Confucius, Einstein, Geofge Washington, Moses, Plato, Jean Cris- tophe, the Black Napoleon, and Abra- ham Lincoln all belonged to one race, the race of Imperial Man — homo su- perior.

And each was a mongrel hybrid- even as you and I!

The Editor.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE- F I OT I O N

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

BY C. M. KORNBLUTH

A language is more than a pattern of words; ids part and parcel of a vaster system of concomitant traditions and cultural beliefs. And being a Translator for a galaxy of planetary folk . . .

Illustrated by Rogers

Young Alen, one of a thousand in the huge refectory, ate absent-mind- edly as the reader droned into the per- fect silence of the hall. Today’s lesson happened to be a word-list of the Thetis VIII planet’s sea-going folk.

“ Tlon — a ship,” droned the reader.

“ Rtlo — some ships, number un- known.

“'Long — some ships, number known, always modified by cardinal.

“ Ongr — a ship in a collection of ships, always modified by ordinal.

“ Ngrt — first ship in a collection of

ships; an exception to ongr.”

A lay brother tiptoed to Alen’s side. “The Rector summons you,” he whis- pered.

Alen had no time for panic, though that was the usual reaction to a sum- mons from the Rector to a novice. He slipped from the refectory, stepped onto the northbound corridor and stepped off at his cell, a minute later and a quarter-mile farther on. Hastily, but meticulously, he changed from his drab habit to the heraldic robes in the cubicle with its simple stool, wash-

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

9

stand, desk, and paperweight or two. Alen, a level-headed young fellow, was not aware that he had broken any section of the Order’s complicated Rule, but he was aware that he could have done so without knowing it. It might, he thought, be the last time he would see the cell.

He cast a glance which he hoped would not be the final one over it; a glance which lingered a little fondly on the reel rack where were stowed: “Nicholson on Martian Verbs,” “The New Oxford Venusian Dictionary,” the ponderous six-reeler “Deutche- Ganymediche Konversasionslexikon ” published long ago and far away in Leipzig. The later works were there, too: “The Tongues of the Galaxy — An Essay in Classification,” “A Con- cise Grammar of Cephean,” “The Self-Pronouncing Vegan II Diction- ary” — scores of them, and, of course, the worn reel of old Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”

Enough of that! Alen combed out his small, neat beard and stepped onto the southbound corridor. He trans- ferred to an eastbound at the next intersection and minutes later was before the Rector’s lay secretary.

“You’d better review your Lyran irregulars,” said the secretary disre- spectfully. “There’s a trader in there who’s looking for a cheap herald on a swindling trip to Lyra VI.” Thus un- ceremoniously did Alen learn that he was not to be ejected from the Order but that he was to be elevated to

Journeyman. But as a herald should, he betrayed no sign of His immense relief. He did, however, take the secre- tary’s advice and sensibly reviewed his Lyran.

While he was in the midst of a declension which applied only to in- animate objects, the voice of the Rector — and what a mellow voice it was! — floated through the secretary’s intercom.

“Admit the novice, Alen,” said the Master Herald.

A final settling of his robes and the youth walked into the Rector’s huge office, with the seal of the Order blaz- ing in diamonds above his desk. There was a stranger present; presumably the trader — a black-beareded fellow whose rugged frame didn’t carry his Vegan cloak with ease.

Said the Rector: “Novice, this is to be the crown of your toil if you are acceptable to — ?” He courteously turned to the trader, who shrugged irritably.

“It’s all one to me,” growled the blackbeard. “ Somebody cheap, some- body who knows the cant of the thievish Lyran gem peddlers, above all, somebody at once. Overhead is de- vouring my flesh day by day as the ship waits at the field. And when we are space-borne, my imbecile crew will doubtless waste liter after priceless liter of my fuel. And when we land the swindling Lyrans will without doubt make my ruin complete by tricking me

10

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE- FI CT1 O N

even out of the minute profit I hope to realize. Good Master Herald, let me have the infant cheap and I’ll bid you good day.”

The Rector’s shaggy eyebrows drew down in a frown. “Trader,” he said sonorously, “our mission of galactic utilitarian culture is not concerned with your margin of profit. I ask you to test this youth and, if you find him able, to take him as your Herald on your voyage. He will serve you well, for he has been taught that commerce and words, its medium, are the unify- ing bonds which will one day unite the cosmos into a single humankind. Do not conceive that the College and Order of Heralds is a mere aid to you in your commercial adventure.”

“Very well,” growled the trader. He addressed Alen in broken Lyran:“Boy, how you make up Vegan stones of three fires so Lyran women like, come buy, buy again? ”

Alen smoothly replied: “The Vegan triple-fire gem finds most favor on Lyran and especially among its women when set in a wide glass anklet if large, and when arranged in the Lyran ‘lucky five’ pattern in a glass thumb- ring if small.” He was glad, very glad, he had come across — and as a matter of course memorized, in the relentless fashion of the Order — a novel which touched briefly on the Lyran jewel trade.

The trader glowered and switched to Cephean - apparently his native

tongue. “That was well-enough said, Herald. Now tell me whether you’ve got guts to man a squirt in case we’re intercepted by the thieving so-called Customs collectors of Eyolf’s Realm between here and Lyra?”

Alen knew' the Rector’s eyes were on him. “The noble mission of our Order,” he said, “ forbids me to use any weapon but the truth in furthering cosmic util- itarian civilization. No, master trader, I shall not man one of your weapons.” The trader shrugged. “So I must take what I get. Good Master Herald, make me a price.”

The Rector said casually : “ I regard this chiefly as a training mission for our novice; the fee will be nominal. Let us say twenty-five per cent of your net as of blastoff from Lyra, to be audited by Journeyman-Herald Alen.” The trader’s howl of rage echoed in the dome of the huge room. “It’s not fair!” he roared. “Who but you thievish villains with your Order and your catch- ’em-young and your years of training can learn the tongues of the galaxy? What chance has a decent mer- chant busy with profit and loss got to learn the cant of every race between Sirius and the Coalsack? It’s not fair! It’s not fair and I’ll say so until my dying breath ! ”

“Die outside if you find our terms unacceptable, then,” said the Rector. “The Order does not haggle.”

“ Well I know it,” sighed the trader brokenly. “I should have stuck to my own system and my good father’s

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

11

pump-flange factory. But no! I had to pick up a bargain in gems on Vego! Enough of this — bring me your con- tract and I’ll sign it.”

The Rector’s shaggy eyebrows went went up. “There is no contract,” he said. “A mutual trust between Herald and trader is the cornerstone upon which cosmos- wide amity and under- standing will be built.”

“At twenty- five per cent of an un- licked pup,” muttered blackbeard to himself in Cephean.

None of his instructors had played Polonius as Alen, with the seal of the Journeyman-Herald on his brow, packed for blastoff and vacated his cell. He supposed they knew that twenty years of training either had done their work or had not.

The trader taking Alen to the field where his ship waited, was less wise. “The secret of successful negotiation,” he weightily told his Herald, “is to yield willingly. This may strike you as a paradox, but it is the veritable key to my success in maintaining the profits of my good father’s pump-flange trade. The secret is to yield with rueful ad- miration of your opponent — but only in unimportant details. Put up a little battle about delivery date or about terms of credit and then let him have his way. But you never give way a hair’s breadth on your asking price unless — ”

Alen let him drivel on as they drove through the outer works of the Col-

12

lege. He was glad the car was open. For the first time he was being ac- corded the doffed hat that is the due of Heralds from their inferiors in the Order, and the grave nod of salutation from equals. Five-year-old postulants seeing his brow-seal tugged off their headgear with comical celerity; fellow- novices, equals a few hours before, un- covered as though he were the Rector himself.

The ceremonial began to reach the trader. When, with a final salutation, a lay warder let them through the great gate of the curtain wall, he said with some irritation: “They appear to hold you in high regard, boy.”

“I am better addressed as ‘Herald’,” said Alen composedly.

“A plague descend on the College and Order! Do you think I don’t know my manners? Of course, I call a Herald ‘ Herald,’ but we’re going to be cooped up together and you’ll be wrorking for me. What’ll happen to ship’s discipline if I have to kowtow to you?”

“There will be no problem,” said Alen.

Blackbeard grunted and trod fiercely on the accelerator.

“That’s my ship,” he said at length. “Starsong. Vegan registry — it may help passing through Eyolf’s Realm, though it cost me overmuch in bribes. A crew of eight, lazy, good-for-nothing wastrels — Agh ! Can I believe my eyes? ” The car jammed to a halt be- fore the looming ship and blackbeard was up the ladder and through the

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

port in a second. Settling his robes, Alen followed.

He found the trader fiercely de- nouncing his chief engineer for using space drive to heat the ship; he had seen the faint haze of a minimum ex- haust from the stern tubes.

“For that, dolt,” screamed black- beard, “we have a thing known as electricity. Have you by chance ever heard of it? Are you aware that a chief engineer’s responsibility is the efficient and economical operation of his ship’s drive mechanism? ”

The chief, a cowed-looking Cephean, saw Alen with relief and swept off his battered cap. The Herald nodded gravely and the trader broke off in irritation. “We need none of that bow- ing and scraping for the rest of the voyage,” he declared.

“Of course not, sir,” said the chief. “O’course not. I was just welcoming the Herald aboard. Welcome aboard, I Jerald. I’m Chief Elwon, Herald. And 1 ’m glad to have a Herald with us.” A covert glance at the trader. “I’ve voyaged with Heralds and without, and I don’t mind saying I feel safer indeed with you aboard.”

“May I be taken to my quarters?” asked Alen.

“Your — ?” began the trader, stu- pefied.

The chief broke in: “I’ll fix you a cabin, Herald. We’ve got some bulk- heads I can rig aft for a snug little space, not roomy, but the best a little

ship like this can afford.”

The trader collapsed into a bucket seat as the chief bustled aft and Alen followed.

“Herald,” the chief said with some embarrassment after he had collared two crewmen and set them to work, “you’ll have to excuse our good master trader. He’s new to the interstar lanes and he doesn’t exactly know the jets yet. Between us we’ll get him squared away.”

Alen inspected the cubicle run up for him — a satisfactory enclosure af- fording him the decent privacy he rated. He dismissed the chief and the crewmen with a nod and settled him- self on the cot.

Beneath the iron composure in which he had been trained, he felt scared and alone. Not even old Machi- avelli seemed to offer comfort or coun- cil: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to con- duct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduc- tion of a new order of things,” said Chapter Six.

But what said Chapter Twenty-Six? “Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.”

Slarsong was not a happy ship. Blackbeard’s nagging stinginess hung over the crew like a thundercloud, but Alen professed not to notice. He walked regularly fore and aft for two hours a day greeting the crew members in their various native tongues and

THAT SHARK or GLORY

13

then wrapping himself in the reserve the Order demanded — though he longed to salute them man-to-man, eat with them, gossip about their native planets, the past misdeeds that had brought them to their berths aboard the miserly Starsong and their hopes for the future. The Rule of the College and Order of Heralds decreed other- wise. He accepted the uncoverings of the crew with a nod and tried to be pleased because they stood in growing awe of him that ranged from Chief Elwon’s lively appreciation of a Her- ald’s skill to Wiper Jukkl’s supersti- tious reverence. Jukkl was a low- browed specimen from a planet of the decadent Sirius system. He outdid the normal slovenliness of an all-male crew on a freighter — a slovenliness in which Alen could not share. Many of his waking hours were spent in his locked cubicle burnishing his metal and cleaning and pressing his robes. A Herald was never supposed to suggest by his appearance that he shared mor- tal frailties.

. Biackbeard himself yielded a little, to the point of touching his cap sul- lenly. This probably was not so much awe at Alen’s studied manner as re- spect for the incisive, lightning-fast job of auditing the Herald did on the books of the trading venture — ab- surdly complicated books with scores of accounts to record a simple matter of buying gems cheap on Vega and chartering a ship' in the hope of selling them dearly on Lyra. The complicated

14

books and overlapping accounts did tell the story, but they made it very easy for an auditor to erroneously read a number of costs as far higher than they actually were. Alen did not fall into the trap.

On the fifth day after blastoff, Chief El won rapped, respectfully but ur- gently, on the door of Alen’s cubicle.

“If you please, Herald,” he urged, “could you come to the bridge?”

Alen’s heart bounded in his chest, but he gravely said: “My meditation must not be interrupted. I shall join you on the bridge in ten minutes.” And for ten minutes he methodically pol- ished a murky link in the massive gold chain that fastened his boat-cloak — the “meditation.”' He donned the cloak before stepping out; the sum- mons sounded like a full-dress affair in the offing.

Tire trader was stamping and fum- ing. Chief Elwon was riffling through his spec book unhappily. Astrogator Hufrfer was at the plot computer run- ning up trajectories and knocking them down again. A quick glance showed Alen that they were all high- speed trajectories in the “evasive action” class.

“Herald,” said the trader grimly, “ we have broken somebody’s detector bubble.” He jerked his thumb at a red- lit signal. “I expect we’ll be over- hauled shortly. Are you ready to earn your twenty-five per cent of the net?”

Alen overlooked the crudity. “Are

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

you rigged for color video, merchant?” he asked.

“We are.”

“ Then I am ready to do what I can for my client. ”

He took the communicator’s seat, stealing a glance in the still-blank screen. The reflection of his face was reassuring, though he wished he had thought to comb his small beard.

. Another light flashed on, and Huf- ner quit the operator to study the de- tector board. “Big, powerful and get- ting closer,” he said tersely. “Scanning for us with directionals now. Putting out plenty of energy — ”

The loud-speaker of the ship-to-ship audio came to life.

“VVhat ship are you?” it demanded in Vegan. “We are a Customs cruiser of the Realm of Eyolf. What ship are you?”

“Have the crew man the squirts,” said the trader softly to the chief.

Elwon looked at Alen, who shook his head. “Sorry, sir,’ said the en- gineer apologetically. “The Herald — ”

“We are the freighter Star song , Vegan registry,” said Alen into the audio mike as the trader choked. “We are carrying Vegan gems to Lyra.”

“They’re cfn us,” said the astro- gator despairingly, reading his instru- ments. The ship-to-ship video flashed on, showing an arrogant, square- jawed face topped by a battered naval cap.

“ Lyra indeed 1 We have plans of our own for Lyra. You will heave to — ” began the officer in the screen, before

he noted Alen. “My pardon, Herald,” he said sardonically'. “ Herald, will you please request the ship’s master to heave to for boarding and search? We wish to assess and collect Customs duties. You are aware, of course, that your vessel is passing through the Realm.”

The man’s accented Vegan reeked of Algol IV. Alen switched to that obscure language to say: “We were not aware of that. Are you aware that there is a reciprocal trade treaty in effect between the Vegan system and the Realm which specifies that freight in Vegan bottoms is dutiable only when consigned to ports in the Realm? ”

“You speak Algolian, do you? You Heralds have not been underrated, but don’t plan to lie your way out of this. Yes, -I am aware of some such agreement as you mentioned. We shall board you, as I said, and assess and collect duty in kind. If, regrettably, there has been any mistake you are, of course, free to apply to the Realm for reimbursement. Now, heave to!”

“I have no intentions of lying. I speak the solemn truth when I say that we shall fight to the last man any attempt of yours to board and loot us.”

Alen’s mind was racing furiously' through the catalogue of planetary folkways the Rule had decreed that he master. Algol IV — some ancestor- worship; veneration of mother; hand- to-hand combat with knives; compli-

TH AT SHARE OF GLORY

15

mentary greeting, “May you never strike down a weaker foe”; folk-hero Gaarek unjustly accused of slaying a cripple and exiled but it was an ene- my’s plot —

A disconcerted shadow was crossing the face of the officer as Alen impro- vised: “You will, of course, kill us all. But before this happens I shall have messaged back to the College and Order of Heralds the facts in the case, with a particular request* that your family be informed. Your name, I think, will be remembered as long as Gaarek’s — though not in the same way, of course; the Algolian whose hundred-man battle cruiser wiped out a virtually unarmed freighter with a crew of eight.”

The officer’s face was dark with rage. “You devil!” he snarled. “Leave my family out of this! I’ll come aboard and fight you man-to-man if you have the stomach for it!”

Alen shook his head regretfully. “The Rule of my Order forbids re- course to violence,” he said. “Our only permissible weapon is the truth.” “We’re coming aboard,” said the officer grimly. “ I’ll order my men not to harm your people. We’ll just be col- lecting customs. If your people shoot first, my men will be under orders to do nothing more than disable them.” Alen smiled and uttered a sentence or two in Algolian.

The officer’s jaw dropped and he croaked, after a pause: “I’ll cut you to ribbons. You can’t say that about my

16

mother, you — ” and he spewed back some of the words Alen had spoken.

“Calm yourself,” said the Herald gravely. “I apologize for my disgust- ing and unheraldic remarks. But I wished to prove a point. You would have killed me if you could; I touched off a reaction which had been planted in you by your culture. I will be able . to do the same with the men of yours who come aboard. For every race of man there is the intolerable insult that must be avenged in blood.

“Send your men aboard under or- ders not to kill if you wish; I shall goad them into a killing rage. 'We shall be massacred, yours will be the blame and you will be disgraced and dis- owned by your entire planet.” Alen hoped desperately that the naval crews of the Realm were, as reputed, a barbarous and undisciplined lot — Evidently they were, and the proud Algolian dared not risk it. In his na- tive language he spat again: “You devil! ” and switched back into Vegan. “Freighter Starsong,” he said bleakly, “I find that my space fix was in error and that you are not in Realm terri- tory. You may proceed.”

The astrogator said from the detec- tor board, incredulously: “Lie’s dis- engaging. He’s off us. He’s accelerat- ing. Herald what, did you say to him? ” But the reaction from blackbeard was more gratifying. Speechless, the trader took off his cap. Alen acknowl- edged the salute with a grave nod be- fore he started back to his cubicle. It

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

was just as well, he reflected, that the trader didn’t know his life and his ship had been unconditionally pledged in a finish fight against a hundred -man battle cruiser.

Lyra’s principal spaceport was pocked and broken, but they made a fair- enough landing. Alen, in full heraldic robes, descended from Starsong to greet a handful of port officials.

“Any metals aboard?” demanded one of them.

“None for sale,” said the Herald. “ We have Vegan gems, chiefly triple- lire.” He knew that the dull little planet was short of metals and, having made a virtue of necessity was some- how prejudiced against their import.

“ Have your crew transfer the cargo to the Customs shed,” said the port official studying Slarsong’s papers. “And all of you wait there.”

