Astounding v34n04 (1944 12) (AK)

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“Scoff, if you will, Gentlemen, but this woman will live!” Slowly, and with the fierce conviction and undying faith that had marked him from the beginning, Lister, his scalpel laid aside, the last dressing completed, addressed his critical audience. In the eyes of one or two he saw hope and faith to buttress his own, but on the faces of others — some of them the leaders of the pro- fession— he read only doubt and disbelief. He could almost hear the sneers of the attending nurses whispering in the back- ground while they viewed the pale and love- ly woman on the table. Lister knew that they regarded his fanatical insistence on cleanli- ness, the repeated dressings, his evil antisep- tics, as the vagaries of a madman . . . that they were awaiting the "dead-cart” to carry the woman away, just as it had carried away countless others, when blood poisoning fol- lowed compound fracture. But Lister knew, also, that his radical methods, his antiseptics aimed to keep germs out of wounds, before, during and after every operation, must, with God’s will, triumph. And triumph they did . . . the woman lived ! So, patient by patient, case by case, day by day, Lister piled up evidence in support of his antiseptic theory which was to rid the world of untold suffering, and reduce the hideous fatalities that time and time again followed even the simplest surgical opera- tions. Quick Germ-Killing Action — Safely It was for the great Lister that Listerine Antiseptic was named, meeting the require- ments of a fine antiseptic ... a solution with a rapid germ-killing power, non-poisonous in character, and absolutely safe to use. Today, in literally millions of homes, Listerine Antiseptic is the trustworthy first- aid in countless little emergencies "until the doctor comes.” Make it a "must” for your medicine cabinet. Lambert Pharmacal Co., St. Louis , Mo. LISTERINE ANTISEPTIC for countless little emergencies A

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ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION Ret. II. S. rat OR. CONTENTS DECEMBER, 1944 VOL. XXXIV, NO. 4 SERIAL NOMAD, by Wesley Long 7 Three Parte — Part Orte NOVELETTES THE FIRING LINE, by (ieorge 0. Smith ... 60 NO WOMAN BORN, by C. L. Moore 134 SHORT STORY TRICKY TONNAGE, by Malcolm Jameson . . . fifi ARTICLES SPACESHIP’S VIEW 00 MOON MYSTERIES, by Willy Ley 104 READERS’ DEPARTMENTS THE EDITOR’S PAGE 5 IN TIMES TO COME 08 THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY .... OS PROBABILITY ZERO 128 Editor JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR. COVER BY TIMMINS Illustrations by Kramer and Orban Tbe editorial content! hare not been published before, are protected ny copyright and cannot be reprinted without publisher’s permission. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name .r character. Any similarity Is coincidental. Monthly publication issued by 8tre<*t & Smith Publications. Incorporate, 122 East 42nd Street, New York 17, N. Y. Allen L. Oraramer, President; Gerald H. Smith, Vice President and Treasurer; Henry W. Ralston, Vice President and Secretary. Copyright, 1944, la U. S. A. and Great Britain by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reentered as Second-class Matter. February 7, 1938, at the Post Office at New York, under Act of Congress of March 3, 1879. Subscriptions to Countries In Pan American Onion. $2.75 per year; elsewhere, $3.25 per year. We cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Auy material submitted must include return postage. $2.5Q per Year In 0. S. A. Printed in «^3gj£fc»i9a the U. S. A. 25c par Copy NEXT ISSUE ON SALE DECEMBER 10. 1044

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Robots and Planes The robot part of the robot bomb is, of course, a low-grade idiot among robots. Incidentally, it vio- lates, seriatim, all three. of Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” — it will injure humans ; it destroys itself ; and it is much too erratic to allow anyone to say honestly that it obeys orders given it. Yet, curiously, the public in gen- eral is becoming aware of the fact that robots ’are not silly dreams of a fantastic future but, in this in- stance, horrible nightmares of right now, through the medium of this sub-idiotic contraption among ro- bots. The Flying Fortress, even more the new Super Fortress, are robots — and infinitely more intelli- gent robots — which, it happens, nor- mally carry pilots and crew with them. It has been proven time and again, however, that the Flying Fortress, or the Liberator — which, of course, carries the same type of robotic brain — can fly perfectly without any help from its human crew. Most of the time they do; during the most critical moment of the whole mission, the bombing run itself, they are under the control of the robot bombsight mechanism. ROBOTS AND PLANES The bombardier’s job is to carefully point out to the robot “There — hit that one!” and the robot, not the bombardier, does the job. There are lots of robots in every day use, however, which, because they don’t have clanking arms and legs, nor tin-plate heads with painted eyes, aren’t recognized as such. Everything from telephone switch- boards— particularly the crossbar type — to differential integrators. But the robot bomb, actually, is new only in minor degree — techno- logically, it is not an invention, but an improvement and adaptation. It’s a Whitehead torpedo with modi- fications for air-borne use. As the Whitehead torpedo is a miniature submarine carrying a warhead, the robot bomb is a miniature plane similarly burdened. Both are gyro controlled. Both must, to be at all effective, attain speeds comparable to the highest speeds possible to other mechanisms operating in their respective media. Each, at its first introduction, has been enormously dangerous, requiring the develop- ment of new countermeasures. The Nazi’s torpedoes have been rendered harmless, incidentally, in 6

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precisely the . same way the robot bomb was stopped — by destroying or capturing the launching mecha- nisms. Nobody tried to destroy the torpedoes particularly — they went after the subs that launched them. The air torpedo is more vulnerable, and its launching platform consider- ably less so. However, the rocket bomb probably won’t be a particu- larly dangerous weapon — nowhere near as dangerous, for instance, as a fighter-bomber. The robot’s great trouble, whether piloting a bomb or in any other application, is that it can not correct its errors, handle emergencies, nor display inherent intelligence. (They can, and do, of course, display secondhand intelli- gence— the intelligence the designer built into them.) Essentially, that means simply that a robot can’t duck. It can’t, as a human pilot can, zig when it’s expected to zag. Characteristically, the most ad- vanced types of robots include spe- cial devices that call for human help when something goes wrong — they don’t yet think their own way out of emergencies. So long as the robot bomb can’t duck, a combination of improved antiaircraft fire control and special, super-speed fighters can take care of them. The standard fighter plane is designed to be able to maneuver, to be able to zig just as fast and just as tight as the zig of the enemy pilot, and to zag every time he does. You sacrifice a lot of speed that way —but you need it against a human pilot. You don’t, with a robot pi- lot. And, since a human-piloted machine can be expected to return « intact, a lot more expensive, more powerful, and better parts can be used in it. The robot bomb idea, converted to peacetime use, would give us a com- pletely robot air freight system. The present use of the flying robot sim- ply allows it to crash-land — but the blind-landing systems developed before the war, to permit safe land- ing when fog closed in on the airports, nearly all depended on hav- ing the pilot bring the plane into the neighborhood of the field, where a radio signal picked up and started a robot-landing pilot. It was easier to design a robot to directly inter- pret and act on the radio signals than to design instruments for a pi- lot to read, convince him he could trust them, and train them to act on them. Simple enough to add that robot to the present systems. And you know, they will almost certainly do that. Fog and weather won’t hold terrors. Every plane will take off under robot control, fly under radio-robot control, and land under radio-robot control. Every plane on every commercial air line. With two men to watch the robot. Men can replace a tube if it blows. They can make adequate adjustment for an engine that burns out. No robot yet devised can do all the things that might be needed in all the emergencies that could arise — and it will be a heck of a long time before they do contrive one that will do that, and still weigh less than one hundred fifty pounds, and cost less than ten thousand dollars a year for all maintenance. The Editor. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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Nomad by WESLEY LONG Pari 1 of 3 parts. Long's first serial tells of a man harried from world to world, kidnaped, betrayed — for a purpose he never knew, but faithfully fulfilled! illustrated by Orban i. Guy Maynard left the Bureau of Exploration Building at Sahara Base and walked right into trou- ble. It came more or less of a surprise; not the trouble as a con- dition but the manner and place of its coming was the shocking quality. Guy Maynard was used to trouble but like all men who hold commis- sions in the Terran Space Patrol, he was used to trouble in the proper places and in the proper doses. But to find trouble in the mid- dle of Sahara Base was definitely stunning. Sahara Base was as re- stricted an area as had ever been guarded and yet trouble bad come for Guy. The trouble was a MacMillan held in the clawlike hand of a Mar- tian. The bad business end was dead-center for the pit of Guy’s NOMAD 7

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stomach and the steadiness of the weapon’s aim indicated that the Martian who held the opposite end of the ugly weapon knew his Mac- Millans. Maynard’s stomach crawled, not because of the aim on said midriff, but at the idea of a MacMillan be- ing aimed at any portion of the anatomy. His mind raced through several possibilities as he recalled previous mental theories on what he would do if and when such a thing happened. In his mind’s eye, Guy Maynard had met MacMillan-holding Mar- tians before and in that mental playlet, Guy had gone into swift action using his physical prowess to best the weapon-holding enemy. In all of his thoughts, Guy had succeeded in erasing the menace though at one time it ended in death to the enemy and at other times Guy had used the enemy’s own weapon to march him swiftly to the Intelligence Bureau for question- ing. The latter always resulted in the uncovering of some malignant plot for which Maynard received plaudits, decorations, and an in- crease in rank. Now Guy Maynard was. no youngster. He was twenty-four, and well educated. He had seen action before this and had come through the Martio-Terran incident unscathed. Openly he admitted that he had been lucky during those weeks of trouble but in his own mind, Maynard secretly believed that it was his ability and his brain that brought him through without a scratch. t His dreaming of action above and beyond the call of duty was normal for any young man of in- telligence and imagination. But as his mind raced on and on, it also came to the conclusion that the law of survival was higher than the desire to die for a theory. Therefore it was with inward sickness that Guy Maynard stopped short on the sidewalk before the Bureau of Exploration Building and did nothing. He did not look around because the fact that this Martian was able to stand before him in Sahara Base with a Mac- Millan pointed at his stomach was evidence enough that they were alone on the street. Had anyone seen them, the Martian would have been literally torn to bits by the semi-permanent MacMillan mounts that lined the roof tops. The Martian had everything his own way, and so Maynard waited. It was the Martian’s move. “Guy Maynard?” Maynard did not feel that such an unnecessary question required an answer. The Martian would not have been menacing him if he hadn’t known whom he wanted. “Guy Maynard, I advise that you do nothing.” said the Martian. His voice was flat and metallic like all Martian voices, and the sharply- chiseled features were expression- less as are all Martian faces. “You are to come with me,” finished the Martian needlessly. He had not concluded the last bit of informa- tion when invisible tractor beams lashed down and caught the pair in ASTOCNBINfi SCIENCK. fie T I n v

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their field of focus and lifted them straight up. The velocity was terrific, and the only thing that saved them suffo- cation in the extreme upper strato- sphere was the entrapped air that went along with the field of focus. The sky went dark and the stars winked in the same sky as the flam- ing sun. And then they entered the space lock of an almost invisible space- ship. The door slammed behind them and air rushed into the con- fines of the lock just as the trac- tors were snuffed. Maynard arose from the floor to face once more that rigidly held MacMillan. Before he could move, the door behind him flashed open and three Martians swarmed in upon him and trussed him with straps. They carried him to a small room and strapped him to a sur- geon’s table. The one with the MacMillan holstered the weapon as the ship started off at 3-G. “Now, Guy Maynard, we may talk.” Maynard glared. “It is regrettable that this should be necessary,” apologized the Mar- tian. “I am Kregon. Your being restrained is but a physical neces- sity ; I happen to know that you are the match for any two of us. Therefore wc have strapped you down until we have had a chance to speak our mind. After which you may be freed — depending upon vour reception of the proposition we have to offer.” Maynard merely waited. It was very unsatisfactory, this glaring, for the Martian went on as though Maynard were beaming in glee and anxiously awaiting for the “Propo- sition.” He recalled training which indicated that the first thing to do when confronted by captors is to remain silent at all cost. To merely admit that your name was correctly expressed by the captor was to break the ice. Once the verbal ice was broken, the more leading information was easier to extract; a dead and stony silence was hard to break. “Guy Maynard, we would like to know where the Orionad is,” said Kregon. “We have here fifty thousand reasons why you should tell. Fifty thousand, silver-backed reasons, legal for trade in any part of the inhabited Solar System and possibly some not-inhabited places.” No answer. “You know where the Orionad is,” went on Kregon. “You are the aide to Space Marshal Greggor of the Bureau of Exploration who sent the Orionad off on her present mission. The orders were secret, that we know. We want to know those orders.” No answer. “We of Mars feel that the Orionad may be operating against the best interests of Mars. Your continued silence is enhancing that belief. Could it be that we have captured the first prisoner in a new Terra-Martian fracas? Or if the Orionad is not operating against Mars, I can see no reason for con- tinued silence on your part.” c NOMAD

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No answer, though Maynard knew that the Orionad was not menacing anything Martian. He realized the trap they were laying tor him and since he could not avoid it, he walked into it. Kregon paused. Then he started off on a new track. “You are prob- ably immunized against iso-dinila- mine. Most officials are, and their aides are also, especially the aide to such an important official as Space Marshal Greggor. That is too bad, Guy Maynard. Terra is still behind the times. Haven’t they heard that the immunization given by anti-lamine is good except when anti-lamine is decomposed by a low voltage, low frequency electric cur- rent ? They must know that,” said Kregon with as close to a smile as any Martian could get. It was also cynically inclined. “After all, it was Dr. Frederich of the Terran Medical Corps who discovered it.” Maynard knew what was coming and he wanted desperately to squirm and wriggle enough to scratch his spine. The little beads of sweat that had come along his backbone at Kregon’s cool explanation were beginning to itch. But he con- trolled the impulse. “We are not given to torture,” explained the Martian. “Otherwise we could devise something defi- nitely tongue-loosening. For in- stance, we could have you observe some surgical experiments on — say — Laura Greggor.” The beads of sweat broke out over Maynard’s face. It was a harsh thought and very close to home. And yet there was a sepa- 19 rate section of his mind that told him that Laura would undergo that treatment without talking and that he would have to suffer mentally while he watched, because she would hold nothing but contempt for a man who would talk to save her from what she would go through herself. He wondered whether they had Laura Greggor already and were going to do as they said. That was a hard thing to reason out. He feared that he would speak freely to save Laura disfig- urement and torture; knowing as he spoke that Laura would forever afterward hate him for being a weakling. Did they have her — ? “Unfortunately for us, we have not had the opportunity of getting the daughter of the Space Marshal. But there are other things. They are far superior, too. I was against the torture method just described because I know that Mars would never have peace again if we de- stroyed the daughter of Space Mar- shal Greggor. Your disappearance will be explained by evidence. A wrecked spaceship or flier, will take care of the question of Guy May- nard, whereas Laura Greggor is forbidden to travel in military ve- hicles.” Kregon turned and called through the open door. His con- federates came with a portable cart upon which was an equipment case, complete with plug-in cords, elec- trodes, and controls. “You will find that low frequency, low voltage electricity is very ex- cruciating. It will not kill nor maim nor impair. But it will offer ASTOUND! NO SCIENCE-FICTION

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you an insight on the torture of the damned. Ultimately, we will have decomposed the anti-lamine in your system and then you will speak freely under the influence of iso-dinilamine. Oh yes, Guy May- nard, we will give you respite. The current will be turned off periodi- cally. Five minutes on and five minutes off. This is in order for you to rest." " — to rest!” said Maynard’s mind. Irony. For the mind would count the seconds during the five free minutes, awaiting with horror the next period of current. And during the five minutes of electrical horror, the mind would be counting the seconds that remain before the period of quiet, knowing that the peaceful period only preceded more torture. Kregon’s helpers tied electrodes to feet, hands, and the back of his head. Then Kregon approached with a syringe and with an apolo- getic gesture slid the needle into Maynard’s arm and discharged the hypodermic. “Now,” he asked, “before we start this painful process, would you care to do this the easy way? After all, Maynard, we. are going to have the answer anyway. For your own sake, why not give it without pain. That offer of fifty thousand solars will be withdrawn upon the instant that the switch is closed." Maynard glared and broke his si- lence. “And have to go through it anyway? Just so that you will be certain that I’m not lying? No!” Kregon shook his head. “That • possibility hadn’t really occurred to us. You aren’t that kind of man, Maynard. I think that the best kind of individual is the man who knows when to tell a lie and when not to tell. Too bad that you will never have the opportunity of trying that philosophy, but I think it best for the individual, though often not best for society in general. Accept the apology of a warrior, Guy May- nard, that this is necessary, and try to understand that if the cases were reversed, you would be in my place and I in yours. I salute you and say good-by with regrets.” Maynard strained against the straps in futility. He felt that sense of failure overwhelm him again, and he fought against his fate in spite of the fact that there was nothing he could do about it. Another man would have resigned himself, realizing futility when it presented itself, and possibly would have made some sort of prayer. But Guy Maynard fought — And the surge of low frequency, low voltage electricity raced into his body, removing everything but the torture of jerking muscle and the pain of twitching nerves. It was terrible torture. He felt that he could count each reversal of the low frequency, and yet he could do nothing of his own free will. The clock upon the wall danced before his jerking eyeballs so that he could not see the hands no matter how hard he tried. Ironically, it was a Martian clock and not calibrated into Terran time; it would have had no bearing on the five-minute peri- ods of sheer hell. XO.M A » 11

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Ben Williamson raced across the sand of Sahara Base, raising a curling cloud of dust behind him. The little command car rocketed and careened as Williamson ap- proached his destroyer, and then the long, curling cloud of dust took on the appearance of a huge exclamation point as the brakes locked and the command car slid to a stop beside the space lock. Williamson leaped from the com- mand car and inside with three long strides. He caught the auxiliary switch on his way past, and the space lock whirred shut. “Executive to pilot,” he yelled. “Take her up at six.” The floor surged, throwing Wil- liamson to his knees. Defiantly, Ben crawled to the executive’s chair atid rolled into the padded, body- supporting seat. He lay there for some seconds, breathing heavily. Then from the communicator there came the query : “Pilot to executive: Received. What’s doing?” “Executive to crew : Martian of the Mardinex class snatched Guy Maynard on a tractor. We’re to pursue and destroy.” “Golly !” breathed the pilot. “Maynard !” “That’s right,” said Williamson. “They grabbed him right in front of the BuEx and that’s that.” “But to destroy them — ?” “We’re running under TSI or- ders. you know,” reminded Wil- liamson. “Yeah, I know. But killing off one of our own people doesn’t sound good to me. Makes me feel n like a murderer.” “I know,” said Ben. “But re- member, Maynard was grabbed by a Martian. Being an aide to Greg- gor, he was filled to the eyebrows with anti-lamine. That means the electro-treatment for. him, plus a good shot of iso-dinilamine. All we’re doing is giving peace to a man who is suffering the tortures of hell. After all, would any of you care to go on living after that combination was finished?” “No, I guess not. Must be worse than death not to have a mind.” “What’s worse is what happens. You haven’t a mind — and yet you have enough mind to realize that fact. Strange psychological tangle, but there it is. Tough as it is, we’ve got to go through with it." “They’re after some information on the Oriomd?” “Probably. That’s why we’re taking out after them. It’s the only reason why Guv Maynard was cov- ered under the TSI order.” “Too bad,” said the pilot. “It is,” agreed Williamson. “But — prepare for action. Check all ordnance.” It was almost an hour later that the communicator buzzed again. “Observer to executive: Martian of Mardinex class spotted.” “Certain identification ?” “Only from the cardex file. Can’t see her yet, but the spotters have picked up a ship having the characteristics of the Mardinex class. It’s the Mardinex herself, Ben, because she’s the only one left in that class. Old tub, not A S T O r N r> I X 0 SCIENCE - FICTION

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much good for anything except a fool's errand like this.” “Turretman to executive: Have we got a chance, tackling a first- line ship like the Mardinex in a destroyer ?” “Only one chance. They prob- ably didn’t staff it too well. On an abortive attempt like this, they’d put only those men they could af- ford to lose aboard. Probably a skeleton crew. Also the knowledge that detection meant extermination, therefore go fast and light and as frugal as possible on crewmen. That’s our one chance.” “One more chance,” interrupted the technician. “We have the drive pattern of the Mardinex in the cardex. . We can bollix their drive. That’s one more item in our favor.” “Right,” said Ben. “What’s our velocity with respect to theirs?” "Forty miles per second.” “Tim, launch two torpedoes im- mediately. Pete, continue course above Mardinex and cross their apex at two hundred miles. Tim, as we cross their apex, drop a case of interferers. Once that is done, Pete, drop back and give Tim a chance to say hello with the Auto- Macs.” “Giving them the whole thing at once ?” “Yes. And one thing more, Jimmy ?” “Technician to executive,” an- swered Jimmy. “Pm here.” “Can you rig your drive-pattern interferer ?” “In about a minute. I’ve been setting up the constants from the cardex file.” “And hoping they’ve not been changed?” asked Ben with a smile. “Right.” The little destroyer lurched im- perceptibly as the torpedoes were launched, and then continued on its course a hundred miles to the south of the Martian ship, passing quickly above the Mardinex and across the apex of the Martian’s nose. The turretman was busy for several sec- onds dropping his case of inter- ferers from the discharge lock. The little metal boxes spread out in space and began to emit signals. Then the destroyer dropped back, and from the turret there came the angry buzz of the AutoMacs. On the driving fin of the Mardinex ap- peared an incandescent spot that grew quickly and trailed a fine line of luminous gas behind it. Then the turrets of the Mardinex whipped around and Tim shouted : “Look out!” His shout was not soon enough. On the turret of the Martian ship there appeared two spots of light that were just above the threshold of vision against the black sky. The destroyer bucked dangerously, and the acceleration fell sharply. “Hulled us.” On the pilot’s panel there ap- peared a number of winking pilot lights. “We’ll get along,” said he, studying the lights and interpreting their warning. “Got him!” said the turretman. The top turret of the Mardinex erupted in a flare of white flame blown outward by the air inside of the ship. N O MAD IS

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“Can we catch him for another shot?’’ asked Ben pleadingly. “Not a chance,” answered Pete. “We’re out of this fight.” “No, we’re not,” said Ben. “Look !” Before the Mardinex there began to erupt a myriad of tiny, wink- ing spots. The meteor spotting equipment and projectile intercept- ing equipment were flashing the in- terferers one after the other with huge bolts from the secondary bat- tery of the Mardinex. Ben counted the flashes and then asked the technician: “How many spotters has the Mardinex?” “Thirty.” “Good. The torps have-a chance then.” The non-radiating torpedoes would be ignored by the spotting equipment since the emission of the i nter ferers made them appear gi- gantic and dangerously close to the nonthinking equipment. The tor- pedoes, on the other hand, would be approaching the Mardinex from below and slowly enough to be con- sidered not dangerous to the inte- grating equpiment. If they arrived before the spotting circuits de- stroyed the entire case of inter- ferers — The lower dome of the Mardinex suddenly sported a jagged hole. And almost immediately there was a flash of explosive inside of the lower portion of the Martian ship. The lower observation dome split like a cracked egg, and the glass shattered and flew out. Portholes blew out in long streamers of fire around the lower third of the Mar- dinex and a series of shattering 14 cracks started up the flank of the ship. “There goes number two — a clean miss,” swore Ben. “Number one did a fine job.” “I know but — ” “This’ll polish 'em off.” came Jimmy’s voice. “Here goes the drive scrambler." “Hey! No — !” started Ben, but the whining of the generators and the dimming of the lights told him he was too late. The Mardinex staggered and then leaped forward until six full gravities. Bits of broken hull and fractured insides trailed out behind the Mardinex as the derelict's added acceleration tore them loose. Within seconds, the stricken Mar- tian warship was out of the sight of the Terrans. “No reprimand, Jimmy,” said Ben Williamson soberly. “1 did hope to recover Guy’s body.” II. Thomakein, the Ertinian, stopped the recorder as the Ter ran ship reversed itself painfully and began to decelerate for the trip back to home. He nodded to himself and made a verbal addition to the re- cording, stating that the smaller ship had been satisfied as to the destruction of the larger, otherwise a continuance of the fight would have been inevitable. Then Thoma- kein placed the recording in a can and placed it on a shelf containing other recordings. He forgot about it_ then, for there was something more interesting in view. ASTOUNDING SCIFJNf'H-FTCTION

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That derelict warship would be a veritable mine of information about the culture of this system. All warships are gold mines of in- formation concerning the technical abilities, the culture, the beliefs, and the people themselves. Could he assume the destruction of the crew in the derelict? The smaller ship had — unless they were out of the battle and forced to withdraw due to lack of fight- ing contact. That didn’t seem right to Thomakein. For the smaller ship to attack the larger ship meant a dogged determination. There would have been a last-try stand on the part of the smaller ship no matter how much faster the larger ship were. At worst, the determination seemed to indi- cate that ramming the larger ship was not out of order. But the smaller ship had not rammed the larger. Hadn’t even tried. In fact, the smaller ship had turned and started to decelerate as soon as the larger ship had doubled her speed. Thomakein couldn’t read either of the name plates of the two fight- ing ships. He had no idea as to the origin of the two. As an Ertinian, Thomakein couldn’t even recognize the characters let alone read them. Fie was forced to go once more on deduction. The course of the larger vessel. It was obviously fleeing from the smaller ship. Thomakein played with his computer for a bit and came to two possibilities, one of which was remote, the other point- ing to the fourth planet. A carefully collected table of masses and other physical con- stants of the planets of Sol was consulted. Thomakein retrieved his record- ing, set it up and added: “The smaller ship, noticing the increased acceleration of the larger, assumed — probably — that the larger ship’s crew was killed by the in- creased gravity-apparent. Since the larger ship was fleeing, it would in all probability have used every bit of acceleration that the crew could stand. Its course was dead- center for the fourth planet’s posi- tion if integrated for a course based on the larger ship’s velocity and direction and acceleration at and prior to the engagement. “This fourth planet has a sur- face gravity of approximately one- eighth of the acceleration of the larger ship. Doubling this means that the crew must withstand six- teen gravities. The chances of any being of intelligent size withstand- ing sixteen gravities is of course depending upon an infinite number of factors. However, the prob- able reasoning of the smaller ship is that sixteen gravities will kill the crew of the larger ship. Other- wise they would have continued to try to do battle with the larger ship. Their return indicates that they were satisfied.” Thomakein nodded again, re- placed the recording, apd then paced the derelict Mardine x for a full hour with every constant at his disposal on the recorders. At the end of that hour, Thoma- kein noted that nothing had reg- NOMA n 1*

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istered and he smiled with assur- ance. He stretched and said to himself : “I can stand under four gravities. I can live under twelve with the standard Ertinian acceleration garb. 1 hit sixteen gravities for one hour ? Never.” Thomakein noted the acceleration of the derelict as being slightly over six gravities on his own accelerom- eter. which registered the Ertinian constant. Then he began to maneuver his little ship toward the derelict. Entering the Mardincx through the blasted observation dome was no great problem. The lower meteor spotters and most of the machinery had gone with the dome and so no pressor came forth to keep Thoma- kein from his intention. The insides were a mess'. Broken girders and ruined equipment made a bad tangle of the lower third of the great warship. Thomakein jockeyed the little ship back and forth inside of the derelict until he had lodged it against the remainder of a lower deck in such a manner as to keep it there under the six Terran gravities of acceleration. Then he donned spacesuit and started to prowl the ship. It was painful and heavy going, but Thomakein made it slowly. An hour later, Thomakein heard the ringing of alarms, coming from somewhere up above, and the sound made him stop suddenly. Sound, he reasoned, requires air for propa- gation. The sound came through the floor, but somewhere there must be air inside of the derelict. So upward he went through the damage. He found an air-tight door and fought the catch until it puffed open, nearly throwing him back into the damaged opening. White-faced, Thomakein held on until his breath returned, and then with a determined look at the gap below — and the place where he would have been if he had fallen out of the derelict — Thomakein tried the door again. He closed the outer door and tried the inner. Elis alien grasp of mechanics was not universal enough to discover his trouble immediately. But it was logical, and logic told him to look for the air vent. He found it, and turned the valve permitting air to enter the air-tight door system. The inner door opened easily and Thomakein entered a portion of the hull where the alarm bells rang loud and clear. He found them ringing in a room filled with control instruments. Throwing the dome of his suit back ASTOUND INC! SCIKNCTl FICTION

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over his head, Thomakein looked around him with interest. There was nothing in the room that logic or a grasp of elementary mechanics could solve. It did Thomakein no good to look at the Martian char- acters that labeled the instruments and dials, for he recognized noth- ing of any part of the Solar System. He did recognize the bloody lump of inert flesh as having once been the operator of this room — or one of them he came to conclude as his search found others. Thomakein was not squeamish. But they did litter up the place and the pools of blood made the floor slippery which was dangerous under 6-G Ter ran — or for Thomakein, five point six eight. So Thomakein struggled with the Martian bodies and hauled them to the corridor where he let them drop over the edge of the central well onto the bulkhead below. He returned to the instrument room in an attempt to find out what the bell-ringing could mean. He inspected the celestial globe with some interest until he noticed that the upper limb contained some minute, luminous spheres — prolate spheroids to be exact. Wondering, Thomakein tried to look forward and up with respect to the ship’s course. His anxiety increased. He was about to meet a whole battle fleet that was spread out in a dragnet pattern. Then before he could worry about it he was through the network and some of the ships tried to follow but with no success. The Mar dine x bucked and pitched as XOM AD tractors were applied and subse- quently broken as the tension reached overload values. Thomakein smiled. Their in- ability to catch him plus their ob- vious willingness to let the matter drop with but a perfunctory try gave him sufficient evidence as to their origin. They could never catch a ship under six gravities when the best they could do was three. The func- tions with respect to one another would be as though the faster ship were accelerating away from the slower ship by 3-G plus the initial velocity of the faster ship’s intrin- sic speed, for the pursuers were standing still. The Mardinex swept out past Mars and Thomakein smiled more and more. This maze of equipment was better than anything that he had expected. The Ertinians would really get the information as to the kind of people inhabited this sys- tem. Thomakein wandered idly from room to room, finding dead Mar- tians and dropping them onto the bulkhead. Two he saved for the surgeons of Ertene to inspect ; they were in fair physical condition com- pared to the rest but they were no less dead from acceleration pres- sure. Eventually, Thomakein came to the room wherein Guy Maynard was lying strapped to the surgeon’s table. The Ertinian opened the door and walked idly in, looking the room over quickly to see which i7