All of them — except Alen — lugged numbered sacks and boxes of gems to the low brick building designated. The trader was allowed to pocket a handful for samples before the shed was sealed — a complicated business. A brick was mortared over the simple ironwood latch that closed the ironwood door, a pat of clay was slapped over the brick and the port seal stamped in it. A mechanic with what looked like a pot- tery blowtorch fed. by powdered coal played a flame on the day seal until it glowed orange-red and that was that.

“Herald,” said the port official, “tell the merchant to sign here and

make his fingerprints.”

Alen studied the document; it was a simple identification form. Black beard signed with the reed pen provided and fingerprinted the documented. After two weeks in space he scarcely needed to ink his fingers first.

“ Now tell him that we’ll release the gems on his written fingerprinted order to whatever Lyran citizens he sells to. And explain that this roundabout sys- tem is necessary to avoid metal smug- gling. Please remove all metal from your clothes and stow it on your ship. Then we will seal that, too, and put it under guard until you are ready to take off. We regret that we will have to search you before we turn you loose, but we can’t afford to have our economy disrupted by irresponsible introduction. of metals.” Alen had not realized it was that bad.

After the thorough search that ex- tended to the confiscation of forgotten watches and pins, the port officials changed a sheaf of the trader’s ura- nium-backed Vegan currency into Ly- ran legal tender based on man-hours. Blackbeard made a partial payment to the crew, told them to have a good liberty and check in at the port at sunset tomorrow for probable take-off.

Alen and the trader were driven to town in an unlikely vehicle whose power plant was a pottery turbine. The driver, when they were safely out on the open road, furtively asked whether they had any metal they

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

17

wanted to discard.

The trader asked sharply in his broken Lyran : “ What you do you get metal? Where sell, how use?”

The driver, following a universal tendency, raised his voice and lapsed into broken Lyran himself to tell the strangers: “Black market science men pay much, much for little bit metal. Study, use build. Politicians make law no metal, what I care politicians? But you no tell, gentlemen?”

“We won’t tell,” said Alen. “But we have no metal for you.”

The driver shrugged.

“Herald,” said the trader, “what do you make of it?”-

“I didn’t know it was a political issue. We concern ourselves with the basic patterns of a people’s behavior, not the day-to-day expressions of the patterns. The planet’s got no heavy metals, which means there were no metals available to the primitive Ly- rans. The lighter metals don’t occur in native form or in easily-split com- pounds. They proceeded along the ceramic line instead of the- metallic line and appear to have done quite well for themselves up to a point. No electricity, of course, no aviation and no space flight.”

“And,” said the trader, “naturally the people who make these buggies and that blowtorch, we saw are scared witless that metals will be imported and put them out of business. So natu- rally they have laws passed prohibiting it.”

18

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

“Naturally,” said the Herald, look- ing sharply at the trader. But black- beard was back in character a moment later. “An outrage,” he growled. “Try- ing to tell a man what he can and can’t import when he sees a decent chance to make a bit of profit.”

The driver dropped them at a boardinghouse. It was half-timbered construction, which appeared to be swankier than the more common brick. The floors were plate glass, roughened for traction. Alen got them a double room with a view.

“What’s that thing?” demanded the trader, inspecting the view.

The thing was a structure looming above the slate and tile roofs of the town — a round brick tower for its first twenty-five meters and then wood for another -fifteen. As they studied it, it pricked up a pair of ears at the top and began to flop them wildly.

“Semaphore,” said Alen.

A minute later blackbeard piteously demanded from the bathroom: “ How do you make water come out of the tap? I touched it all over but nothing happened.”

“You have to turn it,” said Alen, demonstrating. “And that thing — you pull it sharply down, hold it and then release.”

“Barbarous,” muttered the trader. “Barbarous.”

An elderly maid came in to show them how to string their hammocks and ask if they happened to have a bit of metal to give her for a souvenir.

They sent her away and, rather than face the public dining room, made a meal from their own stores and turned in for the night.

It’s going well, thought Alen drow- sily: going very well indeed.

He awoke abruptly, but made no move. It was dark in the double room, and there were stealthy, furtive little noises nearby. A hundred thoughts flashed through his head of Lyran treachery and double-dealing. He lifted his eyelids a trifle and saw a figure silhouetted against the faint light of the big window. If a burglar, he was a clumsy one.

There was a stirring from the other hammock, the trader’s. With a sub- dued roar that sounded like “Thieving villains!” blackbeard launched him- self from the hammock at the intruder. But his feet tangled in the hammock cords and he belly-flopped on the floor.

The burglar, if it was one, didn’t dash smoothly and efficiently for the door. He straightened himself against the window and said resignedly: “You need not fear. I will make no resist- ance.”

Alen rolled from the hammock and helped the trader to his feet. “He said he doesn’t want to fight,” he told the trader.

Blackbeard siezed the intruder and shook him, like a rat. “ So the rogue is a coward too!” he boomed. “Give us a light, Herald.”

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19

Alen uncovered the slow-match, blew it to a flame, squeakily pumped up a pressure torch until a jet of pul- verized coal sprayed from its nozzle and ignited it. A dozen strokes more and there was enough heat feeding back from the jet to maintain the pres- sure cycle.

Through all of this the trader was demanding in his broken Lyran : “What make here, thief? What reason thief us room? ”

The Herald brought the hissing pressure lamp to the window. The in- truder’s face was not the unhealthy, neurotic face of a criminal. Its thin lines told of discipline and thought.

“What did you want here?” asked Alen.

“Metal,” said the intruder simply. “I thought you might have a bit of iron.”

It was the first time a specific metal had been named by any Lyran. He used, of course, the Vegan word for iron.

“You are particular,” remarked the Herald. “Why iron?” i “I have heard that it possesses cer- tain properties — perhaps you can tell me before you turn me over to the police. Is it true, as we hear, that a mass of iron whose crystals have been aligned by a sharp blow will strongly attract another piece of iron with a force related to the distance between them?”

“It is true,” said the Herald, study- ing the man’s face. It was lit with ex-

20

citement. Deliberately Alen added: “This alignment is more easily and uniformly effected by placing the mass of iron in an electric field — that is, a space surrounding the passage of an electron stream through a conductor.” Many of the words he used had to be Vegan; there were no Lyran words for “electric,” “electron” or “conductor.” The intruder’s face fell. “I have tried to master the concept you refer to,” he admitted. “But it is beyond me. I have questioned other interstar voyagers and they have touched on it, but I cannot grasp it — But thank you, sir; you have been very courteous. I will trouble you no further while you summon the watch.”

“You give up too easily,” said Alen. “For a scientist, much too easily. If we turn you over to the watch, there will be hearings and testimony and whatnot. Our time is limited here on your planet ; I doubt that we can spare any for your legal processes.”

The trader let go of the intruder’s shoulder and grumbled: “Why you no ask we have iron, I tell you no. Search, search, take all metal away. We no police you. I sorry hurted you arms. Here for you.” Blackbeard brought out a palmful of his sample gems and picked out a large triple-fire stone. “You not be angry me,” he said, put- ting it in the Lyran’s hand.

“ I can’t — ” said the scientist. Blackbeard closed his fingers over the stone and growled: “I give, you take. Maybe buy iron with, eh?”

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

“That’s so,” said the Lyran. “Thank you both, gentlemen. Thank you — ”

“ You go,” said the trader. “ You go, ‘we sleep again.”

The scientist bowed with dignity and left their room.

“Gods of space,” swore the trader. “To think that Jukkl, the Starsong’s wiper, knows more about electricity and magnetism than a brainy fellow like that.”

“ And they are the key to physics,” mused Alen. “A scientist here is dead- ended forever, because their materials are all insulators! Glass, clay, glaze, wood.”

“Funny, all right,” yawned black- beard. “Did you see me collar him once I got on my feet? Sharp, eh? Good night, Herald.” He gruntingly hauled himself into the hammock again, leaving Alen to turn off the hissing light and cover the slow-match with its perforated lid.

They had roast fowl of some sort or other for breakfast in the public dining room. Alen was required by his Rule to refuse the red wine that went with it. The trader gulped it approvingly. “A sensible, though backward peo- ple,” he said. “And now if you’ll in- quire of the management where the thievish jewel-buyers congregate, we can get on with our business and per- haps be off by dawn tomorrow.”

“So quickly?” asked Alen, almost forgetting himself enough to show surprise.

“My charter on Starsong, good Herald — thirty days to go, but what might not go wrong in space? And then there would be penalties to mulct me of whatever minute prSfit I may realize.”

Alen learned that Gromeg’s Tavern was the gem mart and they took an- other of the turbine-engined cabs through the brick-paved streets.

Gromeg’s was a dismal, small-win- dowed brick bam with heavy-set men lounging about, an open kitchen at one end and tables at the other. A score of smaller, sharp-faced men were at the tables sipping wine and chatting.

“I am Journeyman-Herald Alen,” announced Alen clearly, “with Vegan gems to dispose of.”

There was a silence of elaborate un- concern, and then one of the dealers spat and grunted: “Vegan gems. A drug on the market. Take them away, Herald.”

“Come, master trader,” said Alen in the Lyran tongue. “ The gem dealers of Lyra do not want your wares.” He started for the door.

One of the dealers called languidly: “ Well, wait a moment. I have nothing better to do; since you’ve come all this way I’ll have a look at your stuff.”

“You honor us,” said Alen. He and blackbeard sat at the man’s table. The trader took out a palmful of samples, counted them meaningfully and laid them on the boards.

“Well,” said the gem dealer, “I don’t know whether to be amused or

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

21

insulted. I am Garthkint, the gem dealer — not a retailer of beads. How- ever, I have no hard feelings. A drink for your frowning friend, Herald? I know you gentry don’t indulge.” The drink was already on the table, brought by one of the hulking guards.

Alen passed Garthkint’s own mug of wine to the trader, explaining po- litely: “In my master trader’s native Cepheus it is considered honorable for the guest to sip the drink his host laid down and none other. A charming custom, is it not?”

“Charming, though unsanitary,” muttered the gem dealer — and he did not touch the drink he had ordered for blackbeard.

“ I can’t understand a word either of you is saying — too flowery. Was this little rat trying to drug me?” de- manded the trader in Cephean.

“No,” said Alen. “Just trying to get you drunk.” To Garthkint in Ly- ran, he explained, “The good trader was saying that he wishes to leave at once. I was agreeing with him.”.

“Well,” said Garthkint, “perhaps I can take a couple of your gauds. For some youngster who wishes a cheap ring.”

“He’s getting to it,” Alen told the trader.

“High time,” grunted blackbeard.

“The trader asks me to inform you,” said Alen, switching back to Lyran, “that he is unable to sell in lots smaller than live hundred gems.”

22

“A compact language, Cephean,” said Garthkint, narrowing his eyes. “Is it not?” Alen blandly agreed. The gem dealer’s forefinger rolled an especially fine three-fire stone from the little pool of gems on the table. “ I suppose,” he said grudgingly, “that this is what I must call the best of the lot. What, I am curious to know, is the price you would set for five hundred equal in quality and size to this poor thing?”

“This,” said Alen, “is the good trader’s first venture to your delightful planet. He wishes to be remembered and welcomed all of the many times he anticipates returning. Because of this he has set an absurdly low' price, counting good will as more important than a prosperous voyage. Two thou- sand Lyran credits.”

“Absurd,” snorted Garthkint. “I cannot do business with you. Either you are insanely rapacious or you have been pitifully misguided as to the value of your wares. lam well-known for my charity; I will assume that the latter is the case. I trust you will not be too downcast when I tell you that five hundred of these muddy, under- sized out-of-round objects are worth no more than two hundred credits.” “If you are serious,” said Alen with marked amazement, “we would not dream of imposing on you. At the fig- ure you mention, we might as well not sell at all but return with our wares to Cepheus and give these gems to children in the streets for marbles.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

Good gem trader, excuse us for taking up so much of your time and many thanks for your warm hospitality in the matter of the wine.” He switched to Cephean and said: “ We’re dicker- ing now. Two thousand and two hun- dred. Get up; we’re going to start to walk out.”

“What if he lets us go?” grumbled blackbeard, but he did heave himself to his feet and turn to the door as Alen rose.

“ My trader echoes my regrets,” the Herald said in Lyran. “Farewell.”

“ Well, stay a moment,” said Garth- kint. “I am well-known for my soft heart toward strangers. A charitable man might go as high as five hundred and absorb the inevitable loss. If you should return some day with a pass- able lot of real gems, it would be worth my while for you to remember who treated you with such benevolence and give me fair choice.”

“Noble Lyran,” said Alen, appar- ently almost overcome. “I shall not easily forget your combination of acumen and charity. It is a lesson to traders. It is a lesson to me. I shall nol insist on two thousand. I shall cut the throat of my trader’s venture by re- ducing his price to eighteen hundred credits, though I wonder how I shall dare tell him of it.”

“ What’s going on now? ” demanded blackbeard.

“Five hundred and eighteen hun- dred,” said Alen. “We can sit down again.”

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

“Up, down — up, down,” muttered the trader.

They sat, and Alen said in Lyran: “ My trader unexpectedly indorses the reduction. He says, ‘Better to lose some than all’ — an old proverb in the Cephean tongue. And he forbids any further reduction.”

“Come, now,” wheedled the gem dealer. “Let us be men of the world about this. One must give a little and take a little. Everybody knows he can’t have his own way forever. I shall offer a good, round eight hundred credits and we’ll close on it, eh? Pil- quis, fetch us a pen and ink!” One of the burly guards was right there with an inkpot and a reed pen. Garthkint had a Customs form out of his tunic and was busily filling it in to specify the size, number and fire of gems to be released to him.

“ What’s it now? ” asked blackbeard.

“Eight hundred.”

“Take it!”

“Garthkint,” said Alen regretfully, “you heard the firmness and decision in my trader’s voice? What can I do? I am only speaking for him. He is a hard man but perhaps I can talk him around later. I offer you the gems at a ruinous fifteen hundred credits.”

“Split the difference,” said Garth- kint resignedly.

“Done at eleven -fifty,” said Alen.

That blackbeard understood. “Well done!” he boomed at Alen and took a swig at Garthkint’s winecup. “Have

23

him fill -in ‘Sack eighteen’ oil his paper. It’s five hundred of that grade.”

The gem dealer counted out twenty- three fifty-credit notes and blackbeard signed and fingerprinted the release.

“Now,” said Garthkint, “you will please remain here while I take a trip to the spaceport for my property.” Three or four of the guards were sud- denly quite close.

“You will find,” said Alen dryly, “that our standard of commercial, mo- rality is no lower than yours.”

The dealer smiled politely and left.

“Who will be the next? asked Alen of the room at large.

“I’ll look at your gems,” said an- other dealer, sitting at the table.

With the ice-breaking done, the transactions went quicker. Alen had disposed of a dozen lots by the time their first buyer returned.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We’ve been tricked before, but your gems are as represented. I congratulate you, Herald, on driving a hard, fair bar- gain.”

“That means,” said Alen regret- fully, “that I should have asked for more.” The gufirds were once mT>re lounging in corners and no longer seemed so menacing.

They had a mid-day meal and con- tinued to dispose of their wares. At sunset Alen held a final auction to clean up the odd lots that remained over and was urged to stay to dinner.

The trader, counting a huge wad of

the Lyran manpower-based notes, shook his head. “We should be off be- fore dawn, Herald,” he told Alen. “Time is money, time is money.”

“They are very insistent.”

“And I am very stubborn. Thank them and let us be on our way before anything else is done to increase my overhead.”

Something did turn up — a city watchman with a bloody nose and split lip.

He demanded of the Herald: “Are you responsible for the Cephean ma- niac known as Elwon? ”

Garthkint glided up to mutter in Alen’s ear: “Beware how you answer!”

Alen needed no warning. His ground- ing included Lyran legal concepts — and« on the backward little planet touched with many relics of feudalism “responsible” covered much territory.

“What has Chief Elwon done?” he parried.

“As you see,” the watchman glumly replied, pointing to his wounds. “And the same to three others before we got him out of tire wrecked wineshop and into the castle. Are you responsible for him?”

“ Let me speak with my trader for a moment. Will you have some wine meantime?” He signaled and one of the guards brought a mug.

“Don’t mind if I do. I can use it,” sighed the watchman.

“We are in trouble,” said Alen to blackbeard. “Chief Elwon is in the ‘ castle’ — prison — for drunk and dis-

24

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

orderly conduct. You as his master are considered responsible for his conduct under Lyran law. You must pay his fines or serve his penalties. Or you can ‘ disown ’ him, which is considered dis- honorable but sometimes necessary. For paying his fine or serving his time you have a prior lien on his services, without pay — but of course that’s unenforceable off Lyra.”

Blackbeard was sweating a little. “Find out from the policeman how long all this is likely to take. I don’t want to leave Elwon here and I do want us to get off as soon as possible. Keep him occupied, now, while I go about some business.”

The trader retreated to a corner of the darkening bamlike tavern, beckon- ing Garthkint and a guard with him as Alen returned to the watchman.

“ Good keeper of the peace,” he said, “will you have another?”

He would.

“My trader wishes to know what penalties are likely to be levied against the unfortunate Chief Elwon.”

“Going to leave him in the lurch, eh?” asked the watchman a little bel- ligerently. “A fine master you have!” One of the dealers at the table in- dignantly corroborated him. “If you foreigners aren’t prepared to live up to your obligations, why did you come here in the first place? What happens to business if a master can send his man to steal and cheat and then say: Don’t blame me — it was his doing! ’ ” Alen patiently explained: “On other

planets, good Lyrans, the tie of master and man is not so strong that a man would obey if he were ordered to go and steal or cheat.”

They shook their heads and mut- tered. It was unheard-of.

“Good watchman,” pressed the Herald, “my trader does not want to disown Chief Elwon. Can you tell me what recompense would be necessary — and how long it would take to man- age the business? ”

The watchman started on a third cup which Alen had unostentatiously signaled for. “It’s hard to say,” he told the Herald weightily. “For my damages, I would demand a hundred credits at least. The three other mem- bers of the watch battered by your lunatic could ask no less. The wineshop suffered easily five hundred credits’ damage. The owner of it was beaten, but that doesn’t matter, of course.” “No imprisonment?”

“Oh, a flogging, of course” — Alen started before he recalled that the “flogging” was a few half-hearted symbolic strokes on the covered shoul- ders with a light cane — “but no im- prisonment. His Honor, Judge Krarl, does not sit on the night bench. Judge Krarl is a newfangled reformer, stran- ger. He professes to believe that mulct- ing is unjust — that it makes it easy for the rich to commit crime and go scot-free.”