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item of interest was the most com- pelling. His glance fell upon Maynard and passed onward to the equip- ment on the cart beyond the Ter- rain Then Thomakein's eyes snapped back to the unconscious Terran and Thomakein’s jaw fell while his face took on an astonished look. Thomakein often remarked after- wards that it was a shame that no one of his photographically inclined friends had been present. He’d have enjoyed a picture of himself at that moment and he realized the fact. Thomakein had ignored the dead Martians. They were different enough to permit him a certain amount of callousness. But the man strapped to the ta- ble, and hooked up to the diabolical looking machine was the image of an Ertinian ! Thomakein didn’t know what the machine was for, but his logical mind told him that if. this man, different from the rest, were strapped to a table with some sort of electronic equipment tied to his hands, feet, and head, it was sufficient evidence that this was a captive and the machine some sort of torture. He stepped forward and jerked the electrodes from Maynard’s inert frame and pushed the machine backward onto the floor with a foot. A quick check told Thomakein that the unknown man was not dead, though nearly so. He raced through the derelict to his own ship and returned with a stimulant. The man remained un- conscious but alive. His eyes opened after a long time, but be- hind them was no sign of intelli- gence. They merely stared fool- ishly, and closed for long periods. Thomakein tended the man as best he could with the limited sup- plies from his own ship and then began to plan his return to Ertene with his find. Days passed, and Thomakein un- willingly abandoned any hope of having this man give him any in- formation. The man was as one dead. He could not speak, nor could he understand anything. Thomakein decided that the best thing to do was to take the unknown man to Ertene with him. Perhaps Charalas, or one of his contempo- rary neuro-surgeons could bring this man to himself. Thomakein diagnosed the illness as some sort of nerve shock though he knew that he was no man of medicine. Yet the surgeons of Ertene were brilliant, and if they could bring this unknown man to himself, they would have a gold mine indeed. So at the proper time, Thomakein took off from the derelict with the mindless Guy Maynard. By now, the derelict was far beyond the last outpost of the Solar System and obviously beyond detection. Thoma- kein installed a repeater-circuit de- tector in the wrecked ship ; it would enable him to find the Mardinex at some later time. So unknowing, Guy Maynard came to Ertene. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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The first thing that reached across the mental gap to Guy May- nard was music. Faint, elfin music that seemed to sway and soothe the ragged edges of his mind. It came and it went depending on how he felt. But gradually the music increased in strength and power, and the lapses were shorter. Warm pleas- ant light assailed him now and gave him a feeling of bodily well-being. Flashes of clear thinking found him considering the satisfied condi- tion of his body, and the fear and nerve-racking torture of the Mar- tian method of extracting infornia- tion dropped deeper and deeper into the region of forgetfulness. Then he realized, one day, that he was being fed. It made him ashamed to be fed at his age, but the thought was fleeting and gone before he could clutch at it and consider why he should be ashamed. One portion of his mind cursed the fleetingness of such thoughts and recognized the possibilities that might lie in the sheer contemplation of self. There were periods in which someone spoke to him in a strange tongue. It was a throaty voice; a woman. Maynard’s inquisitive sec- tion tried the problem of what was a woman and why it should stir the rest of him and came to the meager conclusion that it was standard for this body to be stirred by woman; especially women with throaty voices. The tongue was alien; he could understand none of it. But the tones were soothing and pleas- antj and they seemed to imply that he should try to understand their meaning. And then the wonder of meaning came before that alert part of May- nard’s mind. What is meaning? it asked. Must things have meaning? It decided that meaning must have some place in the body’s existence. It reasoned thus : There is light. Then what is the meaning of light? Must light have a meaning? It must have some importance. Then if light has importance and mean- ing, so must all things ! Even self ! So the voices strived to teach Ertinian to the Terran while he was still in the mindless state, and gradually he came to think in terms of this alien tongue. But he had been taught to think in Terran, and the Terran words came to mind slowly but surely. And then came the day when Guy Maynard realized that he was Guy Maynard, and that he had been saved, somehow, from the terrors of the Martian inquisition. He saw the alien tongue for what it was and wondered about it. Where was he? Why? The days wore on with Maynard growing stronger mentally. They gave him everything they could, these Ertinians. Scrolls were given to him to read, and the movement of reflections from his eyeballs mo- tivated recording equipment that spoke the word he was scanning into his ear in that pleasant throaty voice. It was lightning-fast train- ing, but it worked, once Guy’s men- tality went to work as an entity. NOMAD 19

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Maynard learned to read Ertiuian printing and lastly the simplified cursory writing. Then with handwriting at the gate of learning, they placed his hand around a controlled pencil, and the voice spoke as the controlled pencil wrote. They spoke Ertinian to him, not knowing Terran, though his earlier replies were recorded. And as he strengthened, his re- plies made sense, and for every Er- tiniau word impressed upon his mind, he gave them the Terran word. They taught him composition and grammar as he taught them, and whether it was by the written script or the spoken word, the in- terchange of knowledge was com- plete. One day he asked: “Where am I?” And the doctor replied : “You are on Ertene.” “That I know. But where or what is Ertene?” “Ertene is a wandering planet. We found you almost dead in a derelict spaceship and brought you back to life.” “I recall parts of that. But — Ertene ?” “Generations ago, Ertene left her parent sun because of a great, im- pending cataclysm. Since then we have been wandering in space in search of a suitable home.” “Sol is not far away — you will find a home there.” The doctor smiled sagely and did not comment on that. Maynard wondered about it briefly and tried to explain, but they would have none of it. He tried at later times, but there was a reticence about their accept- ing Sol. as a home sun. No matter what attack he tried, there was a casual reference to a decision to be made in the future. But their lessons continued, and Guy progressed from the hospital to the spacious grounds. He sought the libraries and read quite a bit, for they urged him to, saying: “We can not entertain you con- tinually. You are trot strong enough to work, nor will we permit you to take any position. Therefore your best bet is to continue learn- ing. In fact, Guy, you have a job to perform on Ertene. You are to become well versed in Ertinian lore so that you may converse with us freely and draw comparisons between Ertene and your Terra for us. Therefore apply yourself.” Guy agreed that if he could do nothing else, he could at least do their bidding. So he applied himself. He read. He spoke at length with those about him. He practised with the writing machine. He accepted their cus- toms with the air of one who feels that he must, in order that he be accepted. And gradually he took on the manner of an Ertinian. He spoke with a pure Ertinian accent, he thought in Ertinian terms, and his hand was the handwriting of an Ertinian. t And from his studies he came to the next question. “Charalas, how could you tell me from an Ertinian?” Charalas smiled. “We can.” 20 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-DICTION

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‘‘But how? It is not apparent.” ‘‘Not to you. It is one of those things that you miss because you are too close to it. It is like your adage: ‘Cannot see the forest for the trees.’ It will come out.” ‘‘Come out?” “Grow out,” smiled the neuro- surgeon. “Your . . . beard. You notice that I used the Terran name. That is because we have no com- parable term in Ertinian. That is because no Ertinian ever grew hair on his face. Daily, you . . . shave . . . with an edged tool we fur- nished you upon your request. You were robotlike in those days, Guy. You performed certain duties in- stinctively and the lack of . . . shav- ing equipment . . . caused you no end of mental concern. Thomakein studied your books and had a . . . razor . . . fashioned for you.” “Whiskers. I never noticed that.” “No, it is one of those things. Save for that, Guy, you could lose yourself among us. The . . . mus- tache . . . you wear marks you on Ertene as an alien.” “I could shave that off.” “No. Do not. It is a mark of distinction. Everyone on Ertene has seen your picture with it and therefore you will be accorded the deference we show an alien when people see it. Otherwise you would be expected to behave as we do in all things.” “That I can do.” “We know that. But there is another reason for our request. One day you will know about it. It has to do with our decision con- cerning alliance with Sol’s family.” Guy considered. “Soon?” “It will be some time.” Again that unwillingness to dis- cuss the future. Guy thought it over and decided that this was some- thing beyond him. He, too, let the matter drop for the present and took a new subject. “Charalas, this sun of yours. It is not a true sun.” “No,” laughed Charalas. “It is not.” “Nor is it anything like a true sun. Matter is stable stuff only under certain limits. If that size were truly solar matter, it would necessarily be so dense that space would be warped in around it so tight that nothing could emerge — radiation, I mean. To the observer, it would not exist. That is axio- matic. If a bit of solar matter of that size were isolated, it would merely expand and cool in a mat- ter of hours — if it were solar-core matter it would probably be cur- tains for anything that tried to live in the neighborhood. Matter of that size is stable only at reason- able temperatures. I don’t know the limits, but I’d guess that three or four thousand degrees kelvin would be tops. Oh, I forgot the opposite end ; the very high tem- perature white dwarf might be that size — but it would warp space as 1 said before and thus do no good. Therefore a true sun of that size and mass is impossible. “Another thing, Charalas. We are close to Sol. A light-week or less. That would have been seen . . . should have been seen by our 31 xow An

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observatories. Why haven't they seen it?” “Our shield,” explained Charalas, “explains both. You see, Guy, in order that a planet may wander space, some means of solar effect must be maintained. As you say, nothing practical can be found in nature. Our planet drive is poorly controlled. We can not maneuver Ertene as you would a spaceship. It requires great power to even shift the course of Ertene by so much as a few degrees. We’ve taken luck as a course through the galaxy and have visited only those stars that have lain along our course. Trying to swing anything of solar mass vvould be impossible. Ertene would merely leave the sun ; the sun would not answer Ertene’s gravitational pull. “But this is trivial. Obviously we have no real sun. But we needed one.” Charalas smiled shyly. “At this point 1 must sound brag- gart,” he said, “but it was an an- cestor of mine — Timalas — who brought Ertene her sun.” “Great sounding guy,” com- mented the Terran. “He was. Ertene left the parent sun with only the light-shield. The light-shield, Guy, is a screen of energy that permits radiation to pass inwardly but not outwardly. Thus we collect the radiation of all the stars and lose but a minute quantity of the input from losses. That kept Ertene warm during those first years of our wandering. “It also presented Ertene with a serious problem. The entire sky 22 was faintly luminous. It was neither night nor day at any place on Ertene, but a half-light all the time. Disconcerting and entirely alien to the human animal. Evo- lutionary strains might have ap- peared to accept this strange con- dition, but Timalas decided that Intis, the lesser moon, would serve as a sun. He converted the screen slightly, distorting it so that the focal point for incoming radiation was at Intis. The lesser moon be- came incandescent, eventually, and serves a.s Ertene’s sun. It is syn- thetic. The other radiations that prove useful to growing things and to man but which are not visible are emitted right from the inner surface of the light-shield itself. Intis serves as the source of light and most of the heat. It is a natural effect, giving us beautiful sunrises and peaceful sunsets. The radiation that causes growth and healthful effects is ever-present, be- cause of the screen. Some heat, too, for that is included in the bene- ficial radiation. But the visible spectrum is directed at Intis along with a great quantity of the heat rays. Intis is small, Guy, and it is also beneficial that the re-radiation from Intis that misses Ertene and falls on the screen is converted also. Much of Ertene’s power is derived from the screen itself — a back-en- ergy collected from the screen gen- erator.” “So the effective sun is the re- sult of an energy shield ? And this same shield prevents any radiation from leaving this region. I can see why we haven’t seen Ertene. ASTOUNDING SOT K NOE FICTION

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You can’t see something that doesn’t radiate. But what about occulta- tion ?” “Quite possible. But the size of the screen is such that it is of stellar size as seen from stellar dis- tances. It is but a true point in space.” Charalas smiled. “I was about to say a point-source of light similar to a star but the shield is a point-source of no-light, really. Occultation is possible but the prob- abilities are remote, plus the prob- ability of a repeat, so that the ob- server would consider the brief occultation of the star anything but an accident to his photographic plate.” “Don’t get you on that.” “It’s easy, Guy. Take a star- photograph and lay a thin line across it and see how many stars are really covered by this line — which is of the thickness of the stars themselves. Too few for a non- suspecting observer to tie together into a theo$. No, we are safe from detection.” “Detection ?” “Yes. Call it that. Suppose we were to pass through a malignant culture. We did, three generations ago and it was only our shield that saved us from being absorbed into that system. We would have been slaves to that civilization.” “I see.” “Do you?” “Certainly,” said Guy. “You in- tend to have me present the Solar Government to your leaders. Upon my tale will rest your decision. You will decide whether to join us — or to pass undetected.” “I believe you understand," said Charalas. “So study well and be prepared to draw the most discern- ing comparisons, for the Council will ask the most delicate questions and you should be able to discuss any phase of Ertene’s social, sys- tem and the corresponding Terran system.” Mentally, Guy bade good-by to Sol. He applied himself to his Er- tinian lessons because he felt that if Sol were lost to him — as it might be — he could at least enter the Er- tinian life as an Ertinian. III. Guy Maynard, the Terran, be- came steeped in Ertinian lore. He went at it with the same intensity that he went at anything else, and possibly driven with the heart-chill- ing thought that he might not be able to convince Ertene that Sol had a place for her. He saw that possibility, and prayed against it, yet he realized that Ertene was a planet of her own mind and that they might decide against alliance. It was a selling job he had to do. And if not — Guy Maynard would have to re- main on Ertene. Therefore in either case it would serve him best to become as Ertinian as possible. He did not believe that they would exile him — that would be danger- ous. Nor did he believe that death would accompany his failure to con- vince Ertene of their place around Sol. The obvious course in case of failure would be to permit him the freedom of the planet; to be- NOMAD 23

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come in effect, an Ertinian. He’d be under watch, of course. Escape would prove dangerous for their integrity. Imprisonment was not impossible, but he hoped that his failure to convince would not be so sorry as to have them suspect him. Of course, an opportunity to es- cape would be taken, unless he gave his word of honor. Yet, he had sworn the oath of an officer in Terra’s space fleet, and that oath compelled him to serve Terra in spite of danger, death, or dishonor to self. He must not give his pa- role— Guy fought himself over that problem for days and days. It led him in circular thinking, the outlet to which would be evident only when he found out the Ertinian re- action. Too much depended on that trend;- there were too many ifs standing between him and any plan for the future. He forgot his mental whirl in study. He investigated Ertinian science and tucked a number of items away in his memory. He visited the observatory and after a number of visits he plotted Ertene in the celestial sphere within a few hundred thousand miles. That, too, he filed away in his memory along with the course of the wanderer. He learned that his place of con- valescence was no hospital, but Thomakein’s estate. It staggered him. Thomakein was — must be — a veritable dynamo of energetic mentality to have the variety of in- terests as reflected in the trappings about the estate. The huge library, 24 the observatory, the laboratories. How many of the things he saw and studied were Thomakein’s personal property he would never know ; though he did know that some of them came from museums and in- stitutes across the planet. He wondered about Thomakein. He had never seen his saviour since his mind had come back. He recalled vague things, but nothing cogent. He asked Charalas about Thomakein. “Thomakein’s main problem is Sol,” explained Charalas. “A prob- lem which you have made easy for him. However, he is on the dere- lict, studying the findings there. A \yarship is a most interesting mu- seum of the present, you know. Often things of less than perfect operation are there ; things that will eventually become perfected and es- tablished into private use. It is almost a museum of the future. Thomakein will learn much there and he has been commissioned to remain on the derelict until he has catalogued every item on it.” “Lone life, isn't it?” asked Guy. “He has friends. Last I heard from him, he had sealed the usable portion of the derelict against the void, and was turning the course to bring it toward Ertene. Eventually the wreck will circle Ertene. Per- haps we may attempt to land it here.” “It’ll be a nice museum piece,” said Guy, “but it will not endear you to those of Mars.” “I know. Of course if we ac- cept Sol’s offer, we will destroy it completely.” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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“Keep ft," said Guy, shrugging his shoulders. “Ertene will find little in common with Mars. It will he Terra and Ertene; together we will form the nucleus of Solar power.” “So?” “Naturally. Ertene and Terra are the most alike, even to the flora and fauna.” “I see.” Charalas let the matter drop as he did before. Guy tried to open the line of thought again, but met with no success. It was not a mat- ter of indifference to Guy’s argu- ments, but more a complete disin- clination to make any sort of state- ment prior to the decision of the Council of Ertene. Realizing that this decision was one of the single- try variety, Guy studied hard dur- ing the next few days. There would be no appeal even though he tried to get another hearing during the rest of his life. He wondered how soon it would be. Charalas landed on Thomakein’s estate in a small flier and asked Guy if he would like to see the famous Hall of History. They flew a quarter of the way around the planet, and during the trip, Charalas pointed out scenes of interest. It was enlightening to Guy, who hadn’t seen anything beyond a few miles of Thomakein’s estate. There were farms laid out on the production- line scale while the cities and towns that housed the farmers were sprawling, rustic villages of simple beauty. The larger cities had evolved from the square-block and rubber-stamp home kind to special- ized aggregations in which the cen- tral, business sections were close- knit while the residences were wide- spread and well apart, giving each family adequate breathing room. “The railroad,” smiled Charalas, “is still with us. It will never leave, because shipments of heavy machin- ery of low necessity can be trans- ported cheaper that way. Like the barges that ply the rivers with coal, ore. and grain, they are powered with adaptations of the space drive, but they are none the less barges or trains.” “They’ve found that, too.” laughed Guy. “There is little eco- nomic value in trying to ship a million tons of coal by flier.” “Normally, you should say. The slowest conveyor system is rapid if the conveyor is always filled and the material is not perishable. Coal and ore have been here for eons. Therefore it is no hardship to wait for six weeks while a given ton of ore gets across the continent, pro- vided that the user can remove a ton of ore from the conveying sys- tem simultaneously with the place- ment of another ton that will not get there for six weeks.” “Sounds correct, though I’ve never thought of it in that man- ner,” said Guy thoughtfully. “But that must be why it is done. We hull ore across space untended, and in pre-calculated orbits, picking it up at Terra from Pluto, for in- stance. The driverless and crew- less hull is packed with ore, towed into space by a space tug and set NOMAD 25

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into its orbit, the tug then returning to the shipping area to await the next hull. The hull may take a couple of years to get to Terra, but when it does, it begins to emit a finder-signal and Terran space tugs pick the hull up and lower it to Terra. The hulls are returned with unperishable supplies to the Pluto- nian miners.” “We hadn’t the necessity of ap- plying that thought to space ship- ping,” answered Charalas. “Tonis, the larger moon, is so close that special shipping methods are not needed. We have but a few colo- nists there, most of which are mem- bers ofthe laboratory staff.” “You’ve found moon laboratories essential in space work, too?” asked Guy. “Naturally. Tonis is airless and upon it is the Ertinian astronomical laboratory.” %“Moons — even sterile moons — are good' for that.” said Guy. “They — Say, Charalas, what is that collec- tion of buildings below here ? They look like something extra-special.” “They are. That is the place we’re going to see.” Charalas put the flier into a steep dive and landed in the open space between the buildings. They en- tered the long, low building at the end opposite the most ornate build- ing of the seven that surrounded the landing area and Charalas told the receptionist that they were ex- pected. The long hall was excellently illu- minated, and on either side of the corridor were murals ; great twelve- 26 foot panels of rare color and of photographic detail. Upon close ex- amination they proved to be paint- ings. The first panel showed an impres- sion of the formation of Ertene, along with the other eleven planets of Ertene’s parent sun. It was colorful, and impressionistic in char- acter rather than an attempt to portray the actual cataclysm that formed the planets. The next few panels were of geologic interest, giving the impressions of Ertene through the long, geologic periods. There were dinosaur-picturizations next, and the panels brought them forward in irregular steps through the carboniferous; through the gla- cial ages ; through the dawn ages ; and finally into the coming of man to power. The next fourteen panels were used in the rise of man on Ertene from the early ages to full, efficient civilization. They were similar to a possible attempt to portray a sim- ilar period on Terra, showing wars, life in the cities of power during the community-power ages, and the fall of several powerful cities. Then the rise of widespread gov- ernment came with its more closely- knit society made possible by better means of communication and trans- portation. This went on and on until the facility of the combining factors made separate governments on Ertene untenable, and there were seven great, fiery panels of mighty, widespread wars. “Up to here, it is similar to ours,” commented Guy. “And here it changes,” said AST Ol) NO I NO SCIBNCE-FTCTTOX

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Charalas. “For the next panels show the impending doom of Ertene’s parent sun. The problem of space had been conquered but the other planets were of little interest to Ertene. We fought about four in- terplanetary wars as you see here, all against alien races. Then came trouble. The odd chance of a run- away star coming near Ertene did happen, and we faced the decision of living near an unstable sun for cen- turies, for our astronomers calcu- lated that the two stars would pass close enough to cause upheavals in the suns that would result in in- stability for thousands, perhaps mil- lions of years.” “Instability might not have been so bad,” said Guy thoughtfully, “if it could be predicted. No, I'm not speaking in riddles,” he laughed. “I may sound peculiar, saying that it would be possible to predict in- stability. But a regular variable of the cepheid type is predictable in- stability.” “True. But we had no basis for prediction. After all, it would have been taking a chance. Suppose that the instability had caused a nova? Epitaphs are nice but none the less final. We left hundreds of years before the solar proximity. Now we know that we might have sur- vived, but as you know, we can not swerve Ertene’s course readily and though we are slowly turning, the race may have died out and gone for a galactic eon before we could return. Once the race dies out — or the interest in returning to a certain sun hack there in the depths of the galaxy dies — we will cease ar NOMAD

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to turn. We may fine a haven some- where, before then.” ‘‘You were speaking of years,” said Guy. “Was that a loose ref- erence or were you approximating my conception of a year?” “A year is a loose term indeed, no matter by whom it is used,” said Charalas. ‘‘To you, it is three hun- dred and sixty-five, and about a quarter, days. A day is one revo- lution of Terra. From Mars, say, a Terran year is something else en- tirely. Mars, of course, is not too good an example for its sidereal day is very close to Terra’s. But your Venus, with its eighteen hour day — eighteen Terran hours — sees Terra’s year as four hundred eighty- six, plus, days. On Ertene, we have no year. We had one, once. It was composed of four hundred twelve point seven zero four two two nine three one days, sidereal. Now, our day is different, since the length of the solar day depends upon the pro- gression of the planet about its luminary. Our luminary behaves as a moon with a high ecliptic-angle as I have explained. No, Guy, I have been mentally converting my year to your year, by crude ap- proximation.” The next panel was an ornate painting of the Ertinian system, showing — out of scale for artistic purpose — the planets and sun, with Ertene drawing away in a long spiral. “For many years we pursued that spiral, withdrawing from the sun by slow degrees. Then we broke free.” Charalas indicated the panel which showed Ertene in the fore- 36 ground while the clustered system was far behind. They passed from panel to panel, all of which were interesting to Guy Maynard. There was a series of the first star contacted by Er- tene. It was a small system, cold and forbidding, or hot and equally forbidding. The outer planets were in the grip of frozen air, and the inner planets bubbled in molten- ness. “This system was too far out of line to turn. It was our first star, and we might have stayed in youthfulness. Now, we know bet- ter.” The next panel showed a dimly- lighted landscape; a portrayal of Ertene without its synthetic sun. The luminous sky was beautiful in a nocturnal sort of way; to Guy it was slightly nostalgic for some un- known reason, at any rate it was the soul of sadness, that landscape. Charalas shook his head and then smiled. He led Guy to the next panel, and there was a portrait of an elderly man, quite a bit older than Charalas though the neuro-surgeon was no young man. “Timalas,” said Charalas proudly. “He gave us the next panel.” The following panel was a sim- ilar scene to the dismal one, but now the same trees and buildings and hills and sky were illuminated by a sun. It was a cheerful, up- lifting scene compared to the soul- clouding darkness. Ertene was a small sphere en- circled by a band of peaceful black in a raving sky of fire and flame. Three planets fought in the death ASTOUNDING SOIBNCF.-FICTTON

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throes, using every conceivable weapon. Space was riven with blasting beams of energy and segre- gated into square areas by far-flung cutting planes. Raging energy con- sumed spots on each of the planets and the corners of the panel were tangled masses of broken machin- ery and burning wreckage, and the hapless images of trapped men. But Ertene passed through this holo- caust unseen because of Timalas’ light-shield. “He saved us that, too,” said Charalas reverently. “We could not have hoped to survive in this. Our science was not up to theirs, though the aid of a derelict or two gave us most of their science of war. I doubt that Terra herself could have survived. We passed unseen, though we worried for a hundred years lest they find us.” A race of spiders overran four of the planets of the next panel. They were unintelligent, there was a questioning air to the panel, as though posing the query as to how this race of spiders had crossed the void. And the picture of an Erti- nian dying because contact with one of the spiders indicated their rea- son for not remaining. The next panel showed a whole system with ammoniated atmos- phere. “It was before the last panel,” said Charalas, “that Ertene became of age as far as the wander- lust went. We knew that we could survive. We wanted no system wherein Ertene would be alone. Of what use to civilization would a culture be if its people could never leave the home planet?” NOMAD “No,” agreed Guy. “Once a race has conquered space, they must use it. It would restrict the knowledge of a race not to use space.” “So we decided never to accept a system wherein we could not travel freely to other planets. Who knows, but the pathway to the planets may be but the first, falter- ing step to the stars?” “We’d never have reached the planets if we’d never flown on the air,” agreed Guy. “We prefer company, too,” smiled Charalas, pointing out the next panels. One was of a normal system but in which the life was not quite ready for the fundamen- tals of science and therefore likely to become slave-subject to the Er- tinian mastery. The next was a system in which the intelligent life had overrun the system and had evolved to a high degree — and Er- tene might have been subject to them if they had remained. “Un- fortunately we could learn nothing from them.” said the Ertinian. “It was similar to an ignorant savage trying to learn something from us.” Then they came to a panel in which there were ten planets. It was a strange collection of oppo- sites all side by side. There were several races, some fighting others, some friendly with others. Plenty and poverty sat hand in hand, and in one place a minority controlled the lives of the majority while pro- fessing to be ruled by majority-rule. Men strived to perfect medicine and increase life-expectancy and other men fought and killed by the hundreds of thousands. A cold and 29

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forbidding planet was rich in essen- tial ore, and populated by a semi- intelligent race of cold-blooded crea- tures. The protectors of these poor creatures were the denizens of a high civilization, who used them to tight their petty fights for them, un- der the name of unity. For their trouble, they took the essential ores to their home planet and exchanged items of dubious worth. The tres- pass of a human by the natives of a slightly populated moon caused the decimation of the natives, while the humans used them by the hun- dreds in vivisection since their anat- omy was quite similar to the hu- man’s. “Where is Ertene?” asked Guy. “Ertene is not yet placed,” said Charalas. “No?” asked Guy in wonder. “No,” said Charalas with a queer smile. “Ertene is still not sure of her position. You see, Guy, that system is Sol.” Guy Maynard stood silent, think- ing. It was a blow to him, this picturization of the worlds of Sol as seen through the eyes of a totally alien race. His own feelings he analyzed briefly, and he knew that in his own heart, he was willing to shade any decisions concerning the civilization of Ertene in the Erti- nian favor ; had any dispute between Ertene and a mythical dissenter, Guy would have had his decision weighted in favor of the wanderer for one reason alone. Ertinians were human to the last classification ! Guy smiled inwardly. “Blood is thicker than water,” he thought to himself, and he knew that while the old platitude was meant to cover blood-relations who clung together in spite of close bonds with friends not of blood relationship, it could very well be expanded to cover this situation. Obviously he as a Ter- ran would tend to support a hitman race against a merely humanoid race. He would fight the Martians for Ertene just as*he would fight them for Terra. Fighting Ertene itself was un- thinkable. They were too human ; Ertene was too Terran to think of strife between the two worlds. Be- ing of like anatomy, they would and should ding together against the whole universe of alien bodies. •But — - He had spoken to Charalas, to the nurses, to the groundkeepers, and to the scientists who came to learn of him and from him. He had told them of Terra and of the Solar System. He had explained the other worlds in detail and his own interpretation of those other cul- tures. And still they depicted Terra in no central light. Terra did not dominate the panel. It vied with the other nine planets and their satel- lites for the prominence it should have held. What was wrong? Knowing that he would have fa- vored Ertene for the anatomical reasons alone, Guy worried. Had his word-picture been so poor that Ertene gave the other planets their place in the panel in spite of the natural longing to place their own 30 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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kind above the rest? “I should think — ” he started haltingly, but Charalas stopped him. “Guy Maynard, you must under- stand that Ertene is neutral. Per- haps the first neutral you’ve ever seen. Believe that, Guy, and be warned that Ertene is capable of making her own, very discerning decision.” Guy did not answer. He knew something else, now. Ertene was not going to be easily convinced that Sol was the place for them. She was neutral, yes, but there was something else. Ertene had the wanderlust! For eons, Ertene had passed in her unseen way through the galaxy. She had seen system after system, and the lust for travel was upon her. Travel was her life, and had been for hundreds of generations. Her children had been bora and bred in a closed system, free from stellar bonds. Their history was a vast storehouse of experience such as no other planet had ever had. Every generation brought them to another star and each succeeding generation added to the wisdom of Ertene as it extracted or tried to extract some bit of knowledge from each system through which Ertene passed. With travel her natural life, the wandering planet would be loath to cease her transient existence. Like a man who has spent too many years in bachelorhood, flitting like a butterfly from lip to lip, Er- tene had become inured to a single life. It would take a definite at- traction to swerve her from her self- sufficiency. These tilings came to Maynard as he stood in thought. He knew then that his was no easy job. Not the simple proposition of asking Ertene to join her own kind in an orbit about Sol. Not the mere sign- ing of a pact would serve. Not the Terran-shaded history of the worlds of Sol with the Terran egotism that did not admit that Terra could pos- sibly be wrong. Ertene must be made to see the attractiveness of living in May- nard’s little universe. It must be made more attractive than the in- teresting possibilities offered by the unknown worlds that lie ahead on her course through the galaxy. All this plus the natural reticence of Ertene to become involved in a system that ran rife with war. The attractiveness of Sol must be so great that Ertene would remain in spite of war and alien hatred. And Maynard knew in his heart that he was not the one to sway them easily. Part of his mind felt akin to their desire to roam. Even know- ing that he would not live on Ertene to see the next star he wanted to go with them in order that his chil- dren might see it. And yet his honor was directed at the service of Terra. His sacred oath had been given to support and strive to the best interest of Terra and Sol. He put away the desire to roam with Ertene and thought once more of the studying he must do to con- vince Ertene of the absolute fool- ishness of continuing in their search NOMAD St

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for a more suitable star than Sol about which to establish a residence. Maynard turned to Charalas and saw that the elderly doctor had been watching him intently. Before he could speak, the Ertinian said: “It is a hard nut to crack, lad. Many have tried but none have succeeded. Like most things that are best for people, they are the least exciting and the most formal, and people do not react cheerfully to a formal diet.” Maynard shook his head. “But unlike a man with ulcers, I cannot prescribe a diet of milk lest he die. Ertene will go on living no matter whether I speak and sway them or whether I never say another word. I am asked to convince an entire world against their will. I can not tell them that it is the slightest bit dangerous to go on as they have. In fact, it may be dangerous for them to remain. In all honesty, 1 must admit that Terra is not with- out her battle scars.” Charalas said, thoughtfully : “Who knows what is best for civil- ization? We do not, for we are civilization. We do as we think best, and if it is not best, we die and another civilization replaces us in Nature’s long-time program to find the real survivor.” He faced the panel and said, partly to himself and partly to Guy : “Is it best for Ertene to go on through time experimenting ? Gath- ering the fruits of a million civiliza- tions bound forever to their stellar homes because of the awful abyss between the stars ? For the planets #2 all to become wanderers would be chaos. “Therefore is it Nature’s plan that Ertene be the one planet to gather unto herself the fruit of all knowledge and ultimately lie barren because of the sterility of her cul- ture? Are we to be the sponge for all thought? If so, where must it end? What good is it? Is this some great master plan? Will we, after a million galactic years, reach a state where we may disseminate the knowledge we have gained, or are we merely greedy, taking all and giving nothing? “What are we learning? And, above all, are we certain that Er- tene’s culture is best for civiliza- tion? How may we tell? The strong and best adapted survive, and since we are no longer striving against the lesser forces of Nature on our planet, and indeed, are no longer striving against those of anti- social thought among our own peo- ple— against whom or what do we fight? “Guy Maynard, you are young and intelligent. Perhaps by some whimsy of fate you may be the deciding factor in Ertene’s aimless- ness. We are here, Guy. We are at the gates to the future. My real reason for bringing you to the Cen- ter of Ertene is to have you present your case to the Council.” He took Guy’s arm and led him through the door at the end of the corridor. They went into the gilt- and-ivory room with the vast hemi- spherical dome and as the door slowly closed behind them, Guy Maynard, Terran, and Charalas, Er- ASTOUNDING SC IENCE-P I CT ION

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tinian, stood facing a quarter-circle of ornate desks behind which sat the Council. Obviously, they had been waiting. IV. Guy Maynard looked reproach- fully at Charalas. He felt that he had been tricked , that Charalas had kicked the bottom out of his argu- ment and then had forced him into the debate with but an impromptu defense. He wondered how this discussion was to be conducted, and while he was striving to collect a lucid story, part of his mind heard Charalas going through the usual procedure for recording purposes. “Who is this man?” “He is Junior Executive Guy Maynard of the Terran Space Pa- trol.” “Explain his title.” “It is a rank of official service. It denotes certain abilities and re- sponsibilities.” “Can you explain the position of bis rank with respect to other rat- ings of more or less responsibility ?” Charalas counted off on his fin- gers. “From the lowest rank up- ward, the following titles are used : Junior Aide, Senior Aide, Junior Executive, Senior Executive, Sector Commander, Patrol Marshal, Sec- tor Marshal, and Space Marshal.” “These are the commissioned of- ficers? Are there other ratings?” “Yes, shall I name them?” “Prepare them for the record. There is no need of recounting the noncommissioned officials.” “I understand.” “How did Guy Maynard come to Ertene ?” “Maynard was rescued from a derelict spaceship.” “By whom?” “Thomakein.” “Am I to assume that Thomakein brought him to Ertene for study?” “That assumption is correct.” “The knowledge of the system of Sol is complete?” “Between the information fur- nished by Guy Maynard and the observations made by Thomakein, the knowledge of Sol's planets is sufficient. More may be learned before Ertene loses contact, but for the time, it is adequate.” “And Guy Maynard is present for the purpose of explaining the Ter- ran wishes in the question of whether Ertene is to remain here ?” “Correct.” The councilor who sat in the cen- ter of the group smiled at Guy and said: “Guy Maynard, this is an in- formal meeting. You are to rest assured we will not attempt to goad you into saying something you do not mean. If you are unprepared to answer a given question, ask for time to think. We will understand. However, we ask that you do not try to shade your answers in such a manner as to convey erring im- pressions. This is not a court of law; procedure is not important. Speak when and as you desire and understand that you will not be called to account for slight breaches of etiquette, since we all know that formality is a deterrent to the real point in argument.” Charalas added : “Absolute for- 83 N O M A D

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mality in argument usually ends in the decision going to the best orator. This is not desirable, since some of the more learned men are poor ora- tors, while some of the best orators must rely upon the information furnished them by the learned.” The center councilor arose and called the other six councilors by name in introduction. This was slightly redundant since their names were all present in little bronze signs on the desks. It was a pleasantry aimed at putting the Terran at ease and offering him the right to call them by name. “Now,” said Terokar, the center one, “we shall begin. Everything we have said has been recorded for the records. But, Guy, we will re- move anything from the record that would be detrimental to the integ- rity of any of us. We will play it back before you leave and you may censor it.” “Thank you,” said Guy. “Know- ing that records are to be kept as spoken will often deter honest ex- pression.” “Quite true. That is why we per- mit censoring. Now, Guy, your wishes concerning Ertene’s alliance with Sol.” “I invite Ertene to join the Solar System." “Your invitation is appreciated. Please understand that the accept- ance of such an invitation will change Ertene’s social structure for- ever, and that it is not to be taken lightly.” “I realize that the invitation is not one to accept lightly. It is a large decision.” “Then what has Sol to offer?” “A stable existence. The com- merce of an entire system and the friendship of another world of sim- ilar type in almost every respect. The opportunity to partake in a veritable twinship between Ertene and Sol, with all the ramifications that such a brotherhood would of- fer.” “Ertene’s existence is stable, Guy. Let us consider that point first.” “How can any wandering pro- gram be considered stable?” “We are born, we live, and we die. Whether we are fated to spend our lives on a nomad planet or ulti- mately become the very center of the universe about which everything revolves, making Ertene the most stable planet of them all, Ertinians will continue living. When nomad- ism includes the entire resources of a planet, it can not be instable.” “Granted. But do you hope to go on forever?” “How old is your history, Guy?” “From the earliest of established dates, taken from the stones of Assyria and the artifacts of Maya, some seven thousand years.” Charalas added a lengthy discus- sion setting the length of a Terran year. “Ertinian history is perhaps a bit longer,” said Terokar. “And so who can say ‘forever’?” “No comment,” said Guy with a slight laugh. “But my statements concerning stability are not to be construed as the same type of in- stability suffered by an itinerant 34 A STOUNDINO SC IKNCB-F ICT TO X

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human. He has no roots, and few friends, and he gains nothing nor does he offer anything to - society. No, I am wrong. It is the same thing. Ertene goes on through the eons of wandering. She has no friends and no roots and while she may gain experience and knowledge of the universe just as the tramp will, her ultimate gain is poor and her offering to civilization is zero.” “I dispute that. Ertene’s life has become better for the experience she has gained and the knowledge, too.” “Perhaps. But her offering to civilization?” “We are not a dead world. Per- haps some day we may be able to offer the storehouses of our knowl- edge to some system that will need it. Perhaps we are destined to become the nucleus of a great, galac- tic civilization.” “Such a civilization will never work as long as men are restrained as to speed of transportation. Could any pact be sustained between plan- ets a hundred light-years apart ? In- deed, could any pact be agreed upon ?”’ “I cannot answer that save to agree. However, somewhere there may be some means of faster-than- light travel and communication. If this is found, galactic-wide civiliza- tion will not only be possible but a definite expectation.” “You realize that you are asking for Ertene a destiny that sounds definitely egotistic ?” “And why not ? Are you not sold on the fact that Terra is the best planet in the Solar System?” “Naturally.” “Also,” smiled Charalas, “the Martians admit that Mars is the best planet.” “Granted then that Ertene is stable. Even granting for the mo- ment that Ertene is someday to be- come the nucleus of the galaxy. I still claim that Ertene is missing one item.” Guy waited for a moment and then added : “Ertene is missing the contact and commerce with other races. Ertene is self-sufficient and as such is stagnant as far as new. life goes. Life on Ertene has reached the ultimate — for Ertene. Similarly, life on Terra had reached that point prior to the opening of space. Life must struggle against something, and when the struggle is no longer possible — when all pos- sible obstruction has been circum- vented— then life decays.” “You see us as decadent?” “Not yet. The visiting of sys- tem after system has kept you from total decadence. It is but a stasis, however. Unless one has the sam- ples of right and wrong from which to choose, how may he know his own course?” “Of what difference is it?” asked the councilor named Baranon. “If there is no dissenting voice, if life thrives, if knowledge and science advance, what difference does it make whether we live under one so- cial order or any other? If thiev- ery and wrongdoing, for instance, could support a system of social importance, and the entire popula- tion lives under that code and thrives, of what necessity is it to change ?” NOMAD AST— 2S 35

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“Any social order will pyramid,” said Guy. “Either up or down.” “Granted. But if all are prepared to withstand the ravages of their neighbors, and are eternally pre- pared to live under constant strife, no man will have hig rights trod upon.” “But what good is this eternal wandering ? This everlasting eye upon the constantly receding hori- zon? This never ending search for the proper place to stop in order that this theoretical galactic civiliza- tion may start? At Ertene’s state of progress, one place will be as good as any other,” said Guy. “Precisely, except that some places are definitely less desirable. Recall, Guy, that Ertene needs noth- ing.” “I dispute that. Ertene needs the contact with the outside worlds.” “No.” “You are in the position of a recluse who loves his seclusion.” “Certainly.” “Then you are in no position to appreciate any other form of social order.” “We care for no other social order.” “I mentioned to Charalas that in my eyes, you are wrong. That I am being asked to prescribe for a patient who will not die for lack of my prescription. I can not even say that the patient will benefit di- rectly. My belief is as good as yours. I believe that Ertene is suf- fering because of her seclusion and that her peoples will advance more swiftly with commerce between the planets — and once again in inter- 36 stellar space, Ertene will have no planets with which to conduct trade.” “And Sol, like complex society, will never miss the recluse. Let the hermit live in his cave, he is neither hindering nor helping civilization.” “Indirectly, the hermit hinders. He excites curiosity and the wonder if a hermit’s existence might not be desirable and thus diverts other thinkers to seclusion.” “But if the hermit withdraws alone and unnoticed, no one will know of the hermitage, and then no one will wonder.” “But / know, and though no one else in the Solar System knows, I am trying to bring you into our society. I have the desire of broth- erhood, the gregarious instinct that wants to be friend with all men. It annoys me — as it annoys all men — to see one of us alone and unloved by his fellows. I have a burning desire to have Ertene as a twin world with Terra.” “But Ertene likes her itinerant ex- istence. The fires that burn beyond the horizon are interesting. Also,” smiled Terokar, “the grass is greener over there.” “One day you will come to the end of the block,” said Guy, “and find that the grass is no greener anywhere, with the exception that you now have no more grass to look at, plus the sorry fact that you can- not return. A million galactic years from now, Ertene will have passed through the galaxy and will find her- self looking at intergalactic space. Then what?” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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“Then our children will learn to live in a starless sky for a hundred thousand generations. Solarians live in a sky of constant placement ; Ertene’s sky is ever changing and all sky maps are obsolete in thirty or forty years. You must remem- ber that to us, wandering is the normal way of life. Some of us believe that we may eventually re- turn to our parent sun. We may. But all of us believe that we would find our parent sun no more inter- esting than others. No Guy, I doubt that we will stop there either.” “You are assuming that you will not remain at Sol?” “We are a shy planet. We do not like to change our way of life. You are asking us to give up our life and to accept yours. It is sim- ilar to a man asking a woman to marry. But a woman is not com- pletely reversed in her life when she marries. Here you are asking us to cleave unto you forever — and there is no bond of love to soften the hard spots.” “I did mention the bond of broth- erhood,” said Guy. “Brotherhood with what?” asked * Terokar. “You ask us to enter a bond of twinship with a planet that is the center of strife. You ask us in the name of similarity to join you — and help you gain mastery over the Solar System.” “And why not?” “Which of you is right? Is the Terran combine more righteous than the Martian alliance?” “Certainly.” “Why?” Guy asked for a moment to think. The room was silent for a moment and then he said, slowly and pain- fully : “I can think of no other rea- son than the trite and no-answer reason: ‘We’re right because we’re right !’ The Martian combine fights us to gain the land and the commerce that we have taken be- cause of superiority in space.” “A superiority given merely be- cause of sheer size,” said Baranon. “The Martians, raised under a grav- ity of less than one third of Terra’s find it difficult to keep pace with the Terrans, who can live under three times as much acceleration. Battle under such conditions is un- fair, and the fact that the Martians have been able to survive indicates that their code is not entirely wrong.” Charalas nodded. “Any code that is entirely in error will not be able to survive.” “So,” said Terokar, “you ask us to join your belligerent system. You ask us to emerge from our pleasure and join you in a struggle for exist- ence. You ask that we give up the peace that has survived for a thou- sand years, and in doing so you ask that we come willingly and permit our cities to be war-scarred and our men killed. You ask that we join in battle against a smaller, less adapted race that still is able to survive in spite of its ill-adaption to the rigors of space.” Guy was silent. “Is that the way of life? Must we fight for our life? Strife is deplorable, Guy Maynard, and I am saying that to you, who come of a v o »r a r> 87

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planet steeped in strife. You wear a uniform — or did — that is dedi- cated to the job of doing a better job of fighting than the enemy. Continual warlike, activity has no place on Ertene. “Plus one other thing, Guy May- nard. You are honorable and your intent is clear. But your fellows are none too like you. Ertene would become the playground of the Solar System. There would be continual battles over Ertene, and Ertene with her inexperience in warfare would be forced to accept the protection of Terra. That protection would break down into the same sort of protection that is offered the Pluto- nians by a handful of Terrans. In exchange for ‘protection’ against enemies that would possibly be no better or worse, the Plutonians are 88 stripped of their metal. They are not accorded the privilege of school- ing because they are too ignorant to enter even the most elementry of schools. Besides, schooling would make them aware of their position and they might rebel -' against the system that robs them of their sub- stance under the name of ‘protec- tion.’ Protection ? May the High- est Law protect me from my pro- tectors!” Terokar's lips curled slightly. “Am I not correct ? Have not the Plutonians the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- ness ? It would be a heavy blow to Terra if the third planet were forced to pay value for the substance that comes from Pluto.” “After all,” said Guy, “if Terra hadn’t got there first, Mars would be doing the same thing.” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -DICTION

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“Granted/' said Baranon. “Ab- solutely correct. But two wrongs do not make a right. Terra is no worse than Mars. But that does not excuse either of them. They are both wrong!” “Are you asking Terra to change its way of life?” demanded Guy. “You are asking Ertene to change. We have the same privilege.” “Obviously in a system such as ours a completely altruistic society would be wiped out.” “Obviously,” said Baranon. “Then—” “Then Ertene will change its way of life — providing Terra changes hers.” “Mars—” “Mars will have to change hers, too. Can you not live in harmony ?” “Knowing what the Martians did to me — can you expect me to greet one of them with open arms?” “Knowing what you have done to them, I wouldn’t expect either one of you to change your greetings. No, Guy, I fear that Ertene will continue on her path until such a time as we meet a system that is less belligerent and more adapted to our way of life.” “Then I have failed?” “Do not feel badly. You have failed, but you were fighting a huge, overwhelming force. You fought the inheritance of a hundred gen- erations of wanderers. You fought the will of an integrated people who deplore strife. You fought the de- sire of everyone on Ertene, and since no Ertinian could change Solar society, we cannot expect a Terran to change Ertinian ideals. You failed, but it is no disgrace to fail against such an overwhelming de- fense.” Guy smiled weakly. “I presume that I was fighting against a deter- mined front?” “You were trying to do the most difficult job of all. In order to have succeeded, you would first have had to unsell us on our firm convictions, and then sell us the desirability of yours. A double job, both uphill.” “Then I am to consider the mat- ter closed?” “Yes. We have decided not to remain.” “You decided that before I came in,” said Guy bitterly. “We decided that a thousand years before you were born, so do not feel bitter.” “I presume that a change in your plans is out of the question even though further information on Sol’s planets proves you wrong?” “It will never be brought up again.” “I see,” said Guy unhappily. “Part of my desire to convince you was the hope of seeing my home again.” “Oh, but you will,” said Chara- las. Guy was dumfounded. He could hardly believe his ears. He asked for a repeat, and got it. It was still amazing. To Guy. it was out- right foolishness. He wouldn’t have trusted anyone with such a secret. To permit him to return to Terra with the knowledge he had — “Charalas, what would prevent NOMAD 89

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me from bringing my people to Er- tene? I could bring the forces of Terra down about your very ears.” “But you will not. We have a strict, value-even trade to offer you.” “But it would be so easy to keep, me here.” “We could not restrain you with- out force. And if we must rely upon your honor, we’d be equally reliant whether you be here or on Terra.” “Here,” said Guy dryly, “I’d be away from temptation. If I were tempted to tell, there’d be no one to tell it to.” “We must comply with an ancient rule,” explained Terokar. “It says specifically that no man without Ertinian blood may remain on Er- tene. It was made to keep the race pure when we were still about our parent sun and has never been re- voked. We wouldn't revoke it for you alone.” “But permitting me to go free would be sheer madness.” “Not quite. We are mutually in- debted to one another, Guy. There is the matter of knowledge. You gave freely of yours, we gave you ours. We have gained some points that were missing in our science, you have a number of points that will make you rich, famous, and re- membered. Use them as your own, only do it logically in order that they seem to be discoveries of your own. You admit the worth of them ?” “Oh, but yes,” said Guy eagerly. “Wonderful—” “Then there is no debt for knowl- edge ?” "If any, I am in your debt.” “We’ll call it even,” said Bara- non, dryly. “Then there is the matter of life,” said Terokar. “You know how you were found?” Guy shook his head in wonder. “I had been through the Martian idea of how to get information out of a reluctant man,” he said slowly. “I know that their methods result in a terrible mindless state which to my own belief is worse than death itself. I know that as I lost con- sciousness, I prayed for death to come, even though I knew that they would not permit it.” “We found you that way. You know. And we brought you back to life. You owe us that.” “Indeed I do.” “Then for your life, we demand our life in return.” “I do not understand.” “Your life is yours. We ask that you say nothing of us — for we feel that we will die if we are found. At least, the integrity of Ertene is at stake. In any event, we will not be taken, you may as well know that. And when I say die, I mean that Ertene will not go on living in the way we want her to live. There- fore you will disclose nothing that will point our way to anyone.” “And you are willing that 1 should return to Terra with such an oath ? What of my oath to Terra ?” “Do you feel that your presence on Ertene will benefit Terra in some small way?” asked Charalas. “Now that you have given me 40 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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the things we spoke of before, I do." “Then,” said Charalas, “consider this point. You may not return un- less you swear to keep us secret. You may not give Terra the bene- fit of your knowledge unless you deprive them of Ertene. Is that clear ?” “If I may not return to Terra, and may not remain on Ertene, I can guess the other alternative and will admit that I do not like it. On the returning angle, about all I can do is to justify myself in my own mind that I have done all that I can by bringing these scientific items back with me. Since doing the best I can for Terra includes keeping your secret, I can do that also. But tell me, how do you hope to cover the fact that I’ve been miss- ing for almost a year? That will take more than mere explanation.” “The process is easy,” said Charalas. “We have one of the lifeships from the derelict. It was slightly damaged in the blast. It is maneuverable, but unwieldy. Evi- dence has been painstakingly forged. Apparently you will have broken your straps under the shock of the blast — and before the torture reached its height — and you found yourself in a derelict with no one left alive but yourself. You were hurt, mentally, and didn’t grasp the situation clearly. There was no way to signal your plight in secrecy, and open signaling would have been dangerous since you were too close to Mars. “You found the lifeship and waited until you could safely take off. The derelict took a crazy course, according to the recorded log in your own handwriting, and headed for interstellar space. You took off at the safe time and have been floating free in the damaged lifeship. You’ve been on a free orbit for the best part of a year.” “Sounds convincing enough.” “The evidence includes empty air cans, your own fingerprints on everything imaginable, a dulled can opener and the remnants of can labels that have fallen into nooks and crannies of the ship. The water-recovery device has been un- der constant operation and examin- ation will show about a year’s ac- cumulation of residual matter. A scratch-mark calendar has been kept on the wall of the lifeship, and daily it has been added to. That is im- portant since the wall will show more oxidation in the scratches made a year ago than the ones made recently. The accumulators of the ship have been run down as if in service while you were forcing the little ship into its orbit, and the de- mand recorder shows how the drain was used. The lights in the ship have been burned, and the de- posits of fluorescent material in the tubes have been used about the cal- culated number of hours. Books have been nearly worn out from re- reading and they were used with fingerprint gloves though they were studied by us. Instruments and gadgets are strewn about the ship in profusion, indicating the attempts of an intelligent man trying to kill time. Also you will find the initial NOMAD 41

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findings on the energy collector vve used in conjunction with the light- shield. “Now, yourself. Into your body we will inject the hormones that occur with fear and worry. You will not enjoy a bit of atmosphobia, but believe us, it is necessary. You will have the appearance and atti- tude of a man who has been in space alone for a year, and luckily for you, you are a spaceman and inured to the rigors of space travel so that it will not be necessary to really give you the works in order to make you seem natural. “As a final touch, both for our safety and yours, we will inject in your body a substance far superior to your anti-lamine. This is not destroyed by electrolysis, but only by a substance made from the orig- inal base. This will protect you against any attempt to make you talk. As long as it is your will, con- sciously or subconsciously, our se- cret will be kept. Is there anything we may have overlooked?” “One thing. The space tan.” “That you will get before you leave.” “Then that sounds like the works.” “It is. Guy Maynard, we wish you the best of luck. We are all sorry that you must leave, but it is best that way. Sooner or later you would become homesick for the things you knew on Terra. Ertene will not last in your memory, we have been careful not to let you in- dulge in anything that will leave memories either pleasant or un- pleasant, and forgetting is easy 42 when the subject was uneventful. Farewell, Guy Maynard.” “Good-bye. And if you ever de- cide whether your way is at all questionable, have someone look me up. I’ll be around Sol.” Terokan laughed. “And if you find that Sol changes her way of living, you may see if you can find us!” Charalas smiled : “No need. They will not. This is farewell for- ever, Guy. Good luck.” It was little more than an hour later that Guy Maynard, inoculated with all kinds of shots, was lifted into the sky in a heavy spaceship and on the way for a predetermined section of the Solar sky. They left him, a couple of weeks later. And Guy Maynard was headed for Terra in a broken lifeship saved from the derelict of the Mardinex. He thought of Ertene briefly, and then put the thought from him. He would never see Ertene again. But the things he had in his mind would make Ertene’s influence ever- lasting over an unknown Terra. That alone made the contact worth while. Guy Maynard stumbled upon an- other thought. He had accused them of going on forever like an itinerant, taking nothing and giving nothing and living sterile as far as their good toward civilization. He was wrong, and now he knew it. Ertene did not go on her lonely path. She had strewn the fruits of experience in Sol’s path as best she could and still maintain safety for •ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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herself. It was reasonable to sup- pose that Ertene had done the same things for those other systems. Hers was not a useless existence. Ertene was doing as much for civ- ilization as Terra, surely. And though he would never see Ertene again, his own personal gain from having been to Ertene would cause him to remember the wan- derer. And even though Terra would never know of Ertene’s ex- istence, she would benefit from their experience. Ertene — completely altruistic. Or was she completely selfish? Terra would never know. V. Ben Williamson sat bolt upright in his chair and listened to the faint piping whistle that came through the communicator along with the sounds from the communications office. Te snapped the button call- ing for silence in order to hear bet- ter, and then scratched his head in wonder. “Executive to Communications and Pilot: Tune in that signal bet- ter and get a fix on it. Prepare to follow the fix.” “Received,” came the laconic re- ply, and then the less formal : “What’s in the sky, Ben ?” “Whether you know it or not, that signal was Guy Maynard’s pri- vate sign.” “I thought so,” said the com- munications officer. “I wasn’t cer- tain.” “We’ll not court-martial you for that,” laughed Ben. “After all, you didn’t know Maynard personally.” “Right. I didn’t know him at all. But this fix — I’ve got it.” “Can you get range and possible track ?” “Fairly well.” There was silence for several minutes and then the communications officer announced the figures concerning the distance and probable course constants of the emitting source. “Executive to Technician: Jim- my, have you got the cards on the Mardinex or did we put them in the morgue after we slipped her the slug ?” “Still got ’em. BuSI thought we should keep ’em a bit just in case. After all, the Mardinex was a secret proposition and to remove her cards from the Terran cardexes would be like the guy in that story.” “Which guy in what story.” “The fellow who suspected his neighbor of stealing his chickens just because he found the neighbor garbaging chicken feathers and chicken carcasses. They’ve made no announcement of the Mardinex' s failure to return. To have Terra toss away the information that we have so painstakingly gathered con- cerning her most intimate features would be almost an open admission that Terra is not longer concerned about the Mardinex.” “They couldn’t prove a thing.” “No, but as the Chinese say: ‘A wise man does not stoop to secure his shoes in a melon patch nor adjust his hat under a cherry tree.’ They could trump up enough evi- dence to arouse their people if they could prove our disinterest in some 43 NOM AT>

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concrete manner. As it is, the whole system knows that Terra still carries the cards of the Mardine x. That’s the one thing they’ve ascertained. We’ve got ’em all right.” “Good. Then as soon as we get close enough to that source, and the spotters take hold, run the constants through the cardex.” “Good Sol, Ben. What do you expect ?” “Dunno. Couldn’t be the Mar- dinex, of course. That couldn’t possibly be here and now. But — that was Maynard’s sign and he may have survived in some queer man- ner. We know that the Mardine x carried lifeships.” Time passed as the destroyer ac- celerated constantly, reached turn- over, and began to decelerate toward the suspected position of the signal- emitting object. Just after turn- over the spotters took hold and an- nounced that the object was capable of being scanned and analyzed. The whirr of the file as the cardex ran through the thousands of mi- nute cards filled the technician’s office and came through the open communicator. Then the attention bell tingled once, and the card that matched the constants of the emit- ting object was slid from the file into a projector. The micro-printing above the cardex pattern was pro- jected on the ground glass above the instrument and the technician read it off in a flat voice. “Fore lifeship — standard type from Martian space craft of the Mardinex class. One of six similar models placed in the upper quadrant of the ship. These ships are capa- ble of four gravities, Terran, and are capable of making, the one hun- dred million mile trip. No arma- ment as per agreements under the Eros Conference. Will accommo- date thirty passengers for a period of ninety days, Terran without dis- comfort other than atniosphobia and the possibility of avoirduphobia if the distance demands free flight for any period of time. Equipped with spotter equipment and signaling equipment capable of reaching in- terested searchers but not raising those whose equipment is nondirec- tive or whose directive equipment is pointed away from the emitting* source. Also equipped with com- plete spares for signaling equip- ment— ” “That’s enough,” said Ben. “Ex- ecutive to Turretman: Trim your autoMacs and load the torpedo tubes. “This may be a trap.” “Right,” said Tim. “And ac- cording to Jimmy, they may be try- ing to see how we react after a sign of the Mardinex’ s lifeship pattern. They’re capable of duplicating that pattern, you know.” “We’re going in there to win or lose,” said Ben soberly. “No matter how they take it, we’re ready. Tim, put a remote arming fuse in one torp and launch it right now. If this is trouble, we’ll butter our chances. If this is not trouble, we’ll keep the arming signal running and retrieve the torpedo. Right?” “Received. Want it set to remain inert as long as the arming signal is on?” “That’s the order.” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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The destroyer bucked slightly and Tim said: “She’s off. Any time anybody thinks we should let her roar, poke the arming button on the panels.” Instinctively, Ben Williamson glanced at the minute pilot light that gleamed faintly just above a button on the ordnance panel. It was the left-most button of a row of twenty. By reaching out of his chair with the right hand and leaning back so that his spine was arched deeply, Williamson could touch the arming control. He nodded, and as he watched, the panel below winked on, indicating that the turret was ready for action. Beside it, the winking lights indicated that his orders to load up the torpedo tubes had been conveyed to the tube crew. A string of varicolored lights indi- cated a series of interferers and space bombs that were being armed in the bomb bay. Williamson smiled. Tim Monahan was an excellent ord- nance officer ; one who rode the turret himself and directed the fire controls from there. “Executive to Pilot: What’s our position?” “Twenty minutes from object.” “Ring the Action Alarm. Who knows — we may see action 1” “Turretman to Executive: Object sighted. Definitely a lifeship. Doesn’t look dangerous. Shall we take a chance ?” “Executive to Communications : Answer ’em on their band.” “Received. Ben, they went off the air as soon as I opened my transmitter.” There was some pe- riod of silence. “Communications to Executive: Identifies himself as Guy Maynard. Says alone and safe. Cut emitter to prevent curiosity on the part of Martian observers who may be listening.” “Good fellow. He should be an Intelligence Officer. Tell him to prepare for transshipping.” “He says that after a year in that sardine can, it can’t be too quick. Want him to jump?” “Can he put on any speed ?” “His suit is still in partial opera- tion. He can rev up about a G.” “Tell him to dive. We’ll scoop him without trying to match speed.” Guy smiled vaguely. He made one 'last prayer that he could look as starved for company as a man would after a year in that tiny ship. He didn’t stop to wonder why they’d asked him to dive. He merely prayed that his story would be acted as convincingly as his forged diary read. He’d partially committed that to memory ; certain lapses would be expected. It was good and it con- tained several references to ideas for equipment which would help explain his sudden inventive streak. He hugged the volume to him and dived out of the open space lock. Once free of the ship, Guy turned the tiny driving fin on and he stood upright on the soles of the spacesuit shoes. And minutes later the destroyer arrowed silently past and a silent, invisible tractor reached out and caught him in the focal area. It stretched like a thin elastomer cord, invisible, and it accelerated him gently as the destroyed sped on. He 45 NOMAD

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caught up with the destroyer and was taken aboard just as the sound- less gout of flame far below marked the end of the lifeship. “Why ?” he asked patiently, shortly and tersely. "Didn’t care to leave any evidence for the Marties.” “Sort of got attached to it,” said Guy. “Could be, but one sight of that anywhere in the Solar System would mean trouble. Evidence from the Mardinex, you know. Forget it, Maynard. You’re far more impor- tant. What happened, and how, and why?” Maynard looked pained. “Forget it, Guy. Obviously you had a tough time. Take your time about telling us. What do you want most ?” Guy smiled shyly. “I thought about that a lot,” he said slowly. “I wanted steak and potatoes. I wanted cigarettes. I even thought of Laura Greggor. I wanted . . . Ben, I want everthing, and in mass- production lots.” “Steak and potatoes we can give you. Cigarettes we have in plenty. A shower and a shave and a soft, well-made man-sized bed. Books and pictures and a dollop of liquor, too. Candy, cigars, chewing gum, et cetera. But the only female we have on board is cooky’s pet hen. Like a fresh egg?” “Anything as long as it is not lonely,” said Guy. “My throat is slightly lame.” “I can imagine. Well, it’s sick bay for you and we’ll wait on you. And — Guy, there’ll be plenty of ■a# company.” Ben snapped the gen- eral communicator button and said : “Executive to crew : Junior Execu- tive Guy Maynard is aboard. He is to be shown every consideration, and it is directed that each watch appoint three roving spacemen whose duties will be to replace crew members who will visit Maynard. His stay in sick bay is not quaran- tine.” "Williamson, I’ll take that shower now. And then the steak. Got a cigarette ?” As Maynard ignited the cigarette, he thought : Carefully prepared evi- dence ! How painstaking they were 1 Even the scratches on the wall made so that the earlier ones would be made first. The millions of finger- prints. And destroyed because it would be bad evidence against us. Ironic. And yet — they might have missed something. And supposing Williamson hadn’t armed that tor- pedo but had taken the crate in to Terra instead? Then Ertene’s evi- dence would have been needed. We couldn’t have known — “Now for that shower,” he said to Ben. There was no use in de- liberately thinking of Ertene now. Forget it. To Ben he added: “Might run through that log of mine. Gives you the story pretty well, and my voice-box is still un- used to talking much. I’m going, but I’ll be back.” “Good thing you kept a log,” said Ben. “It’ll be most valuable evi- dence for the investigation.” Investigation ! Guy hadn’t thought of that factor. Naturally he must give his evidence before a court- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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martial, though he would by no means be on trial. Yet, they were thorough and he prayed that he wouldn’t make the most unnoticed slip. They’d ply him with questions and watch his answers. He was glad that he hadn’t memorized the log by rote. To repeat word for word certain parts would be ex- pected, and to miss completely other parts would be expected. There would even be parts he had for- gotten and parts too doleful for the mind to keep fresh. Then Guy Maynard put it all aside. He forgot his troubles and his worries, and gave himself up to the luxuries of civilization once more. His act was most convinc- ing. He ate with relish and smoked until his throat was sore. He was reticent at the right time, and he made it appear as though it had be- come habit with him to remain si- lent; and also brought out the fact that his larynx was slightly unused to exercise. He was glad to be home, though he deplored the de- struction of his lifeship — he spoke of it affectionately sometimesr other times he outwardly hated the thought of it — because there were some experiments uncompleted on it. They could be duplicated from the log, of course, but the originals were priceless in his estimation — And then the reaction really set in. Guy Maynard was home again. Home, to Guy, was the ever-chang- ing orientation of the starry sky and the never constant gravity. He fin- gered the ordnance controls on the destroyer with affection and real- ized that Ertcne was long ago and far away, and that his place was here, and that his life was geared to the quick life of a spaceman in the Terran Space Patrol. Peace was wonderful, of course, and at the time he wanted it des- perately. But now he realized that the excitement of living in a system of planets offered more than the placid existence of Ertene with its one moon and the occasional space trip. In spite of the treaties and ac- ceptance of peaceful measures made on the part of the Martians, there was always the chance that some un- derhanded move might be made. There was that edge to life; that fine, razor-sharp edge of excitement and danger. Mars might make un- toward moves, but it was not all Mars’ party. Terra made her own espionage and operations tended to display her might to the Red Planet. Brushes that never reached notice were always going on. He permitted himself to wax en- thusiastic over his being home again. They never knew that it was not merely the release from space loneliness but a return from a too long, too uneventful vacation. He considered himself objectively one day after he found himself look- ing forward to the return to Terra. The investigation did not bother him ; it was the question of whether his year of absence from the service would cause him a year’s loss in ad- vancement. If it caused him no loss, he would become a Senior Ex- ecutive within a month or so after his return. That would give him NOMAI) 4T