“But doesn’t it?” asked Alen, drawn off-course in spite of himself.

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25

There was pitying laughter around him.

“Look you,” a dealer explained kindly. “The good watchman suffers battery, the mad Cephean or his mas- ter is mulcted for damages, the watch- man is repaid for his injuries. What kind of justice is it to the watchman if the mad Cephean is locked away in a cell unfined?.”

The watchman nodded approvingly. “Well-said,” he told the dealer. “Luck- ily we have on the night bench a jus- tice of the old school, His Honor, Judge Treel. Stern, but fair. You should hear him! ‘Fifty credits! A hundred credits and the lash! Robbed a ship, eh? Two thousand credits!’” He returned to his own voice and said with awe: “For a murder, he never assesses less than ten thousand credits /”

And if the murderer couldn’t pay, Alen knew, he became a “public charge,” “responsible to the state” — that is, a slave. If he could pay, of course, he was turned loose.”

“And His Horror, Judge Treel,” he pressed, “is sitting tonight? Can we possibly appear before him, pay the fines and be off? ”

“To be sure, stranger. I’d be a fool if I waited until morning, wouldn’t I?” The wine had loosened his tongue a little too far and he evidently realized it. “Enough of this,” he said. “Does your master honorably accept respon- sibility for the Cephean? If so, come along with me, the two of you, and we’ll get this over with.”

“Thanks, good watchman. We are coming.”

He went to blackbeard, now alone « in his corner, and said:-“It’s all right. We can pay off — about a thousand credits — and be on our way.”

The trader muttered darkly: “Ly- ran jurisdiction or not, it’s coming out of Elwon’s pay. The bloody fool!”

They rattled through the darkening streets of the town in one of the turbine- powered wagons, the watchman sitting up front with the driver and the trader and the Herald behind.

“Something’s burning,” said Alen to the trader, sniffing the air.

“This stinking buggy — ” began blackbeard. “Oops,” he said, inter- rupting himself and slapping at his cloak.

“Let me, trader,” said Alen. He turned back the cloak, licked his thumb, and rubbed out a crawling ring of sparks spreading across a few centimeters of the cloak’s silk lining. And he looked fixedly at what had started the little fire. It was an im- properly-covered slow-match protrud- ing from a bolstered device that was unquestionably a hand weapon,

“I bought it from one of their guards while you were parleying with the policeman,” explained blaclvbeard embarrassedly. “I had a time making him understand. That Garthkint fel- low helped.” He fiddled with the perfo- rated cover of the slow-match, screw- ing it on more firmly.

26

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

“A pitiful excuse for a weapon,” he went on, carefully arranging his cloak over it. “ The trigger isn’t a trigger and the thumb-safety isn’t a safety. You pump the trigger a few times to build up pressure, and a little air squirts out to blow the match to life. Then you uncover the match and pull back the cocking-piece. This levers a dart into the barrel. Then you push the thumb- safety which puffs coaldust into the firing chamber and also swivels down the slow-match onto a touch-hole. Poof, and away goes the dart if you didn’t forget any of the steps or do them in the wrong order. Luckily, I also got a knife.”

He patted the nape of his neck and said, “That’s where they carry ’em here. A little sheath between the shoul- derblades — wonderful for a fast draw- and-throw, though it exposes' you a little more than I like when you reach. The knife’s black glass. Splendid edge and good balance.

“And the thieving Lyrans knew they had me where it hurt. Seven thousand, five hundred credits for the knife and gun — if you can call it that — and the holsters. By rights I should dock Elwon for them, the bloody fool. Still, it’s better to buy his way out and leave no hard feelings behind us, eh, Herald?”

“Incomparably better,” said Alen. “And I am amazed that you even entertained the idea of an armed jail- delivery. What if Chief Elwon had to serve a few days in a prison? Would

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

27

that be worse than forever barring yourself from the planet and blacken- ing the names of all traders with Lyra? Trader, do not hope to put down the credits that your weapons cost you as a legitimate expense of the voyage. I will not allow it when I audit your books. It was a piece of folly on which you spent personal funds, as far as the College and Order of Heralds is con- cerned.”

“Look here,” protested blackbeard. “You’re supposed to be spreading utilitarian civilization, aren’t you? What’s utilitarian about leaving one of my crewmen here?”

Alen ignored the childish argument and wrapped himself in angry silence. As to civilization, he wondered darkly whether such a trading voyage and his part in it was relevant at all. Were the slanders true? Was the College and Order simply a collection of dupes headed by cynical oldsters greedy for luxury and power?

Such thoughts hadn’t crossed his mind in a long time. He’d been too busy to entertain them, cramming his head with languages, folk-ways, mores, customs, underlying patterns of cul- ture, of hundreds of galactic peoples — and for what? So that this fellow could make a profit and the College and Order take a quarter of that profit. If civilization was to come to Lyra, it would have to come in the form of metal. If the Lyrans didn’t want metal, make them take it.

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What did Machiavelli say? “The chief foundations of all states — are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well-armed, it follows that where they are well-armed, they have good laws.” It was odd that the teachers had slurred over such a seminal idea, emphasizing instead the spiritual in- tegrity of the weaponless College and Order — or was it?

The disenchantment he felt creeping over him was terrifying.

“The castle,” said the watchman over his shoulder, and their wagon stopped with a rattle before a large but unimpressive brick structure of . five stories.

“You wait,” the trader told the driver after they got out. He handed him two of his fifty-credit bills. “You wait, you get many, many more money. You understand, wait?”

“I wait plenty much,” shouted the driver delightedly. “I wait all night, all day. You wonderful master. You great, great master, I wait — ”

“All right,” growled the trader, shutting him off. “You wait.”

The watchman took them through an entrance hall lit by hissing pressure lamps and casually guarded by a few liveried men with truncheons. He threw open the door of a medium-sized, well-lit room with a score of people in it, looked in, and uttered a despairing groan.

A personage on a chair that looked like a throne said sharply, “Are those

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

the star-travelers? Well, don't just stand there. Bring them in ! ”

“Yes, your honor, Judge Krarl,” said the watchman unhappily.

“It’s the wrong judge!” Alen hissed at the trader. “This one gives out jail sentences!”

“Do what you can,” said black-

beard grimly.

The watchman guided them to the personage in the chair and indicated a couple of low stools, bowed to the chair and retired to stand at the back of the room.

“Your honor,” said Alen, “I am Journeyman-Herald Alen, Herald for the trading voyage — ”

“Speak when you’re spoken to,” said the judge sharply. “Sir, with the usual insolence of wealth you have chosen to keep us waiting. I do not take this personally; it might have happened to Judge Treel, who — to your evident dismay — I am replacing because of a sudden illness, or to any other member of the bench. But as an insult to our justice, we cannot over- look it. Sir, consider yourself repri- manded. Take your seats. Watchman, bring in the Cephean.”

“Sit down,” Alen murmured to the trader. “This is going to be bad.”

A watchman brought in Chief El- won, bleary-eyed, tousled and sporting a few bruises. He gave Alen and. the trader a shamefaced grin as his guard sat him on a stool beside them. The trader glared back.

Judge Krarl mumbled perfunctorily: “ Lelbattlebejoinedamongtheseverai partiesinthisdisputeletnomanquestion ourimpartialawardingofthevictory speakno wifyouy ieldin stead toour judgment. Well? Speak up, you watchmen ! ”

The watchman who had brought the Herald and the trader started and said from the back of the room: “Iyield instead toyourhonorsjudgment. ”

Three other watchmen and a bat- tered citizen, the wineshop keeper, mumbled in turn: “ Iyieldinsteadto yourhonorsjudgment. ”

“Herald, speak for the accused,” snapped the judge.

Well, thought Alen, I can try. “Your Honor,” he said, “Chief El- won’s master does not yield to your honor’s judgment. He is ready to bat- tle the other parties in the dispute or their masters.”

“What insolence is this?” screamed, the judge, leaping from his throne. “The barbarous customs of other worlds do not prevail in this court! Who spoke of battle — ?” He shut his mouth with a snap, evidently abruptly realizing that he had spoken of battle, in an archaic phrase that harked back to the origins of justice on the planet. The judge sat down again and told Alen, more calmly: “You have mis- taken a mere formality. The offer was not made in earnest.” Obviously, he didn’t like the sound of that himself, but he proceeded, “Now say ‘Iyield insteadtoyourhonorsjudgment ! and we

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

29

can get on with it.tFor your informa- tion, trial by combat has not been practiced for many generations on our enlightened planet.”

Alen said politely: “Your Honor, I am a stranger to many of the ways of Lyra, but our excellent College and Order of Heralds instructed me well in the underlying principles of your law. I recall that one of your most revered legal maxims declares: ‘The highest crime against man is murder; the high- est crime against man’s society is breach of promise.’”

Purpling, the judge snarled: “Are you presuming to bandy law with me, you slippery-tongued foreigner? Are you presuming to accuse me of the high crime of breaking my promise? For your information, a promise con- sists of an offer to do, or refrain from doing, a thing in return for a considera- tion. There must be the five elements of promiser, promisee, offer, substance, and consideration.”

“If you will forgive a foreigner,” said Alen, suddenly feeling the ground again under his feet, “I maintain that you offered the parties in the dispute your services in awarding the victory.” “An empty argument,” snorted the judge. “Just as an offer with substance from somebody to nobody for a con- sideration is no promise, or an offer without substance from somebody to somebody for a consideration is no promise, so my offer was no promise, for there was no consideration in- volved.”

30

“Your honor, must the considera- tion be from the promisee to the promiser?”

“Of course not. A third party may provide the consideration.”

“ Then I respectfully maintain that your offer was a promise, since a third party, the government, provided you with the considerations of salary and position in return for you offering your services to the disputants.”

“Watchmen, clear the room of un- interested persons,” said the judge hoarsely. While it was being done, Alen swiftly filled in the trader and Chief Elwon. Blackbeard grinned at the mention of a five-against-one bat- tle royal, and the engineer looked alarmed.

When the doors closed leaving the nine of them in privacy, the judge said bitterly: “Herald, where did you learn such devilish tricks?”

Alen told him: “My College and Order instructed me well. A similar situation existed on a planet called England during an age known as the Victorious. Trial by combat had long been obsolete, there as here, but had never been declared so — there as here. A litigant won a hopeless lawsuit by publishing a challenge to his oppo- nent and appearing at the appointed place in full armor. His opponent ig- nored the challenge and so lost the suit by default. The English dictator, one Disraeli, hastily summoned his parliament to abolish trial by combat.”

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“ And so,” mused the judge, “ I find myself accused in my own chamber of high crime if I do not permit you five to slash away at each other and de- cide who won.”

The wineshop keeper began to blub- ber that he .was a peaceable man and didn’t intend to be carved up by that black-bearded, bloodthirsty star-trav- eler. All he wanted was his money.

“Silence!” snapped the judge. “Of course there will be no combat. Will you, shopkeeper, and you watchmen, withdraw if you receive satisfactory financial settlements?”

They would.

“Herald, you may dicker with them.”

The four watchmen stood fast by their demand for a hundred credits apiece, and got it. The terrified shop- keeper regained his balance and de- manded a thousand. Alen explained that his black-bearded master from a rude and impetuous world might be unable to restrain his rage when he, Alen, interpreted the demand and, ignoring the consequences, might beat him, the shopkeeper, to a pulp. The asking price plunged to a reasonable five hundred, which was paid over. The shopkeeper got the judge’s per- mission to leave and backed out, bowing.

“You see, trader,” Alen told black- beard, “that it was needless to buy weapons when the spoken word — ”

“And now,” said the judge,with a sneer, “we are easily out of that di-

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lemma. Watchmen, arrest the three star-travelers and take them to the cages.”

“Your honor!” cried Alen, out- raged.

“Money won’t get you out of this one. I charge you with treason.”

“The charge is obsolete — ” began the Herald hotly, but he broke off as he realized the vindictive strategy.

“Yes, it is. And one of its obsolete provisions is that treason charges must be tried by the parliament at a regular session, which isn’t due for two hun- dred days. You’ll be freed and I may be reprimanded, but by my head, for two hundred days you’ll regret that you made a fool of me. Take them awTay.”

“A trumped-up charge against us. Prison for two hundred days,” said Alen swiftly to the trader as the watch- men closed in.

“Why buy weapons?” mocked the blackbeard, showing his teeth. His left arm whipped up and down, there was a black streak through the air — and the judge was pinned to his throne with a black glass knife through his throat and the sneer of triumph still on his lips.

The trader, before the knife struck, had the clumsy pistol out, with the cover off the glowing match and the cocking piece back. He must have pumped and cocked it under his cloak, thought Alen numbly as he told the watchmen, without prompting: “Get back against the wall and turn around.”

.11

They did. They wanted to live, and the grinning blackbeard who had made meat of the judge with a flick of the arm was a terrifying figure.

“Well. done, Alen,” said the trader. “Take their clubs, Elwon. Two for you, two for the Herald. Alen, don’t argue! I had to kill the judge before he raised an alarm — nothing but death will silence his breed. You may have to kill too before we’re out of this. Take the clubs.” He passed the clumsy pistol to Chief Elwon and said : “Keep it on their backs. The thing that looks like a thumb-safety is a trigger. Put a dart through the first one who tries to make a break. Alen, tell the fellow on the end to turn around and come to me slowly.”

Alen did. Blackbeard swiftly stripped him, tore and knotted his clothes into ropes and bound and gagged him. The others got the same treatment in less than ten minutes.

The trader holstered the gun and rolled the watchmen, out of the line of sight from the door of the chamber. He recovered his knife and wiped it on the judge’s shirt. Alen had to help him prop the body behind the throne’s high back.

“Hide those dubs,” blackbeard said. “Straight faces. Here we go.”

The)? went out, single file, opening the door only enough to pass. Alen, last in line, told one of the liveried guards nearby: “His honor, Judge Krarl, does not wish to be disturbed.”

“That’s news?” asked the tipstaff sardonically. He put his hand on the Herald’s arm. “Only yesterday he gimme a blast when I brought him a mug of water he asked me for himself. An outrageous interruption, he called me, and he asked for the water him- self. What do you think of that? ”

“Terrible,” said Alen hastily. He broke away and caught up with the trader and the engineer at the en- trance hall. Idlers and loungers were staring at them as they headed for the waiting wagon.

“I wait!” the driver told them loudly. “I wait long, much. You pay more, more? ”

“We pay more,” said the trader. “You start.”

The driver brought out a smoldering piece of punk, lit a pressure torch, lifted ' the barn-door section of the wagon’s floor to expose the pottery turbine and preheated it with the torch. He pumped squeakily for min- utes, spinning a flywheel with his other hand, before the rotor began to turn on its own. Down went the hatch, up onto the seats went the passengers.

“The spaceport,” said Alen. With a slate-pencil screech the driver engaged his planetary gear and they were off.

Through it all, blackbeard had ig- nored frantic muttered questions from Chief Elwon, who had wanted nothing to do with murder, especially of a judge. “You sit up there,” growled the trader, “and every so often you look around and see if we’re being followed.

32

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Don’t alarm the driver. And if we get to the spaceport and blast off without- any trouble, keep your story to your- self.” He settled down in the back seat with Alen and maintained a gloomy silence. The young Herald was too much in awe of this stranger, so sud- denly competent in assorted forms of violence, to question him.

They did get to the spaceport •with- out trouble, and found the crew in the Customs shed, emptied of the gems by dealers with releases. They had built a fire for warmth.

“We wish to leave immediately,” said the trader, to the port officer. “Can you change my Lyran currency?” The officer began to sputter apolo- getically that it was late and the vault was sealed for the night —

“That’s all right. We’ll change it on Vega. It’ll get back to you. Call off your guards and unseal our ship.” They followed the port officer to Starsong’s dim bulk out on the field. The officer cracked the seal on her with his club in the light of a flaring pres- sure lamp held by one of the guards.

Alen was sweating hard through it all. As they started across the field he had seen what looked like two closely spaced green stars low on the horizon towards town suddenly each jerk up and towards each other in minute arcs. The semaphore!

The signal officer in the port admin- istration building would be watching too — but nobody on the field, preoc-

cupied witli the routine of departure, seemed to have noticed.

The lights flipped this way and that. Alen didn’t know the code and bitterly regretted the lack. After some twenty signals the lights flipped to the “rest” position again as the port officer was droning out a set of take-off regula- tions: bearing, height above settled areas, permissible atomic fuels while in atmosphere — Alen saw somebody start across the field toward them from the administration building. The guards were leaning on their long, competent looking weapons.

Alen inconspicuously detached him- self from the group around Starsong and headed across the dark field to meet the approaching figure. Nearing it, he called out a low greeting in Lyran, using the noncom-to-officer military form.

“Sergeant,” said the signal officer quietly, “go and draw off the men a few meters from the star-travelers. Tell them the ship mustn’t leave, that they’re to cover the foreigners and shoot if — ”

Alen stood dazedly over the limp body of the signal officer. And then he quickly hid the bludgeon again and strolled back to the ship, wondering whether he’d cracked the Lyran ’s skull.

The port was open by then and the crew filing in. He was last. “Close it fast,” he told the trader. “I had to — ”

“I saw you,” grunted blackbeard. “A semaphore message?” He was

THAT SHARE OF GLORY

33

working as he spoke, and the metal port closed.

.“Astrogator and engineer, take over,” he told them.

“All hands to their bunks,” .ordered Astrogator Hufner. “Blast-off im- mediate.”

Alen took to his cubicle and strapped himself in. Blast-off deafened him, rattled his bones and made him thor- oughly sick as usual. After what seemed like several wretched hours, they were definitely space-borne under smooth acceleration, and his nausea subsided.

Blackbeard knocked, came in, and unbuckled him.

“Ready to audit the books of the voyage? ” asked the trader.

“No,” said Alen feebly.

“It can wait,” said the trader. “The books are the least important part, anyway. We have headed off a frightful war.”

“War? We have?”

“You wondered why I was in such haste to get off Lyra, and why I wouldn’t leave Ehvon there. It is be- cause our Vegan gems were most un- usual gems. I am not a technical man, but I understand they are actual gems which were treated to produce a cer- tain effect at just about this time.”

Blackbeard glanced at his wrist chronometer and said dreamily: “Lyra is getting metal. Wherever there is one of our gems, pottery is decomposing into its constituent aluminum, silicon,

34

and oxygen. Fluxes and glazes are de- composing into calcium, zinc, barium, potassium, chromium, and iron. Build- ings are crumbling, pants are dropping as ceramic belt-buckles disintegrate — ”

“It means chaos!” protested Alen.

“It means civilization and peace. An ugly clash was in the making. Blackbeard paused and added deliber- ately: “Where neither their property nor their honor is touched, most men live content.”

‘“The Prince’, Chapter 19. You are — ”

“There was another important pur- pose to the voyage,” said the trader, grinning. “You will be interested in this.” He handed Alen a document which, unfolded, had the seal of the College and Order at its head.

Alen read in a daze: “Examiner 19 to the Rector — final clearance of Novice — ”

He lingered pridefully over the paragraph that described how he had “with coolness and great resource” foxed the battle cruiser of the Realm, “ adapting himself readily in a delicate situation requiring not only physical courage but swift recall, evaluation and application of a minor planetary culture.”

Not so pridefully he read: “ — in- clined towards pomposity of manner somewhat ludicrous in one of his years, though not unsuccessful in dominating the crew by his bearing — ”

And: “ — highly profitable disposal of our gems; a feat of no mean impor-

ASTOTTNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

tance since tiie College and Order must, after all, maintain itself.”

And: **■= — cleared the final and cru- cial hurdle with some mental turmoil if I am any judge, but did clear it. After some twenty years of indoctri- nation in unrealistic non-violence, the youth was confronted with a situation where nothing but violence would serve, correctly evaluated this, and applied violence in the form of a truncheon to the head of a Lyran sig- nal officer, thereby demonstrating an ability to learn and common sense as precious as it is rare.”

And, finally, simply: “ Recommended for training.”

“Training?” gasped Alen. “You mean there’s more?”

“Not for most, boy. Not for most. The bulk of us are what we seem to be: oily, gun-shy, indispensable adjuncts to trade who feather our nest with percentages. We need those percent- ages and we need gun-shy Heralds.” Alen recited slowly: “Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.”

“Chapter 14,” said blackbeard me- chanically. “We leave such clues ly- ing by their bedsides for twenty years, and they never notice them. For tire few of us who do — more training.”

“ Will I learn to throw a knife like you?” asked Alen, repelled and fasci- nated at once by the idea.

“On your own time, if you wish. Mostly it’s ethics and morals so you’ll

be able to weigh the values of such things as knife-throwing.”

“Ethics! Morals!”

“We started as missionaries, you know.”

“Everybody knows that. But the Great Utilitarian Reform — ”

“Some of us,” said blackbeard dryly, “ think it was neither great, nor utilitarian, nor a reform.”

It was a staggering idea. “ But we’re spreading utilitarian civilization!” protested Alen. “Or if we’re not, what’s the sense of it all?”

Blackbeard told him: “We have our different motives. One is a sincere utilitarian ; another is a gambler — happy when he’s in danger and his pulses are pounding. Another is proud and likes to trick people. More than a few conceive themselves -as servants of mankind. I’ll let you rest for a bit now.” He rose.

“But you?” asked Alen hesitantly. “Me? You will find me in Chapter Twenty-Six,” grinned blackbeard. “And perhaps you’ll find someone else.” He closed the door behind him.

Alen ran through the chapter in, his mind, puzzled, until — that was it.

It had a strange and inevitable fa- miliarity to it as if he had always known that he would be saying it aloud, welcomingly, in this cramped cubicle aboard a battered starship: “God is not willing to do every- thing, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.” THE END

THAT SHARE OE GLORY

35

THE ANALOGUES

BY DAMON KNIGHT

Illustrated by Cartier

A very interesting technique indeed , to block antisocial actions, as determined of course by the " society Very neat and effective. But no segment of society is so important to that society'' s progress as the " antisocial" rebel, the innovator . . .

The creature was like an eye, a globular eye that could see in all di- rections, encysted in the gray, cloudy mind that called itself Alfie Strunk. In that dimness thoughts squirmed, like dark fish darting; and the eye fol- lowed them without pity.

It knew Alfie, knew the evil in

36

Alfie; the tangled skein of impotence and hatred and desire; the equation: Love equals death. The roots of that evil were beyond its reach ; it was only an eye. But now it was changing. Deep in its own center, little electric tingles came and went. Energy found a new gradient, and flowed.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-PICTION

A thought shone in the gray cioud that was Alfie — only half-for£ned, but unmistakable. And a channel opened. Instantly, the eye thrust a filament of itself into the passage.

Now it was free. Now it could act.

The man on the couch stirred and moaned. The doctor, who had been whispering into his ear, drew back and watched his face. At the other end ■ of the couch, the technician glanced alertly at the patient, then turned again to his meters.

The patient’s head was covered to the ears by an ovoid shell of metal. A broad strap of webbing, buckled under his jaw, held it securely. The heads of screw-clamps protruded in three circles around the shell’s circum- ference, and a thick bundle of insu- lated wires issued from its center, lead- ing ultimately to the control board at the foot of the couch.

The man’s gross body was re- strained by a. rubber sheet, the back of his head resting in the trough of a rubber block fixed to the couch.

“No!” he shouted suddenly. He mumbled, his loose features contort- ing. Then, “I wasn’t gonna — No! Don’t — ” He muttered again, trying to move his body, the tendons in his nec'k sharply outlined. “Please” he said, and tears glittered in his eyes.

The doctor leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “You’re going away from there. You’re going away. It’s five minutes later.”

The patient relaxed and seemed to be asleep, A teardrop spilled over and ran slowly down his cheek.

The doctor stood up and nodded to the technician, who slowly moved his rheostat to zero before he cut - the switches. “A good run,” the doctor mouthed silently. The technician nodded and grinned. He scribbled on a pad, “Test him this aft.?” The doc- tor wrote, “ Yes. Can’t tell till then, but think we got him solid.”

Alfie Strunk sat in the hard chair and chewed rhythmically, staring at nothing. His brother had told him to wait here while he went down the hall to see the doctor. It seemed to Alfie that he had been gone a long time.

Silence flowed around him. The room lie sat in was almost bare — the chair he sat in, the naked walls and floor, a couple of little tables with boqks on them. There were two doors; one, open, led into the long bare hall outside. There were other doors in the hall, but they were all closed and their windows were dark. At the end of the hall was a door, and that was closed, too. Alfie had heard his brother close it behind him, with a solid click, when he left. He felt very safe and alone.

He heard something, a faint echo of movement, and turned his head swiftly, automatically. The noise came from beyond the second door in the room, the one that was just slightly ajar. He heard it again.

TJEtF. ANALOGUES

37

He stood up cautiously, not making a sound. He tiptoed to the door, looked through the crack. At first he saw nothing; then the footsteps came again and he saw a flash of color: a blue print skirt, a white sweater, a glimpse of coppery hair.

Alfie widened the crack, very care- fully. His heart was pounding and his breath was coming faster. Now he could see the far end of the room. A couch, and the girl sitting on it, open- ing a book. She was about eleven, slen- der and dainty. A reading lamp by the couch gave the only light. She was alone.

Alfie’s blunt fingers went into his trousers pocket and clutched futilely. They had taken his knife away. Then he glanced at the little table beside the door, and his breath caught. There it was, his own switchblade knife, lying beside the books. His brother must have left it there and forgojten to tell him.

He reached for it —

And an angry female voice said, “ ALFIE l”

He whirled, cringing. His mother stood there, towering twice his height, with wrath in her staring gray eyes, every line of her so sharp and real that he could not doubt her — though he knew she had been dead these fifteen years.

She had a willow switch in her hand.

“No!” gasped Alfie, retreating to the wall. “Don’t — I wasn’t gonna do nothing.”

She raised the switch. “You’re no good, no good, no good,” she spat. “You’ve got the devil in you, and jt’s just got to be whipped out.”

“Don’t, please — ” said Alfie. Tears leaked out of his eyes.

“ Get away from that girl,” she said, advancing. “ Get clean away and don’t ever go back. Go on — ”

Alfie turned and ran, sobbing in his throat.

In the next room, the girl went on reading until a voice said, “ O.K., Rita. That’s all.”

. She looked up. “Is that all? Well, I didn’t do much.”

“You did enough,” said the voice. “We’ll explain to you what it’s all about some day. Come on, let’s go.”

She smiled, stood up — and vanished as she moved out of range of the mir- rors in the room below. The two rooms where Alfie had been tested were empty. Alfie’s mother was already gone — gone with Alfie, inside his mind where he could never escape her again, as long as he lived.

Martyn’s long, cool fingers gently pressed the highball glass. The glass accepted the pressure, a very little; the liquid rose almost imperceptibly inside it. This glass would not break, he knew; it had no hard edges and if thrown it would not hurt anybody much. It was a symbol, perhaps; but only in the sense that nearly every- thing around him was a symbol.

The music of the five-piece combo

38

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

down at the end of the long room was like a glass — muted, gentle, accom- modating, And the alcohol content of the whisky in his drink was twenty- four point five per cent.

But men still got drunk, and men still reached instinctively for a weapon to kill.

And, incredibly, there were worse things that could happen. The cure was sometimes worse than the dis- ease. “The operation was successful, but the patient died.” We’re witch doctors, he thought. We don’t realize it yet, most of us, but that’s what we are. The doctor who only heals is a servant; but the doctor who controls the [lowers of life and death is a ty- rant.

The dark little man across the table had to be made to understand that. Martyn thought he could do it. The man had power -the power of mil- lions of readers, of friends in high places — but he was a genuine, not a professional, lover of democracy.

Now the little man raised his glass, tilted it hi a quick, automatic gesture. Martyn saw his throat pulse, like the knotting of a fist, as he swallowed. He set the glass down, and the soft rosy light from the bar made dragons’ eyes of his spectacles.

“Well, Dr. Martyn?” he said. His voice was crisp and rapid, but ami- able. This man lived with tension; he was acclimated to it, like a swim- mer in swift waters.

Martyn gestured with his glass, a

slow, controlled movement. “I want you to see something first,” he said. “ Then we’ll talk. I asked you to meet me here for two reasons. One is that it’s an out-of-the-way place, and, as you’ll understand, I have to be care- ful. The other has to do with a man who corpes here every night. His name is Ernest Fox; he’s a machinist, when he works. Over there at the bar. The big man in the checkered jacket. See him?”

The other flicked a glance that way; he did not turn his head. “Yeah. The one with the snootful?”

“ Yes. You’re right, he’s very drunk. I don’t think it will take much longer.”

“How come they serve him?”

“You’ll see in a minute,” Martyn said.

Ernest Fox was swaying slightly on the bar stool. His choleric face was flushed, and his nostrils widened vis- ibly with each breath he took. His eyes were narrowed, staring at the man to his left — a wizened little fel- low in a big fedora.

Suddenly he straightened and slammed his glass down on the bar. Liquid spread over the surface in a glittering flood. The wizened man looked up at him nervously. Fox drew' his fist back.

Martyn’s guest had half-turned in his seat. He was watching, relaxed and interested.

The big man’s face turned abruptly as if someone had spoken to him. He

39

THE ANALOGUES

stared at an invisible something six inches' away,- and his raised arm slowly dropped. He appeared to be listening. Gradually his face lost its anger and became sullen. He muttered some- thing, looking down at his hands. He listened again. Then he turned to the wizened man and spoke, apparently in apology; the little man waved his hand as if to say, “Forget it,” and turned back to his drink.

The big man slumped again on the bar stool, shaking his head and mut- tering. Then he scooped up his change from the bar, got up and walked out. Someone else took his place almost immediately.

“That happens every night, like clockwork,” said Martyn. “That’s why they serve him. He never does any harm, and he never will. He’s a good customer.”

The dark little man was facing him alertly once more. “And?"

“A year and a half ago,” Martyn said, “no place in the Loop would let him in the door, and he had a police record as long as your arm. He liked to get drunk, and when he got drunk he liked to start fights. Compulsive. No cure for it, even if there were fa- cilities for such cases. He’s still in- curable. He’s just the same as he was — just as manic, just as hostile. But — he doesn’t cause any trouble now.”

“All right, doctor, I check to you. Why not?”

“He’s got an analogue,” said Mar-

tyn. “In the classical sense, he is even less sane than he was before. He has auditory, visual and tactile hallucina- tions— a complete, integrated set. That’s enough to get you entry to most institutions, crowded as they are. But, you see, these hallucinations are pre-societal. They were put there, deliberately. He’s an acceptable mem- ber of society, because he has them.”

The dark man looked interested and irritated at the same time. He said, “He sees things. What does he see, exactly, and what does it say to him?”

“Nobody knows that except him- self. A policeman, maybe, or his mother as she looked when he was a child. Someone whom he fears, and whose authority he acknowledges. The subconscious has its own mechanism for creating these false images; all we do is stimulate it — it does the rest. Usually, we think, it just warns him, and in most cases that’s enough. A word from the right person at the right moment is enough to prevent ninety- nine out of a hundred crimes. But in extreme cases, the analogues can ac- tually oppose the patient physically — as far as he’s concerned, that is. The hallucination is complete, as I told you.”

“Sounds like a good notion.”

“A very good notion — rightly handled. In another ten years it will cut down the number of persons in- stitutionalized for insanity to the point where we can actually hope to

40

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTTON

make some progress, both in study and treatment, with those that are left.”

“Sort of personal guardian angel, tailored to fit,” said the dark man.

“That’s exactly it,” said Martyn. “The analogue always fits the patient because it is the patient — a part of his own mind, working against his conscious purposes whenever they cross the prohibition we lay down. Even an exceptionally intelligent man can’t defeat his analogue, because the analogue is just as intelligent. Even knowing you’ve had the treatment doesn’t help, although ordinarily the patient doesn’t know. The analogue, to the patient, is absolutely indis- tinguishable from a real person — but it doesn’t have any of a real person’s weaknesses.”

The other grinned. “Could I get one to keep me from drawing to inside straights?”

Martyn did not smile. “That isn’t quite as funny as it sounds,” he said. “There’s a very real possibility that you could, about ten years from now. And that’s precisely the catastrophe that 1 want you to help prevent-”

The tall, black-haired young man got out of the pickup and strolled jauntily into the hotel lobby. He wasn’t thinking, about what he was going to do; his mind was cheerfully occupied with the decoration of the enormous loft he had just rented on the lower East Side. It might be bet- ter, he thought, to put both couches

along one wall, and arrange the bar opposite. Or put the Capeharl there, with an easy-chair on either side.

The small lobby was empty except for the clerk behind his minuscule desk and the elevator operator loung- ing beside the cage. Tlje young man walked confidently forward.

“Yes, sir?” said the clerk.

“Listen,” said the young man, “there’s a man leaning out of a win- dow upstairs, shouting for help. He looked sick.”

“What? Show me.”

The clerk and the elevator operator followed him out to the sidewalk. The young man pointed to two open win- dows. “It was one of those, the ones in the middle on the top floor.”

“Thanks, mister,” said the clerk.

The young man said, “Sure,” and watched the two men hurry into the elevator. When the doors closed be- hind them, he strolled in again and watched the indicator rise. Then, for the first time, he looked down at the blue carpet that stretched between elevator and entrance. It was almost new, not fastened down, and just the right size. He bent and picked up the end of it.

“Drop it,” said a voice.

The young man looked up in sur- prise. It was the man, the same man that had stopped him yesterday in the furniture store. Was he being fol- lowed?

He dropped the carpet. “I thought I saw a coin under there,” he said.

THE ANALOGUES

41

“I know what you thought,” the man said. “Beat it.”

The young man walked out to his pickup and drove away. He felt chilly inside. Suppose this happened every time he wanted to take something — ?

The dark man looked shrewdly at Martyn. He said, “All right, doctor. Spill the rest of it. Let’s have it all, not just the background. I’m not a science reporter, you know.”

“The Institute,” Martyn said, “has already arranged for a staff of lobby- ists to start working for the first page of its program when the world legis- lature returns to session this fall. Here’s what they want for a begin- ning:

“One, analogue treatment for all persons convicted of crime ‘ while tem- porarily insane,’ as a substitute for either institutionalization or punish- ment. They will argue that society’s real purpose is to prevent the repeti- tion of the crime, not to punish.” “They’ll be right,” said the little man.

“Of course. But wait. Second, they want government support for a vast and rapid expansion of analogue services. The goal is to restore useful citizens to society, and to ease pres- sure on institutions, both corrective and punitive.”

“Why not?”

“No reason why not — if it would stop there. But it won’t.” Martyn took a deep breath and clasped his

42

long fingers together on the table. It was very clear to him, but he realized that it was a difficult thing for a lay- man to see — or even for a technically competent man in his own field. And yet it was inevitable, it was going to happen, unless he stopped it.

“It’s just our bad luck,” he said, “that this development came at this particular time in history. It was only thirty years ago, shortly after the third world war, that the problem of our wasted human resources really be- came so acute that it couldn’t be evaded any longer. Since then we’ve seen a great deal of progress, and pub- lic sentiment is fully behind it. New building codes for big cities. New speed laws. Reduced alcoholic content in wine and liquor. Things like that. The analogue treatment is riding the wave.

“It’s estimated by competent men in the field that the wave will reach its maximum about ten years from now. And that’s when the Institute will be ready to put through the sec- ond stage of its progress. Here it is:

“One, analogue treatment against crimes of violence to be compulsory for all citizens above the age of seven.”

The dark man stared at him. “Blue balls of fire,” he said. “Will it work, on that scale?”

“Yes. It will completely eliminate any possibility of a future war, and it will halve our police problem.”

The dark man whistled. “Then what? ”

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

“Two,” said Martyn, “analogue treatment against peculation, collu- sion, bribery, and all the other forms of corruption to be compulsory for all candidates for public office. And that will make the democratic system fool- proof, for all time.”

The dark man laid his pencil down. “Dr. Martyn,” he said, “you’re confusing me. I’m a libertarian, but there’s got to be some method of pre- venting this race from killing itself off. If this treatment will do what you say it will do, I don’t care if it does violate civil rights. I want to go on living, and I want my grandchildren — I have two, by the way — to go on liv- ing, Unless there’s a catch you haven’t told me about this thing, I’m for it.” Martyn said earnestly, “This treat- ment is a crutch. It is not a therapy, it does not cure the patient of anything. As a matter of fact, as I told you be- fore, it makes him less nearly sane, not more. The causes of his irrational or antisocial behavior are still there, they’re only repressed — temporarily. They can’t ever come out in the same way, that’s true; we’ve built a wall across that particular channel. But they will express themselves in some other way, sooner or later. When a dammed-up flood breaks through in a new place, what do you do?”

“Build another levee.”

“Exactly,” said Martyn. “And af- ter that? Another, and another, and another —

“It’s basically wrong!”