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the right to captain a destroyer like this one. His interest and anxiousness to return to Terra had become honest. On Ertene he had argued against it. Now he knew his mind and also knew that Charalas had done the proper thing. He would not have remained on Ertene. Some day the everlasting peace and quiet would get him, and then there would have been trouble. He owed them his life, and if some of the things in his log worked to his own satisfaction, he owed them more than that. He’d keep their secret ; denying Terra the right to exploit Ertene was hard, but bet- ter deny them that than to deny them the knowledge he had gained. Terra would hold dominance over the Solar System without Ertene’s presence ; though it was not without Ertene’s help. Poor Ertene. A sterile, placid life that was beginning to look pale and uninteresting against the rugged, boisterous existence of men who roamed the Solar System. Let them have their stability. What was their history? A few thousand years since the dawn of their written lore ? Far greater than Sol’s though he had been loath to tell them that. At that time such an admission was like admitting that one was but an adolescent. But it was true. But in those thousands of years, had their science come a comparable distance with Terra’s? And Guy knew why. With noth- ing to strive against, progress ceases. He wondered whether the in- vestigating committee would make 48 an issue of the fact that a junior executive had been so oblivious to his duty as to permit capture by Martians. That was the only fly in liis ointment, the only point over which he worried. He felt that his capture could have happened to any- one,. and secretly he admired the bold stroke in the light of how dar- ing it had been for Mars to storm the very ramparts of Sahara Base. But investigating committees are strange things and their decisions are often based on theory instead of action with no regard to circum- stances. That one minor point continued to worry him at times. And then the destroyer dropped out of the sky onto Sahara Base, and Guy Maynard stooped to pick up a handful of the soil of Terra. He shook it in the sky and rubbed it into his hands. He smelled of it and exhaled deeply. Then, still holding a bit of it, he faced the sector commander who was waiting for him in the command car. The commander smiled curtly and said: “Junior Executive Maynard, you are to speak to no one. You are technically not under arrest, nor are you to be placed in that light. How- ever a violation of the order to dis- cuss nothing with anyone will lead to arrest.” “How long is this quarantine go- ing to last, sir ?” “Not too long. The Board of Investigation will convene tomor- row. At that time we will decide your future.” Maynard entered the command ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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car and they drove off silently. He was thinking: One more hurdle. If I can make it — His dreams were troubled that night. There was nothing definite about them ; they were kaleidoscopic in nature and Charalas whirled in and out of them along with Greggor of the Bureau of Exploration and Laura Greggor. In these dreams he was the central figure; a pitiful, un- armed being that could not strike back against the pointed questions that they hurled at him. He was mired in a black mess of intrigue that would follow him forever. And only by living in constant guarded- ness would he be safe. For once the hurdle of the in- vestigation was passed, there would be no recanting. God help him if after he perjured himself they found out that his tale had been designed to cover a definite breach of his own oath. It was the price he would pay for the success that Ertene’s science would bring him. Yet he knew that if he continued as he had started, he would be all right. To be convincing in a lie, he knew that the first problem was to convince himself. And so Guy Maynard went into the Board of Investigation almost self-convinced that his year of lone- liness was a fact. He didn’t dare consider the fu- ture if he failed to convince the Board. Not only for himself, but for Ertene and Terra both. They — he dropped the awful possibility there. He stiffened his resolve and thrust the thought from his mind.' There must be no slip. So with a part of his mind fight- ing to keep from viewing utter chaos, and another pan of his mind telling him that he was hiding his head in the sand like an ostrich, Guy NOMAD <0

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Maynard entered the large room with the silent, waiting men. He swallowed deeply as he noted the weight of the platinum braid and he took his appointed position with a qualm of misgiving. VI. Guy Maynard’s eyes swept about the room and saw eyes that were quiet, and if they were not openly friendly, at least they were neither hostile nor doubtful. The Board of Investigation was composed of several high officers and a civilian. He glanced at the neat pile of papers that were placed on the table before his appointed position and glanced through the names of those present, wondering about the civilian; most of the officers he knew by sight. He nodded to himself ; the civilian was Thomas Kane, a news pub- lisher, and therefore quite natural a presence in this investigation. The fact that he was the publisher him- self, and not one of his hirelings gave the investigation the air of ex- treme secrecy, and Guy understood that whatever went on in this gath- ering today would be held in the utmost confidence until the necessi- i ties of living made the publicity of ' the conference desirable — if ever. The public would accept the word of the publisher with more credulity than they would a prepared state- ment issued for common consump- tion by a propaganda department. People had become used to nor- mal propaganda, and were capable of picking it out and disregarding it. A publisher’s own statements were so considered to be noncontrollable since the only recourse that any Patrol investigation could take was to bar the publisher from their sub- sequent conferences, and to combat that the publisher could make things literally warm for any body of Patrol officers who tried to muzzle him. The chairman, Patrol Marshal Alfred Mantley, rapped for order, and started the proceedings by tell- ing Guy: "We have been in order for three hours, during which time we have considered the evidence presented by the log of your . . . er . . . journey. Also, the log has been read and digested by profes- sional readers and pronounced au- thentic. The latter is not so much in defense of you, Maynard, as it is to assure us that you have not been or are not now acting under duress. You present us quite a problem, young sir. Quite a problem. Coldly and cruelly, we would find our lives less complicated if you hadn’t re- turned,” he said with a laugh. "But you are here and we are glad to have you returned. You have had quite an experience — one that is seldom enjoyed and only recorded a few times in the annals of the Terran Space Patrol. How are you feeling ?” “Quite all right.” “Fine. Now, Guy, tell us in your own words a brief account of your travels.” Guy got as far as the encounter with the Martian when he was in- terrupted by Patrol Marshal Jones. “How do you account for the fact that a Martian was able to penetrate ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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to the very heart of Sahara Base?” “I have no idea, sir. I, like the rest of us, have been led to believe that our security in the Base was perfect. Naturally I was not armed.” “No,” said the chairman. "And had you been armed, I doubt that the encounter would have been dif- ferent. Fighting unarmed against a Martian who is holding a Mac- Millan at the ready is not considered the kind of thing that any intelligent man would attempt. The fault lies with the security office, not with you.” His chief, Greggor of the Bureau of Exploration asked: “Is this an official decision? I want it made clear that my assistant is not re- sponsible for his trouble.” “Maynard is not to be held re- sponsible. When the word came via Senior Executive Williamson, the investigation of the kidnaping act disclosed that the blame — if any — was to lie with Security. Off the record, 1 can not see how any se- curity bureau could cope with such boldness. It was born of despera- tion and bred of terror — and it died for lack of sheer weight and veloc- ity.” “Thank you,” said Space Marshal Greggor. Guy went on, telling his partly- memorized tale, until he was again questioned. “You hadn’t felt the brunt of the electrolysis before the Mardinex was attacked?” “It had just started. The final explosion broke my straps and de- stroyed the electrolysis equipment.” “And you couldn’t make your way to a lifeship at that time?” “I did as soon as I came to, and realized that I was alone. The least damaged lifeship required re- pairs that were completed several hours later. By that time we were passing through the midst of Mar- tian territory and I thought it best to lie low.” “You preferred to take the chance of orbiting rather than running the Martian gauntlet?” “Orbiting was no chance, sir. Running the gauntlet would have been sheer suicide since the Mar- tians were extremely interested in the Mardinex. They had most of their grand fleet out watching. Only my velocity — which prevented any attempt to stop me — and my ac- celeration— which prevented any attempt to try to match my speed — got me past safely. I am certain that they put a pointer on me as we went past.” “By what reasoning?” “I would have done it, sir, if the cases had been reversed.” “Naturally,” said the chairman. “Proceed, Maynard.” “Knowing that any deviation of the Mardinex or electrical activity aboard would register at the Mar- tian detector stations, at least until we were out of safe range, I pro- ceeded to make the lifeship as spaceworthy and as comfortable as I could. I took plenty of spare equipment — ” “Of what sort?” “Sheer gadgetry, sir. I’ve had a few ideas, and this looked as though NOMAD si

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I’d have plenty of time to try them out. I powered the lifeship far be- yond her normal power because I had to get back home from a ship leaving the System at better than ten. thousand miles per second.” ‘‘In order to bring out the re- sourcefulness of my assistant,” said Greggor, “I want the record to state that he prepared for the boredom he knew would come.” “It is recorded.” “Then, as soon as we were be- yond the longest possible range of the most powerful detector-analyz- ers, even when aimed by a pointer, and taking into consideration that Mars might have had an observer out about even with the orbit of Pluto, I emerged from the derelict and began to decelerate.” “Good.” “Well, that’s about all,” he said. He felt that this was it. He was worried that the deeper discussion might bring forth errors and con- tradictions, and he wanted them to lead him into the initial disclosures rather than to have them add to a statement that might be straining at the truth already. “I slept. I worked. I did about everything a man can do when he’s sitting in a lifeship for a solid year waiting for his home planet to come close enough to signal to. This is the hard part. Nothing of any impor- tance happened. One hour was like the rest. I slept when I got tired and worked until I tired of it. I ate when hungry. I shaved when my beard got uncomfortable. I prob- ably have attained a number of bad habits during my enforced hermit- OJ ing, but they will be easily broken.’” “Your record is quite clear,” said Chairman Mantley. “Is it the agreement of this investigation that Guy Maynard’s story be accepted ?” “I see no reason why it should be disputed.” “What purpose would Maynard have in lying?” “It is truthful enough for me.” “I’m in accord.” “Let’s drop this foolishness,” said Kane, the publisher. “What is far more important is the public expla- nation for Maynard’s absence.” “Our friend of the Fourth Estate is correct,” said Mantley. “The log is accepted, and will be maintained in the archives under secret classifi- cation.” He smiled at Maynard. “Now, young man, you force us into developing a year-long cock- and-bull story for the public.” “Sir? I don’t understand.” “If you breathe a word of that story to anyone else, you’ll be the direct reason for an Interplanetary War— with capital letters.” “But—” “So it’s the truth. You’ll learn, young man, that there are times when the truth is not always the best. You are all right, alive and vc ell — to say nothing of being equipped with a few brilliant ideas for your trouble. Your captors are dead and gone. Mars doesn’t really know what happened to their Mar - dinex, and Terra doesn’t really know anything about the incident. You can’t be court-martialed for being Absent Without Leave for we need you and your ideas. You haven’t ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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been spaeewrecked, for no ship is missing.” “How was my absence ex- plained ?” asked Guy. "You were M-12.” “Oh ?” said Guy. “Then it’s easy,” said Greggor. “Has his first contact been reported yet ?” “No. I see your point. Cer- tainly. Funny, it never has hap- pened this way before and now that it did, I forgot the reality.” “As an M-12 case, he can make the one-year mention in his own right. It will also tend to authenti- cate other M-12 cases which must be false. Then after the third year — if he hasn’t been returned to full duty already — he can make the third-year mention. But instead of decreasing the mention, Guy will increase it.” “Providing it is necessary. After all, we are not trying to establish a fade-out for a man killed in an inci- dent that might lead to total war. This time the man has returned.” “How can we strengthen this contact ?” ■ Kane spoke up cheerfully. “From the stuff in his log, I’d say that the best way would be to promote him a rank for service above and beyond the requirements of his present rank. It will also permit him to skipper a destroyer or lighter craft which was denied him by the Junior Executive’s rank. I’ll plant his pic- ture in my news sheet with a vague reference to the fact that Guy Maynard has been engaged in ex- periments at a secret place and that his initial experiments have been so successful that he is being given the command of a small laboratory ship in order that the experiments may be tested in the prime medium.” “And then?” “Marshal, there is nothing that sounds like truth than a lie liberally sprinkled with truth. In fact, I’d say the latter sounded even better than truth.” “Truth? Is there any in this story ?” “Maynard,” asked Kane, “you said that some of these things were partially assembled and tested in that lifeship?” “Yes. It is deplorable that they were completely destroyed.” “Not too deplorable,” said Mar- shal Warsaw wryly. “After all, the evidence was pretty bald-faced.” “Well, his story about working in a secret laboratory is not too untrue, is it? What could have been more secret than his position ? Gentle- men, no one but he knew where he was ! And some of the experiments were eminently successful, were they not?” “I believe so.” “Then his statements warrant the trust of this assemblage. What do you say, gentlemen?” “Sounds reasonable,” said the chairman. “Any dissent?” There was none. “Furthermore,” said Kane, “I’d suggest that you have professional writers copy his log and convert it into a day-by-day account of bis ex- periments. Use it as close to the real thing as possible so that he won’t have to memorize too much. Then destroy this original.” 53 NOM AD

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“Excellent,” said Patrol Marshal Mantley. “Maynard, you may think this cold-blooded. No doubt you want revenge. I’d want it, I know. But we’re all satisfied, here. You are hack, and the Martians lost their battlecraft.” “It does sound brutal,” said Maynard, “vknd very depressing. But I do suppose that one man’s loss against the loss of a heavy space craft and a partial crew can not be argued. I’ll accept it.” “Then,” said Mantley, “this Board of Investigation is closed and the recommendations will be fol- lowed. Maynard, your rank will be increased immediately, and until we can commission a small laboratory ship for you, you are released from active duty. You will remain in touch with this office, for you will be needed from time to time to sign papers and to requisition the mate- rials you will require to complete your experiments. As soon as our writers have been able to copy your original log, the Bureau of Science will check it over and decide which of your experiments will be com- pleted.” “Will I be able to work on the rest of them, sir?” “That depends. You will prob- ably be called upon for consultation since you developed them. But we cannot overlook the urgency of some of these.” Space Marshal Greggor came over to Guy and placed an arm over the young man’s shoulders. “That was quite an experience, Guy. Far beyond the experiences of most r.l men. I am sorry for myself, and happy for you. You’ll be coming to the house?” “As soon as I can get settled, sir. Possibly tonight.” “Excellent. I’ll prepare Marian and Laura — they think you’re a real M-12.” “Will it be a shock?” “Somewhat. They aren’t too cer- tain of the M-12 business; though they do not know the blunt truth, they are aware that few men classi- fied under the M-12 are ever heard of again. That’s because they’re close to the Service. M-12 is a bril- liant method of permitting a man to drop from sight, since it was de- signed to permit a man to leave his friends gently — the so-called con- tacts are made by telegram and per- sonal messenger to remove certain portions of the man’s effects and to pay his rent and so on. Eventually all of his stuff is gone, his friends wonder where he is and eventually forget him, “But your return will put faith in M-12 a gam. They’ll both be glad to see you.” “You must do me a favor,” asked Guy earnestly. “Please explain to Laura about my leaving without saying good-bye.” “I’ll do that. M-12 is the roughest on the ones who are close without being blood relations. We’ll smooth it over. Now take it easy. Hello, Kane,” he said looking over Guy’s head. “Are you sorry we deprived you of a story?” “Some day this young man will make me a better one,” laughed Kane. “Drop up to the office to- ASTOUNDINC, SCIENCE -FICTION

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morrow if you can. I’ll buy lunch — you deserve some special treat- ment to pay for your year of — experimenting. He’ll be -safe,” said Kane to Greggor. “I know it,” said the Space Mar- shal. ‘‘You wouldn’t be permitted the inside Council unless you were proven, you know.” “I’ll do more,” said Kane. “I’ll halve one of my boys run over the forged log for you. He can make it sound a bit more authentic. I’ve always thought that your logs and diaries were a little stiffish. A bit of yearning and youthful hope would lend that log a world of real- ity, it having been written by a lonely young scientist.” “That’s a deal. Well, take it easy. And we’ll see you later.” Guy Maynard arrived to find his room in order as according to the treatment given M-12 cases. He walked around the room and in- spected everything there, finally dropping into the easy-chair to think. It struck him, then. For a moment he was thoughtful, and then the humor of the situation hit him like a blow. For Ertene had prepared a world of painstaking evidence to support his tale of suffering and trouble. They gave him every bit. And for their trouble on the life- ship, it had been destroyed without inspection because of Terran fear of discovery. Not that Terra was concerned about reprisals, but just because Terran ideas of exchange dictated that they should let a mat- ter drop after they had received the better of the argument. And then his story. Had he memorized that log day for day and word for word, it would have been of no use. He was ordered to for- get it in every detail save those “ideas” he was supposed to have had. How neatly had the Terrans de- stroyed every mite of Ertinian evi- dence. All expect the scientific side. And Ertene would roam on through the Galaxy in utter silence, having scattered the seeds of ad- vancement upon fertile ground. Ertene’s life was not in vain. TO BE CONTINUED. NOMAD SB

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Tricky Tonnage by MALCOLM JAMESON Tricky indeed. A very neat system of cheap transpor- tation it made, too — but it led to some slight difficul- ties with rocks that footed and roads that sank! Illustrated by Kramer When you’ve lived across the fence from an amateur inventor, you come to expect anything. When the wind was right we used to get some of the aw fullest chemical stinks from the Nicklheim barn, and we got so used to hearing ex- plosions that they didn’t bother us any more than automobile back- 5« fires. We just took it for granted when we’d see Elmer, the boy next door, walking around with his eye- brows singed off and the rest of him wrapped up in bandage. When Elmer was a little tad, he was a great enthusiast for scientific fiction. You hardly ever saw him unless he was lugging some Jules ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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Vernian opus around, and he ate up all he read with dead earnest- ness. With that yen for science it might have been expected that he would , shine at school, but it did not work out that way. He wouldn’t go along in the rut laid out for the run-of-the-mine student. The physics prof finally had him kicked out for some crazy stunt he pulled with the school’s equipment. Elmer hooked it all together in a very un- orthodox way, and the resulting fireworks was quite a show. Being barred from school did not faze Elmer. He rigged up his own lab in the barn, buying the stuff from mail order houses with money he made doing odd jobs. Some of the people in the town thought the boy might go places; most simply thought he was a nut. I belonged to the former group, and sometimes helped the kid with small loans. Not many of his inventions panned out, but he did sell one gadget useful in television to a big company. In a way it proved to be a bad thing he did. The company bought the idea outright and paid promptly, but afterwards for reasons of its own it suppressed the invention — an act that irked Elmer exceedingly. It prejudiced him violently against big corporations as such and the whole patent set-up in general. He swore that after that he would keep all his discoveries secret. About that time his father died, and it looked as if Elmer had fin- ished with his scientific dabbling phase. Overnight he seemed to ma- ture, and after that he was seldom seen pottering around his bam. He was busy about town, carrying on the little one-horse trucking busi- ness bequeathed him by the old man. His truck was one of those vintage rattletraps that appear to be always threatening a make the legend of the one hoss shay come true, but Elmer was a fair mechanic and somehow kept the old crate going. Not only that, but to the astonish- ment of the citizenry, he seemed to be making money at it, and that at a time when rate competition was keen and gas expensive and hard to get. I was beginning to think we had witnessed the end of a bud- ding scientist and the birth of an up and coming young business man. It was Elmer himself who disabused me of that notion. One morning he stopped his truck at my gate and came up onto the porch. He pulled out a wad of bills and peeled off a couple of twen- ties. “Thanks,” he said. “It was a big help, but I’m O.K. now.” “Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “There was no hurry about paying it back. But I’m glad to see you’re doing well in the hauling game. It may not be as distinguished as get- ting to Ire known as a big shot scientist, but at least you eat.” He gave me a funny look and sort of smiled. “Hauling game, huh?” he sniffed, “I’d never thought of it that way. I don’t cart stuff around for the fun of it, or the money either. That’s incidental. What I’m doing is testing out a theory I thought up.” “What’s that one, Elmer?” I TRICKY TONNAGE 67

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asked. I had heard a lot of his theories, first and last, and seen most of them go flop. Elmer had a very screwy approach to the mys- teries of nature. “It’s about gravity. I’ve found out what it is, which is more than anybody else since Newton has done. It’s really very simple once you know what makes it.” “Yes,” I agreed. “That is what Einstein says, except that he hasn’t finished his universal field formula. So you’ve beat him to it?” “Yes. I’ve been running my truck by gravity for the last three months.” That didn’t quite make sense to me. The country round about was hilly and a lot of coasting was pos- sible. But still a vehicle couldn’t coast up hill. Elmer was studying me uncertainly, and I realized he wanted to talk to somebody, but he was always so cagey about his projects that I hesitated to come right out and ask. “I’ve discovered something big,” he said, soberly. “So big I don’t know what to do with it. I’d like to show it to somebody, only — ” “Only what?” “Oh, a lot of reasons. I don’t mind being laughed at, but I’d like to keep this secret for awhile. If the other truckers found out how I’m doing what I do, they might gang up on me, smash the truck, and all that. Then again there's no telling what somebody else might do with my idea if they got hold of it before all the theory is worked out.” “I can keep a secret,” I told him. “All right,” he said. “Come along and I’ll show you something.” I got in the truck with him. He stepped on the starter and the cranky old engine finally got going, though I thought it would shake us to pieces before it made up its mind whether to run or not. Then we lurched off down the road, rat- tling and banging like a string of cans tied to a mongrel’s tail. “Where does the gravity come in?” I asked. “I don’t use it in town,” he said. “People might get wise to me.” We went on down to the oil com- pany’s bulk station. It had been raining off and on all week and there was a good deal of mud, but Elmer skirted the worst puddles and we got up to the loading plat- form all right. It was there I got my first surprise. A couple of huskies started loading up that truck, and when they were through I would have bet my last simoleon Elmer would not get two miles with it. There were six big barrels of grease, weighing four hundred pounds each, a half dozen drums of oil, and some package goods. The truck kept creaking and groaning, and by the time the last piece was on, its springs were mashed out flat as pancakes. It was bad enough to have that overload, but the stuff was for Peavy’s store out at Breed- ville — forty miles away over as sketchy a bit of so-called highway as can be found anywhere in America. “You’ll never get over Five Mile Hill with that,” I warned Elmer. S3 ASTOUNDING, SCIF.N CBS -FT G'TI ON

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but he just grinned and pocketed the invoices. The oil company agent was looking on in a kind of puzzled wonder. He had used Elmer’s de- livery service before, but it was clear that he didn’t believe his eyes. Meanwhile Elmer got the motor go- ing and we backed out of the yard. There was a good deal of bucking and backfiring and shimmying, but pretty soon we were rolling along toward the edge of town. Just beyond the last house the Breedville road turns sharp to the right into some trees, and Elmer stopped at a secluded place where there was an outcropping of bed- rock alongside the road proper. He killed the engine and got a cable- TBICKY TONNAGE like affair out of his tool box. “The first step,” he said, “is to lighten the load.” He hooked one end of the cable against the side of a grease barrel and the other he led to the bare bedrock and attached it there. The cable terminated in what appeared to be rubber-suction cups. It looked as if it were made of braided asbestos rope, threaded with cop- per wire, and near one end it spread out in a flattened place like the hood of a cobra. There was a small dial and some buttons set in that. Elmer set the dial and punched a button. Instantly there was a pop- ping sound as the truck bed stirred, and I saw that it jumped up about 69

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a quarter or half an inch. “Now heft that barrel,” said El- mer. I did. If there hadn’t been an- other one right behind me, I would have gone overboard backward. I got hold of the top of the cask and gave it a tug, not dreaming I could budge four hundred pounds of heavy grease. But it came away with about the same resistance that an empty cardboard carton would have had. “What makes weight,” explained Elmer, “is gravitons. All molecular matter contains them in various de- gree. Up to now nobody knew how to extract them. You could only manipulate weight by moving the matter itself. I simply drain most of the gravitons off into the bed- rock where it will be out of the way. It’s easy because there is a gravitic gradient in that direction.” As an explanation it was a long way from being satisfactory. But there was the barrel, plainly sten- cilled with its gross weight, and it was now practically weightless. The weight had left as abruptly as a short-circuited electric charge. Moreover, Elmer was shifting his cable from one drum to another, and as he touched each one the truck rose another notch. By the time he was through it rode as high as if there was no load at all. “I’ll use the last one of these drums for power,” said Elmer, coiling up his cable and putting it away. Then I saw that he was making a short jumper connection between it and another cable run- ning down under the cab to the 60 hood. He lifted that up and showed me an attachment on the shaft be- hind the motor. It was a bulbous affair of metal and there were two leads to it. One was the connec- tion to the drum, the other was a short piece of cable that dangled to the ground. “I call that my Kineticizer,” said Elmer. “It is really a gravity motor. It works on exactly the same prin- ciple as a water turbine except that it doesn’t require the actual pres- ence of the water. The upper cable has more gravitic resistance than the one I use to dump the load. It feeds a slow stream of gravitons to the upper vanes of a steel rotor. They become heavy and start to fall, exerting torque. At the bot- tom they wipe the ground cable and the moving gravitons simply waste away into the road. Four hundred pounds falling four feet gives a lot of power — especially when you use it all. See?” Did I? I don’t know. It sounded plausible, and anyway Elmer banged down the hood and we climbed back into the cab. That time we started off like a zephyr. There was smooth, silent, resistless power, and the truck being lightened of its load, leaped like a jack rabbit. The gasoline motor was idle. The only noise was the rattling of the fenders and the swish of the air. Breed- ville began to look more attainable. After we straightened out on the road, Elmer began to tell me about gravities. “It was Ehrenhaft’s work with magnetics that got me to thinking ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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about it. Since he was already do- ing magnetolysis I didn’t bother to go along that line. What interested me was the evident kinship on the one hand between electric and mag- netic phenomena in general, and between the strong magnetism of electric fields and iron and the rela- tively weak magnetism of all other substances.’' I kept on listening. Elmer’s whole theory of gravities was pretty involved, and in some spots down- right screwy. But on the whole it hung together, and there I was rift- ing along on a stream of moving gravitons to prove it. According to the Elmerian doctrine, in the be- ginning there was chaos and all mat- ter was highly magnetic. It there- fore tended to coalesce into nebulae, and thence into stars. There the fierce pressures and temperatures tended to strip the basic matter of its more volatile outer shells and hurl them outward in the form of radiant energy. Atomic stresses yielded enormous quantities of light and heat and great streams of magnetons and electrons. In the end there is only ash — the cold inert rocks of the planetary bodies. With the excep- tion of the ferric metals none of that ash retains more than a bare fragment of its original magnetic power. Yet even rock when in mas- sive concentration has strong at- tractive power. The earth is such a concentration, and its pull on the apple was what woke Newton up. From that concept Elmer dug into the apple itself and into the atoms that compose it. Mass, he claimed, in so far as what we call weight is concerned, is simply a matter of gravitonic coefficient, a graviton being the lowest unit — one more aspect of the atom. It is the nucleus of a magneton, what is left after the outer shells have been stripped away. The graviton is ut- terly inert and heretofore locked inseparably in the atoms of the sub- stance to which it originally be- longed. If only they could be in- duced to move, their departure would rob the parent substance of nothing except weight, and by mov- ing pure essence of weight poten- tial energy could be turned into kinetic with the minimum of loss. “It was finding a suitable con- ductor that stumped me longest,” Elmer confessed, “and I’m not tell- ing yet what that is. But as soon as I found it I built this motor. You see for yourself how beauti- fully it works.” I did, and I saw a myriad of rosy dreams as well. We took Five Mile Hill like a breeze, almost floating over, thanks not only to the silent drive but to the weightlessness of the cargo. I thought of all the mas- sive mountain ranges just sitting in their grandeur with billions and bil- lions of foot-tons of locked up en- ergy awaiting release. I could en- visage hundreds of kineticizer plants around their slopes sending out an abundance of free power. What it did not occur to me to think of was what would happen when those mountains eventually became weightless. What worried me most just then was haw the other prop- erties of materials would be affected TRICKY TONNAGE

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with alteration of its natural weight. “Oh. not much/' said Elmer. “The relative weights of duralumi- num, steel and lead have nothing whatever to do with their tensile strength. I drained off most of the weight of a pan of mercury and tested it. I found that it got a lot more viscous when it was light, a characteristic that is overcome by its normal heaviness. But other- wise it was still mercury. There is an anvil in my barn that weighs less than a toy balloon. If it wasn’t kept clamped to the block it sits on, it would soar and bump against the rafters, but as long as I keep it from doing that I can still ham- mer iron out on it.” We were nearly to Breedville when it began to rain again. Elmer put up the storm curtains, and I asked him about how Mr. Peavy was going ‘to react at getting bar- rels of grease that were lighter than whipped cream. “I’m going to take care of that before we get there,” said Elmer. I found out what he meant when he pulled up under a railroad under- pass about a mile this side of Peavy’s store, tie got out and pro- duced his cable again. This time he attached it to the face of one of the concrete abutments that held up the girders carrying the track. One by one he reloaded the barrels by dead weight sucked out of the abutment and let it run into the containers on the truck. Again the truck body settled groaning on its springs. “I’m working on a way to meter this flow more accurately,” said 62 Elmer with a grin. “The last load out here Peavy squawked like everything because the stuff was light. This time I’ll give him good measure. Nobody ever kicks at getting more pounds than he paid for.” Well, there it was — Elmer’s stunt full cycle. No wonder his gas and tire costs were less than anybody else’s in the business, or that he could set out on a long trip with an impossible load. He had only to reduce the load to zero, using part of it for power, and replenish it at the other end of the line. We went on to Peavy’s, using the wheezy gasoline motor again. No one at the store saw anything amiss when we drove up, and though Peavy was careful to roll each box and drum onto the scale, he made no comment when he found them markedly overweight. He probably figured it was only justice from the short-changing he had had on the delivery before, and on which the oil company had been adamant as to adjustment. Elmer then picked up some empty drums and we started back. The rain was coming down hard by then, and when we got to the underpass there were several inches of water in it. Elmer stopped long enough to draw off a few more hun- dred pounds of avoirdupois into one of the empty drums so as to have power for the trip home, tie said it was the best place along his route to get needed weight in a hurry. We started up, but had not gone more than about a hundred yards ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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when we heard a terrific swoosh behind us, and on the heels of it a resounding metallic crash and the scream of shearing metal. The ground shook, and a wave of muddy water swept along the road from behind and passed us, gurgling among the wheel spokes. “What on Earth?” yelled Elmer, and stopped the car. What was behind us was not pretty to see. The concrete abut- ment we had just left had slid from its foundation straight across the road until it almost impinged on its opposite mate. What had been the earth fill behind it was a mass of sprawling semiliquid mud. Sodden by days of rain and heavy with water, the fill had come to act like water behind a dam and sim- ply pushed along the line of least resistance. The now practically weightless retaining wall gave way, since there was only friction to hold it where it should be. The two great black steel-girders that it sup- ported lay at an awkward angle half in the pit where the underpass had been, half sticking up into the air. “Gosh,” said Elmer, gazing at the spectacle. “Do you suppose I did that?” “I’m afraid you did,” I said. “Maybe concrete don’t need weight for strength, but it has to have something to hold it down.” Well, the damage was done, and Elmer was scared. A train was due soon and something had to be done about it. So we drove on to the first farmhouse that had a phone and sent in word about a washout. After that we went on home, Elmer being pretty chastened. The days that followed were quite hectic. The more the railroad and public utility commission engineers studied the retaining wall’s failure, the more baffled they became. The abutment itself was unmarred in the least degree. There was not a crack in it, and only a few chipped places where the falling girders had knocked corners off. Experts chis- eled chunks of it and took them to dozens of engineering labs. The records of the contracting firm that built it were overhauled. The wall was up to specifications and had been thoroughly inspected at the time of construction. The frag- ments subjected to strains and stresses reacted as they should, hav- ing exactly the tensile and compres- sion strength it should have. The mix was right, the ingredients with- out flaw. The hitch was that the stuff under examination had about the same weight as an equal volume of t>alsa wood! Learned treatises began to ap- pear in the engineering journals under such titles as, “Weight Loss in Mature Concretes,” “Extraordi- nary Deterioration Noted in Failure of Concrete Railway Abutment,” and so on. Throughout the whole strange controversy Elmer never peeped, and neither did I. I kept silent for several reasons, and only one of them was the fact that I had given Elmer my pledge not to divulge his invention before he gave the word. Mainly I felt that what- ever I might tell them would be re- TRICKY TONNAGE es