Nicholas Dauth, cold sober, stared broodingly at the boulder that stood on trestles between the house and the orchard. It was a piece of New Eng- land granite, marked here and there with chalk lines.

It had stood there for eight months, and he had not touched a chisel to it.

The sun was warm on his back. The air was still; only the occasional hint of a breeze ruffled the treetops. Be- hind him he could hear the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, and beyond that the clear sounds of his wife’s voice.

Once there had been a shape buried in the stone. Every stone had its latent form, and when you carved it, you felt as if you were only helping it to be born.

Dauth could remember the shape he had seen buried in this one: a woman and child — the woman kneel- ing, half bent over the child in her lap. The balancing of masses had given it grace and authority, and the free space had lent it movement.

He could remember it; but he couldn’t see it any more. •

There was a quick, short spasm in his right arm and side, painful while it lasted. It was like the sketch of an action: turning, walking to where there was whisky — meeting the guard who wouldn’t let him drink it, turning away again. All that had squeezed itself now into a spasm, a kind of tic. He didn’t drink now, didn’t try to drink. He dreamed about it, yes,

THE ANALOGUES

43

thought of it, felt the burning ache in his throat and guts. But he didn’t try. There simply wasn’t any use.

He looked back at the unborn stone, and now, for an instant, he could not even remember what its shape was to have been. The tic came again. Dauth had a feeling of pressure building intolerably inside him, of something restrained that demanded exit.

He stared toward the stone, and saw its form drift away slowly into an .inchoate gray sea; then nothing.

He turned stithy toward the house. “Martha!” he called.

The clatter of the dish ware an- swered him.

He stumbled forward, holding his arms away from his body. “Martha!” he shouted. ‘‘I’m blind!”

“ Correct me if I’m wrong,” said the dark man. “It seems. to me that you’d only run into trouble with the actual mental cases, the people who really have strong complications. And, ac- cording to you, those are the only ones who should get the treatment. Now, the average man doesn’t have any compulsion to kill, or steal, or what have you. He may be tempted to, once in his life. If somebody stops him, that one time, will it do him any harm?”

“For a minute or two, he will have been insane,” said Martyn. “But I agree with you that if that were the end of it, no great harm would be

44

clone. At the Institute, the majority believe that that will be the end of it. They’re wrong, they’re tragically wrong. Because there’s one provision that the Institute hasn’t included in its program, but that would be the first thought of any lawmaker in the world. Treatment against any attempt to overthrow the government.”

The dark man sat silent.

“And from there,” said Martyn, “it’s only one short step to a tyranny that will last till the end of time.” The other nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “You are so right. What do you want me to do?”

“Raise funds,” said Martyn. “At present the Institute is financed almost entirely by the members themselves. We have barely enough to operate on a minimum scale, and expand very slowly, opening one new center a year. Offer us a charitable contribution — tax-deductible, remember — of half a million, and we'll grab it. The catch is this: the donors, in return for such a large contribution, ask the privilege of appointing three members to the Institute’s board of directors. There will be no objection to that, so long as my connection with the donation is kept secret, because three members will not give the donors control. But it will give me a majority on this one issue — the second stage of the Insti- tute’s program.

“This thing is like an epidemic. Give it a few years, and nothing can stop it. But act now, and we can

astounding science-fiction

scotch it while it’s still small enough to handle.”

“ Good enough,” said the dark man. “I won’t promise to hand you half a million tomorrow, but I know a few people who might reach into their pockets if I told them the score. I’ll do what I can. I’ll get you the money if I have to steal it. You can count on me.”

- Martyn smiled warmly, and caught the waiter as he went by. “No, this is mine,” he said, forestalling the little man’s gesture. “I wonder if you real- ize what a weight you’ve taken off my shoulders?”

He paid, and they strolled out into the warm summer night. “Inciden- tally,” Martyn said, “there’s an an- swer to a point you brought up in passing — that the weakness of the treatment applies only to the genu- inely compulsive cases, where it’s most needed. There are means of getting around that, though not of making the treatment into a therapy. It’s a crutch and, that’s all it will ever be. But for one example, we’ve recently worked out a technique in which the analogue appears, not as a guardian but as the object of the attack — when

there is an attack. In that way, the patient relieves himself instead of being further repressed, but he still doesn’t harm anybody but a phan- tom.”

“It’s going to be a great thing for humanity,” said the little man seri- ously, “instead of the terrible thing it might have been except for you, Dr. Martyn. Good night!”

“Good night,” said Martyn grate- fully. He watched the other disappear into the crowd, then walked toward the El. It was a wonderful night, and he was in no hurry.

The waiter whistled under his breath, as unconscious of the conflict- ing melody the band was playing as he was of the air he breathed. Philo- sophically, he picked up the two un- touched drinks that stood at one side of the table and drained them one after the other.

If a well-dressed, smart-looking guy like that wanted to sit by himself all evening, talking and buying drinks for somebody who wasn’t there, was there any harm in it?

No harm at all, the waiter told himself.

THE END

THE ANALOGUES

45

IELEK

BY JACK YANCE

If a group has a Power not possessed by all men, they will inevitably become an aristocracy. And an aristocracy , having no competing peers , fust as inevitably . . .

Illustrated by van Dorn gen

i.

Geskamp and Shorn stood in the sad light of sundown, high on the rim of the new stadium. Wooded hills rolled away to either side; behind them, far to the west, the towers of Tran cut sword-shaped notches into the sky.

46

Geskamp pointed east, up Swans- comba Valley, now glowing a thousand tones of gold and green in the long light of sunset, “That’s where I was born, by that row of poplars. I knew the valley well in the old days.” He spent a moment in far reflection. “I hate to see the changes, the old things wiped out. There’ W-he pointed —

astounding science -fiction

“by the stream was Pimssi’s croft and stone barn. There, where you see the grove of oaks, that was the village Cobent. There, by Poll Point, was the valley power tank. There, the Tran aquaport crossed the river, entered the tunnel. It was, considered beautiful, the aquaport, antique, overgrown with ivy, stained with lichen. And only six months ago; already it seems a hun- dred years.”

Shorn, intending to make a delicate request, considered how best to take advantage of Geskamp’s nostalgia for the irretrievable past; he was faintly surprised to find Geskamp, a big jut- faced man with gray-blond hair, in- dulging in sentiment of any kind. “There is certainly no recognizing it now.”

“No. It’s all tidy and clean. Like a park. Look up that mile of clear lawn. 1 liked it better in the old days. Now it’s waste, nothing else.” Geskamp cocked his bristling eyebrows at Shorn. “ Do you know, they hold me responsi- ble, the farmers and villagers? Because I’m in charge, I gave the orders? ”

“They strike out at what’s closest.”

“ I merely earn my salary. I did what I could for them. Completely use- less, of course ; there never were people so obdurate as the Teleks. Level the valley, build a stadium! Hurry, in time for their midsummer get together. I say, why not build in Mismarch Valley, around the mountain, where only sheepherders would be disturbed, no crofts and farms to be broken up,

no village to be razed.”

“What did they say to that?”

“It was Forence Nollinrude I spoke to; you know him?”

“I’ve seen him: one of their liaison committee. A young man, rather more lofty than the average.”

Geskamp spat on the concrete un- der his feet. “The young ones are the worst. He asked, ‘Do we not give you enough money? Pay them well, clear them out. Swanscomba Valley is where we will have our stadium.’ So” — Geskamp held out his hands in a quick gesticulation — “I bring out my ma- chines, my men. We fly in material. For those who have lived here all their lives there is no choice; they take their money and go. Otherwise some morn- ing perhaps they look out their door and find polar ice or mountains of the moon. I’d not put such refinement past the Teleks.”

“Strange tales are told,” Shorn agreed.

Geskamp pointed to the grove of oaks. His shadow, cast against the far side of the stadium by the level rays of the sun, followed the motion. “The oaks they brought, so much did they condescend. I explained that trans- planting a forest was a job of great delicacy and expense. They were in- different. ‘Spend as much as . you like.’ I told them there wasn’t enough time, if they wanted the stadium in- side the month; finally they were aroused. Nollinrude and the one called Henry Motch stirred themselves, and

TELEX

47

the next day we had ail our forest — But would they dispose of the waste from the aquaport, cast it in the sea? No. ‘You hire four thousand men, let them move the rubble, brick by brick if need be ; we have business elsewhere. ’ And they were gone.”

“A peculiar people.”

“Peculiar?” Geskamp gathered his bushy eyebrows into arches of vast scorn. “Madmen. For a whim — a town erased, men and women sent forth „ homeless.” He waved his hand around the stadium. “Two hundred million crowns spent to gratify irresponsible popinjays whose only — ”

A droll voice above them said, “ I hear myself bespoken.”

The two men jerked around. A man stood in the air ten feet above them. His face was mercurial and light- hearted; a green cap hung waggishly to the side of his head ; dark hair hung below, almost to his shoulders. He wore a flaring red cape, tight green trousers, black velvet shoes. “You speak in anger, with little real con- sideration. We are your benefactors; where would you be without us? ” “Living normal lives,” growled Geskamp.

The Telek was disposed to facetious- ness. “Who is to say that yours is a normal life? In any event, our whim is your employment; we formulate our idle dreams, you and your men enrich yourselves fulfilling them, and we’re both the better for it.”

“Somehow the money always ends up back with the Teleks. A mystery.” “No, no mystery whatever. It is the exercise of economic law. In any event, we procure the funds, and we would be fools to hoard. In our spending you find occupation.”

“We would not be idle otherwise.” “Perhaps not. Perhaps . . . well, look.” He pointed across the stadium to the shadows on the far wall. “Per- haps there is your bent.” And as they watched, their shadows became active. Shorn’s shadow bent forward, Ges- kampjs shadow drew back, aimed and delivered a mighty kick, then turned, bent, and Shorn’s shadow kicked.

The Teiek cast no shadow. Geskamp snorted, Shorn smiled grimly. They looked back overhead, but the. Telek had moved high and was drifting south.

“ Offensive creature,” said Geskamp. “A law should be passed confiscating their every farthing.”

Shorn shook his head. “They’d have it all back by nightfall. That’s not the answer.” He hesitated, as if about to add something further.

Geskamp, already irked by the Telek, did not take the contradic- tion kindly. Shorn, an architectural draughtsman, was his subordinate. “I suppose you know the answer? ”

“I know several answers. One of them is that they should all be killed.” Geskamp ’s irritation had never car- ried him quite so far. Shorn was a strange unpredictable fellow. “Rather

48

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

bloodthirsty,” he said heavily.

Shorn shrugged. “It might be best in the long run.”

Geskamp’s eyebrows lowered into a straight bar of gold-gray bristle across his face. “The idea is impractical. The creatures are hard to kill.”

Shorn laughed. “It’s more than im- practical—fit's dangerous. If you recall the death of Vernisaw Knerwig — ”

Vernisaw Knerwig had been punc- tured by a pellet from- a high-power rifle, fired from a window. The mur- derer, a wild-eyed stripling, was appre- hended. But the jail had not been tight enough to keep him. He dis- appeared. For months misfortune dogged the town. Poison appeared in the water supply. A dozen fires roared up one night. The roof of the town school collapsed. And one afternoon a great meteor struck down from space and obliterated the central square.

“Killing Teleks is dangerous work,” said Geskamp. “It’s not a realistic thought. After all,” he said hurriedly, “they’re men and women like our- selves; nothing illegal has ever been proved.”

Shorn’s eyes glittered. “Illegality? When they dam the whole stream of human development?”

Geskamp frowned. “I’d hardly say — ”

“The signs are clear enough when a person pulls his head up out of the sand.”

The conversation had got out of hand;. Geskamp had been left behind.

Waste and excess he admitted, but there were so few Teleks, so many ordinary people; how could they be dangerous? It was strange talk for an architect. He looked sidewise in cau- tious calculation.

Shorn was faintly smiling. “Well, what do you make of it?”

“You take an extreme position. It’s hardly conceivable — ”

“The future is unknown. Almost anything is conceivable. We might become Teleks, all of us. Unlikely? I think so myself. The Teleks might die out, disappear. Equally unlikely. They’ve always been with us, all of history, latent in our midst. What are the probabilities? Something like the present situation, a few Teleks among the great mass of common people? ” Geskamp nodded. “That’s my opin- ion.”

“Picture the future then. What do you see?”

“Nothing extraordinary. 1 imagine things will move along much as they have been.”

“You see no trend, lio curve of shifting relationships?”

“The Teleks are an irritation, cer- tainly, but they interfere very little in our lives. In a sense they’re an asset. They spend their money like water; they contribute to the general pros- perity.” He looked anxiously into the sky through the gathering dusk. “Their wealth, it’s honestly acquired; no matter where they find those great

TELEK

49

blocks of metal.”

“The metal comes from the moon, from the asteroids, from the outer planets.”

Geskamp nodded. “Yes, that’s the speculation.”

“The metal represents restraint. The Teleks are giving value in return for what they could take.”

“ Of course. Why shouldn’t they give value in return?”

“No reason at all. They should. But now — consider the trend. At the outset they were ordinary citizens. They lived by ordinary conventions; they were decent people. After the first congress they made their for- tunes by performing dangerous and unpleasant tasks. Idealism, public service was the keynote. They identi- fied themselves with all of humanity, and very praiseworthy, too. Now, sixty years later. Consider the Teleks of today. Is there any pretension to public service? None. They dress dif- ferently, speak differently, live differ- ently. They no longer load ships or dear jungles or build roads; they take an easier way, which makes less de- mands on their time. Humanity bene- fits; they bring us platinum, palla- dium, uranium, rhodium, all the pre- cious metals, which they sell at half the old price, and they pour the money back into circulation.” He gestured across the stadium. “And meanwhile the old ones are dying and the new Teleks have no roots, no connection

with common man. They draw ever

*

50

farther away, developing a way of living entirely different from ours.” Geskamp said half-truculently, “What do you expect? It’s natural, isn’t it?”

Shorn put on a patient face. “That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. Consider the trend, the curve. Where does this ‘natural’ behavior lead? Al- ways away from common humanity, the old traditions, always toward an elite-herd situation.”

Geskamp rubbed his heavy chin. “I think that you’re . . . well, mak- ing a mountain out of a molehill.”

“Do you think so? Consider the stadium, the eviction of the old prop- erty-owners. Think of Vernisaw Kner- wig and the revenge they took.” “Nothing was proved,” said Geskamp uneasily. What was the fel- low up to? Now he was grinning, a superior sort of grin.'

“In your heart, you agree with what I say; but you can’t bring your- self to face the facts — because then you’d be forced to take a stand. For or against.”

Geskamp stared out across the val- ley, wholly angry, but unable to dis- pute Shorn’s diagnosis. “I don’t see the facts clearly.”

“There are only two courses for us. We must either control the Teleks, that is, make them answerable to human law — or we must eliminate them entirely. In blunt words — kill them. If we don’t — they become the masters; we the slaves. It’s inevitable.”

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

Geskamp’s anger broke surface. “Why do you tell me all these things? What are you driving at? This is strange talk to hear from an archi- tect; you sound like one of the con- spirators I've heard rumors of.”

“ I’m talking for a specific purpose — just as I worked on this job for a specific purpose. I want to bring you to our way of thinking.”

“Oh. So that’s the way of it.” “And with this accomplished, re- cruit your ability and your authority toward a concrete end.”

“ Who are you? What is this group?” “A number of men worried by the trend I mentioned.”

“A subversive society?” Geskamp’s voice held a tinge of scorn.

Shorn laughed. “ Don’t let the flavor of words upset you. Call us a com- mittee of public-spirited citizens.” “You’d be in trouble if the Teleks caught wind of you,” said Geskamp woodenly.

“They’re aware of us. But they’re not magicians. They don’t know who we are.”

“I know who you are,” said Ges- kamp. “Suppose I reported this con- versation to Nollinrude?”

Shorn grinned. “What would you gain?”

“A great deal of money.”

“You’d live the rest of your life in fear of revenge.”

“ I don’t like it,” said Geskamp in a brutal voice. “I don’t care to be involved in any undercover plots.”

“ Examine your conscience. Think it over.”

II.

The attack on Forence Nollinrude came two days later.

The construction office was a long L-shaped building to the west of the stadium. Geskamp stood in the yard angrily refusing to pay a trucker more than the agreed scale for his concrete aggregate.

“I can Buy it cheaper in half a dozen places,” roared Geskamp. “You only got the contract in the first place because I went to bat for you.”

The trucker had been one of the dispossessed farmers. He shook his head mulishly. “You did me no favor. I’m losing money. It’s costing me three crowns a meter.”

Geskamp waved an arm angrily toward the man’s equipment, a small hopper carried by a pair of ram- copters. “ How do you expect to make out with that kind of gear? All your profit goes in running back and forth to the quarry. Get yourself a pair of Samson lifts; you’ll cut your costs to where you can make a few crowns.” “I’m a farmer, not a trucker. I took this contract because I had what I have. If I go in the hole for heavy equipment, then I’m stuck with it. It’ll do me no more good now, the job’s three-quarters done. I want more money, Geskamp, not good advice.” “Well, you can’t get it from me.

51

TELEK

Talk to the purchasing agent; maybe he’ll break down. I got you the con- tract, that’s as far as I go.”

“ I already talked to the purchasing agent; he said nothing doing.”

“Strike up one of the Teleks then; they’ve got the money. I can’t do anything for you.”

The trucker spat on the ground. “The Teleks, they’re the devils who started this whole thing. A year ago I had my dairy — right where that patch of -water is now. I was doing good. Now I’ve got nothing; the money they gave me to get out, most of it’s gone in this gravel. Now where do I go? I got my family.”

Geskamp drew his bushy gray-blond eyebrows together. “I’m sorry, Hop- son. But there’s nothing I can do. There’s the Telek now; tell him your troubles.”

The Telek was Forence Nollinrude, a tall yellow-haired man, magnificent in a rust cape, saffron trousers, black velvet slippers. The trucker looked across the yard to where he floated a fastidious three feet above the ground, then resolved himself and trudged sullenly forward.

Shorn, inside the office, could hear nothing of the interview. The trucker stared up belligerently, legs spread out. Forence Nollinrude turned him- self a little to the side, looked down with distaste deepening the lines at the corners of his mouth.

The tracker did most of the talking. The Telek replied in curt mcftiosylla-

52

bles, and the trucker became progres- sively more furious.

Geskamp had been watching with a worried frown. He started across the yard, with the evident intention of calming the trucker. As he approached, Nollinrude pulled himself a. foot or two higher, drew slightly away, turned toward Geskamp, motioned toward the trucker, as if requiring Geskamp to remove the annoyance.

The trucker suddenly seized a bar of reinforcing iron, swung mightily.

Geskamp bawled hoarsely; Forence Nollinrude jerked away, but the iron caught him across the shins. He cried in agony, drew back, looked at the trucker. The trucker rose like a rocket, a hundred feet into the air, turned end for end, dived head-first to the ground. He struck with crushing force, pulping his head, his shoulders. But, as if Nollinrude were not yet satisfied, the bar of iron rose and beat the limp body with enormous savage strokes.

Had Nollinrude been less anguished by the pain of his legs he would have been more wary. Almost as the trucker struck the ground, Geskamp seized a laborer’s mattock, stalked close be- hind, swung. The Telek collapsed to the ground.

“Now,” said Shorn to himself, “there will be hell to pay.”

Geskamp stood panting, looking down at the body huddled in the finery that suddenly seemed not chosen human vestments, but the

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

gaudy natural growth of a butterfly or flash-beetle in pathetic disarray. He became aware of the mattock he still held, flung it away as if it were red-hot, and stood wiping his hands nervously together.

Shorn knelt beside the body, searched with practised swiftness. He found and pocketed a wallet, a small pouch, then rose to his feet.

“We’ve got to work fast.” He looked around the yard. Possibly half a dozen men had witnessed the oc- currence— a tool-room attendant, a form foreman, a couple of time-clerks, a laborer or two. “Get them all to- gether, everyone who saw what hap- pened; I’ll take care of the body. Here, you!” He called to a white- faced Lift operator. “Get a hopper down, here.”

They rolled the gorgeous hulk into the hopper. Shorn jumped up beside the operator, pointed. “Up there where they’re pouring that abutment.”

They swept diagonally up the great north wall, to where a pour-crew worked beside a receptor designed to receive concrete from loaded hoppers. Shorn jumped four feet from the hopper to the deck, went to the fore- man. “There’s a hold-up here; take your crew down to B-142 Pilaster and work there for a while.”

The foreman grumbled, protested. The receptor was half-full of concrete.

Shorn raised his voice impatiently. “Leave it set. I’ll send a lift up to move the whole thing.”

The foreman turned away, barked ill-naturedly to his men. They moved with exaggerated slowness. Shorn stood tautly while they gathered their equipment and trooped down the ramp.

He turned to the lift operator. “Now.”

The bedizened body roiled into the pour.

Shorn guided the dump-hose into position, pulled the trigger. Gray slush pressed down the staring face, that had known so much power.

Shorn sighed slightly. “That’s good. Now— we’ll get the crew back on the job.”

At Pilaster JB- 142 Shorn signaled the foreman, who glowered belliger- ently. Shorn was a mere draughtsman, therefore a fumbler and impractical. “You can go back to work up above now.”

Before the foreman could find words for an adequate retort, Shorn was back in the hopper.

In the yard he found Geskamp standing at the center of an appre- hensive group.

“Nollinrude’s gone.” He looked at the body of the trucker who had caused the original outburst. “Some- body will have to take him home.”

He surveyed the group, trying to gauge their strength, and found noth- ing to reassure him. Eyes shifted sullenly from his. With an empty feel- ing in his stomach Shorn knew that the fact of the killing could not be

T F. r, F. k

53

disposed of as easily as the body.

Shorn once more scanned the sur- roundings. A great blank wall rose immediately to the east; to the north were the Alban Hills, to the south the empty Swanscomba Valley.

Probably these few people were still alone in their knowledge of the killing. He looked from face to face. “A lot of people to keep a secret. If one of us talksJ — even to his brother or his friend or his wife — then there’s no more secret. You all remember Verni- saw Knerwig? ”

A nervous mutter assured him that they did; that their urgent hope was to disassociate themselves from any part of the current episode.

Geskamp’s face was working ir- ritably. Shorn remembered that Ges- karnp was nominally in charge, and was possibly sensitive to any usurpa- tion of his authority. “Yes, Mr. Ges- kamp? Did you have something to add?”

Geskamp drew back his heavy lipS, grinning like a big blond dog. With an effort he restrained himself. “You’re doing-fine.”

Shorn turned back to the others. “You men are leaving the job now. You won’t be questioned by any Teleks. Naturally they’ll know that Nollinrude has disappeared, but I hope they won’t know where. Just in case you are asked — Nollinrude came and went. That’s all you know. Another thing.” He paused weightily. “If any one of us becomes wealthy

54

and the Teleks become full of knowl- edge— this person will regret that he sold his voice.” And he added, as if it were an inconsequential matter, “There’s a group to cope with situa- tions of this sort.” He looked at Ges- kamp, but Geskamp kept stonily si- lent. “Now, I’ll get your names— for future reference. One at a time — ” Twenty minutes later a carry-all floated off toward Tran.

“Well,” said Geskamp bitterly, “I’m up to my neck in it now. Is that what you wanted?”

“I didn’t want it this way. You’re in a tough spot. So am I. With luck we’ll come through. But — just in case — tonight we’ll have to do what I was leading up to.”

Geskamp squinted angrily. “Now I’m to be your cat’s-paw. In what?” “You can sign a requisition. You can send a pair of lifts to the ex- plosives warehouse — ”

Geskamp’s bushy eyebrows took on an odd reverse tilt. “Explosives? How much? ”

“A ton of mitrox.”

Geskamp said in a tone of hushed respect: “That’s enough to blow the stadium ten miles high!”

Shorn grinned. “Exactly. You’d better get that requisition off right now. Then you have the key to the generator room. Tomorrow the main pile is going in. Tonight you and I will arrange the mitrox under the piers.”

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. Geskatnp's mouth hung open. “But—”

Shorn’s dour face became almost charming. “I know. Wholesale mur- der. Not sporting. I agree with you. A sneak attack. I agree. Stealth and sneak attacks and back-stabbing are our weapons. We don’t have any others: None at all.”

“But — why are you so confident of bloodshed?”

Shorn suddenly exploded in anger. “Man, get your head up out of the sand. What’s our chance of getting every single one without exception?”

Geskamp jumped out of the com- pany airboat assigned to his use, stalked with a set face around the stadium toward the construction of- fice, Above him rose two hundred feet of sheer concrete, glowing in the morn- ing sun. In his mind’s eye Geskamp saw the dark cartons that he and Shorn had carried below like moles on the night previous; he still moving with reluctance and uncertainty, car- ried only by Shorn’s fire and direction.

Now the trap was set. A single coded radio signal would pulverize the new concrete, fling a molten gout miles into the air, pound a gigantic blow at the earth.

Geskamp’s honest face became taut as he wrestled with his conscience.

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Had he been too malleable? Think what a revenge the Teleks would take for such a disaster! Still, if the Teleks were as terrible a threat to human freedom as Shorn had half' made him believe, then the mass killing was a deed to be resolutely carried through, like the killing of dangerous beasts. And certainly the Teleks only paid lip-service to human laws. His mind went to the death of Forence Nollin- rude. In ordinary events there would be an inquiry. Nollinrude had killed the trucker; Geskamp, swept by over- whelming rage and pity, had killed 4the Telek. At the worst a human court would have found him guilty of man- slaughter, and no doubt have granted probation. But with a Telek — Ges- kamp’s blood chilled in his veins. Maybe there was something to Shorn’s extreme methods after all; certainly the Teleks could be controlled by no normal methods of law.

He rounded the corner of the tool room, noted an unfamiliar face within. Good. Home office had acted without inquisitiveness; the shifting of em- ployees had interested no one with authority to ask questions.

He looked into the expediter’s room. “ Where’s the draughtsman? ” he asked Cole, the steel detailer.

“Never showed up this morning, Mr. Geskamp.”

Geskamp cursed under his breath. Just like Shorn, getting him into trouble, then ducking o(ut, leaving him to face it. Might be better to

56

come clean with the whole incident; after all it had been an accident, a fit of blood-rage. The Teleks could understand so much, surely.

He turned his head. Something flickered at the edge of his vision. He looked sharply. Something like a big black bug whisked up behind a shelf of books. Big cockroach, thought Geskamp. A peculiar cockroach.

He attacked his work in a vicious humor, and foremen around the job asked themselves wonderingly what had got into Geskamp. Three times during the morning he looked into the office for Shorn, but Shorn had made no appearance.

And once, as he ducked under a low soffit on one of the upper decks, a black object darted up behind him. He jerked his eyes around, but the thing had disappeared under the beams.

“Funny bug,” he said to the new form foreman, whom he was showing around the job.

“I didn’t see it, Mr. Geskamp.”

Geskamp returned to the office, obtained Shorn’s home address — a ho- tel in the Marmion Tower — and put in a visiphone call .

Shorn was not in.

Geskamp turned away, almost bumped into the feet of a Telek stand- ing in the air before him: a thin somber man with silver hair and oil-black eyes. He wore two tones of gray, with a sapphire clasp at the collar of his cape, and the usual Telek slippers of

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

black velvet.

Geskamp’s heart started thudding; his hands became moist. The moment he had been dreading. Where was Shorn?

“You are Geskamp?”

“Yes,” said Geskamp. “I — ”

He was picked up, hurled through the air. Far, fleeting below, went the stadium, Swanscomba Valley, the en- tire countryside. Tran was a gray and black honeycomb, he was in the sunny upper air, hurtling with unthinkable speed. V ind roared past his ears, but he felt no pressure on his skin, no tear at his clothes.

The ocean spread blue below, and something glittered ahead — a complex edifice of shiny metal, glass and bright color. It floated high in the sunny air, with no support above or below.

Geskamp saw a glitter, a flash; he was standing on a floor of glass threaded and drawn with strands of green and gold. The thin gray man sat behind a table in a yellow chair. The room was flooded with sunlight; Ges- kamp was too dazed to notice further details.

The Telek said, “Geskamp, tell me what you know of Forence Noilin- rude.”’

It appeared to Geskamp that the Telek was watching him with superior knowledge, as if any lie would be instantly known, dismissed with grim humor. He was a poor liar to begin with. He looked around for a place to rest his big body. A chair appeared.

“Noilinrude?” He seated himself.

“I saw him yesterday. What about him?”

“ Where is he now? ”

Geskamp forced a painful laugh. “How would I know?”

A sliver of glass darted through the air, stung the back of Geskamp’s neck.

He rose to his feet, startled and angry.

“Sit down,” said the Telek, in a voice of unnatural coolness.

Geskamp slowly sat down. A kind of faintness dimmed his vision, his brain seemed to move away, seemed ^ to watch dispassionately.

“Where is Noilinrude?”

Geskamp held his breath. A voice said, “ He’s dead. Down in the con- crete.”

“ Who killed him?”

Geskamp listened to hear what the voice would say.

III.

Shorn sat in a quiet tavern in that section of Tran where the old sud- denly changes to the new. South were the sword-shaped towers, the neat intervening plazas and parks; north spread the ugly crust of three- and four-story apartments gradually blending into the industrial district.

A young woman with straight brown hair sat across the table from Shorn. She wore a brown cloak without orna- ment; looking into her face there was little to notice but her eyes — large, brown-black, somber; the rest of her

t i : 1. 1 '. k

57

face was without accent.

Shorn was drinking strong tea, his thin dark face in repose.

The young woman seemed to see an indication that the surface calm was false. She put out her hand, rested it on his, a quick exquisite gesture, the first time she had touched him in the three months of their acquaintance. “How could you have done differ- ently?” Her voice became mildly ar- gumentative. “What could you have done?”

“Taken the whole half-dozen un- derground. Kept Geskamp with me.” “How would that have helped? There’ll be a certain number of deaths, a certain amount of destruction — how many and how much is out of our hands. Is Geskamp a valuable man?” “No. He’s a big hard-working lik- able fellow, hardly devious or many- tracked enough to be of use. And I don’t think he would have come with me. He was to the point of open rebellion as it was — the type who resents infringement.”

“It’s not impossible that your ar- rangements are effective.”

“Not a chance. The only matter for speculation is how many the Teleks destroy and whom.”

The young woman relaxed somberly back in her chair, stared straight ahead. “If nothing else, this episode marks a new place in the ... in the ... I don’t know what to call it. Struggle? Campaign? War?”

“Call it war.”

“We’re almost out in the open. Public opinion may be aroused, swung to our side.”

Shorn shook his head gloomily. “The Teleks have bought most of the police, and I suspect that they own the big newspapers, through fronts of course. No, we can’t expect much public support yet. We’ll be called Nihilists, Totalitarists — ”

The young woman quoted Tur- geniev. “ ‘If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly or even harm him, you reproach him with every defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself.’ ”

“It’s just as well.” Shorn laughed bitterly. “Perhaps it’s one of our big advantages, our freedom, to merge into the masses. If everyone were anti-Telek, the Teleks would have an easy job. Kill everybody.”

‘-‘■‘Then they’d have to do all their own work.”

“That’s, right, too.”

She made a fluttering gesture, her voice was strained. “It’s a blood penance on our century, on human- ity— ”

Shorn snorted. “Mysticism.”

She went on as if she had not heard. “If men were to develop from sub- apes a thousand times — each of those thousand rises would show the same phases, and there would be a Telek phase in all of them. It’s as much a part of humanity as hunger and fear and sex.”

“And when the Teleks are out of

58

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the way — what’s the next phase? Is history only a series of bloody phases? Where’s the leveling-off point? ”

She smiled wanly. “Perhaps when we’re all Teleks.”

Shorn gave her a strange look — calculation, curiosity, wonder. He re- turned to his tea as if to practical reality. “I suppose Geskamp has been trying to get hold of me all morning.” He considered a moment, then rose to his feet. “I’ll call the job and find out what’s happened.”

A moment later he returned. “ Ges- kamp’s nowhere around. A message just came in for me at the hotel, and it’s to be delivered by hand only.” “Perhaps Geskamp went of his own accord.”

“Perhaps.”

“ More likely — ” she paused. “ Any- way, the hotel is a good place to stay away from.”

Shorn clenched and unclenched his hands. “It frightens me.”

“What?” She seemed surprised. “My own — vindictivness. It’s not right to hate anyone. A person is bad because exterior forces have hurt his essentially good brain. I realize this — and yet I hate.”

“The Teleks?”

“No, not the Teleks.” He spoke slowly. “I fear them, good healthy fear. I kill them for survival. Those I want to kill, for pleasure, are the men who serve the Teleks for money, who sell their own kind.” He clenched,

unclenched his hands. “ It’s unhealthy to think like that.”

“You’re too much the idealist, Will.”

Shorn mused, talking in a mono- tone. “Our war is the war of ants against giants. They have the power — • but they loom, we see them for miles. We’re among the swarm. We move a hundred feet, into a new group of people, we’re lost. Anonymity, that’s our advantage. So we’re safe — until a Judas-ant identifies us, drags us forth from the swarm. Then we’re lost; the giant foot comes down, there’s no escape. We — ”

The young woman raised her hand. “Listen.”

A voice from the sound-line, here running under the ceiling molding, said, “ The murder of a Telek, Forence Nollinrude, Liaison lieutenant, by sub- versive conspiracy has been an- nounced. The murderer, Ian Geskamp, superintendent of construction at the Swanscomba Valley Stadium, has dis- appeared. It is expected that he will implicate a number of confederates when captured.”

Shorn sat quietly.

“What will they do if they catch him? Will they turn him over to the authorities? ”

Shorn nodded. “They’ve announced the murder. If they want to maintain the fiction of their subservience to Federal law, then they’ve got to sub- mit to the regular courts. Once he’s out of their direct custody, then no

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doubt he’ll die — any one of a number of unpleasant deaths. And then there will be further Acts of God. Another meteor, into Geskamp’s home town, something of the sort — ”

“ Why are you smiling? ”

“It just occurred to me that Ges- kamp’s home town was Cobent Vil- lage, that used to be in Swanscomba Valley. They’ve already wiped that one off the map. But they’ll do some- thing significant enough to point up the moral — that killing Teleks is a very expensive process.”

“It’s odd that they bother with legality at all.”

“It means that they want no sud- den showdown. Whatever revolution there is to be, they want it to come gradually, with as little dislocation as possible, no sudden flood of annoying administrative detail.” He sat tap- ping his fingers nervously. “ Geskamp was a good fellow. I’m wondering about this message at the hotel.”

“If he were captured, drugged, your name and address would come out. You would be a valuable captive.” “Not while I can bite down on my back tooth. Full of cyanide. But I’m curious about that message. If it’s from Geskamp he needs help, and we should help him. He knows about the mitrox under the stadium. The subject might not arise during the course of questioning, especially under drugs, but we don’t want to run the risk.” “Suppose it’s a trick?”

“ Well- — we might learn something.”

60

“I could get it,” she said doubtfully.

Shorn frowned.

“No,” she said, “I don’t mean by walking in and asking for it; that would be foolish. You write a note authorizing delivery of the message to bearer.”

The young woman said to the boy, “It’s very important that you follow instructions exactly.”

“Yes, miss.”

The boy rode the sidewalk to the Marmion Tower, whose seventh and eighth floors were given over to the Cort Hotel. He rode the lift to the seventh floor, went quietly to the desk.

“Mr. Shorn sent me to pick up his mail.'” He passed the note across the desk.

The clerk hesitated, looked away in preoccupation, then without words handed the boy an envelope.

The boy returned to the ground floor, walked out into the street, where he paused, waited. Apparently no one followed him. He rode the sidewalk north, along the gray streets to the Tarrogat, stepped around the corner, jumped on the high-speed East Divi- sion sidewalk. Heavy commercial traf- fic growled through the street beside him, trucks and drays, a few surface cars. The boy spied a momentary gap, stepped to the outside band, jumped running into the street. He darted across, climbed on the sidewalk running in the opposite direction,

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

watching over his shoulder. No one followed. He rode a mile, past the Flatiron Y, turned into Grant Avenue, jumped to the stationary, crouched by the comer.

No one came hurrying after.

He crossed the street, entered the Grand Maison Cafe.

The food panel made an island down the center; to either side were tables. The boy walked around the food panel, ignoring a table where a young woman in a brown cloak sat by her- self. He ducked out an entrance op- posite to where he entered, rounded the building, entered once more.

The young woman rose to her feet, followed him out. At the exit they brushed together accidentally.

The boy went about his business, and the young woman turned, went back to the rest room. As she opened the door a black beetle buzzed through with her.

She ducked, looked around the ceil- ing, but the insect had disappeared. She went to a visiphone, paid for sonic, dialed.

“Well?”

“I’ve got it.”

“Anyone follow?”

“No. I watched him leave Marmion Tower. I watched behind him in — her voice broke off.

“What’s the matter?”