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ceived as too ridiculous to be be- lieved. After all, people just don't go around sapping idle weight from stationary objects. The sequel to the incident has to remain obscure. The very ride that let me into the secret proved also to be the cause of my being ex- cluded from it thereafter. I caught a cold that day, and before long it turned into pneumonia. Complica- tions followed, and there were some months when I was confined to a hospital bed. When I was out again and around, my neighbor Elmer had gone, presumably in search of wider fields. It is a pity that Elmer’s unfor- tunate experience with his earlier invention soured him on the usual channels of development, for I 64 think what happened to him later was that he got into the hands of unscrupulous promoters. For quite a long time after the collapse of the railroad crossing I heard nothing of Elmer himself or his world-shaking discovery. But little bits of news kept cropping up that indicated to me that while Elmer’s secret was being kept, it was not getting rusty from disuse, though he lacked the necessary business imagination ever to put it to its best uses. There was the phenomenal suc- cess of Trans-America "Trucking, for example. It was significant to me that the Eastern terminus of its main haul was laid out in the bottom of an abandoned rock quarry and its Pacific end in a deep canyon. I thought I knew where the power ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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came from, especially when an oil salesman told me he had tried hard to get the Trans- America contract. They not only refused to buy from him, but he could not find out what company, if any, was supplying them. I also noted that Trans- America was continually embroiled in law suits arising from discrepan- cies in weights. I knew from that that Elmer had not yet solved the problem of metering his weight siphons. There were other straws that pointed to Elmer’s fine hand. High- way engineers along the routes trav- ersed chiefly by his trucks discov- ered after a time that even the dirt roads over which the trucks ran needed little or no binder. The sur- face soil was found to be incredibly heavy, like powdered lead, and therefore did not dust away under high-speed traffic. In the course of time it became as hard and com- pact as the floor of a machine shop where iron chips form the soil. But eventually there was trouble. Disloyal employees must have stolen lengths of Elmer’s mysterious gravi- ton conductor, for there was a story told in some glee of a policeman giving chase to a fleeing man who had a big iron safe on his shoul- ders! The burglar got away, so for a time Elmer’s secret was com- paratively safe. And then there was the exposure of what was later known as the spud racket. One of Trans- America’s ex- truckmen, being aware that potatoes were sold by the pound, saw oppor- tunity. He absconded with a length of Elmer’s cable and set himself up in the potato business. He was modest at first. The spuds he han- dled were overweight, but not too much too heavy when he resold them. The dieticians in the big in- stitutions were the first to notice something wrong, for they had analysts to interpret the figures. But greed got the best of the gangster truckman. Not content with his initial ten or twenty percent boosts in weight, he poured on the avoir- dupois thicker and thicker. The average housewife began to com- plain that big potatoes required all her strength to lift. The day the market inspectors raided the man’s storehouse the cat was out of the bag. They uncovered an endless stream of potatoes on a conveyor belt that ran by a bin filled with scrap iron. As each spud passed a certain point it was wiped by a wisp of mineral wool, where- upon the belt beneath sagged deeply and spilled the potatoes onto the floor. Cranes scooped them up and carried them to the packing depart- ment. The subsequent prosecution ran into a myriad legal difficulties. There was ample precedent for deal- ing with short weights, but none for artificially added surplus weight. Chemists sought to prove, once they tumbled to the concept of movable gravitons, that the introduction of ferrous gravitons into a food prod- uct constituted a willful adultera- tion. They failed. The composition of the potatoes was no more altered than , is that of iron when tempo- rarily magnetized. In the end the «6 TRICKY TONNAGE

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case was thrown out of court, much to the anger of some theologians who had also developed an interest in the case. That there was at once a spate of laws forbidding the alteration of natural weights was inevitable. State after state enacted them, and the Interstate Commerce Commis- sion began an investigation of Trans- America Trucking, damaging admissions having been made by the potato racketeer. It was the col- lapse of one of the cliffs at the western terminus of that company that was the straw to break the camel’s back. Weight shifting be- came a federal offense with drastic penalties. Perhaps collapse is a badly chosen word. The cliff disintegrated, but it did not fall. It soared. It happened late one afternoon shortly after a heavy convoy ar- rived from the east. Thousands of tons of weight had to be made up, and the power units of the incoming trucks recharged with still more weight. The already lightened cliff yielded up its last pounds, for it had been drawn upon heavily for a long time. Its stone, being loosely strati- fied, lacked cohesion, so with sound effects rivaling those of the siege of Stalingrad, it fell apart — upward — in a cloud of dust and boulders. The fragments, though stone, weighed virtually nothing, rose like balloons and were soon dispersed by the winds. Unfortunately the canyon was not far from the most traveled transcontinental air route. Within an hour pilots were reporting seeing what they described as inert bodies floating in the upper air. One of them ran into a stone no bigger than his fist, but since he was mak- ing several hundred miles an hour at the time, it neatly demolished one of his wings. That night two stratoliners were brought down, both riddled with imponderable gravel. The debris while lighter than air, still had some residual weight and unimpaired tensile strength. Congress intervened. Trans- America’s charter was voided and its equipment confiscated and de- stroyed. Elmer was forbidden to resume business except in orthodox lines. There was no place in the United States for his invention. That should have been the end of the Theory of Gravities and its un- happy applications. But it was not. For Elmer had associates by that time who had tasted the luxury of sure and easy profits, and they were not to be denied. Rumor had it that it was his shady partners who took over the financial end and relegated him to his lab again to hunt for other means of utilizing his kineticizcr. However that may be, the next stage was several years in incubation. For a time gravitons ceased to be news except in scienti- fic circles where controversies pro and con still raged. People had already begun to forget when Caribbean Power announced itself to the world. It started operating from a tiny island republic known as Cangrejo Key. Through oversight, or be- ASTOUNDING SC IE MCE F ICT I ON

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cause it was a worthless patch of coral sand frequently swept by hur- ricanes, mention of it was omitted in the treaty between the United States and Spain at the end of the war of 1898. It was still Spanish until the graviton syndicate bought it from an impoverished Franco for a few millions in real gold. Where- upon the Cangrejo Commonwealth was set up as an independent state and a law to itself. By then they had one valuable addition to their bag of tricks — Elmer’s third great invention. It was a transmitter of beamed radio electric power, and they promptly entered into contracts with large industries in nearby America for the sale of unlimited broadcast power at ridiculously low rates. At first the great maritime powers pro- tested, suspecting what was afoot and fearing the incalculable effects on shipping if Caribbean Power meant to rob the sea of its weight. But the storm subsided • when the new republic assured them sea water would not be touched. They pledged themselves to draw only from the potential energy of the island they owned. So the world settled down and forgot its fears. No matter what happened to Cangrejo Key, there was the promise of abundant cheap power, and at the worst one coral islet more or less did not matter. Even if its sands did float off into the sky as had the canyon wall on the Pacific Coast they could do little harm, the Key being well off the air lanes. It was a premature hope, for they reckoned without the ingenuity of the men behind the scheme. Soon great derricks reared themselves on You skim off beards in swingtime, men. With Thin Gillette Blades— four for ten! Your fare looks well-groomed, feels top-grade. And you get lots more shaves per blade! Top Quality at Rock-Bottom Price Produced By The Maker Of The Famous Gillette Blue Blade TRICKY TONNAGE AST— 3S 67

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the Key and drills began biting their way into the earth. By the time the holes reached eight miles depth the transmission towers were built and ready. Then came the flow of power, immense and seemingly in- exhaustible. A battery of kinetici- zer-dynamos commenced operat- ing, suspended by cables deep into the bowels of the planet, converting the weight that was overhead into kilowatts which were sent up to the surface through copper wires. There it was converted into radio power waves and broadcast out to the customers. It was good, clean power. Industry was grateful. How deep the syndicate eventu- ally sunk its shafts no one ever knew. Nor how many millions of tons of earth weight were converted into electric energy and spewed out to the factories of the world. But it took only a few years for the project to revolutionize modern economics. With power literally as cheap as air, coal holdings became worthless and petroleum nearly so. In the heydey of the power boom cities like New York went so far as to install outdoor heating units so that in the coldest of cold waves its citizens could still stroll about without overcoats. There was no point in conservation any more. Old- Terra Firma had gravitons to burn. The beginning of the payoff came with the Nassau disaster. The town was flattened by a mighty earthquake, and the attendant tidal wave left little of the Florida coastal cities. When the tremors died THE 61 down the British Empire found it had added another island of near continental size to its realm. The Bahama Bank had risen above water and then stood from ten to fifty feet above sea level throughout. But there was a rider attached to that dubious blessing. The bed of the Florida Straits had risen corres- pondingly and the current of the Gulf Stream diminished. Europeans began to worry about the effect of that upon their climate. Isostatic adjustment was respon- sible, sober geologists warned darkly. Let the Caribbean Power gang continue to rob that region of its proper weight there would be nothing to hold it down. Adjacent geographical masses would push in to fill the vacuum, just as the under- lying, restless, semifluid magma would push up. The time would soon come when mountains rivaling the Himalayas would rear loftily where the Bahama Bank had been and when that day came the other islands about it and the nearby continental areas might well be only shoal spots in a shallowing sea. The Republic of Cangrejo had to go. It was a matter for the new United Nations Court to decide. Well, that’s the story of Elmer Nicklheim’s kineticizer as I know it. I am still wondering whether he was with the gang the day the bombers came over and blasted Caribbean Power off the map. If he was, I think he must have been ' a prisoner, for the gang he at -last teamed up with turned out to be an arrogant, greedy lot. END. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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Firing Line by GEORGE O. SMITH Hellion Murdoch was on the loose, es- caped and deadly — and out to get Don Channmg. A top-rank gadgeteer on the loose , however, can be devastatmgly deadly himself — Illustrated by Orban Mark Kingman was surprised by the tapping on his windowpane. He thought that the window was unreachable from the outside — and then he realized that it was prob- ably someone throwing bits of dirt or small stones. But who would do that when the doorway was free for any bell-ringer? He shrugged, and went to the window to look out — and become cross-eyed as his eyes tried to cope with a single circle not more than ten inches distant. He could see the circle — and the lands on the in- side spiraling into the depths of the barrel, and a cold shiver ran up his spine from there to here. Behind the heavy automatic, a dark -com- plected man with a hawklike face grinned mirthlessly. Kingman stepped back and the stranger swung in and sat upon the windowsill. “Well?” asked the lawyer. “Is it well?” asked the stranger. “You know me?” “No. Never saw you before in my life? Is this a burglary?” “Nope. If it were, I’d have drilled you first so you couldn’t de- scribe me.” Kingman shuddered. The stran- ger looked as though he meant it. “In case you require an intro- duction,” said the hard-faced man, firing line

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“I’m Allison Murdoch.” “Hellion?” “None other.” “You were in jail — ” “I know. I’ve been there be- fore.” “But how did you escape?” “I’m a doctor of some repute,” said Hellion. “Or was, until my darker reputation exceeded my reputation for neural surgery. It was simple. I slit my arm and de- posited therein the contents of a cigarette. It swelled up like gan- grene and they removed me to the hospital. I removed a few guards and lit out in the ambulance. And I am here.” “Why?” Kingman then became thoughtful. “You’re not telling me this for mutual friendship, Mur- doch. What’s on your mind?” “You were in the clink, too. How did you get out?” “The court proceedings were un- der question for procedure. It was further ruled that — ” “I see. You bought your way out.” “I did not—” “Kingman, you’re a lawyer. A smart one, too.” “Thank you — ” “But you’re capable of buying your freedom, which you did. Fun- damentally, it makes no difference whether you bribe a guard to look the other way or bribe a jury to vote the other way. It’s bribery in either case.” Kingman smiled in a superior way. “With the very important difference that the latter means re- sults in absolute freedom. Bribing 7* a guard is freedom only so long as the law may be avoided.” “So you did bribe the jury?” “I did nothing of the sort. It was a ruling over a technicality that did me the favor.” “You created the technicality.” “Look,” said Kingman sharply. “You didn’t come here to steal by your own admission and your ex- cellent logic. You never saw, me before, and I do not know of you save what I’ve heard. Revenge for something real or fancied is obvi- ously no reason for this visit. I was charged with several kinds of larceny, which charges fell through and I was acquitted *)f them — which means that I did not commit them. I, therefore, am no criminal. On the other hand, you have a rec- ord. You were in jail, convicted, and you escaped by some means that may have included the act of first-degree murder. You came here for some reason, Murdoch. But let me tell you this: I am in no way required to explain the workings of my mind. If you ex- pect me to reveal some legal mach- ination by which I gained my freedom, you are mistaken. As far as the solar system is concerned, everything was legal and above board.” “I get it,” smiled Murdoch. “You’re untouchable.” “Precisely, And rightfully so.” “You’re the man I want, then.” “It isn’t mutual. I have no de- sire to be identified with a criminal of your caliber.” “What’s wrong with it?” asked Murdoch, ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION

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“It is fundamentally futile. You are not a brilliant criminal. You’ve been caught.” “I didn’t have the proper assist- ance. I shall not be caught again. Look,” he said suddenly, “how is your relationship with Venus Equi- lateral ?” Kingman gritted his teeth and made an animal noise. “I thought so. I have a score of my own to settle. But I need your help. Do I get it ?” “I can’t see how one of your cali- ber is capable — ” “Are you or aren’t you? Your answer may decide the duration of your life.” “You needn’t threaten. I’m will- ing to go to any lengths to get even with Channing and his crowd. But it must be good.” “I was beaten by a technical er- ror,” explained Murdoch. “The coating on my ship did it.” “How?” “They fired at me with a super electron-gun. A betatron. It hit me and disrupted the ship’s appa- ratus. The thing couldn’t have hap- pened if the standard space-finish hadn’t been applied to the Hippoc- rates.” “I’m not a technical man,” said Kingman. “Explain, please.” “The average ship is coated with a complex metallic oxide which among other things inhibits sec- ondary emission. Had we been run- ning a ship without this coating, the secondary emission would have left the Hippocrates in fair con- dition electronically, but the 'Relay Station would have received sev- eral times the electronic charge. But the coating accepted the terrific charge and prevented the normal urge of electrons to leave by sec- ondary emission — ” “What is secondary emission?” “When an electron hits at any velocity, it drives from one to as high as fifty electrons from the substance it hits. The quantity de- pends upon the velocity of the origi- nal electron, the charges on cathode and anode, the material from which the target is made, and so on. We soaked ’em in like a sponge and took it bad. But the next time, we’ll coat the ship with the oppo- site stuff. We’ll take a bit of Venus Equilateral for ourselves.” “I like the idea. But how ?” “We’ll try no frontal attack. Storming a citadel like Venus Equi- lateral is no child’s play, Kingman. As you know, they’re prepared for anything either legal or technical. I have a great respect for the com- bined abilities of Channing and Franks. I made my first mistake by giving them three days to make up their minds. In that time, they devised, tested, and approved an electron weapon of some power. Their use of it was as dangerous to them as it was to me — or would have been if I’d been prepared with a metallic-oxide coating of the proper type.” “Just what are you proposing?” asked Kingman. “I do not under- stand what you’re getting at.” “You are still one of the officials of Terran Electric?” “Naturally.” FIRING LINE 71

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“You will be surprised to know that I hold considerable stock in that company.” “How, may I ask?” “The last time you bucked them, you did it on the market. You lost,” grinned Murdoch. “Proving that you haven’t a one hundred per- cent record either. Well, while Terran Electric was dragging its par value down around the twos and threes, I took a few shares.” “How do you stand?” “I rather imagine that I hold fifteen or twenty percent.” “That took money.” “I have money,” said Murdoch modestly. “Plenty of it. I should have grabbed more stock, but I fig- ured that between us we have enough to do as we please. What’s your holdings?” “I once held forty-one percent. They bilked me out of some of that. I have less than thirty percent.” “So we’ll run the market crazy again, and between us we’ll take off control. Then, Kingman, we’ll use Terran Electric to ruin Venus Equi- | lateral.” “Terran Electric isn’t too good a company now,” admitted King- man. “The public stays away in huge droves since we bucked In- terplanetary Communications. That bunch of electronic screwballs , has the public acclaim. They’re now i in solid since they opened person-to- person phone on the driver fre- { quencies. You can talk to someone t in the Palanortis Country of Venus 1 with the same quality and speak- | ability that you get in making a call from here to the house across the street.” “Terran Electric is about fin- ished,” said Murdoch flatly. “They shot their wad and lost. You’ll be bankrupt in a year, and you know it.” “That includes you, doesn’t it?” “Terran Electric is not the main- stay of my holdings,” smiled Mur- doch. “Under assumed names, I have picked up quite a few bits. Look, Kingman, I’m advocating pi- racy !” “Piracy ?” asked Kingman aghast. “Illegal piracy. But I’m intelli- gent. I realize that a pirate hasn’t a chance against civilization un- Jess he is as smart as they are. We need a research and construction organization, and that’s where Ter- ran Electric comes in. It’s an old company, well established. It’s now on the rocks. ’ We can build it up again. We’ll use it for a base, and set the research boys to figuring out the answers we need. Eventually we’ll control Venus Equilateral, and half of the enterprises throughout the system.” “And your main plan?” “You run Terran Electric, and I'll run the space piracy. Between us we’ll have the system over a bar- rel. Space craft are still run with- out weapons, and no weapons are suited for space fighting. But the new field opened up by the driver radiation energy may exhibit some- thing new in weapons. That’s what I want Terran Electric to work on.” “We’ll have to plan a bit more,” said Kingman thoughtfully. * “I’ll ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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cover you up, and eventually we’ll buy you out. Meanwhile we’ll go to work on the market and get con- trol of Terran Electric. And plan, too. It’ll have to be foolproof.” “It will be,” said Murdoch. “We’ll plan it that way.” “We’ll drink on it,” said King- man. “You’ll drink on it,” said Mur- doch. “I never touch the stuff. I still pride myself on my skill with a scalpel, and I do not care to lose it. Frankly, I hope to keep it long enough to uncover the metatarsal bones of one Donald Channing, Di- rector of Communications.” Kingman shuddered. At times, murder had passed through his mind when thinking of Channing. But this cruel idea of vivisecting an enemy indicated a sadism that was far beyond Kingman’s idea of revenge. Of course, Kingman never considered that ruining a man financially, reducing him to ab- solute dependency upon friends or government, when the man had spent his life in freedom and plenty — the latter gained by his ability under freedom — was cruel and in- human. And yet it would take a com- pletely dispassionate observer to tell which was worse; to ruin a man’s body or to ruin a man’s life. The man in question was oblivi- ous to these plans on his future. He was standing before a compli- cated maze of laboratory glassware and a haywire tangle of electronic origin. He looked it over in puz- zlement, and his lack of enthusiasm bothered the other man. Wesley Farrell thought that his boss would have been volubly glad to see the fruits of his labor. “No doubt it’s wonderful,” smiled Channing. “But what is it, Wes?” “Why, I’ve been working on an alloy that will not sustain an arc.” “Go on. I’m interested even though I do not climb the chande- lier and scream, beating my manly chest.” “Oil switches are cumbersome. Any other means of breaking con- tact is equally cumbersome if it is to handle much power. My alloy is non-arcing. It will not sustain an arc, even though the highest cur- rent and voltage are broken.” “Now I am really interested,” admitted Channing.- “Oil switches in a spaceship are a definite draw- back.” “I know. So — here we are.” “What’s the rest of this stuff?” asked Channing, laying a hand on the glassware. “Be careful !” said Farrell in con- cern. “That’s hot stuff.” “Oh?” “In order to get some real volt- ages and currents to break without running the main Station bus through here, I cooked this stuff up. The plate-grilleworks in the large tubes exhibit a capacity between them of about one microfarad. Empty, that is, or I should say pre- cisely point nine eight microfarads in vacuuo. The fluid is of my own devising, concocted for the occa- sion, and has a dielectric constant of thirteen times ten to the sixth power. It — ” FI KINO LINE 7*

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“Great Howling Rockets !” ex- ploded Channing. “That makes the overall capacity equal to thirteen farads!” “Just about. Well, I have the condenser charged to three kilo- volts, and then I discharge it through this switch made of the non-arcing alloy. Watch! No, Don, from back here, please, be- hind this safety glass.” Channing made some discomfort- ing calculations about thirteen farads at three thousand volts charge and decided that there was something definitely unlucky about the number thirteen. “The switch, now,” continued Farrell, as though thirteen farads was just a mere drop in the bucket, “is opened four milliseconds after it is closed. The time-constant of the discharging resistance is such that the voltage is point eight three, of its peak three thousand volts, giving a good check of the alloy.” “I should think so,” groused Channing. “Eighty-three percent of three thousand volts is just shy of twenty-five hundred volts. The current of discharge passing through a circuit that will drop the charge in a thirteen farad condenser eighty-three percent in four milli- seconds will be something fierce, be- lieve me.” “That is why I use the heavy bus- bars from the condenser bank through the switch.” “I get it. Go ahead, Wes. I want to see this non-arcing switch of yours perform.” Farrell checked the meters, and then said “Now !” and punched the 74 switch at his side. Across the room a solenoid drove the special alloy bar between two clamps of similar metal. Almost immediately, four thousandths of a second later, to be exact, the solenoid reacted auto- matically and the no-arc alloy was withdrawn. A minute spark flashed briefly between the contacts. “And that is that,” said Chan- ning, slightly dazed by the magni- tude of it all, and the utter sim- plicity of the effects. “But look, Wes, may I ask you a favor? Please discharge that infernal ma- chine and drain that electrolyte out. Then make the thing up in a tool- steel case and seal it. Also hang on busbars right at the plates them- selves, and slap a peak-voltage fuse across the terminals. One that will close at anything above three thou - sand volts. Follow me?” “I think so. But that is not the main point of interest — ” “I know,” grinned Channing, mopping his forehead. “The non- arc is. But that fragile glassware makes me as jittery as a Mexican jumping bean.” “But why?” “Wes, if that glassware fractures somewhere, and that electrolyte drools out, you'll have a condenser of one microfarad — charged to thir- teen million times three thousand volts. Or, in nice, hollow, round numbers, forty billion volts! Four times ten to the tenth. Of course, it won’t get that far. It’ll arc across the contacts before it gets that high, but it might raise par- ticular hell on the way out. Take it easy, Wes. We’re seventy million- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION

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odd miles from the nearest large body of dirt, all collected in a little steel bottle about three miles long and a mile in diameter. I’d hate to stop all interplanetary communica- tions while we scraped ourselves off of the various walls and treated our- selves for electric shock. It would — the discharge itself, I mean — raise hell with the equipment any- way. So play it easy, Wes. We do not permit certain experiments out here because of the slow neu- trons that sort of wander through here at fair density. Likewise, we- cannot permit dangerous experi- ments. And anything that includes a dangerous experiment must be out, too.” “Oh,” said Wes. His voice and attitude were together crestfallen. “Don’t take it so hard, fella,” grinned Channing. “Anytime we have to indulge in dangerous ex- periments, we always do it with an assistant — and in one of the blister- laboratories. But take that fragile glassware out of the picture and I’ll buy it,” he finished. Walt Franks entered and asked what was going on. “Wes was just demonstrating the latest equipment in concentrated deviltry,” smiled Channing. “That’s my department,” said Walt. “Oh, it’s nojt as bad as your stuff,” said Channing. “What he’s got here is an alloy that will break several million watts without an arc. Great stuff, Walt.” “Sounds swell,” said Walt. “Bet- ter scribble it up and we’ll get a FIRING LINE patent. It sounds useful.” “I think it may bring us a bit of change,” said Channing. “It’s great stuff, Wes.” “Thanks. It annoyed me to see those terrific oil-breakers we have here. All I wanted to do was to replace ’em with something smaller and more efficient.” “You did, Wes. And that isn't all. How did you dream up that high-dielectric?” , “Applied several of the physical phenomena.” “That’s a good bet, too. We can use several fluids of various dielec- tric constants. Can you make solids as well?” “Not as easily. But I can try — ?” . “Go ahead and note anything you find above the present, listed com- pounds and their values.” “I’ll list everything, as I always do.” “Good. And the first thing to do is to can that stuff in a steel case.” “It’ll have to be plastalloy.” “That’s as strong as steel and nonconducting. Go ahead.” Channing led Franks from the laboratory, and once outside Chan- ning gave way to a session of the shakes. “Walt,” he asked plain- tively, “take me by the hand and lead me to Joe’s. I need some vita- mins.” “Bad?” “Did you see that glassblower’s nightmare ?” “You mean that collection of cut glass?” grinned Walt. “Uh-huh. It looked as though it were about to collapse of its own dead weight.” “That held an electrolyte of di- 75

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electric constant thirteen times ten to the sixth. He had it charged to a mere three thousand volts. Ye Gods, Walt. Thirteen farads at three KV. Whew. And when he discharged it, the confounded leads that went through the glass side- walls to the condenser plates posi- tively glowed in the cherry red. I swear it!” “He’s like that,” said Walt. “You shouldn’t worry about him. He’ll have built that condenser out of good stuff — the leads will be al- loys like those we use in the bigger tubes. They wouldn’t fracture the glass seals no matter what the tem- perature difference between them and the glass was. Having that al- loy around the place — up in the tube -maintenance department they have a half ton of quarter-inch rod ■ — he’d use it naturally.” “Could be, Walt. Maybe I’m a worry wart.” “You’re not used to working with his kind.” “I quote : ‘Requiring a high volt- age source of considerable current capacity, I hit upon the scheme of making a super-high capacity con- denser and discharging it through my no-arc alloy. To do this it was necessary that I invent a dielectric material of C equals thirteen times ten to the sixth.’ Unquote.” “Wes is a pure scientist," re- minded Walt. “If he were investi- gating the electrical properties of zinc, and required solar power mag- nitudes to complete his investiga- tion, he’d invent it and then include it as incidental to the investigation on zinc. He’s never really under- ,3«. stood our recent divergence in pur- pose over the power tube. That we should make it soak up power from Sol was incidental and useful only as a lever or means to make Terran Electric give us our way. He’d have forgotten it, I’ll bet, since it was not the ultimate goal of the in- vestigation.” “He knows his stuff, though.” “Granted. Wes is brilliant. He is a physicist, though, and neither engineer nor inventor. I doubt that he is really interested in the practi- cal aspects of anything that is not directly concerned with his eating and sleeping.” “What are we going to do about him ?” “Absolutely nothing. You aren’t like him — ” “I hope not.” “And conversely, why should we try to make him like you ?” “That I’m against !” chimed in a new voice. Arden Channing took each man by the arm and looked up on either side of her, into one face and then the other. “No matter how, why, when, who, or what, one like him is all that the solar system can stand.” “Walt and I are pretty much alike.” “Uh-huh. You are. That’s as it should be. You balance one an- other nicely. You couldn’t use an- other like you. You’re speaking of Wes Farrell?” “Right.” “Leave him alone,” said Arden sagely. “He’s good as he is. To make him similar to you would be to spoil a good man. He’d then be ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. He doesn’t think as you do, but instead proceeds in a straight line from re- mote possibility to foregone conclu- sion. Anything that gets needed en route is used, or gadgeteered and forgotten. That’s where you come in, fellows. Inspect his by-prod- ucts. They may be darned useful.” “O. K. Anybody care for a drink?” “Yup. All of us,” said Arden. "Don, how did you rate such a good-looking wife?” ‘‘I hired her,” grinned Channing. "She used to make all my steno- graphic mistakes, remember?” “And gave up numerous small errors for one large one ? Uh-huh. I recall. Some luck.” "It was my charm.” “Baloney. Arden, tell the truth. Didn’t he threaten you with some- thing terrible if you didn’t marry him ?” "You tell him,” grinned Chan- ning. “I’ve got work to do.” Channing left the establishment known as Joe’s and advertised as the “Best bar in twenty-seven mil- lion miles, minimum,” and made his way toward his office slowly. He didn’t reach it. Not right away. He was' intercepted by Charley Thomas who invited him to view a small experiment. Channing smiled and said that he’d prefer to see an experiment of any kind to going to his office, and followed Charley. “You recall the gadget we use to get perfect tuning with the alloy- selectivity transmitter ?” "You mean that variable alloy disk all bottled up and rotated with a selsyn?” asked Don, wondering what came next. "Naturally I re- member it. Why?” “Well, we’ve found that certain submicroscopic effects occur with inert objects. What I mean is this: Given a chunk of cold steel of goodly mass and tune your alloy- disk to pure steel, and you can get a few micro-microamperes output if the tube is pointed at the object.” “Sounds interesting. How much amplification do you need to get this reading and how do you make it tick?” “We run the amplifier up to the limit and then sweep the tube across the object sought, and the output meter leaps skyward by just enough to make us certain of our results. Watch !” Charley set the tube in operation and checked it briefly. Then he took Don’s hand and put it on the handle that swung the tube on its gimbals. “Sort of paint the wall with it,” he said. “You’ll see the deflection as you pass the slab of tool steel that’s standing there.” Channing did, and watched the minute flicker of the ultra-sensitive meter. “Wonderful,” he grinned, as the door opened and Franks en- tered. “Hi, Don. Is it true that you bombarded her with flowers?” “Nope. She’s just building up some other woman’s chances. Have you seen this effect?” “Yeah — it’s wonderful, isn’t it?” “That’s what I like about this place,” said Charley with a huge smile. “That’s approximately seven FIRING MNE 77

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micro-microamperes output after amplification on the order of two hundred million times. We’re either working on something so small we can’t see it or something so big we can’t count it. It’s either fifteen decimal places to the left or to the right. Every night when I go home, I say a little prayer. I say: ‘Dear God, please let me find something today that is based upon unity, or at least no more than two decimal places’ but it is no good. If He hears me at all, He’s too busy to bother with things that the human race classifies as ‘One.’ ” “How do you classify resistance, current, and voltage?” asked Chan- ning, manipulating the tube on its gimbals and watching the effect. “One million volts across ten megohms equals one hundred thou- sand microamperes. That's accord- ing to Ohm’s Law.” “He’s got the zero-madness too,” chuckled Walt, “it obtains from thinking in astronomical distances, with interplanetary coverages in watts, and celestial input, and stuff like that. Don, this thing may be handy, some day. I’d like to de- velop it.” “I suggest that couple of stages of tube-amplification might help. Amplify it before transduction into electronic propagation.” “We can get four or five stages of sub-electronic amplification, I think. 7* ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION

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It’ll tike some working.” “O. K., Charley. Cook ahead. We do not know whither we are heading, but it looks darned inter- esting.” “Yeah,” added Walt, “it’s a darned rare scientific fact that can’t be used for something, some- where. Well, Don, now what?” “I guess we now progress to the office and run through a few reams of paper-work. Then we may re- lax.” “O. K. Sounds good to me. Let’s go.” Hellion Murdoch pointed to the luminous speck in the celestial globe. His finger stabbed at the marker button, and a series of faint concentric spheres marked the dis- tance from the center of the globe to the object, which Murdoch read and mentioned : “Twelve thousand miles.” “Asteroid?” asked Kingman. “What else?” asked Murdoch. “We’re lying next to the Asteroid Belt.” “What are you going to do?” “Burn it,” said Murdoch. His fingers danced upon the keyboard, and high above him, in the dome of the Black Widow, a power in- take tube swiveled and pointed at Sol. Coupled to the output of the power intake tube, a power output tube turned to point at the asteroid. And Murdoch’s poised finger came down on the last switch, closing the final circuit. Meters leaped tip across their scales as the intangible beam of solar energy came silently in and went as silently out. It passed across the intervening miles with the velocity of light squared, and hit the asteroid. A second later the asteroid glowed and melted under the terrific bombardment of solar energy directed in a tight beam. “It’s O. K„” said Hellion. “But have the gang build us three larger tubes to be mounted turret wise. Then we can cope with society.” “What do you hope to gain by that? Surely piracy and grand lar- ceny are not profitable in the light of what we have and know.” “I intend to institute a reign of terror.” “You mean to go through with your plan ?” “I am a man of my word. 1 shall levy a tax against each and every ship leaving any spaceport. We shall demand one dollar solarian for every gross ton that lifts from any planet and reaches the plan- etary limit.” “How do you establish that limit?” asked Kingman interest- edly. “Ironically, we’ll use the Chan- ning Layer,” said Murdoch with dark humor. “Since the Channing Layer describes the boundary be- low which our solar beam will not work. Our reign of terror will be identified with Channing because of that; it will take some of the praise out of people’s minds when they think of Channing and Interplan- etary Communications.” “That’s pretty deep psychology,” said Kingman. “You should recognize it,” smiled Murdoch. “That’s the kind of stuff FIRING MNK 79

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yon legal lights pull. Mention the accused in the same sentence with one of the honored people; mention the defendant in the same breath with one of the hated people — it’s the same stunt. Build them up or tear them down by reference.” “You’re pretty shrewd.” “1 am,” agreed Murdoch pla- cidly. “Mind telling me how you found yourself in the fix you’re in?” “Not at all. I’ve been interested for years in neuro-surgery. My re- searches passed beyond the realm of rabbits and monkeys, and I found it necessary to investigate the more delicate, more organized, the higher- strung. That means human beings — though some of them are less sensitive than a rabbit and less deli- cate than a monkey.” Murdoch’s eyes took on a cynical expression at this. Then it passed and he con- tinued : “I became famous, as you know. Or do you?” Kingman shook his head. “I suppose not. I became fa- mous in my own circle. Lesser neuro-surgeons sent their complex cases to me; unless you were com- plex, you would never hear of Al- lison Murdoch. Well anyway, some of them offered exciting opportuni- ties. I — frankly, experimented. Some of them died. It was quite a bit of cut and try because not too much has been written on the finer points of the nervous system. But there were too few people who were complex enough to require my services, and I turned to clinical work, and experimented freely.” “And there you made your mis- take ?” “Do you know how ?” “No. I imagine that with many patients you exceeded your rights once too often.” “Wrong. It is a funny factor in human relationship. Something that makes no sense. When people were paying me three thousand dol- lars an hour for operations, I could experiment without fear. Some died, some regained their health un- der my ministrations. But when I experimented on charity patients, I could not experiment because of the ‘Protection’ given the poor. The masses were not to be guinea pigs. Ha!” laughed Murdoch, “only the rich are permitted to be subjects of an experiment. Touch not the poor, who offer nothing. Experiment upon those of intellect, wealth, fame, or anything that sets them above the mob. Yes, even genius came under my knife. But I couldn’t give a poor man a fifty-fifty chance at his life, when the chances of his life were less than one in ten. From a brilliant man, operating under fifty-fifty chances for life, I be- came an inhuman monster that cut without fear. I was imprisoned, and later escaped with some friends.” “And that’s when you stole the Hippocrates and decided that the solar system should pay you re- venge-money ?” “I would have done better if I had not made that one mistake. I forgot that in the years of imprison- ment, I fell behind in scientific knowledge. I know - now that no so ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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one can establish anything at all without technical minds behind him.” Kingman’s lips curled. “I wouldn’t agree to that.” “You should. Your last defeat at the hands of the technicians you scorn should have taught you a les- son. If you had been sharp, you would have outguessed them; out- engineered them. They, Kingman, were not afraid to rip into their de- tector to see what made it tick.” “But I had only the one — ” “They knew one simple thing about the universe. That rule is that if anything works once, it may be made to work again.” He held up his hand as Kingman started to speak. “You’ll bring all sorts of cases to hand and try to disprove me. You can’t. Oh, you couldn’t cause a quick return of the diplo- docus, or re-enact the founding of the solar government, or even re- burn a ton of coal. But there is other carbon, there will be other governmental introductions and re- forms, and there may some day be the rebirth of the dinosaur — on some planet there may be carbonif- erous ages now. Any phenomena that is a true phenomena — and your detector was definite, not a misin- terpretation of effect — can be re- peated. But, Kingman, we’ll not be outengineered again.” “That I do believe.” “And so we will have our re- venge on Interplanetary Communi- cations and upon the system itself.” “We’re heading home now?” “Right. We want this ship fitted with the triple turret I mentioned before. Also I want the intercon- necting links between the solar in- take and the power-projectors beefed up. When you’re passing several hundred megawatts through any system, losses of the nature of .000,000,1% cause heating to a dan- gerous degree. We’ve got to cut the I2R losses. I gave orders that the turret be started, by the way. It’ll be almost ready when we re- turn.” “ You gave orders?” said King- man. “Oh yes,” said Hellion Murdoch with a laugh. “Remember our last bout with the stock market? I seem to have accumulated about forty-seven percent. That’s suffi- cient to give me control of our company.” “But . . . but — ” spluttered King- man. “That took money — ” “I still have enough left,” said Murdoch quietly. “After all, I spent years in the Melanortis Coun- try of Venus. I was working on the Hippocrates when I wasn’t do- ing a bit of mining. There’s a large vein of platiniridium there. You may answer the rest.” “I still do not get this piracy.” Murdoch’s eyes blazed. “That’s my interest. That’s my revenge! I intend to ruin Don Channing and Venus Equilateral. With the super turret they’ll never be able to catch us, and we’ll run the entire system.” Kingman considered. As a law- yer, he was finished. His last try at the ruination of the Venus Equi- lateral crowd by means of pirating the interplanetary communications flRINO LINK

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beam, well that was strictly a viola- tion of the Communications Code. The latter absolutely prevented any man or group of men from divert- ing communications not intended for them and using these communi- cations for their own purpose. His defense that Venus Equilateral had also violated the law went unheard. It was pointed out to him that Venus Equilateral tapped his own line, and the tapping of an illegal line was the act of a comfnunications agent in the interest of the government. He was no longer a lawyer, and in tact he had escaped a long jail term by sheer bribery. He was barred from legal prac- tice, and he was barred from any business transactions. The stock market could be manipulated, but only through a blind, which was neither profitable nor safe. His holdings in Terran Electric was all that stood between him and ruin. He was no better off than Murdoch, save that he was not wanted. But — “I’m going to remain on Terra and run Terran Electric like a model company,” he said. “That’ll be our base.” “Right. Except for a bit of re- search along specified lines, you will do nothing. Your job will be to act apologetic for your misdeeds. You will grovel on the floor before any authority, and beseech the legal profession to accept you once more. T will need your help, there. You are to establish yourself in the good graces of the Interplanetary Patent Office and report to me any applica- nt tions that may be of interest. The research that Terran Electric will conduct will be along innocuous lines. The real research will be conducted in a secret laboratory. The one in the Melanortis Country. Selected men will work there, and the Terran Electric fleet of cargo- carriers will carry the material needed. My main failure was not to have provided a means of know- ing what the worlds were doing. I’ll have that now, and I shall not be defeated again.” “We’ll say that one together!” said Kingman. He flipped open a large book and set the autopilot from a set of figures. The Black Widow turned gently and started to run for Terra at 2-G. Walt Franks frowned at the memorandum in his hand. “Look, Don, are we ever going to get to work on that deal with Keg John- son ?” “Uh-huh,” answered Don, with- out looking up. “He’s serious. Transplanet is getting the edge, and he doesn’t like it.” “Frankly, I don’t like dabbling in stuff like that either. But Keg’s an old friend, and I suppose that’s how a guy gets all glommed up on projects, big business deals, and so forth. We’ll be going in directly. Why the rush?” “A bit of personal business on Mars which can best be done at the same time, thus saving an addi- tional trip.” “O. K.,” said Don idly. “Might ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -PICT ION

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as well get it over with. Can you pack in an hour?” “Sure. I’ll be there.” Actually, it was less than an hour before the Relay Girl went out of the South End Landing Stage, turned, and headed for Mars. Packing to the Charmings was a matter of persuading Arden not to take everything but the drapes in the apartment along with her, while for Walt Franks it was a matter of grabbing a trunkful of instruments and spare parts. Space travel is a matter of waiting for days in the confines of a small bubble of steel. Just waiting. For the scenery is unchanging all the way from Sol to Pluto — and is the same scenery that can be seen from the viewports of Venus Equilateral. Walt enjoyed his waiting time by tinkering; hav- ing nothing to do would have bored him, and so he took with him enough to keep him busy during the trip. At two" Terran gravities, the velocity of the Relay Girl built up bit by bit and mile by mile until they were going just shy of one thousand miles per second. This occurred an hour before turnover, which would take place at the twenty-third hour of flight. And at that time there occurred a rarity. Not an impossibility like the chances of collision with a me- teor, those things happen only once in a lifetime, and Channing had had his collision. Nor was it as remote as getting a royal flush on the deal. It happened, not often, but it did happen to some ships occasionally. Another ship passed within de- tector range. The celestial globe glimmered faintly and showed a minute point at extreme range. Automatic marker spheres appeared concentri- cally within the celestial globe and colures and diameters marked the globe off into octants. A dim red line appeared before the object, giving the probable course of the object. Bells rang briefly, and the auto- matic meteor circuits interpreted the orbit of the oncoming object and decided that the object was not dan- gerous. Then they relaxed. Their work was done until another ob- ject came within range for them to inspect. They were no longer in- terested, and they forgot about the object with the same powers of com- plete oblivion that they would have exerted on a meteor of niekle and iron. They were mechanically in- capable of original thought. So the object, to them, was harmless. Channing looked up at the lumi- nescent spot, sought the calibration spheres, made a casual obesrvation, and forgot about it. To him it was a harmless meteor. Even the fact that his own ve- locity was a thousand miles per second, and the object’s velocity was the same, coming to them on a one hundred and seventy degree course and due to pass within five thousand miles did not register. Their total velocity of two thou- sand miles did not register just be- cause of that rarity with which ships pass within detector range, while as FIRING GINB

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meteors are encountered often. Had Channing been thinking about the subject in earnest, he would have known — for it is only man, with all too little time, who uses such velocities. The universe, with eternity in which to work her miracle, seldom moves in velocities greater than forty or fifty miles per second. Channing forgot it, and as the marker-spheres switched to accom- modate the approaching object, he turned to more important things. In the other ship, Hellion Mur- doch frowned. He brightened, then, and depressed the plunger that energized his solar beam and projector. He did not recognize the oncoming object for anything but a meteor, either, and his desire was to find out how his invention worked at top speeds. Kingman asked: “Another one?” “Uh-huh,” said Murdoch idly, “1 want to check my finders.” “But they can’t miss.” “No? Look, lawyer, you’re not running a job that may be given a stay or a reprieve. The finders run on light velocities. The solar beam runs on the speed of light squared. We’ll pass that thing at five thou- sand miles and at two thousand ac- cumulative miles per second. A microsecond of misalignment, and we’re missing, see? I think we’re going to be forced to put correction circuits in so that the vector sums and velocities and distances will all come out with a true hit. It will not be like sighting down a search- light beam at high velocity.” “I see. You’ll need compensa- tion ?” “Plenty, at this velocity and dis- tance. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to try it out.” The latter fact saved the Relay Girl. By a mere matter of feet, and inches ; by the difference between the speed of light and the speed of light squared at a distance of five thou- sand miles, plus a slight miscom- pensation. The intolerably hot um- bra of Murdoch’s beam followed below the pilot’s greenhouse of the Relay Girl all the way past, a matter of several seconds. The spill-over was tangible enough to warm the Relay Girl to uncomfortable tem- peratures. Then with no real damage done, the contact with ships in space was over, but not without a certain mini- mum of recognition. “Hell!” said Kingman. “That was a space craft.” “Who?” “I don’t know. You missed.” “I’d rather have hit,” said Mur- doch coldly. "I hope I missed by plenty.” “Why?” “If we scorched their tails any, there’ll be embarrassing questions asked.” “So— ?” “So nothing until we’re asked. Even then you know nothing.” In the Relay Girl, Channing mopped his forehead. “That was hell itself,” he said. Arden laughed uncertainly. “I thought that it would wait until we ASTOUNDING SO IE NCE-FICT ION

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got there; I didn’t expect hell to come after us.” “What — exactly — happened?” asked Walt, coming into the scan- ning room. “That — was a spaceship." “One of this system’s?” “I wonder,” said Don honestly. “It makes a guy wonder. It was gone too fast to make certain. It probably was Solarian, but they tried to burn us with something.” “That makes it sound like some- thing alien,” admitted Walt. “But that doesn’t make good sense.” “It makes good reading,” laughed Channing. “Walt, you’re the Boy Edison. Have you been tinkering with anything of lethal leanings?” “You think there may be some- thing powerful afloat?” “Could be. We don’t know every- thing.” “I’ve toyed with the idea of coupling a solar intake beam with one of those tubes that Baler and Carroll found. Recall, they smashed up quite a bit of Lincoln Head before they uncovered the secret of how to handle it. Now that we have unlimited power — or are lim- ited only by the losses in our own system — we could, or should be able to, make something rawther tough.” “You’ve toyed with the idea, hey ?” “Uh-huh.” “Of course you haven’t really tried it?” “Of course not.” “How did it work?” “Fair,” grinned Walt. “I did it witli miniatures only, «-ot course, since I couldn’t get my hooks on a full-grown tube.” “Say,” asked Arden, “how did you birds arrive at this idea so suddenly? I got lost at the first premise.” “We passed a strange ship. We heated up to uncomfortable tem- peratures in a matter of nine sec- onds flatC" They didn’t warm us with thought waves, or vector-in- vectives. Sheer dislike wouldn’t do it alone. I guess that someone is trying to do the trick started by our esteemed Mr. Franks here a year or so ago. Only with something prac- tical instead of an electron beam. Honest-to-goodness energy, right from Sol himself, funneled through some tricky inventions. Walt, that experiment of yours. Did you bring it along?” Walt looked downcast. “No,” he said. “It was another one.” “Let’s see.” “It’s not too good — ” “Same idea?” Walt went to get his experiment. He returned with a tray full of laboratory glassware, all wired into a maze of electronic equipment. Channing went white. “You, too?” he yelled. . “Take it easy, sport. This charges only to a hundred volts. We get thirteen hundred micro- farads at one hundred volts. Then we drain off the dielectric fluid, and get one billion three hundred million volts charge in a condenser of only one hundred micro-microfarads- It’s an idea for the nuclear physics boys. I think it may tend to so- lidify some of the uncontrollables PIKING LINE 85

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in the present system of developing high electron velocities.” “That thirteen million dielectric constant stuff is strictly electro- dynamite, I think,” said Charming. “Farrell may have developed it as a by-product, but I have a hunch that it will replace some heretofore valuable equipment. The Franks- Farrell generator will outdo Van- Der Graf’s little job, I think.” “Franks-Farrell ?” “Sure. Fie thunk up the dielec- tric. You thunk up the applica- tion. Fie won’t care, and you couldn’t have done it without. Fol- low?” “Oh sure. I was just trying to figure out a more generic term for it.” “Don’t. Let it go as is for now. It’s slick, Walt, but there’s no weapon in it.” "You're looking for a weapon?” “Uh-huh. Ever since Murdoch took a swing at Venus Equilateral, I’ve been sort of wishing that we could concoct something big enough and dangerous enough to keep us free from any other wiseacres. Re- member, we stand out there like a sore thumb. We are as vulnerable as a half pound of butter at a ban- quet for starving Armenians. The next screwball that wants to control the system will have to control Venus Equilateral first. And the best things we can concoct to date include projectile-tossing guns at velocities of less than the speed of our ships, and an electron-shooter that can be overcome by coating the ship with any of the metal-salts that enhance secondary emission.” “Remind me to requisition a set of full-sized tubes when we return. Might as well have some fun.” “O. K., you can have ’em. Which brings us back to the present. Ques- tion: Was that an abortive attempt upon our ship*1 or was that a mis- taken try at melting a meteor?” “I know how to find out. Let’s call Charley Thomas and have him get on the rails. We can have him request Terran Electric to give us any information they may have on energy beams to date.” “They’d tell you?” scorned Ar- den. “If they write no!, and we find out that they did, we’ll sue ’em dead. They’re too shaky to try anything deep right now.” “Going to make it an official re- quest, hey?” “Right. From the Station, it’ll go out in print, and their answer will be on the ’type, too, since busi- ness etiquette requires it. They’ll get the implication if they’re on the losing end. That’ll make ’em try something slick. If they’re honest, they’ll tell all.” “That’ll do it all right,” said Walt. “They’re too shaky to buck us any more. And if they are try- ing anything, it’ll show.” The rest of the trip was without incident. They put in at Canalopsis and found Keg Johnson with an of- ficial ’gram waiting for them. Don Channing ripped it open and read : Interplanetary Communications Attention Dr. Channing: No project for energy beam capable of removing meteors under way at Terran ea -Astounding science-fiction

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Electric, or at any of the subsidiary com- panies. Ideas suggested along these lines have been disproven by your abortive at- tempt of a year ago, and will not be con- sidered unless theory is substantiated in every way by practical evidence. If you are interested, we will delve into the subject from all angles. Please advise. Terran Electric Co. Board of Legal Operations Mark Kingman, LLD. Channing smiled wryly at Keg Johnson and told him of their trou- ble. “Oh?” said Keg, with a frown. “Then you haven’t heard?” “Heard what?” “Hellion Murdoch has been on the lose for weeks.” “Weeks!” yelled Channing. “Uh-huh. He feigned gangrene, was taken to the base hospital where he raised hob in his own, inimitable way. He blasted the communica- tions set-up completely, ruined three spaceships, and made off with the fourth. The contact ship just touched there recently and found hell brewing. If they hadn’t had a load of. supplies and prisoners for the place, they wouldn’t have known about it for months, perhaps.” “So! Brother Murdoch is loose again. Well! The story dovetails in nicely.” “You think that was Hellion him- self?” “I’d bet money on it. The official report on Hellion Murdoch said that he was suffering from a very silght peresecution complex, and that he was capable of making something of it if he got the chance. He’s slightly whacky, and danger- ously so.” “He’s a brilliant man, isn’t he?” “Quite. His name is well known in the circles of neuro-surgery. He is also known to be an excellent re- search worker in applied physics.” “Nuts, hey?” asked Walt. “Yeah, he’s nuts. But only in one way, Walt. He’s nuts to think that he is smarter than the entire solar system all put together. Well, what do we do now?” “Butter ourselves well and start scratching for the answer. That betatron trick will not work twice. There must be something.” “O. K, Walt. We’ll all help you think. I’m wondering how much research he had to do to develop that beam. After all, we were five thousand miles away, and he heated us up. He must’ve thought we were a meteor — and another thing, too — he must’ve thought that his beam was capable of doing something at five thousand miles distance or he wouldn’t have tried. Ergo he must have beaten that two hundred mile, bugaboo.” “We don’t know that the two hundred mile bugaboo is still bug- ging in space,” said Walt, slowly. “That’s set up so that the ioniza- tion-by-products are not dangerous. Also, he’s not transmitting power from station to station, et cetera. He’s ramming power into some sort of beam and to the devil with losses external to his equipment. The trouble is, darn it, that we’ll have to spend a month just building a large copy of my miniature set-up.” “A month is not too much time,” FIRING LINK 87

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agreed Charming. “And Murdoch will take a swing at us as soon as he gets ready to reach. We can have Charley start building the big tubes immediately, can’t we?” “Just one will be needed. We’ll use one of the standard solar in- take tubes that we’re running the Station from. There’s spare equip- ment aplenty. But the transmitter- terminal tube will take some build- ing.” “Can we buy one from Terran Electric?” “Why not? Get the highest rat- ing we can. That should be plenty. Terran probably has them in stock, and it’ll save us building one.” “What is their highest rating ?” “Two hundred megawatts.” “O. K. I’ll send ’em a coded requisition with my answer to their letter.” “What are you going to tell ’em ?” “Tell ’em not to investigate the energy-gun idea unless they want to for their own reasons,” Chan- ning grinned. “They’ll probably as- sume— and correctly — that we’re going to tinker ourselves.” “And?” “Will do nothing since it is an extra-planetary proposition. Un- less it becomes suitable for digging tunnels, or melting the Martian ice cap,” laughed Channing. Mark Kingman took the'letter to Murdoch, who was hidden in the depths of the Black Widow. Hel- lion read it twice, and then growled. “They smell something, sure,” he snarled. “Why didn’t we make s*. that a perfect hit!” “What are we going to do now ?” “Step up our plans. They’ll have this thing in a few weeks. Hm-m-m. They order a transmitter terminal tube. Have you got any in stock?” “Naturally. Not in stock, but available for the Northern Landing power-line order.” “You have none, then. You will have some available within a few days. That half -promise will stall them from making their own, and every day that they wait for your shipment is a day in our favor. To keep your own nose clean, I’ll tell you when to ship the tube. It’ll be a few days before I strike.” “Why bother?” asked Kingman. “They won’t be around to call names.” “No, but their friends will, and we want to keep them guessing.” “I see. Those tubes are huge enough to excite comment, and there will be squibs in all the papers telling of the giant going to Venus Equilateral, and the Sunday Sup- plements will all break out in wild guesses as to the reason why Venus Equilateral wants a two-hundred megawatt tube. Too bad you couldn’t keep your escape a longer secret.” “I suppose so. But it was bound to be out sooner or later anyway. A good general, Kingman, is one whose plans may be changed on a moment’s notice without sacrificing. We’ll win through.” The days wore on, and the big turret on the top of the Black Widow took shape. The super- tubes were installed, and Murdoch ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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worked in the bowels of the ship to increase the effectiveness of the course-integrators to accommodate high velocities and to correct for the minute discrepancies that would crop up due to the difference in ve- locities between light and sub-elec- tronic radiation. And on Venus Equilateral, the , losing end of a war of nerves was taking place. The correspondence by 'type was growing into a reason- able pile, while the telephone con- versations between Ter ran Electric and Venus Equilateral became a daily proposition. The big tubes were not finished. The big tubes were finished, but rejects because of electrode-misalignments. The big tubes were in the rework de- partment. The big tubes were on Luna for their testing. And again they were rejects because the maxi- mum power requirements were not met. They were returned to Evan- ston and were once more in the rework department. You have no idea how difficult the manufacture of two hundred megawatt tubes really is. So the days passed, and no tubes were available. The date passed which marked the mythical date of ‘if’ — If Venus Equilateral had FIRING LINE 89

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started tlicir own manufacturing di- vision on the day they were first ordered from Terran Electric, they would have been finished and avail- able. Then, one day, word was passed along that the big tubes were shipped. They were on their way, tested and approved, and would be at Venus Equilateral within two days. In the due course of time, they arrived, and the gang at the Relay Station went to work on them. But Walt Franks shook his head. "Don, we’ll be caught like a sitting rabbit.” “I know. But — ?” answered Channing. There was no answer to that question, and so they went to work again. The news of Murdoch’s first blow came that same day. It was a news report from the Interplanetary Net- work that the Titan Penal Colony had been attacked by a huge black ship of space that carried a huge dome-shaped turret on the top. Beams of invisible energy burned furrows in the frozen ground, and the official buildings melted and ex- ploded from the air pressure within them. The Titan station went off the ether with a roar, and the theo- rists believed that Murdoch’s gang had been augmented by four hun- dred and nineteen of the Solar Sys- tem’s most vicious criminals. “That rips it wide open,” said Channing. “Better get the folks to prepare to withstand a siege. I don’t -think they can take us.” “That devil might turn his beams on the Station itself, though,” said Walt. “He wants to control communica- tions.” “With the sub-electron beams we now have, he could do it on far less Station for some time. Not per- fectly, but he’d get along.” “Fine future,” gritted Channing. “This is a good time to let this project coast, Walt. We’ve got to start in from the beginning and walk down another track.” “It’s easy to say, chum.” “I know it. So far, all we’ve been able to do is to take energy from the solar intake beams and spray it out into space. It goes like the ar- row that went — we know not where.” “So?” “Forget these gadgets. Have Charley hook up the solar intake tubes to the spotter and replace the cathodes with pure thorium. I’ve got another idea.” “O. *K., but it sounds foolish to me.” Channing laughed. “We‘ll stale- mate him,” he said bitterly, and ex- plained to Walt. “I wonder when Murdoch will come this way?” “It’s but a matter of time,” said W’alt. “My bet is as soon as he can get here with that batch of fresh rats he’s collected.” Walt’s bet would have collected. Two days later, Hellion Murdoch flashed a signal into Venus Equi- lateral and asked for Channing. “Hello, Hellion,” answered Chan- ning. “Haven’t you learned to keep out of our way?” #o ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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worked in the bowels of the ship to increase the effectiveness of the course-integrators to accommodate high velocities and to correct for the minute discrepancies that would crop up due to the difference in ve- locities between light and sub-elec- tronic radiation. And on Venus Equilateral, the losing end of a war of nerves was taking place. The correspondence by ’type was growing into a reason- able pile, while the telephone con- versations between Terran Electric and Venus Equilateral became a daily proposition. The big tubes were not finished. The big tubes were finished, but rejects because of electrode-misalignments. The big tubes were in the rework de- partment. The big tubes were on Luna for their testing. And again they were rejects because the maxi- mum power requirements were not met. They were returned to Evan- ston and were once more in the rework department. You have no idea how difficult the manufacture of two hundred megawatt tubes really is. So the days passed, and no tubes were available. The date passed which marked the mythical date of ‘if’ — If Venus Equilateral had 89 FIRING LINE

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fort along another line.” “That’s not all— ?” “No. Frankly, I’m almost certain that your beam won’t do a thing to Venus Equilateral.” “We’ll see. Listen ! Turretman ! Are you ready?” Faintly, the reply came, and Channing could hear it. “Ready!” “Then fire all three. Pick your targets at will. One blast!” The lights in Venus Equilateral brightened. The thousands of line- voltage meters went from one hun- dred and twenty-five to one hun- dred and forty volts, and the line-frequency struggled with the crystal-control and succeeded in making a ragged increase from sixty to sixty point one five cycles per sec- ond. The power-output meters on the transmitting equipment went up briefly, and in the few remaining battery-supply rooms, the overload and overcharge alarms clanged until the automatic adjusters justified the input against the constant load. One of the ten-kilowatt modulator tubes •flashed over in the audio-room and was immediately cut from the op- erating circuit; the recording met- ers indicated that the tube had gone west forty-seven hours prior to its expiration date due to filament over- load. A series of fluorescent lighting fixtures in a corridor of the Station that should have been dark because of the working hours of that section, flickered into life and woke sev- eral of the workers, and down in the laboratory, Wes Farrell swore because the fluctuating line had dis- rupted one of his experiments, giv- ing him reason to doubt the result. 92 He tore the thing down and began once more; seventy days work had been ruined. “Well,” said Channing cockily, “is that the best you can do?” “You— !” “You forgot,” reminded Chan- ning, “that we have been working with solar power, too. In fact, we discovered the means to get it. Go ahead and shoot at us, -Murdoch. You’re just giving us more power.” “Cease firing!” exploded Mur- doch. “Oh don’t !” cheered Don. “You forgot that those tubes, if aligned properly, will actually cause bend- ing of the energy-beam. We’ve got load-terminal tubes pointing at you, and your power-beam is bending to enter them. You did well, though. You were running the whole Sta- tion with plenty to spare. We had to squirt some excess into space. Your beams aren’t worth the glass that’s in them !” “Stalemate, then,” snarled Mur- doch. “Now you come and get us. We’ll leave. But we’ll be back. Meanwhile, we can have our way with the shipping. Pilot ! Course for Mars! Start when ready!” The Black Widow turned and streaked from Venus Equilateral as Don Channing mopped his fore- head. “Walt,” he said, “that’s once I was scared to death.” “Me, too. Well, we got a respite. Now what?” “We start thinking.” “Right. But of what?” “Ways and — Hello, Wes. What’s the matter?” ASTOUNDING SO IITNCE-FICT I ON

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Farrell entered and said: “They broke up my job. I had to set it up again, and I’m temporarily free. Anything I can do to help?” “Can you dream up a space- gun ?” Farrell laughed. “That’s prob- lematical. Energy guns are some- thing strange. Their output can be trapped and used to good advan- tage. What you need is some sort of projectile, I think.” “But what kind of projectile would do damage to a spaceship?” “Obviously the normal kinds are useless. Fragmentation shells would pelt the exterior of the ship with metallic rain — if and providing you could get them that close. Ar- inor-pierCing would work, possibly, but their damage would be negli- gible since hitting a spacecraft with a shell is impossible if the ship is moving at anything like the usual velocities. Detonation shells are a waste of energy, since there is no atmosphere to expand and cantract. They’d blossom like roses and do as much damage as a tossed rose.” “No projectiles, then.” “If you could build a super-heavy fragmentation and detonation shell and combine it with armor-piercing qualities, and could hit the ship, you might be able to stop ’em. You’d have to pierce the ship, and have the thing explode with a terrific blast. It would crack the ship be- cause of the atmosphere trapped in the hull — and should be fast enough to exceed the compressibility of air. Also it should happen so fast that the air leaving the hole made would not have a chance to decrease the pressure. The detonation would crack the ship, and the fragmenta- tion would mess up the insides to boot, giving two possibilities. But if both failed and the ship became airless, they would fear no more detonation shells. Fragments would always be dangerous, however.” “So now we must devise some sort of shell — ?” “More than that. The meteor- circuits would intercept the incom- ing shell and it would never get there. What you’d need is a series of shells — say a hundred, all emit- ting the meteor-alarm primary sig- nals, which would cause paralysis of the meteor-circuits. Then the big one, coming in at terrific velocity.” "And speaking of velocity,” said Walt Franks. “The projectile and the rifle are out. We can get bet- ter velocity with a constant-accel- eration drive. I say torpedoes !” “Naturally. But the aiming? Remember, even though we crank up the drive to 50-G, it takes time to get to several thousand miles per second. The integration of a course would be hard enough, but add to it the desire of men to evade tor- pedoes— and the aiming job is im- possible.” “We may be able to aim them with a device similar to the one Charley Thomas is working with. Murdoch said his hull was made of lithium?” “Coated with,” said Channing “Well. Set the alloy-selectivity disk to pure lithium, and use the output to stear the torpedo right down to the bitter end.” FIRING LINE 93