She said in a strained voice, “ Get out of there fast. Hurry. Don’t ask questions. Get away — fast!’'’

She hung up, pretending that she

had not noticed the black bug pressed against the glass, crystal eyes staring at the visiphone dial.

She reached in her pouch, selected one of the four weapons she carried, drew it forth, closed her eyes, snapped the release.

White glare flooded the room, seared behind her closed lids. She ran out the door, picked up the dazed bug in her handkerchief, stuffed it into her pouch. It was strangely heavy, like a slug of lead.

She must hurry. She ran from the rest room, up through the cafe, out into the street.

Safe among the crowds she watched six emergency vans vomit Black and Golds who rushed to the exits of the Grand 'Maison Cafe.

Bitterly she. rode the sidewalks north. The Teleks controlled the po- lice, it was no secret.

She wondered about the beetle in her pouch. It evinced no movement, no sign of life. If her supposition were correct, it would be quiet so long as she kept light from its eyes, so long as she denied it reference points.

For an hour she wandered the city, intent on evading not only men, but also little black beetle-things. At last she ducked into a narrow passageway in the hard industry quarter, ran up a flight of wooden steps, entered a drab but neat sitting room.

She went to a closet, found a small cannister with a screw top, gingerly

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61

pushed the handkerchief and the bee- tle-thing inside, screwed down the lid.

She removed her long brown cloak, drew a cup of coffee from the dispenser, waited.

Half an hour passed. The door opened. Shorn looked in. His face was haggard and pale as a dog skull; his eyes glowed with an unhealthy yellow light.

She jumped to her feet. “What’s

happened? ”

“Sit still, Laurie, I’m all right.” He slumped into a seat.

She drew another cup of coffee, passed it to him. “ What happened? ”

His eyes burnt brighter. “As soon as I heard from you, I left the tavern. Twenty seconds later — no more — the place exploded. Flame shooting out the door, out the windows — thirty or forty people inside; I can hear them ■yelling now — ” His mouth sagged. He licked his lips. “I hear them — ”

Laurie controlled her voice. “ Just ants.”

Shorn assented with a ghastly grin. “The giant steps on forty ants, but the guilty ant, the marked ant, the intended ant — he’s gone.”

She told him about the black bug. He groaned ironically. “It was bad enough dodging spies and Black and Golds. Now little bugs — Can it hear?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. It’s shut up tight in the can, but sound

probably gets through.”

“We’d better move it.”

* She wrapped the can in a towel, tucked it in a closet, shut the door. When she returned, Shorn was eying her with a new look in his eye. “You thought very swiftly, Laurie.”

She turned away to hide her pleas- ure. “I had to.”

“You still have the message?”

She handed the envelope across the table.

He read, “ ‘Get in touch with Cly- born at the Perendalia.’ ”

“Do you know him?”

“No. We’ll make discreet inquiries. I don’t imagine there’ll be anything good come out of it.”

“It’s so much — work.”

“Easy for the giants. One or two of them manage the entire project. I’ve heard that the one called Dominion is in charge, and the others don’t even realize there’s dissatisfaction. Just as we appoint a dog-catcher, then dismiss the problem of stray dogs from our minds. Probably not one Telek in a hundred realizes that we’re fighting for our lives, our futures, our dignity as human beings.”

After a moment she asked, “Do you think we’ll win, W’ill?”

“I don’t know. W e have nothing to lose.” He yawned, stretched. “To- night I meet C ircumbrigh t ; you re- member Mm? ”

“He’s the chubby little biophysi- cist.”

Shorn nodded. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll take a nap.”

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IV.

At eleven o’clock Shorn descended to the street. The sky was bright with glow from the lake-shore enter- tainment strip, the luxury towers of downtown Tran.

He walked along the dark street till he came to Bellman Boulevard, and stepped out on to the slipway.

There was a cold biting wind and few people were abroad; the hum of the rollers below wa,s noticeable. He turned into Stockbridge Street, and as he approached the quarter-mile .strip of night stores, the sidewalks became crowded and Shorn felt more secure. He undertook a few routine precau- tions, sliding quickly through doors, to break contact with any spy-beetles that might have fixed on him.

At midnight the fog blew thick in from the harbor, smelling of oil, mer- captan, ammonia. Pulling up his hood, Shorn descended a flight of stairs, pushed into a basement recreation hall, sidled past the dull-eyed men at the mechanical games. He walked directly toward the men’s room, turned at the last minute into a short side corridor, passed through a door marked “ Employees” into a workshop littered with bits and parts from the amusement machines.

Shorn waited a moment, ears alert for sound, then went to the rear of the room, unlocked a steel door, slipped through into a second work- shop, much more elaborately fitted

than the first. A short stout man with a big head and mild blue eyes looked up. “Hello, Will.”

Shorn waved his hand. “Hello, Gor- man.”

He stood with his back to the door, looking around the molding for a black, apparently innocent, beetle. Nothing in sight. He crossed the room, scribbled on a bit of paper. “We’ve got to search the room. Look for a flying spy cell, like this.” He sketched the beetle he carried with him in the canister, then appended a postscript. “I’ll cover the ventilator.”

An hour’s search revealed nothing. Shorn sighed, relaxed. “Ticklish. If there was one of the things here, and it saw us searching, the Telek at the other end would have known the jig was up. We’d have been in trouble. A fire, an explosion. They missed me once already today, by about ten seconds.” He set the canister on a bench. “I’ve got one of the things in here. Laurie caught it; rare presence of mind. Her premise is, that if its eyes and ears are made -useless — in other words, if it loses its identity on a spatial frame of reference — then it ceases to exist for the Teleks, and they can no longer manipulate it. I think she’s right; the idea seems intuitively sound.”

Gorman Circumbright picked up the canister, jiggled it. “ Rather heavy. Why did you bring it down here? ” “We’ve got to figure out a counter to it. It must function like a miniature

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video transmitter. I suppose Alvac Corporation makes them. If we cait identify the band it broadcasts on, we can build ourselves detectors, warn- ing units.”

Circumbright sat looking at the can. “If it’s still in operation, if it’s still broadcasting, I can find out very swiftly.”

He set the can beside an all-wave tuner. Shorn unscrewed the lid, gin- gerly removed the bug, still wrapped in cloth, set it on the bench. Circum- bright pointed to a fluorescent scale, glowing at several points. He started to speak, but Shorn motioned for silence, pointed to the bug. Circum- bright nodded, wrote, “The lower lines are possibly static, from the power source. The sharp line at the top is the broadcast frequency — very sharp. Powerful.”

Shorn replaced the bug in the can. Circumbright turned away from the tuner. “ If it’s insensitive to infrared, we can see to take it apart, disconnect the power.”

Shorn frowned doubtfully. “How could we be sure?”

“Give it to me.” Circumbright clipped leads from an oscillograph to the back of the tuner, dialed to the spy-beetles carrier frequency.

The oscillograph showed a normal sine-curve.

“Now. Turn out the lights.”

Shorn threw the switch. The room was dark except for the dancing yel- low-green light of the oscillograph

and the dull red murk from the infra- red projector.

Circumbright’s bulk cut off the glow from the projector; Shorn watched the oscillograph face. There was no change in the wave.

“Good, said Circumbright. “And 1 think that if I. strain my eyes I can ... or better, reach in the closet and hand me the heat-conversion lenses. Top shelf,”

He worked fifteen minutes, then suddenly the carrier wave on the face of the oscillograph vanished. “Ah,” .sighed Circumbright. “That’s got it. You can turn the lights back on now.”

Together they stood looking down at the bug — a little black torpedo two inches long with two crystalline eyes bulging at each side of the head.

“Nice job,” said Circumbright. “It’s an Alvac product all right. I’ll say a word to Graythorne; maybe he can introduce a few disturbing fac- tors.”

“What about that detector unit?”

Circumbright pursed his lips. “ For each of the bugs there’s probably a different frequency; otherwise they’d get their signals mixed up. But the power bank probably radiates about the same in all cases. I can fix up a jury-rig which you can use for a few days, then Graythorne can bring us down some tailor-made jobs from Al- vac, using the design data.”

He crossed the room, found a bottle of red wine, which he set beside Shorn. “Relax a few' minutes.”

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Half an hour passed. Shorn watched quietly while Circumbright soldered together stock circuits, humming in a continuous tuneless drone.

“There,” said Circumbright finally. “If one of those bugs gets within a hundred yards, this will vibrate, thump.”

“Good.” Shorn tucked the device tenderly in his breast pocket, while Circumbright settled himself into an armchair, stuffed tobacco in a pipe. Shorn watched him curiously. Circum- bright, placid and unemotional as a man could be, revealed himself to Shorn by various small signs, such as. pressing the tobacco home with a thumb more vigorous than necessary.

“I hear another Telek was killed yesterday.”

» “Yes. I was there.”

“Who is this Geskamp?”

“Big blond fellow. What’s the latest on him? ”

“He’s dead.”

“Hm-m-m.” Shorn was silent a moment, a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. “How?”

“The Teleks turned him over to the custody of the Federal Marshal at Knoll. He was shot trying to escape.” Shorn felt as if anger were being pumped inside him, as if he were swelling, as if the pressure against his taut muscles were too great to bear.

“Take it easy,” said Circumbright mildly.

“I’ll kill Teleks from a sense of duty,” said Shorn. “I don’t enjoy it.

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But . . . and I feel ashamed, I’ll admit ... I want to kill the Federal Marshal at Knoll.”

“It wasn’t the Federal Marshal himself,” said Circumbright. “It was two of his deputies. And it’s always possible that Geskamp actually did try to escape. We’ll know for sure tomorrow.”

“How so?”

“We’re moving out a little bit. There’ll be an example made of those two if they’re guilty. We’ll narcotize them tonight, find out the truth. If they’re working for the Teleks — they’ll go.” Circumbright spat on the floor. “Although I dislike the label of a terrorist organization? ”

“What else can we do? If we got a confession, turned them over to the Section Attorney, they’d be repri- manded, turned loose.”

“True enough.” Circumbright puffed meditatively.

Shorn moved restlessly in his chair. “It frightens me, the imminence, the urgency of all this — And how few peo- ple are aware of it! Surely there’s never been an emergency so ill-pub- licized before. In a week, a month, three months — there’ll be more dead people on Earth than live ones, unless we get the entire shooting-match at once in the stadium.”

Circumbright puffed at his pipe. “Will, sometimes I wonder whether we’re not approaching the struggle from the wrong direction.”

“How so?”

“Perhaps instead of attacking the Teleks, we should be learning more of the fundamental nature of telekinet- ics.” .

Shorn leaned back fretfully. “The Teleks don’t know themselves.”

“A bird can’t tell you much about aerodynamics. The Teleks have a dis- advantage which is not at all obvious —the fact that action comes too easy, that they are under no necessity to think. To build a dam, they look at a mountain, move it down into the valley. If the dam gives way, they move down another mountain, but they never look at a slide rule. In this respect, at least, they represent a retrogression rather than an advance.” Shorn slowly opened and closed his hands, watching as if it were the first time he had ever seen them. “They’re caught in the stream of life, like the rest t>f us. It’s part of the human tragedy that there can’t be any com- promise; it’s them or us.”

Circumbright heaved a deep sigh. “I’ve racked my brains . . . Com- promise. Why can’t two kinds of peo- ple live together? Our abilities comple- ment each other.”

“One time it was that way. The first generation. The Teleks were still common men, perhaps a little peculiar in that things always turned out lucky for them. Then Joffrey and his Teleki- netic Congress, and the reinforcing, the catalysis, the forcing, whatever it was — and suddenly they’re different.”

“If there were no fools,” said Cir-

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cumbright, “ either among us or among them, we could co-inhabit the earth. There’s the flaw in any compromise negotiation — the fact of fools, both among the Teleks and the common men.”

“I don’t quite follow you.” Circumbright gestured with his pipe. “There will always be Telek fools to antagonize common-man fools; then the common-man fools will am- bush the Teieks, and the Teleks will be very upset, especially since for every Telek, there are forty Earth fools eager to kill him. So they use force, terror. Inexorable, inevitable. But — they have a choice. They can leave Earth, find a home somewhere among the planets" they claim they visit; they can impose this reign of power; or they can return to humanity, renounce telekinesis entirely. Those are the choices open to them.”

“And our choices?”

“We submit or we challenge. In the first instance we become slaves. In the second we either kill the Teleks, drive them away, or we all become dead men.”

Shorn sipped at his wineglass. “ We might all become Teleks ourselves.”

“ Or we might find a scientific means to control or cancel out telekinesis.” Circumbright poured a careful finger of wine for himself. “My own instinct is to explore the last possibility.” “There’s nowhere to get a foothold in the subject.”

“Oh I don’t know. We have a number of observations. Telekinesis and teleportation have been known for thousands of years. It took the concentration of telekinetics at Jof- frey’s Congress to develop the power fully. We know that Telek children are telekinetic — whether by contagion or by genetics we can’t be sure.”

“Probably both. A genetic pre- ' disposition; parental training.”

Circumbright nodded. “Probably both. Although as you know, in rare instances they reward a common man by making a Telek out of him.” “Evidently telekinesis is latent in everyone.”

“There’s a large literature of early experiments and observations. The so-called spiritualist study of polter- geists and house-demons might be significant.”

Shorn remained silent.

“I’ve tried to systematize the sub- ject,” Circumbright continued, “deal with it logically. The first question seems to be, does the Law of Conserva- tion of Energy apply or not? When a Telek floats a ton of iron across the sky by looking at it, is he creating energy or is he directing the use of energy from an unseen source? There is no way of knowing offhand.”

Shorn stretched, yawned, settled back in his chair. “I have heard a metaphysical opinion, to the effect that the Telek uses nothing more than confidence. The universe that he perceives has reality only to the back-

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drop of his own brain. He sees a chair; the image of a chair exists in his mind. He orders the chair to move across the room. His confidence and reality is so great that, in his mind, he be- lieves he sees the chair move, and he bases his future actions on the per- ception. Somehow he is not disap- pointed. In other words, the chair has moved because he believes he has moved it.”

Circumbright puffed placidly on his pipe.

Shorn grinned. “Go on; I’m sorry I interrupted you.”

“Where does the energy come from? Is the mind a source, a valve or a remote control? There are the three possibilities. Force is applied; the mind directs the force. But does the force originate in the mind, is the force collected, , channeled through the mind, or does the mind act like a modulator, a grid in a vacuum tube?”

Shorn slowly shook his head. “So far we have not even defined the type of energy at work. If we knew that, we might recognize the function of the mind.”

“Or vice versa. It works either way. But if you wish, consider the force at work. In all cases, an object moves in a single direction. That is to say, there has been no observed case of an ex- plosion or a compression. The object moves as a unit. How? Why? To say the mind projects a force field is ignor- ing the issue, redefining at an equal level of abstraction.”

“Perhaps the mind is able to con- trol the poltergeists — creatures like the old Persian genii.”

Circumbright tapped the ash from his pipe. “I’ve considered the possi- bility. Who are the poltergeists? Ghosts? Souls of the dead? A matter for speculation. Why are the Teleks able to control them, and ordinary people not?”

Shorn grinned. “I assume these are rhetorical questions — because I don’t have the answers.”

“Perhaps a form of gravity is at work. Imagine a cup-shaped gravity screen around the object, open on the side the Telek desires motion. I have not calculated the gravitational ac- celeration generated by matter at its average universal density, from here to infinity, but I assume it would be insignificant. A millimeter a day, per- haps. Count the cup-shaped gravity- screen out; likewise a method for rendering the object opaque to the passage of neutrinos in a given direction.”

“Poltergeists, gravity, neutrinos — all eliminated. What have we left?” Circumbright chuckled. “I haven’t eliminated the poltergeists. But I in- cline to the Organic Theory. That is, the concept that all the minds and all the matter of the universe are inter- connected, much like brain cells and muscular tissue of the body. When certain of these brain cells achieve a sufficiently close vinculum, they are able to control certain twitchings of

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the corporeal frame of the universe. How? Why? I don’t know. After all, it’s only an idea, a sadly anthropo- morphic idea.”

Shorn looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling. Circumbright was a three-way scientist. He not only proposed theo- ries, he not only devised critical ex- periments to validate them, but he was an expert laboratory technician. “Does your theory suggest any prac- tical application? ”

Circumbright scratched his ear. “Not yet. I need to cross-fertilize it with a few other notions. Like the metaphysics you brought up a few moments ago. If I only had a Telek who would submit himself to experi- ments, we might get somewhere — And I think I hear Dr. Kurgill.”

He rose to his feet, padded to the door. He opened it; Shorn saw him stiffen.

A deep voice said, “Hello, Circum- bright; this is my son. Cluche, meet Gorman Circumbright, one of our foremost tacticians.”

The two^ Kurgills came into the laboratory. The father was short, spare, with simian length to his arms. He had a comical simian face with a high forehead, long upper lip, flat nose. The son resembled his father not at all: a striking young man with noble features, a proud crest of auburn hair, an extreme mode of dress, reminiscent of Telek style. The elder was quick of movement, talkative,

warm; the younger was careful of eye and movement.

Circumbright turned toward Shorn. “Will — ” he stopped short. “Excuse me,” he said to the Kurgills. “ If you’ll sit down, I’ll be with you at once.”

He hurried into the adjoining store- room. Shorn stood in the shadows.

“What’s the trouble?”

Shorn took Circumbright’s hand, held it against the warning unit in his pocket.

Circumbright jerked. “The thing’s vibrating! ”

Shorn looked warily into the room beyond. “How well do you know the Kurgills?”

Circumbright said, “The doctor’s my lifelong friend, I’d go my life for him.”

“And his son?”

“I can’t say.”

They stared at each other, then by common accord, looked through the crack of the door. Cluche Kurgill had seated himself in the chair Shorn had vacated, while his father stood in front of him, teetering comfortably on his toes, hands behind his back.

“I’d swear that no bug slipped past us while I stood in the doorway,” muttered Circumbright.

“No. I don’t think it did.”

“That means it’s on one or the other of their persons.”

“It might be unintentional — a plant. But how would the Teleks know the Kurgills intended to come down here? ”

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Shorn shook his head.

Gircumbright sighed. “I guess not.” “The bug will be where it can see, but where it can’t be seen — or at least, not noticed.”

Their glances went to the ornate headdress Cluche Kurgill wore on one side of his head: a soft roll of gray- green leather, bound by a strip across his hair, trailing a dangle of moon- opals past his ear.

Circumbright said in a tight voice, “We can expect destruction at any time. Explosion — ”

Shorn said slowly, “I doubt if they’ll send an explosion. If they feel they are unsuspected, they’ll prefer to bide their time.”