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"Fine. Now the armor-piercing qualities.” "Can we drill?” "Nope. At those velocities, im- pact would cause detonation, the combined velocities would look like a detonation wave to the explosive. After all, darned few explosives can stand shock waves that propagate through them at a few thousand miles per second.” "O.K. How do we drill?” "We might drill electrically,” suggested Farrell. “Put a beam in front?” "Not a chance,” grinned Chan- ning. “The next time we meet up with Hellion Murdoch, he’ll have absorbers ready for use. We taught him that one, and Murdoch is not slow to learn.” “So how do we drill?” "Wes, is that non-arcing alloy of yours very conductive?” "Slightly better than aluminum.” "Then I’ve got it! We mount two electrodes of the -non-arcing alloy in front. Make ’em heavy and of monstrous current-carrying capacity. Then we connect them to a condenser made of Farrell’s super-dooper dielectric.” "You bet,” said Walt, grinning. "We put a ten microfarad conden- ser in front, only it’ll be one hun- dred and thirty farads when we soak it in Farrell’s super-dielectric. We charge it to ten thousand volts, and let it go.” “We’ve got a few experimental jobs,” said Channing. "Those in- erts. The drones we were using for. experimental purposes. They were radio controlled, and can be 94 easily converted to. the aiming-cir-' cuits.” "Explosives ?” "We’ll get the chemistry boys to brew a batch.” “Hm-m-m. Remind me to quit Saturday,” said Walt. “I wonder how a ten farad condenser would drive one of those miniatures.” “Pretty well, I should imagine. Why?” "Why not mount one of the miniatures on a gunstock and put a ten farad condenser in the han- dle? Make a nice side arm.” "Good for one shot, and not per- manently charged. You’d have to cut your leakage down plenty.” “Could be. Well, we’ll work on that one afterwards. Let’s get that drone fixed.” "Let’s fix up all the drones we have. And we’ll have the boys wire up as many as they can of the little message-cannisters. The whole works go at once at the same accel- eration, with the little ones run- ning interference for the big boy.” “Murdoch invited us to ‘come and get him,’ ” said Channing in a hard voice. “That, I think we’ll do!” Four smoldering derelicts lay in absolute wreckage on or near the four great spaceports of the solar system. Shipping was at an un- equaled standstill, and the commu- nications beams were loaded with argument and recriminations and pleas as needed material did not arrive as per agreement. Three ships paid out one dollar each gross ton in order to take vital mer- ASTOOJiDING SCIRN CE-FI CTI ON

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chandise to needy parties, but the mine-run of shipping was unable to justify the terrific, cost. And then Don Channing had a long talk with Keg Johnson of In- terplanetary Transport. One day later, one of Interplanet- ary’s larger ships took off from Canalopsis without having paid tribute to Murdoch. It went free — completely automatic — into the Martian sky and right into Mur- doch’s hands. The pirate gunned it into a molten mass and hurled his demands at the system once more, and left for Venus since an- other ship would be taking off from there. In the Relay Girl, Don Channing smiled. “That finds Murdoch,” he told Walt. “He’s on the standard course for Venus from Mars.” “Bright thinking,” commented Walt. “Bait him on Mars and then offer him a bite at Venus. When’ll we catch him?” “He’s running, or will be, at about 3-G, I guess. We're roaring along at five and will pass Mars at better than four thousand miles per second. I think we’ll catch and pass the Black Widow at the quarter- point, and Murdoch will be going at about nine hundred miles per. We’ll zoom past, and set the finder on him, and then continue until we’re safely away. If he gets tough, we’ll absorb his output, though he’s stepped it up to the point where a spacecraft can’t take too much concentrated input.” “That’s how he’s been able to blast those who went out with ab- sorbers ?” “Right, The stuff on the Sta- tion was adequate to protect, but an ordinary ship couldn’t handle it unless the ship were designed to absorb and dissipate that energy. The beam-tubes would occupy the entire ship, leaving no place for cargo. Result: A toss-up between paying off and not carrying enough to make up the difference.” “This is Freddy,” spoke the com- municator. “The celestial globe has just come up with a target at eight hundred thousand miles.” “O. K., Freddy. That must be the Black Widow. How’ll we pass her?” “About thirty thousand miles.” “Then get the finders set on that lithium-coated hull as we pass.” “Hold it,” said Walt. “Our velocity with respect to his is about three thousand. We can be certain of the ship by checking the finder- response on the lithium coating. If so, she’s the Black Widow. Right from here, we can be assured. Jim ! Check the finders in the torpedoes on that target!” “Did,” said Jim. “They’re on and it is.” “Launch ’em all!” yelled Franks. “Are you nuts ?” asked Chan- ning. “Why give him a chance to guess what’s happening? Launch ’em!” “Freddy, drop two of the tor- pedoes and half of the interferers. Send ’em out at 10-G. We’ll not put all our eggs in one basket,” Channing said to Walt. “There might be a slip-up.” “It’ll sort of spoil the effect,” FIRING LINE #5

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said Don. “But we’re not here for effect.” “What effect?” “That explosive will be as useless as a slab of soap,” said Don. “Ex- plosive depends for its action upon velocity — brother, there ain’t no ex- plosive built that will propagate at the velocity of our torpedo against Murdoch.” “I know,” said Franks, smiling. “Shall I yell ‘Bombs away’ in a dramatic voice?” asked Freddy Thomas. “Are they?” “Yup.” “Then yell,” grinned Walt. “Look, Don, this should be pretty. Let’s hike to the star-camera above and watch. We can use the double- telescope finder and take pix, too.” “It’s won’t be long,” said Chan- ning grimly. “And we’ll be safe since the interferers will keep Mur- doch’s gadget so busy he won’t have time to worry us. Let’s go.” The sky above became filled with a myriad of flashing spots as the rapidly-working meteor spotters coupled to the big turret and began to punch at the interferers. The clangor of the alarm made Murdoch curse. He looked at the celestial globe and his heart knew real fear for the first time. This was no meteor shower, he knew from the random pattern. Some- thing was after him, and Murdoch knew who and what it was. He cursed Channing and Venus Equi- lateral in a loud voice. It did no good, that cursing. Above his head, the triply mounted 96 turret danced back and forth, free- ing a triple-needle of Sol’s energy. At each pause another interferer went out in a blaze of fire and a shock-excitation of radio energy that blocked, temporarily, the finder circuits. And as the turret de- troyed the little dancing motes, more came speeding into range to replace them, ten to one. And then it happened. The finder-circuit fell into mechanical indecision as two interferers came at angles, each with the same inten- sity. The integrators ground to- gether, and the forces they loosed struggled for control. Beset by opposing impulses, the amplidyne in the turret stuttered, smoked, and then went out in a pungent stream of yellowish smoke that poured from its dust-cover in a high-velocity stream. The danc- ing of the turret stopped, and the flashing motes in the sky stopped with the turret’s death. One hundred and thirty farads, charged to ten thousand volts, touched the lithium-coated, alumi- num side of Murdoch’s Black Widow. Thirteen billion joules of electrical energy ; thirty-six hundred kilowatt hours went against two inches of aluminum. At the three thousand miles per second relative velocity of the torpedo, contact was immediate and perfect. The alu- minum hull vaporized under the million upon million of kilovolt-am- peres the discharge. The vapor- ized hull tried to explode, but was hit by the unthinkable velocity of the torpedo’s warhead. The torpedo itself crushed in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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front. It mushroomed under the millions of degrees Kelvin devel- oped by the energy-release caused by the cessation of velocity. For the atmosphere within the Black Widow was as immobile and as hard as tungsten steel at its best. The very molecules themselves could not move fast enough. They crushed together and in compress- ing brought incandescence. The energy of the incoming tor- pedo raced through the Black Widow in a velocity wave that blasted the ship itself into incan- descence. In a steep wave-front, the vaporized ship exploded in space like a supernova. It blinded the eyes of those who watched. It overexposed the cam- era film and the expected pictures came out with one single frame a pure, seared black. The piffling, comparatively ladylike detonation of the System’s best and most terrible explosive was completely covered in the blast. Seconds later, the Relay Girl hurtled through the sky three thou- sand miles to one side of the blast. The driven gases caught the Girl and stove in the upper observation dome like an eggshell. The Relay Girl strained at her girders, and sprung leaks all through the rigid ship, and after rescuing Don Chan- ning and Walt Franks from the wreckage of the observation dome, the men spent their time welding cracks until the Relay Girl landed. It was Walt who put his finger on the trouble. “That was period for Murdoch,” he said. “But Don, the stooge still runs loose. We’re going to be forced to take over Mark Kingman before we’re a foot taller. He includes Terran Electric, you know. That’s where Murdoch got his machine work done.” “Without Murdoch, Kingman is fairly harmless,” said Don, object- ing. “We’ll have no more trouble from him.” “You’re a sucker, Don. King- man will still be after your scalp. You mark my words.” “Well, what are you going to do about it?” “Nothing for the present. I’ve got some unfinished business to at- tend to at Lincoln Head. Mind?” THE END. V1BINO LINE 87

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IN TIMES TO COME Next month will, of course, bring part two of “Nomad.” This yarn, by the way, is an unusual set-up, more like the usual course of life than the average story in one respect. Generally speaking, a dimwit who starts out to be a hero winds up cither dead, or by getting somebody else to be a hero — the man that rescues the would-be hero under impossible circumstances. The infantryman who comes back to our lines with fifty or so prisoners, six machine-gun nests wiped out, and details on the location of four enemy artillery batteries is usually some guy that was sent on a mission, and got captured. From that point on, a remorseless sequence of reactions and events forced him to — for his life — argue his captors into surrendering, get rid of the opposi- tion between him and home-line safety, and take darned careful note of the location of powerful opposition so he could avoid it. So we start with Guy Maynard — hero. He’s been kidnaped, knocked down, kicked out, and forced back to Earth. He had to; now he has to — Van Vogt’s back next month, with the cover story “The Mixed Men.” A sequel to the series that started with “Concealment” and “The Storm.” As a matter of fact, the line-up proposed for next issue and the next will include nearly all the regular favorites, plus a pair of new names — Robert Abernathy and A. Bertram Chandler. * The Editor. THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY The September reports have interested me in several ways. First, I want to thank the larger number of readers who sent in their votes this time; I can’t answer all letters, naturally, though I try to get at as many as possible. The Lab is, naturally, impossible without your support — and it works two ways. The relative ratings of stories in a given issue is readily calculated on a fairly scientific, statistical basis, and appears on these pages. It’s a darned sight harder, though, to get the compara- tive ratings on the best story in the September issue with respect to the stories that appeared in the June issue, for instance. One way that does give me a slight guide, at least, is the total number of letters received. There were a lot more letters on tlie September issue, than on the August issue, for instance. From which I conclude that the September issue was better liked as a whole, and that, therefore, “A Can of Paint” in September was actually better liked than “Juggernaut.” September is also interesting in that, with a very large number of votes on hand, with a wide scattering of choice, three stories made a dead-heat tie for 13 place. Place SEPTEMBER ISSUE: Story Author Points 1. Renaissance Raymond F. Jones 1.5S 2. Census Clifford D. Simak 2.35 3. Tied: Culture Jerry Shelton 3.35 A Can of Paint A. E. van Vogt 3.35 Hobo God Malcolm Jameson 3.35 4. Business of Killing Fritz Lciber, Jr. 4.51 Place AUGUST ISSUE: Story Author Points 1. Renaissance Raymond F. Jones 1.70 2. The Big and the Little Isaac Asimov 2.30 3. Juggernaut A. E. van Vogt 2.85 4. Bridgehead Frank B. Long 3.00 Finally, Probability Zero went as screwy as any of its own yarns. You see, Jerry Shelton’s Brass Taeks letter about how to cut vacuums to fit, proceeded to take first prize in Probability Zero — in which it wasn't entered. I feel that anybody who can win the race for First Class Liar without even trying obviously deserves the prize. That brings “Icicle Built for Groo,” by John H. Pomeroy ten dollars, and “A Matter of Relativity,” by P. Anderson five dollars. . -paE gnlT0R 98 ASTOUNDING SCI ENOE - FICTI ON)

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Herewith Astounding presents the results of a photographic ex- periment in spaceflight. Admit- tedly, the results were somewhat disappointing, but they were highly interesting and suggest that, with' better apparatus available, some ex- tremely useful investigations could be made. The essence of the experiment is outlined in the drawings above. The Moon is a sphere ; when a tele- scoj)e takes a photograph of its sur- face, the spherical lunar surface is very accurately projected onto a plane surface — the surface of the photographic plate. It is perfectly possible to reverse that purely op- tical process, and project that plane- image onto a white sphere, produc- ing a sphere-image duplicate. This sphere-image will he three-dimen- sional ; it will be an accurate — in most essentials — reproduction of the original, in its correct relationship. It can. therefore, he photographed from new angles, making it possible to view lunar features from direc- tions never seen by man. Old hands at lunar observation will undoubtedly be shocked, con- fused and disturbed by the prints on pages 99 and 101 in particular. The whole layout of the Moon’s face is twisted, distorted almost out The Moon— seen from a point about 100.000' miles north of Earth, and halfway out to the Moon’s orbit. A.sTor N'iuni; scibnck-fictiox

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< •

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The region around Plato and the Great Galley, in the northern hemi- sphere, seen from a point overhead. (1.) Plato. (2.) The Great Galley. of recognition. Each of these shots represents a viewpoint more than one hundred thousand miles out in space — a viewpoint no man has yet attained. The shots on 102 and 103 are less familiar, since they are great enlargements of certain small aspects of the lunar surface. The picture on 102 was taken from a spaceship passing almost directly above the Great Valley and Plato; that on 103 is taken from a view- point almost directly above Clavius and Schiller, far to the south. These photographs are not satis- factory ; they were the best we could arrange in New York City at this time. We were limited by 10:! purely optical considerations, largely- based on the fact that no really large, pure-white sphere was avail- able. A few years back, with a lit- tle co-operation from the World’s Fair committee, we might have done a really good job, using the Peri- sphere as our projection screen on a dark night. Briefly, the problem is this : The photographic plates were made by focusing a sixty-inch or one-hun- dred-inch telescope on the two-thou- sand-mile-diameter moon. The smallest feature1 recorded was sev- eral hundred times sixty inches across. The ratio of diameter of lens to diameter of object was prac- A s t o r x i > i x ( ; seiiixe k k i < ■ t i o n

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tically one to infinity ; the telescope lens constitutes a point. But in projecting the photo- graphic plate so obtained onto a white sphere of a few feet diameter, we are working with something a long, long way from effective-point- size. Even with the projector lens stopped down to its smallest open- ing, the lens diameter is greater than the diameter of some of the objects to be shown — then lens diameter is great enough to “look around” the edge of our ersatz moon. If the lens has an effective diameter of a quarter of an inch, there will be ( Continued an page 178) The region of Clavius and Schiller, far to the south of the Moon. Schiller looks oval on ordinary shots of the Moon; this viewpoit shows it is oval, probably due to a low-angle impact. (1.) Clavius. (2.) Schiller.

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•&> the$t STRAI< ♦ HYGINUS '"Wollwerk i not visible) LATO Sfl WfcM Y ' B ■ Me j LINNE < a ,'MARE IMBRIUM would be-ji^te) JijA 6$ Vpiton ' <? *',co GREAT VALL OOll

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Mysteries by WILLY LEY The Moon ns a whole is not so mysterious as it once was — and some of its features are being explained now. Even the craters — which you can duplicate beautifully ’ and simply in your own basement! Astronomic omnia divisa est in fortes tres — .One of these three parts, or dis- ciplines, is quite recent ; it is long- distance stellar astronomy, dealing with other suns and other galaxies and relying for its raw material mainly on evidence furnished by the spectroscope -and the photographic camera. Because of its recent age we may call it the third of the three Fig. 1. Aerial photographers like dawn light, because shadows bring out details; noon light hides them. For lunar details, full moon is noon- light; half -moon view shows more. disciplines. The other two deal with things closer to home and here the distinc- tion is not one of distance and of instruments employed, but one of subject matter. One discipline deals with movements, the other with con- stitution, topography, et cetera. The one is enormously exact, predicting eclipses, occultations and positions down to minutes and seconds — what meteorologist would even dare to predict even the date of the next thunderstorm? — while the other is, politely speaking, not so exact. Bar- ring the Moon no other large body of our solar system ever comes as MOON MYSTKitlKS 105

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Fig. 2. The astronomer Flammarion pictured the Lunar landscape as a twisted, volcanic area; the true nature of the craters was not known. 106 ASTOUNDING SC I K N C E - F I OT I O N

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Fig. 3. The model for Flamnwr inn’s Lunar landscape, shown in Astro- nomic Populairc, were these extinct volcanoes in the Auvergne, in France. close to Earth as Venus. We know precisely where Venus will be at any given day and hour, wre know her weight and size — but we are not even sure about the position of her axis and in any three astronomical books you can find five different opinions about the surface condi- tions on Venus. As for the Moon which is still closer . . . but we’ll speak about that later. — divisa est in partes tres, but the three parts evidently failed to attain equal degrees of perfection. It is a question of instruments and because of that you are perfectly justified to read a different but equally true Sense into that classic quotation. You can say that the story of astronomical science con- sists of three strictly distinct eras, marked by the inventions of as- tronomical instruments. The first and earliest era of as- tronomy is that which began in Babylonic times and continued until MOON MYSTEHIES 107

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Courtesy: Transcontinental and Western Air Fig. 4. If it zvere not for the plane in the foreground — or if the plane had neither wings nor empennage — you could claim this picture of Meteor Crater, Arizona was simply a minor meteor crater, somewhere on the Moon. Jan Lippershey in the Netherlands invented the telescope during that stormy portion of human history which is called the Renaissance. That first long era of at least thirty centuries was the era of naked eye observation with no other instru- ments than some sighting devices for measuring angles and angular distances. During that era astron- omy had only one discipline, the one dealing with the motion of the planets. All through that era the astronomer with the better eyes was the better astronomer. That rule had no exception until the very end of the first astronomical era. Curiously enough the one big and important exception was Johannes Kepler, the man who established the true shape of planetary orbits and the three laws of planetary motion named after him. The invention of the telescope coincided with the climax of Kep- ler’s work. That work was still based on naked eye observations — mostly Tycho Brahe’s — and then the telescope opened, literally, new vistas. The second era of astron- omy was born and with it the sec- ond discipline, that dealing with the topography and the conditions on the planets. Kepler, who for many A K T O V N D l N G SCIKXC K - F I C T HI N 108

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years had been writing a book about the Moon, finally saw with bis own eyes what even the “best” as- tronomers before him bad not been able to see: the circular ringwalls of our satellite, the so-called “craters.” He saw the mountains whicli were later called the Lunar Alps, the Lunar Apennines and so on, he saw the dark and strangely smooth areas of the maria. The second era of astronomy was the era of the improved eye. First it was straight improvement, the telescope was the bigger and better eye which could see detail where the naked eye, no matter how sharp, had only seen gray smudges. Later on in that era the improve- ments took another turn. If you stare at a faint spot, it remains faint to your eye, no matter how long you look. The telescope does not change this essential feature. But then the artificial eye did not only get a bigger pupil and a more powerful lens, it also acquired a new retina with the miraculous quality of adding faint impressions Fig. 5. A perfect representation of the making of a lunar crater, done in miniature, by dropping a tablespoonfid of cement powder on a surface of the same material from a height of forty inches. The crater at the left, 120 mm. in diameter, shows a typical central mountain; the other at right, 90 mm. across, resembles Meteor Crater in Arizona. In the second experiment, plaster of Paris powder was dropped to show distribution of “meteoric matter.” White splashes could be found as much as a yard from the “crater.” The finished crater landscape can be made permanent by simply spraying with water from an atomizer, followed by soaking.

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Fig. 6. Top: Cross section of ex- perimental impact crater , the dotted line showing ground level before im- pact, white line in crater the dis- tribution of the ‘‘meteorite.'’. Bottom: Cross section of actual moon crater with central mountain; line as above. until they became clear : the camera. And then a still more wonderful “eye” was invented, one which did not see the shape and color of things, but one which could see their chemical constitutions — within certain limitations — the spectro- scope. We are still in that second era but our position on the time scale is about that of the newborn Kep- ler. The second era of astronomy is nearing its end and in about a lifetime the third era is going to begin, with the spaceship added as a new ty]>e of astronomical instru- ment. It is easy to guess which of the three disciplines will progress most during the third era of astronomy. The stars will be out of reach for a no long time to come. The theory of astronomical movements is suffi- ciently well developed not to need the spaceship very urgently, in fact' much of the theory of space travel is based on the reliability of the theory of astronomical movements since the spaceship is essentially, to quote Dr. R. S. Richardson, “an asteroid capable of changing its or- bital elements.” It is the second discipline, the one concerned with the surfaces of the planets, which needs the spaceship. Without it as- tronomers are helpless even in the case of the Moon,, and the Moon is not only the nearest but also by far the best known of all the bodies of the solar system, not counting Earth. The best proof lies in a few hours at night with a telescope, it does not need to be one of the giant instruments. On and off, for the last twenty years, whenever I had an opportunity of using a telescope, I have sat in the open and usually cold air, looking at the formations of the lunar surface and trying to read some meaning into them. By now they have become quite fa- miliar, but only in about the same sense in which I am familiar with the zoological phenomenon of the Australian duckbill platypus. The better you get to know these things the stranger they appear ; it requires a lot of familiarity and knowledge to really appreciate all the quirks and wrinkles and difficulties. The distance across which you look when searching the face of the Moon for your favorite puzzles is very short as astronomical dis- ASTOt’KUI X C SCI K X C K - F I C T 10 X

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Fig. 7 . The “Great Valley'’ of the Lunar Alps, drawn by Pit. Fauth. Fig. 8. Clavius, in the southern hemisphere, a “walled plain” crater. C I an us. like other “walled plains" is evidently extremely old; both the interior plain, and the ringwal! show impact .of later meteorites. Some astronomers believe ancient Clavius shows traces of erosion. 1 1 i MOO N M Y S T K It 1 1 : s

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iV Fig. 9. The astronomer Hansen be- lieved the moon egg-shaped , not spherical, the tip pointing toward Earth. The far side, being "lower,” had collected atmosphere, -dr row points toward Forth. Nezvcomb showed the moon is almost spherical. tances go. It is only a fraction over one light-second, some 240,000 miles, 384,000 kilometers in the metric system. This is not far even by a purely terrestrial yard- stick. 1 am quite certain that there are many thousands of sailors who have helped to get a liberty ship from the American east coast to British ports, making roundtrip after roundtrip as a matter of rou- tine. When they completed their thirtieth roundtrip they had cov- ered the distance to the Moon. It is the distance of thirty round- trips from New York to England, or of forty roundtrips from New York to Hollywood, across which you look when you see the Moon. Looking through a telescope the distance becomes much less, opti- 112 cally speaking. A large astronomi- cal telescope, under fine seeing con- ditions, can put an astronomer so “near” that the picture he sees is the same as if he were looking— without a telescope — .through the window of a spaceship circling the Moon five hundred miles from its surface. The case may be com- pared to the hypothetical one of a pilot flying high over unknown ter- ritory, with enough fuel to cruise endlessly, hut unable to land or even to go lower. Such a position is not without advantages, it is fine for map-mak- ing. The pilot could produce a fine general map and one could tell afterwards where mountains, rivers, forests and lakes are located, how the shoreline runs and where the desert begins. The thing the pilot could not produce is a geological survey. What I said just now about a high-flying plane over unknown territory holds true also for that optical distance of five hundred miles to which a powerful telescope carries the observer or the camera. It is still close enough for excellent map-making ; it is somewhat in- credible but true that we know the surface of the Moon — that half of it that we can see, that is — better than we know the surface of the Earth. Roughly ten percent of the land surface of our planet is still unknown anti is so marked on bet- ter maps. Another ten percent is mostly guesswork, based on reports that are still subject to corrections. There is no guesswork at all on a lunar map. ASTOUNDING S C I B NOB- F I C T I O N

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To make up for such an intoler- ably ideal state of affairs the inter- pretation is guesswork all the way through. These beautiful lunar maps are purely topographical, but what we really want, although we usually do not think of it in those terms, are geological — “selenologi- cal.” if you prefer — surveys. And, since we never had even a single one. these amazingly complete maps are fairly worthless from the point of view of interpretation. That hypothetical pilot who is cruising high above unknown terri- tory without being able to land at least knows what it is he sees. He knows that a shoreline is a bound- ary between sea and land, that a river is a continuous depression con-, tabling flowing fresh water, that white-capped mountain peaks are white because they are covered with ice and snow. In the case of a forest the pilot’s knowledge of longitude and latitude would per- mit him a fair guess as to the type of forest. 'Most of his interpreta- Fig. 10. Section of Moon near Hyginus Chasm, seen near sunset. It creates the impression of some other formation, drowned in hardened lava. The droumed formation is, however, of a type unknown anywhere on Earth. •MOON M VST K KIES 113

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Fig. 11 . The same section as it was “reconstructed'’ a century ago — when walls and battlements and defense towers zvere more common on Earth. That the towers would be a mile high to shozv didn't discourage dreamers , 114 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE -FICTION

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'tion would be correct even though it, strictly speaking, would be based on inference throughout. But the pilot would know other and simi- lar landscapes and would, there- fore, be able to draw correct analo- gies and conclusions. We have, after all, only a few types of cli- mates, moist and warm, moist and cold, dry and warm and dry and cold, superimposed on an equally limited number of topographical features like mountains, highlands, lowlands, et cetera. The surface of the Moon does not lend itself to such interpreta- tion. Everything we see, virtually without exception, is strange. In only a few instances can we rec- ognize features which we know on Earth too, and they are not very customary on Earth. According to Simon Newcomb’s famous word the Moon is a world without weather on which nothing ever hap- pens. This lack of weather should eliminate a number of possible vari- ations of the landscape and it ac- tually does. But that does not help us much, because it is the ground plan itself, the topographical “style,” which is different. In pre-telescopic times, and even during the first century or so of telescopic observation, these differ- ences in “style” did not appear so marked. Hence the lunar map is full of “terrestrializing” names which produce a false sense of simi- larity. The darkish spots one can see with the naked eye were named maria, seas, and it was there where fancy nomenclature had a grand time. One of the maria was con- jectured to be a Cloudy Sea (Mare nubium)-, another a Serene Sea (Mare serenitatii) , a third a Stormy Ocean (Oceanus procellarum) . There is a Rainbow Bay (Sinus iridum) on the lunar map and a Misty Swamp (Palus nebularum). The other lunar features do not have such fancy names, just be- cause they are smaller in size and were not discovered until later, when astronomers had already realized that the Moon could not be com- pared with the Earth in such a di- rect manner. There are five types of lunar formations. The large and strangely smooth darkish maria, once believed to be seas and then the bottoms of ancient seas, are one type. The second and in certain respects most puzzling type are the numerous ringwalls or craters which range all the way from gigan- tic “walled plains” — of which Clavius is a fine example — to “nor- mal” Moon craters like Copernicus, and small “craterlets” to tiny “beads.” The third type are moun- tain chains like those “Alps,” “Apennines” and “Caucasus” around the Mare Imbrium. The fourth are strange deep chasms or channels, often called rills by as- tronomers, in adaptation of the Ger- man appellation Rille which means “groove.” The fifth type, finally, are the “rays” which radiate from some craters, mainly Tycho and Copernicus, bands of higher lumi- nosity which cross other craters, mountains and maria with great im- partiality, as if they were actually immaterial “rays” but they obvi- MOON MYSTERIES AST— 5S 115

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ously have to have a material na- ture. Even this simple accounting ot the five principal features — four of which are strange — gives an idea of the difficulties confronting any attempt at explanation. Most of the surface features of the Earth owe their existence or their shape to weather in one way or another — but there is no weather on the Moon. What seemed at first glance like a simplification of the problem turns out to be a serious handicap. The only lunar “weather” we know of is the monthly day-and-night period, amounting, in terms of sur- face temperature, to a regular cycle with two extremes which are about four hundred fifty degrees in tem- perature and two weeks in time apart from each other. Such weather can cause the cracking of surface rocks and it is quite likely that considerable portions of the lunar surface are covered with a kind of gravel of varying grain size, only a few inches deep. That cannot account for much and is a very secondary factor of which we do not even have any direct tele- scopic evidence. The bigger forms which we see through our telescopes are obvi- ously the final result of develop- ments which took place in the past when there was, presumably, weather and activity on the Moon. The question, the real question, is what kind of weather and what kind of activity. The early interpreters, especially Kepler, were not troubled by such a conception. At a time when it was the unspoken belief that our atmosphere extended to the Moon the question of weather could not come up. And although Kepler himself came to the conclusion that this belief could not be harbored, since that would have meant fric- tion and the solar system could function only if there was no fric- tion anywhere, he still had no rea- son to doubt that the Moon had its own atmosphere and its own weather. Nor did he have any scruples as- suming the existence of selenites, or Endymionides, as he called them. In fact the first evidence presented by the newly invented telescope at the very beginning of the second era of astronomy worked hand in hand with that belief. The tele- scope showed what looked like large numbers of tiny little circles, evi- dently large holes, situated around larger “hollows,”, the maria. And thus Kepler wrote : . "Those hollows of the Moon first seen by Galilei are . . . portions below the general level, like our oceans. But their appearance makes me judge that they are swampy for the greater part. It is there where the Endymionides find the sites for their fortified cities which protect them against the swampiness as well as against the heat of the Sun, possibly also against enemies. They do it in the fol- lowing manner: in the center of the chosen site they put a stout pole to which they attach ropes, their length depending on the size of the fortress to be built ; the longest (rope) measures five German miles (about twenty miles). Then they mark the periphery by walking around at the end of the rope. After that they amass to build the wall . . . Whenever , the inhabitants feel annoyed by the power 118 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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of the sun those who live near the center move into the shadow of the outer wall . . . following the shadow for fifteen days they wander about and by this means en- dure the heat.” It was an obvious Idea for a time when people themselves lived in walled cities because of enemies, where they were plagued by the heat of the summer as well as by the dampness of winter. But Kepler lived to see only the first moments of the second era of astronomy and it was left to his compatriot Johannes Hevelius to explore the Moon with the new in- strument. The result was a monu- mental work called Selenographia which appeared in 1647 and which contained, among other things, evi- dence of lack of noticeable — or even visible — bodies of water on the Moon as well as statements about the lack of an atmosphere, at least if the term were understood in the terrestrial sense. Hevelius was defi- nite enough to influence even the Frenchman Bernard de Fontenelle, who — in 1686, if you care to know the date — claimed that all worlds were inhabited by inhabitants adapted to the conditions of their respective worlds to make an excep- tion in the case of the Moon. The Moon, de Fontenelle declared, might not be inhabited d cause de la rarete de I’air. Quite naturally interest in the Moon flagged for a considerable period and it was not until the nineteenth century that astronomers again energetically pursued the work started by Hevelius. But there were first a number of strange interludes. One of them is connected with the rather strange name of a strange man, the astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen of Munich. (The pronunciation, if you feel inclined to try, is: Frants fon Pow-la Khroyt-hoy-zen. ) Gruithuisen had strange and unusually fantastic ideas, but it has to be said that he did not follow the occult method of substituting afternoon naps with ac- companying visions and revelations for serious research. He worked and worked hard, and had a well- grounded reputation as observer. He could make decent drawings, too. Of all the people who ob- served the Moon it would be just Gruithuisen who stumbled across a real mystery. In the late evening of July 12, 1822, he carefully stud- ied the vicinity of one of those mysterious chasms or rills, the one called the Hyginus rill because it runs through the crater Hyginus in the Southern portion of the Mare vaporum. There is a strange formation near the Hyginus rill. Some astrono- mers refer to it as Snail Moun- tain, because it looks somewhat like the upper portion of a huge snail that was trapped in tar. There are the upper ridges of other moun- tains in the vicinity, also looking as if their lower portions had been buried in something viscid which later hardened. The whole looks strange enough to seem artificial — and Gruithuisen did not hesitate for a moment to say that it was artifi- cial. At last, he proclaimed, we MOON MYSTERIES 117