Circumbright said huskily, “Well, what do you propose then?”

Shorn hesitated a moment before replying. “We’re in a devil of a tick- lish position. Do you have a narco- hypnotic stinger handy? ” Circumbright nodded.

“Perhaps then — ”

Two minutes later Circumbright rejoined the Kurgills. The old doctor was in a fine humor. “Gorman,” he said to Circumbright, “I’m very proud of Cluche here. He’s been a scapegrace all his life — but now he wants to make something of himself.” “Good,” said Circumbright with hollow heartiness. “If he were of our conviction, I could use him right now — But I wouldn’t want him to do any- thing against his — ”

“01^ no, not at all,” said Cluche.

“ What’s your problem? ”

“ Well, Shorn just left for a very im- portant meeting — the regional chiefs — and he’s forgotten his code book. I couldn’t trust an ordinary messenger, but if you will deliver the code book, you’d be doing us a great service.” “Any little thing I can do to help,” said Cluche. “I’ll be delighted.”

His father regarded him with fatu- ous pride. “ Cluche has surprised me. He caught me out just the day before yesterday, and now nothing must do but that he plunges in after me. Need- less to say I’m very pleased; glad to see that he’s a chip off the old block, nothing stands in his way.”

Circumbright said, “I can count on you then? You’ll have to follow in- structions exactly.”

“Quite all right, sir, glad to help.” “Good,” said Circumbright. “First thing then — you’ll have to change your clothes. You’d be too con- spicuous as you are.”

“Oh, now!” protested Cluche. “Surely a cloak — ”

“No!” snapped Circumbright. “ You’ll have to dress as a dock worker from the skin out. No cloak would hide that headgear. In the next room you’ll find some clothes. Come with me, I’ll make a light.”

He held open the door; reluctantly Cluche stepped through.

The door closed. Shorn expertly seized Cluche’s neck, digging strong fingers into the motor nerves. Cluche stiffened, trembling.

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Circumbright slapped the front of his neck with a barbful of drug, then fumbled for Cluche’s headdress. He felt a smooth little object bulging with two eyes like a tadpole. He said easily. “Can’t seem to find the light — ” He tucked the bug into his pouch. "Here it is. Now — your pouch. I’ll put it into this locker; it’ll be safe till you get back.” He winked at Shorn, shoved the pouch into a heavy metal tool chest.

They looked down at the sprawled body. “There’s not much time,” said Circumbright. “ I’ll send Kurgill home, and we’ll have to get out ourselves.” He looked regretfully around the room. "There’s a lot of tine equipment here We can get more, I suppose.”

Shorn clicked his tongue. “What will you tell Kurgill?”

“Um-m-m. The truth would kill him.”

"Cluche was killed bv the Teleks. He died defending the code book. The Teleks have his name; he’ll have to go underground himself.”

“He’ll have to go under tonight. I’ll warn him to lay low, say in Capis- trano’s, until we call him, then we can give him the bad news. As soon as he’s gone we’ll take Cluche out the back way, to Laurie’s.”

Cluche Kurgill sat in a chair, staring into space. Circumbright leaned back smoking his pipe. Laurie, in white pajamas and a tan robe, lay sidewise on a couch in the comer watching;

Shorn sat beside her.

“How long have you been spying for the Teleks, Cluche?”

“Three days.”

“Tell us about it.”

“I found some writings of my father’s which led me to believe he was a member of a sub-organization. I needed money. I reported to a police sergeant who I knew to be interested. He wanted me to furnish him the details; I refused. I demanded to speak to a Telek. I threatened the policeman — ”

“What is his name?”

“Sergeant Cagolian Loo, of the Moxenwohl Precinct.”

“Go on.”

“Finally he arranged an appoint- ment with Adlari Dominion. I met Dominion at the Pequinade, out in Vireburg. He gave me a thousand crowns and a spy cell which I was to carry with me at all times. When any- thing interesting occurred I was to press an attention button.”

“What were your instructions?”

“ I was to become a conspirator along with my father, accompanying him as much as possible. If my efforts resulted in the arrest of important figures, he hinted that I might be made a Telek myself.”

“Did he intimate how this meta- morphosis is accomplished?”

“No.”

“ When are you to report to Domin- ion again?”

“ I am to contact him by visiphone

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TF.T.F.K

at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow, at Glarietta Pavilion.”

“Is there any password or iden- tification Code?”

“No.”

Silence held the room for several minutes. Shorn stirred, rose to his feet. “ Gorman — suppose I were to be metamorphosed, suppose I were to become a Telek.”

Circumbright chewed placidly on his pipestem. “It would be a fine thing. I don’t quite understand how you’ll manage. Unless,” he added in a dry voice, “you intend to turn us all in to Adlari Dominion.”

“No. But look at Cluche. Look at me.”

Circumbright looked, grimaced, straightened up in his seat.

Shorn watched expectantly. “Could it be done?”

“Oh. I see. Give you more nose, a longer chin, fuller cheeks, a lot of red hair — ”

“Add Clu che’s clothes.”

“You’d pass.”

“Especially if I come with in- formation.”

“ That’s what is puzzling me. What . kind of information could you give Dominion that would please him but wouldn’t hurt us?”

Shorn told him.

Circumbright puffed on his pipe. “It’s a big decision. But it’s a good exchange. Unless he’s got the same thing already, from other sources.”

“Such as Geskamp? In which case,

we lose nothing.”

“True.” Circumbright went to the visiphone. “Tino? Bring your gear over to — ” He looked at Laurie: “What’s the address?”

“29, 24, 14 Martinvelt.”

V.

The red-haired man moved with a taut wiriness that had not been char- acteristic of Cluche Kurgill. Laurie inspected him critically.

“Walk slower, Will. Don’t flail your arms so. Cluche was very languid.”

“Check this.” Shorn walked across the room.

“Better.”

“Very well. I’m gone. Wish me luck. My first stop is the old workshop for Cluche’s spy cell. He’d hardly be likely to leave it there.”

“But aren’t you taking a chance, going back to the workshop?”

“I don’t think so. I hope not. If the Teleks planned to destroy it, they would have done so last night.” He waved his hand abruptly and was gone.

He rode the sidewalk, aping the languorous and lofty democracy he associated with Cluche. The morning had been overcast and blustery, with spatters of cold rain, but at noon the clouds broke. The sun surged through gaps in the hurrying rack, and the great gray buildings of Tran stood forth like proud lords. Shorn tilted his head back; this was the grandeur of

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simple bulk, but nevertheless impres- sive. He himself preferred construc- tion on a smaller scale, buildings to suit a lesser number of more highly in- dividualized people. He thought of the antique Mediterranean temples, gaudy in their pinks and green and blues, al- though now the marble had bleached white. Such idiosyncrasy was possible, even enforced, in the ancient mon- archies. Today every man, in theory his own master, was required to mesh with his fellows, like a part in a great gear cluster. The culture-colors and culture-tones came out at the commoru denominator, the melange of all colors: gray. Buildings grew taller and wider from motives of economy — the volume increased by the cube but the enclosing surface only by the square. The motif was utilitarianism, mass policy, each tenant relinquishing edges and fringes of his personality, until only the common basic core — a sound roof, hot and cold water, good light, air-conditioning, and good elevator service — remained.

People living in masses, thought Shorn, were like pebbles on a beach, each grinding and polishing his neigh- bor until all were absolutely uniform. Color and flair were to be found only in the wilderness and among the Teleks. Imagine a world populated by Teleks; imagine the four thousand ex- panded to four hundred million, four billion! First to go would be the cities. There would be no more con- centrations, no more giant gray build-

ings, no directed rivers of men and women. Humanity would explode like a nova. The cities would corrode and crumble, great mournful hulks, the final monuments to medievalism. Earth would be too small, too limited. Out to the planets, where the Teleks claimed to roam at will. Flood Mars with blue oceans, filter the sky of Venus. Neptune, Uranus, Pluto — call them in, bestow warm new orbits upon them. Bring in even Saturn, so vast and yet with a surface gravity only a trifle more than Earth’s — . But these great works, suppose they exhausted the telekinetic energy, wherever it originated? Suppose some morning the Teleks awoke and found the power gone !

Then — the crystal sky-castles fall- ing! Food, shelter, warmth needed, and no secure gray cities, no ant-hill buildings, none of the pedestrian energies of metal and heat and elec- tricity. Then what calamity! What wailing and cursing!

Shorn heaved a deep sigh. Specula- tion. Telekinetic energy might well be infinite. Or it might be at the point of exhaustion at this moment. Specula- tion, and not germane to his present goal.

He frowned. Perhaps it was impor- tant. Perhaps some quiet circuit in his mind was at work, aligning him into new opinions —

Ahead was the basement recreation hall. Shorn guiltily realized that he had been swinging along at his own

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gait, quite out of character with the personality of Cluche Kurgill. Best not forget these details, he told him- self guiltily; there would be oppor- tunity for only one mistake.

He descended the stairs, strode through the hall, past the clicking, glowing, humming game machines, where men, rebelling at the predicta- bility of their lives, came to buy syn- thetic adventure and surprise.

He walked unchallenged through the door marked “Employees”; at the next door he paused, wondering whether he had remembered to bring the key, wondering if a spy cell might be hidden in the shadows, watching the door.

If so, would Cluche Kurgill be likely to possess a key? It was in the bounds of possibility, he decided, and in any event would not be interpreted as suspicious.

Shorn groped into his pouch. The key was there. He opened the door, and assuming the furtive part of a spy, entered the workshop.

It was as they had left it the night before. Shorn went quickly to the tool chest, found Circumbright’s pouch, brought forth the bug, set it carefully into his headdress.

Now — get out as fast as possible. He looked at his watch. Twelve noon. At two, Cluche’s appointment with Adlari Dominion, chief of the Telek Liaison Committee.

Shorn ate an uncomfortable lunch

in one corner of the Mercantile Mart Foodarium, a low-ceilinged acreage dotted with tables precisely as a tile floor, and served by a three-tier dis- play of food moving slowly under a transparent case. His head itched furiously under the red toupee, and he dared not scratch lest he disturb Tino’s elaborate effort. Secondly, he decided that the Foodarium, the noon resort of hurried day-workers, was out of character for Cluche Kurgill. Among the grays and dull greens and browns, his magnificent Telek-style garments made him appear like a flamingo in a chicken-run. He felt glances of dull hostility; the Teleks were envied but respected; one of their own kind aping the Teleks was despised with the animosity that found no release else- where.

Shorn ate quickly and departed. He followed Zyke Alley into Multiflores Park, where he sauntered back and forth among the dusty sycamores.

At two he sat himself deliberately in a kiosk, dialed Glarietta Pavilion on the visiphone. The connection clicked home; the screen glowed with a fanci- ful black-and-white drawing of Glari- etta Pavilion, and a terse man’s voice spoke. “Glarietta Pavilion.”

“I want to speak to Adlari Domin- ion; Cluche Kurgill calling.”

A thin face appeared, inquisitive, impertinent, with a lumpy nose, pale- blue £yes set at a birdlike slant. “What do you want?”

Shorn frowned. He had neglected an

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important item of information; it would hardly do to ask the man in the visiphone if he were Adlari Dominion, whom he was supposed to have met three days previously.

“I had an appointment for today at two,” and cautiously he watched the man in the screen.

“You can report to me.”

“No,” said Shorn, now confident. The man was too pushing, too authori- tative. “I want to speak to Adlari Dominion. What I have to say is not for your ears.”

The thin man glared. “I’ll be the judge of that; Dominion can’t be bothered every five minutes.”

“If Dominion learns that you are standing in my way, he will not be pleased.”

The thin face flushed red. His hand swept up, the screen went pale-green. Shorn waited.

The screen lit once more, showing a

bright room with high white walls.

Windows opened on sun-dazzled

clouds. A man, thin as the first to

*

answer the screen, but somber, with gray hair and oil-black eyes, looked quietly at him. Under the bore of the sharp eyes, Shorn suddenly felt un- easy. Would his disguise hold up?”

“Well, Kurgill, what do you have to tell me?”

“It’s a face-to-face matter.”

“Hardly wise,” Dominion com- mented. “Don’t you trust the privacy of the visiphone? I assure you it’s not tapped.”

“No. I trust the visiphone. But — I stumbled on something big. I want to be sure I get what’s coming to me.” “Oh.” Dominion made no play at misunderstanding. “You’ve been working — how long?”

“Three days.”

“And already you expect the greatest reward it’s in our power to bestow?”

“It’s worth it. If I’m a Telek, it’s to my advantage to help you. If I’m not — it isn’t. Simple as that.”

Dominion frowned slightly. “You’re hardly qualified to estimate the value of your information.”

“ Suppose I knew of a brain disease which attacks only Teleks. Suppose I knew that inside of a year half or three-quarters of the Teleks would be dead?”

Dominion’s face changed not a flicker. “Naturally I want to know about it.”

Shorn made no reply.

Dominion said slowly, “If such is your information, and we authenticate it, you will be rewarded suitably.” Shorn shook his head. “I can’t take the chance. This is my windfall. I’ve got to make sure I get what I’m after; I may not have another chance.” Dominion’s mouth tightened, but he said mildly enough, “I understand your viewpoint.”

“ I want to come up to the Pavilion. But a word of warning to you; there’s no harm in clear understanding Ire- tween friends.”

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“None whatever.”

“Don’t try drugs on me. I’ve got a cyanide capsule in my mouth. I’ll kill myself before you get something for nothing.”

Dominion smiled grimly. “Very well, Kurgill. Don’t execute yourself, swallow it by mistake.”

Shorn smiled likewise. “Only as a gesture of protest. How shall I come up to Glarietta?”

“Hire a cab.”

“Openly?”

“Why not?”

“You’re not afraid of counter- espionage?”

Dominion’s eyes narrowed; his head tilted slightly. “I thought we dis- cussed that at our previous meeting.” Shorn took care not to protest his recollection too vehemently. “Very well. I’ll be right up.”

Glarietta Pavilion floated high above the ocean, a fairy-book cloud- castle — shining white terraces, ranked towers with red and blue parasol roofs, gardens verdant with foliage and vines trailing down into the air.

The cab slid down on a landing flat. Shorn alighted. The driver looked at him without favor. “Want me to wait?”

“No, you can go.” Shorn thought wryly, he’d either be leaving under his own power or not be leaving at all.

A door slid back before him; he entered a hall walled with russet orange, purple and green prisms, glow-

76

ing in the brilliant upper air light. In a raised alcove sat a young woman, a beautiful creature with glossy butter- colored hair, a cream-smooth face.

“Yes, sir?” she asked, impersonally courteous.

“I want to see Adlari Dominion. I’m Cluche Kurgill.”

She touched a key below her. “To your right.”

He climbed a glass staircase which spiraled up a green glass tube, came out in a waiting room walled with gold-shot red rock that had never been quarried on Earth. Dark-green ivy veiled one wall; white columns opposite made a graceful frame into an herbarium full of green light and lush green growth, white and scarlet flowers.

Shorn hesitated, looked around him. A golden light blinked in the wall, an

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

aperture appeared. Acllari Dominion stood in the opening. “ Come in, Kurgill.”

Shorn stepped into the wash of light, and for a moment lost Dominion in the dazzle. When vision returned, Dominion was lounging in a hammock- chair supported by a glistening rod protruding horizontally from the wall. A red leather ottoman was the only other article of furniture visible. Three of the walls were transparent glass, giving on a magnificent vista: clouds bathed in sunlight, blue sky, blue sea.

Dominion pointed to the ottoman. “Have a seat.”

The ottoman was only a foot high; sitting in it Shorn would be forced to crane his neck to see Dominion.

“No, thanks. I prefer to stand.” He put a foot on the ottoman, inspected

Dominion coolly, eye to eye.

Dominion said evenly, “What do you have to tell me?”

Shorn started to speak, but found it impossible to look into the smoldering black eyes and think at the same time. He turned his eyes out the window to a pinnacle of white cloud. “ I’ve natu- rally considered this situation care- fully. If you’ve done the same ... as I imagine you have . . . then there’s no point in each of us trying to outwit the other. I have information that’s important, critically important, to a great number of Teleks. I want to trade this information for Telek status.” He glanced toward Dominion whose eyes had never faltered, looked away once more.

“I’m trying to arrange this state- ment with absolute clarity, so there’ll be complete understanding between

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77

us. First, I want to remind you, I have poison in my mouth. I’ll kill myself before I part with what I know, and I guarantee you’ll never have another chance to learn what I can tell you.” Shorn glanced earnestly sidewise at Dominion. “No hypnotic drug can act fast enough to prevent me from biting open my cyanide — Well, enough of that.

“ Second : I can’t trust any verbal or written contract you make; if I ac- cepted such a contract I’d have no means to enforce it. You are in a stronger position. If you deliver your part of the bargain, and I fail to de- liver my part, you can still arrange that I be . . . well, penalized. There- fore, to demonstrate your good faith, you must make delivery before I do.

“In other words, make me a Telek. Then I’ll tell you what 1 know.”

Dominion sat staring at him a full thirty seconds. Then he said softly, “Three days ago Cluche Kurgill was not so rigorous.”

“Three days ago, Cluche Kurgill did not know what he knows now.”

Dominion said abruptly, “I cannot argue with your exposition. If I were you, in your position, I would make the 'Same stipulation. However” — he looked Shorn keenly up and down — “three days ago I would have con- sidered you an undesirable adjunct.”

Shorn assumed a lofty expression. “Judging from the Teleks I have known, 1 would not have assumed vou

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to be so critical.”

“You talk past your understand- ing,” said Dominion crisply. “ Do you think that men like Nollinrude, for instance, who was just killed, are typical of the Teleks? Do you think that we are all careless of our des- tiny?” His mouth twisted contemptu- ously. “There are forces at work which you do not know of, tremendous patterns laid out for the future. But enough; these are high-level ideas.”

He floated clear of his chair, lowered to the floor. “I agree to your stipula- tion. Come with me, we’ll get it over with. You see, we are not inflexible; we can move swiftly and decisively when we wish.”

He led Shorn back into the green glass tube, jerked himself to the upper landing, watched impatiently while Shorn circled up the steps.

“Come.” He stepped out on a wide white terrace bathed in afternoon sun- light, went directly to a low table on which rested a cubical block of marble.

He reached into a cabinet under the table, pulled out a small speaker, spoke into the mesh. “The top two hundred to Glarietta Pavilion.” He turned beck to Shorn. “Naturally there’ll be certain matters you must familiarize yourself with.”

“In order to become a