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are on the trail of the selenites, we can see an old and abandoned struc- ture, obviously an old fortress, guarding the entrance to an aban- doned city!' The discovery caused an enor- mous stir, as it would even today. But after an interval of breathless- ness other observers, especially Madler, declared that Gruithuisen’s imagination had made him see things that did not really exist. Where Gruithuisen’s had drawn the walls of a fortress and ruins of a city Madler just drew a num- ber of minor mountain ridges crossing each other. It is fair to say that Madler exaggerated as much in one direction as Gruithui- sen had exaggerated in the other. The mysterious spot is not a ruined city as drawn by Gruithuisen, but it is not as featureless as drawn by Madler either. It does not need a large telescope to see it — and the more you look at it the less does it “make sense” one way or another. Alone the fact that there is appar- ently something buried in something once liquid is hard enough to swal- low. What is the substance that once was liquid ? It could not have been water which is now ice. Its color is too dark, and if it were darkish rock dust over a layer of ice the rock dust would heat up sufficiently during the lunar day to melt the ice. If it was lava, where did it come from? Gruithuisen’s Wallwerk, as he called it, is not that, but we’ll not be able to tell what it really is until we get there. its After the storm about the Wall- werk there came another and in some respects even stranger inter- lude, the discussion about the al- leged nonspherical shape of the Moon. The father of that idea was Peter Andreas Hansen, a Danish watchmaker who, via a job as assis- tant surveyor in the Danish Sur- vey, became connected with the then new observatory in Altona and was, in 1825, called to the famous Uni- versity town of Gotha as director of the Seeberg observatory. There he distinguished himself greatly in theoretical work. One of his pa- pers, on the mutual perturbations of Jupiter and Saturn, won a prize from the Berlin Academy, another one on the orbits of comets won a prize from the Paris Academy while his Tables of the motions of the Moon were printed at the expense of the British Government and em- bodied in the Nautical Almanac. The Royal Astronomical* Society awarded him a gold medal, the Royal Saxonian Academy of Sci- ences considered it a privilege to print his works. Hansen’s fame was, as can readily be seen, interna- tional and well deserved and when he announced that he had a novel conception of the Moon everybody listened attentively. The mainstay of Hansen’s thesis was the fact that we see only one side of the Mooh since the Moon’s motion is about that of a barking dog jumping around a man. All he can see is the open mouth and bared inhospitable teeth. If one did not know the appearance of a dog, one might, because of that impression, .ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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picture it as a monster consisting of jaws and teeth, with some minor and ill-defined appendages. Astronomical research about the Moon has disclosed, Hansen said — without any such reference to dog- monsters — that the air is too thin to be detected, a fact which is popu- larly expressed by saying “no air.” It has failed to show the presence of water. All it does show is a collec- tion of silent craters, bleak moun- tain ridges and desolate mare plains. All in all the picture of a forbidding inhospitable world. There is no doubt that this picture is correct, but there is no reason to believe that it applies to all of the lunar world! It applies to the half we can see, it does not necessarily have to apply to the invisible half, too. In fact, Hansen said, there is good reason to believe that it doesn’t. Certain peculiarities in the behavior of the Moon indicate that it is not spherical at all, but that its shape should be compared with an egg, the long axis of which is pointing toward the Earth. What we see is the pointed end of the egg-shaped moon, so-to- speak a gigantic mountain, rising hundreds of miles above the ideal but nonexistent spherical surface of the neighboring world. Natu- rally there is no atmosphere, that gigantic “mountain” is higher than the lunar atmosphere. Naturally there is no water, any water that ever might have been there had flown over the rim to the lovylands of the “other side.” And these lowlands are apt to be moist, with a flourishing vegetation, with animals if************************* HE GOT THE PURPLE HEART . . . WILL A BOND PROVE TOO COSTLY FOR YOU? It's left to your own conscience, be- cause that's the kind of country we are. Somewhere else in the world, the money needed to carry on the war would be gotten through added taxes, compulsory savings. But not here. Because we're still free . . . and it's still up to you— and no one else — to decide whether or not your country, or your boy, is worth another bond, BUY IT NOW! THE WORLD'S BEST INVESTMENT! WAR BONDS +*+*+****++*+*■**+++*+*+***■ MOON MYSTERIES 119

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that have a life-rhythm adapted to the long cycle of lunar day and night, possibly even with those sel- enites Professor Gruithuisen has been looking for more or less in yain all these years. The dog, to return to my own picture, with snarling lips and in- hospitable teeth in front, did have a friendly rear end too, only we can't see it because of his peculiar mo- tion around us. It was an intriguing idea and, al- most needless to say, stories were written around it, one, by a Polish author, as late as 1911. (Fritz Lang, in his space-travel movie “Frau im Mond,” revived part of Hansen’s idea for the very simple practical reason that it permitted the actors to shed their spacesuits.) For a while everybody was in- trigued, but then critics arose. The most important of them was Simon Newcomb and Newcomb actually succeeded in proving that even Han- sen could make mistakes and that the Moon is at least as spherical as the Earth. And one German ob- servatory, just because of Hansen, inaugurated a special study of "the other side.” Since the Moon’s mo- tion is irregular it seems to “wob- ble” a bit, called Vibration in digni- fied language. This libration per- mits to see small parts of the “other side” at regular intervals so that the total of the Moon’s surface which we can see is not precisely one half, as should be expected, but about four sevenths. That special study agreed with Newcomb and not with Hansen, that what we can see of the “other side” is of the same type, or types, which haunt us on our side. The Moon is "all teeth.” After Hansen’s “Moon Moun- tain” had come crashing down as- tronomers set out in great serious- ness to explain what they saw. That explanation still sticks in the minds of quite a number of people and when you stand for some time near the large lunar photographs in the Hayden Planetarium— or any other — you’ll be able to overhear some father displaying his learning to his wife and half-grown children in about the following manner : “These big smooth areas you see there are the so-called mare, in former times this was all ocean, but now they are dry. All these little circles are extinct craters, that must have been some volcanic display when they were still active. Those little lines are deep chasms like our Grand Canyon. Down there you have real mountains like the Rockies-. And those white “rays” that emanate from some craters are cracks, the volcanism must have been bad enough to crack the whole Moon. Then lava came rip in the cracks and lava looks brighter than other rocks.” All of which is perfectly good astronomical conjecture, only it hap- pens to be slightly old-fashioned, by about seventy years. The whole ex- planation, you may have noticed, works with past volcanism and former weather. Former seas, former rivers cutting deep canyons into the rock, former weather erod- ing former volcanic craters. The 120 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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important, but usually neglected, point is that the lunar craters, even if they were volcanic in origin, would have to be conceived as eroded craters. No active volcanic crater looks even remotely like the aver- age Moon crater, but an old and extinct crater on which erosion went to work for some ten thousand years or so, might resemble a lunar crater. In order to maintain the volcanic hypothesis you would have to assume that lunar volcanism stopped at a time when the atmos- phere was still dense and moist so that it could cause considerable ero- sion. I cannot help but feel that the whole volcanic hypothesis owes its existence to the semantic compul- sion of the term “crater.” Some dunderhead in the past thought that "crater” would be a nice conven- ient word for the ringwalls of the Moon and since then a long series of other dunderheads spent their lives trying to prove that the things they called craters actually were craters. If you call them ringwalls to be- gin with and then study their size and shape carefully, you'll soon be- gin to wonder why anybody ever even dreamed that they could have volcanic origin. The diameters of the vast majority run between thirty and one hundred twenty miles. The floor of the ringwalls is always lower than the general level of the surrounding moon- scape, in about fifty percent of all cases it shows a central mountain, in the other fifty percent the floor is virtually smooth. If there is a cen- tral mountain, its height is always such that it about reaches to the level of the surrounding moon- scape. If either the ringwall itself or the floor shows a noticeable in- terruption, it is usually a smaller ringwall of the same general type. As regards the volcanic hypothe- sis: the “craters” are far too large to begin with, even considering the lesser gravity of the Moon. If the ones without a central mountain were weathered down, you would naturally expect that the interior is considerably above the general level of the surrounding moonscape, filled with debris from the crater wall. Those with a central moun- tain would then be craters of the type you occasionally find on Earth, with a “young” active crater inside the old rim. But then the younger crater should be considerably higher than the old eroded ringwall and the floor, again, should be considerably above mean Moon level. And that a secondary young crater should break through the old ringwall, just at the spot where a lot of addi- tional weight is piled on, is a harder strain on the imagination than one could reasonably be expected to stand. Unbiased examination of the available data had to lead to the result that the lunar craters, in spite of their misleading designation, could not be volcanic in origin, unless you invented a special and impossible variety of volcanism to suit the observations. There existed an alternate hy- pothesis, invented by, of all people, old Gruithuisen. At one point of. MOON MYSTERIES 121

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his writings he had mentioned, very much by-the-way, that the lunar craters looked like impact craters caused by cosmic matter. A little later a mining engineer by the name of Althans, who had witnessed the famous life struggle of ordnance engineers — i.e. first to devise an armor plate that will stand all known projectiles and then to de- sign a gun that will pierce that plate — arrived at the same conclusion, presumably without having read Gruithuisen. He even tried to ex- periment, using balls of grapeshot as meteorites and shallow pans filled with fresh mortar as the lunar surface. The first well-known astronomer to subscribe to the meteoric hy- pothesis was R. Proctor, some fifty years ago. Slowly the party of adherents tp the meteoric hypothe- sis grew and when the meteoric origin of comparable objects on Earth — especially Meteor Crater in Arizona — was established the growth of that party accelerated in proportion. What this party lacked was a neat and simple method of demonstrating meteor craters in the laboratory. They got that method in 1918, and it is hardly surprising to learn that it was not devised by an as- tronomer or physicist but by a ge- ologist. His name was Dr. Alfred Wegener, the same who later ac- quired fame as originator of the theory of continental drift. The type of experiments origi- nated by Althans had rarely led ianywhere, obviously because labora- 2* tory conditions could not duplicate the actual event well enough. In one case you had a leaden or rub- ber ball, hitting a “batter” of ce- ment or mortar with something like three feet per second, in the other you had a hunk of iron or rock, weighing scores of tons and striking the ground with a velocity of some twenty miles per second or more. You got a much truer picture of a lunar ringwall for a split second by dropping a drop of cream into a cup of coffee; the coffee, at least, did not have the annoying coherence of mortar. The answer was in that last statement. In general one may dis- tinguish between two types of forces, molecular forces — the strength of the material — and mass forces — gravitation — as Wegener called them. Both types of forces were present both in the laboratory and in actuality, but in an entirely different ratio! In the laboratory the “molecular forces” were rela- tively enormous and the mass force of gravitation appeared mainly as a nuisance. In an actual meteor crash the molecular forces— tensile strength of the material of the meteorite — did not count at all, the hardness of steel is as unimportant as the brittleness of rock when it comes to collisions at twenty miles per second. In order to imitate such a collision in the laboratory one had to find a material of no tensile strength! There are such materials, fine powders of any kind. Wegener chose cement powder for purely practical reasons, it comes in uni- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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form quality and the results can afterwards be hardened by spraying with water. Both the “meteorite” and the “surface” were dust, sim- ply a shallow pan filled with ce- ment dust and a soup spoonful of cement powder that was dropped on that “surface” from a height of about forty inches. The experi- ment is so simple that anybody can repeat it any time, the only thing that is wrong with it is that cement dust is rather dirty to work with. The results are amazing. The impact craters do not only look like meteor craters, they also show all their characteristics. The floor is always below the general level, it is always smooth, the ratio between the height of the ringwall and the diameter of the whole is the same as that found in the less shallow natu- ral lunar craters, and the average of the measurements of some twenty craters showed almost precisely the same ratio of dimensions as Meteor Crater in Arizona. The first question that arose was : “What happens to the meteorite?” To answer that question a soup spoonful of plaster of Paris was dropped on a cement surface. The result was a surprise, the crater was white all over. Particles of plaster had spattered across the rim to a distance of about a yard. A cross section showed that the “meteoric matter” was thinnest over the crater floor and somewhat concentrated on the inner side of the ringwall. There was no “main mass” and it is probable that the majority of all large meteorites “disappears” in this manner. The next question was: “When does a central mountain form?” At first the experiments refused to answer that question, until one formed accidentally. It was then found that you can always get a central mountain, provided your layer of cement dust is not too thick. It has to be less than an inch. Repetition of the experiment with plaster of Paris and cross sec- tioning of the model showed that the central mountain was merely ground material that had not been moved outward to form the rim of the crater. This explains why the real central mountains never attain the height of the crater rim but only that of the surrounding level. The rim is ground material piled high, the central mountain is ground material left undisturbed. Translated into large-scale happen- ings this experiment indicates that a central mountain will form where thick layers of dense rock material can be found not too deeply below the surface. This does not seem to be the case in Arizona, hence Meteor Crater is without a central mountain. The development of the meteoric hypothesis accounts well for the thirty thousand or so craters we see on the Moon. All those diffi- culties with which the volcanic hy- pothesis had to wrestle endlessly, the large size, the smooth crater floor, smaller craters in the rim of bigger ones, lack or presence of a central mountain, the ratio of the various dimensions, all this fits well. MOON MYSTERIES m

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The same hypothesis can account for the maria too. Mare Crisium, as a quick look at any photograph will show, is simply a “super-gigan- tic” Moon crater. So is the Mare Imbrium and its mountain chains, the Alps, Apennines, et cetera, turn out to be merely parts of an enor- mous ringwall. But in the case of the maria an additional assumption has to be made. There can be no doubt that a meteorite causing a mare is a siz- able planetoid; it has been calcu- lated, for example, that the one ' responsible for Mare Imbrium must have had a diameter of about one hundred twenty-five miles. A col- lision with a body of such mass : does more than just cause an im- pact crater. It is apt to break through and cause a lava flow of at least as much mass as that of the meteorite. The magma replaced by i the planetoid wells up and floods the ! floor of the enormous crater. It is interesting, in this connection, to look at the later craters that formed on top of that lava flow. The small ones in the center — and a few large ones near the rim — are without cen- tral mountain, others near the rim, where the lava flow is presumably rather shallow, do have them. The general picture that emerges from these considerations is that the Moon is not a world “shriv- eled with age” as some people de- lighted in putting it half a century ago. On the contrary, the Moon represents the picture of a world which expanded after it was already formed. It expanded because of the addition of very large amounts of cosmic matter, especially those minor planets or moons which re- sulted in the maria. The strange and otherwise almost inexplicable rills are likely a secondary result of that expansion. Yes, but didn’t I knock my own argument out with all the forgoing? Early in this article I said that that discipline of astronomy which deals with the surfaces of the planets needs the spaceship as a new instru- ment of astronomical .research. If we know all that, do we really need it for the Moon? No doubt, a spaceship would be nice to have, but how much more could it teach us about the Moon? Except, pos- sibly, to see what Gruithuisen’s Wallzverk really is. Even forgetting about the IVall- werk which is somewhat boring after a century of discussion, and forgetting also about the "other side” which is rather too obvious an argument, the answer is still “yes.” With emphasis! There are many things we would like to know and never will know unless we get there. The Mare Imbrium has been mentioned so often before, let’s start there again. Just north of the Mare Imbrium — that is “down” on an astronomical photograph — there is the walled plain called Plato. The normal thing regarding the appearance of a lunar crater during a lunar day is this : when the sun rises for the crater the ring- wall stands out in bright illumina- tion, then the central mountain, if 124 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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any, while the floor is still in a deep shadow. Gradually the floor is illuminated by the sun too, save for those por- tions in the direct shadow of the ringwall. As the terminator ad- vances the shadow shortens and when the sun is in the zenith for that crater everything is an almost featureless white, things are hard to see just because there are no shadows now. As for Plato the be- ginnings of a day are the same. But as the terminator progresses and the sun rises higher the floor gets darker. On photographs taken at what is almost high noon for that section of the Moon, Plato looks like an inkspot; people who did not know about that have asked me seri- ously whether that spot was a flaw in the plate. Evaporation of moisture forming a light-absorbing mist? Or just melting ice? I would very much like to know. But it would take a spaceship to get a reliable answer. Some seventy miles west of Plato, in the middle of the “Alps,” you suddenly come across the Great Valley, about ninety miles long and up to six and one half miles wide. The mountains of the “Alps” rise up to twelve thousand feet over the bottom of the Great Valley which is perfectly smooth as far as we can make out. There is absolutely no explanation for the Great Valley except one : that a meteorite of more than six miles diameter hit the Moon at so shallow an angle that it plowed through the Alps before it fell down elsewhere. We don’t know where, but you can find THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD That Axis leader, last heard of fleeing through Europe. . . . And it's Doc who heads the secret man- hunt . . . right into the sinister plots and intrigues of international espionage . . . with time at his heels! Then ... at a famous mountain lodge, Doc walks into a nest of Nazis to climax the VIOLENT NIGHT. Don't fail to read the January issue of DOC SAYAGE AT ALL NEWSSTANDS MOON MYSTERIES 125

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craters lying in the direction of the Great Valley on either side, which, of course, may be accidental and have nothing to do with the projec- tile in question. On Earth we have several meteor craters which we can study in de- tail and at leisure. But we don’t have anything like a valley literally shot out of a mountain chain by a large meteorite. The Great Valley deserves detailed study. But we can’t do it from here! There are some interesting moun- tains— not ringwalls — sticking out of the lava flow of the Mare Iin- briurn, for example Pico, just south of Plato. Are they really moun- tains? Or volcanic upheavals? We can’t tell until we get there. North of the Mare Imbrium there is Eratosthenes. Eratosthenes would be just a medium-sized, very beautiful and very typical crater, if it were not for William Picker- ing who observed repeatedly strange grayish spots moving around inside the crater. Cloud formations be- traying the presence of moisture? Or lunar vegetation, springing up and being killed by the heat of the sun with great rapidity? Or swarms of lunar insects, equivalents of terrestrial locusts? Or simply eyestrain ? We’ll never know until we get there. Not far from Eratosthenes there are the fine craters of Copernicus and Kepler, both showing typical patterns of “rays.” The “rays,” that much is clear, are evidently streaks of fine particles shot to a 329 considerable distance when the cra- ters were formed. It is quite likely that the material that causes them is so thinly spread that you could walk across a “ray” on the Moon with- out ever knowing it. Fine, but why do only a few craters have systems of “rays”? One astronomer ad- vanced the very interesting hypothe- sis that they are the .craters formed by large iron meteorites, that the “rays” are volatilized metal. Rock dust evidently is not apt to show much ; the explanation is fascinating and corresponds with terrestrial evi- dence. The Arizona crater is the result of an iron meteorite and small globules of iron have been found around it. It would be interesting to see wehther Meteor Crater, seen from space, shows “rays.” Before jumping to the South Pole of the Moon we have to make a de- tour into the Mare Serenitatis for Linne, named after the famous Swedish biologist and systematizer Linnaeus. Linne is merely a grayish-whitish spot, not clearly defined and look- ing alike all through the lunar day, i.e. too shallow to cast a shadow. Some observers stated that a tiny hole can be seen in the center of that spot, provided the telescope is large and the seeing conditions are more than just fine. This is a mod- ern description, made after 1900. But Schmidt, in 1843, claimed that Linne was a crater about six miles in diameter and some twelve hun- dred feet deep. And he and others of his time used Linne as a fixed point for measuring distances since it stood so neatly alone in the mare. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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It still stands neatly alone, but no- body in his right mind would use such an ill-defined object for this purpose. Question : is Linne a real volcano which was active some time between about 1860 and 1890? We won’t be able to tell, et cetera. Near the South Pole there are more nice points of interest. There is Clavius, an enormous walled plain measuring well over one hundred fifty miles in diameter. Clavius is, no doubt, old. Seven big and a large number of smaller meteorites have scored direct hits on its walls in the meantime. The troublesome point is this: these newer craters are not .only newer because they are superimposed on Clavius’ ringwall, they also look newer. Is Clavius old enough to go back to a time where there was erosion as we know it? (The same question can be asked about some other walled plains, too. Yes, why only walled plains? Or mostly walled plains? Why not smaller craters?) And then there is Wargentin, ly- ing so close to the SE rim that it is hard to see most of the time. Wargentin is a forty-five-mile crater that is filled to the rim. What happened? If the meteorite that formed it broke through and caused a lava flow, why did not the lava melt the ringwall in some place? How could such a clearly defined ringwall form at all if the meteorite broke through? The only sugges- tion I can think of is that War- gentin was formed in the approved manner and that a later hit inside it broke through. This idea does not make me completely happy, it is merely the best I can think of right now. Meanwhile the “thin cheese” as Nasmyth and Carpenter called Wargentin, will continue to haunt me. And then we have the Railroad on the Southern hemisphere, also called the Straight Wall. Location : in Mare Nubiutn near crater Thebit, west of the crater, to be precise. (East of it, to make things a little more mysterious, is a slightly curved rill, shorter than the Straight Wall, but running parallel to it.) The Straight Wall is about seventy miles long, one thousand to two thousand feet high, showing as a black line part of the lunar day — shadow — and showing as a very white line otherwise. For the sake of the filing index the Straight Wall, also called the Railroad, has been put down as a rock fault. We do have rock faults on Earth, but they are much shorter and I still have to hear of one that is as straight as the Straight Wall. I think the Straight Wall, too, will be reserved for the coming third era of astronomy. THE END. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ MOON MYSTERIES 1*7

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PROBABILITY ZERO AGRICULTURAL GEOLOGY by George Holman “More than most people notice, the way they live depends on the geology o’ the country they live in,” Hardluck Hadley said, as we left Custard City behind and plodded northward along the gloomy trail toward the Carbohydrate Moun- tains. For the reason that he was familiar with the topography and geology of Venus, I had signed up the unlucky old prospector as a partner. Hardluck pointed to a Colonist at work in an artificially lighted field nearby. “Take that farmer in’ size him up with a farmer back on Earth,” he suggested. “The farmer on Earth grows grain, tubers, fruits an’ vegetables. He fertilizes his ground with limestone dust, phos- phates an’ nitrates. But that farmer here on Venus grovys macaroni, cream puffs an’ soft-nosed pies. An’ fur fertilizer he uses spices, eggs an’ rock sugar frum the mines o’ Saccharita.” “Over in Pristine Province farmin’ is different yet,” the old sourdough went on. “There the primordial rocks come near croppin’ out, an’ in places the soil is hematite or liinonite. Both are friable iron ores. One time I staked out a homestead on some hematite land, an’ tried to raise soft-nosed pies. But the crusts o’ my first crop o’ pies turned out to be cast iron. Then I tried to raise macaroni. It turned out to be small steel tubes. Then I hit on the idea o’ raisin’ ball bearin’s. I planted a small field, an’ got a bumper crop. As you know, they grow in long round pods on vines, like peas.” “I was figgerin’ on gittin’ rich raisin’ ball bearin’s fur all the ma- chinery here on Venus when an- other problem popped up. I didn’t have time to sell my crop before they started to rust. Soon they was pitted an’ spoiled. I took this loss. 128 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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an’ set out to make my bearin’s rustproof. I ordered chromite from Luzon, an’ fertilized a small plot o’ my hematite land with it an’ some nickel ore an’ carbon. The bearin’s I raised on this plot turned out stainless. I ordered enough chro- mite fur my whole farm, an’ planted it all in bearin’s.” “I hired coolies to hull my first two crops by hand. But with my whole homestead in ball bearin’s, I needed a machine to thrash them. I mortgaged ever’thing I had to git the money fur a thrashin’ rig. I sent my order to a firm on Earth, an’ by harvest my bearin’ separator an’ separate smasher-powered en- gine was delivered.” “My orderin’ that thrasher let my plans be known, an’ the ball bearin’ manufacturers on Earth plotted my downfall. My shipment o’ fer- tilizer was late, an’ I had it spread at once. The chromite looked darker an’ heavier than the last ship- ment, but I was in too big a hurry to run a test on it.” “About a week later I noticed that ever’ bearin’ pod had lined itself in a northwest-southeast direction. I was puzzled till I remembered that Pristine Province is in a direct line between the two main magnetic poles o’ Venus. My ball bearin’s had become magnetized. I examined my fertilizer I had left over. I opened one of the drums labeled 'Chromite.’ There was no chro- mite about it. It was magnetite.” “I couldn’t see where the bearin’s bein’ magnetic would damage them. So I got ready to thrash them. My coolies fed the vines into the sep- arator, an’ the blower blowed them out. But nary a bearin’ rolled out. I had figgercd out that the magne- tized bearin’s was stickin’ to the iron parts o’ the machine, when the whole separator suddenly turned around. The belt flew off as it made for the engine, like a magnet attracted toward steel.” “No sooner did my Venusian en- gineer see the separator move than he give the engine the gun. The smashers roared out, an’ the engine raced away across the fields. The separator full o’ magnetized bearin’s was right behind it. The engineer raced the engine this way and that tryin’ to git away frum that infernal separator gone loony. But it was no use. The engine had to run over some bearin’ vines, an’ both bearin’s an’ loose pods stuck to it. At last the engine bogged down, an’ the separator went into it like a buttin’ goat. The atom-smashers must have exploded, ’cause that was the last we saw of either machine ’cep- tin’ a cloud o’ smoke.” “Fur a week after the explosion ball bearin’s rained down like hail- stones all over Venus,” the old sour- dough concluded. TPIAT’S A LOT OF HOT AIR ! by Francis Wilson Powell “Yes, sir,” the brisk, young clerk chirped, “a fine new wagon in ex- change for your auto? Or would you rather take this jaunting car? PROBABIEITT ZERO 129

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it’s the latest style, you know.” “I,” said the customer, "would like—” "Oh, you want a sulky, perhaps ? Anything to oblige. Now, sir, would you mind telling me just where you found that?” He pointed to the beautiful, eight- cylinder sedan. The customer opened and shut his mouth, but the clerk rattled right on. “Just sign here. That’s fine! We’ll deliver in the morning. But, as I was saying, sir, we must put down a good reason for your still having that at all. Regulations, you know.” "I,” said the customer — "Oh, I see. You must have been ’way up in the mountains and didn’t hear about the new law. Radio broken ?” “I,” the customer tried again. “Oh, you young fool! Can’t you shut up for a moment?” "I beg your pardon! Of course, sir, you realize that discourtesy to a member of the Bureau of Reclam- ation and Assessment of New and Used Automobiles for the Promo- tion of Public Welfare and Safety of the World may result in a heavy fine. But, sir, I’m sure you are not familiar with the laws, so we’ll overlook it this time. Now, as you were saying — ” "Look,” the customer pleaded, “just take my car ; give me the horse and buggy — and 1-e-a-v-c-m-e- a-l-o-n-e !” ’ Leaving the Reclamation Office, the husky customer adjourned to “Ye Olden Coupe” and ordered a row of brandies set up on the bar. 180 After consuming the first six, he fell into conversation with a barfly. “Tell me, sonny,” he begged, "what’s all this idiotic monkey busi- ness about having to swap in your car for a horse and wagon? I’ve been out of town a long time.” The barfly fumbled in his pocket. “Got change for a twenty?” he asked. "All right,” said the customer, “I’ll buy you a drink. Now, let’s have it.” "Well, hrrrmmm! It’s a long story. My, that was smooth brandy !” The customer bought him two more and listened. Eventually, the story unfolded. It seems that, a few months back, the World Government came to the conclusion that the weather was gradually changing — at an acceler- ating pace. In seeking the reason for this, research men investigated all possible factors. It came to their attention that the consumption of petroleum had in- creased ten times during the war and had persisted at this rate for the past ten years — making a grand total of nearly thirty billion tons. Now, while the Earth itself was be- lieved to weigh six sextillion, six hundred quintillion tons, it can be appreciated that the consumption of petroleum was rapidly becoming a large portion of the Earth’s weight. “So, you see,” said the barfly, “that is a very serious matter.” “No, I don’t see,” the customer replied. “Why, of course,” the barfly re- torted, “they had to forbid the use ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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of petroleum. Every time you burn oil in your auto, you turn the heavy liquid into light gases. As billions of tons of gas escape, the weight of the Earth is lessened — and this is throwing the Earth out of its orbit.” “Oh,” weakly answered the cus- tomer. APPLESAUCE by George W. Hall On the way to his reward, New- ton’s spirit stuck his head out to test the ether drift. He was rather brutally yanked out, caught in a space-time warp. His robe somewhat awry, he landed on a planet belonging to a twin-sun system on one of the galax- ies. A native shaped like a cross between a lobster and a robot bomb was squatting on the nickel-iron ground, browsing on polar magnetic line forces which he snapped like taut elastic bands and ate like spaghetti. “Tell me all about yourself !” telepathed the native, amicably offer- ing the newcomer a few choice bits of meteorite. “My name is QZZZ- 000>4 and this is planet V-2.” Politely Newton refused but be- gan talking: “My name is Newton and I come from Earth.” QZZZ-OOOyi was a wonderful listener and Newton let himself go. “One thing strikes me in the his- tory of man upon your planet Earth and that is the marvelous role that apples played in the development of the race,” mused QZZZ-000J4 when Newton finally ran down. All you told me about your discovery of the laws of gravitation, differ- ential calculus and the corpuscle theory of light, I understand easily ; but that matter of the apples is beyond my comprehension. Tell me more about the apple!” “The apple?” Newton was non- plused. “Oh, you mean the one that fell and got me to thinking! Why, it was just an apple ... a fruit, you know . . . red ... I re- member picking it up afterwards and it was wormy — Ah, me ! An apple orchard in the spring !” “It is extraordinary,” said QZZZ- 000J4 but I cannot see it. But an DON’T WAtT... Until there isn't on available copy of your favorite magazine. A whole year of reoding pleasure, thrills and chills, can be had by just fill- ing in this coupon and sending it to us immediately. Don't wait- act nowl ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION 122 EAST 42nd STREET NEW YORK 17, N. Y. Enclosed is $2.50. Kindly send me a year’s snbscription to ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE 181 PROBABILITY ZERO

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apple must be the most wonderful machine! What about that Adam and Eve business ? It changed your world, didn’t it? And then that William Tell affair! It changed the world again!” “As a matter of fact, yes,” ad- mitted Newton. “And you say it is a small round thing without tubes, without elec- tronic or atomic elements of power ?” “Yes. Just a fruit. We eat it.” “Liar!” “Sir?” “Liar! A thing like that could not change the destiny of a race.” “I do not like being called a liar, sir. If I had some way to — ” “Got you there! If it is as you say, I will apologize. Take hold of my claw while I adjust this slide on my antenna. Third planet in single sun system, Milky Way Galaxy, I believe you said. The space-time warp is simple. Let’s go!” And so, instantly, they found themselves in an orchard on Earth and the year was 1944. The apples were ripe, red and round. “Sit still,” said Newton, “one must fall presently and you will un- derstand.” Three days passed and no apple fell. “Same old story,” growled QZZZ- 000)4. “no matter where they come from they are all liars!” He ad- justed his antenna and disappeared. Two little boys came in the or- chard and began digging for worms. “Gee !” said the smallest, “I’d like an apple!” “Pa got them all counted with the radar,” said the other, “and don’t try climbing either, the elec- tric eye is watching.” “Don’t they never fall?” queried the first boy. “Heck, no ! They have been sprayed with that hormone dope that prevents dissolution of the ab- cission layer between the fruit stem and the spur!” “Heck!” said the first boy. “Heck and double Heck!” mut- tered Newton as he began his long flight up once more. THE END. There are two ways to be sure of getting your copy of Astounding. 1. Be spry — get there before the other guy. 2. Subscribe. We can't print as many as we'd like — you may have heard of the paper shortage. 18S ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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THE FOOTBALL OUTLOOK fftt- Harry Wis mer, Sports Director of the Blue Network, sees o new era of football obout to be ushered in. He fells all obout it in the new FOOTBALL YEARBOOK.' The prospects of the East, West, Pacific Coost, South, Southwest, Western Plains, ond the Rockies ore discussed by experts — and you'll be surprised ot some of the line-ups!. Do you know obout the debt football owes to the Novy? Do you know when intercollegiate football began? And do you know your 1944 schedules ? A thousand questions ore cleared up, in print and pictoriolly, in this great new edition of the best guide to football, ... 25 CITY DIST. ST ATE i j , — - « • • « • « i

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No Woman Born by C. L. MOORE She had been beautiful — before the fire. Now she was living again , in a sense, but as a robot. Could personality show through a robot . . . Illustrated by Kramer She had been the loveliest crea- ture whose image ever moved along the airways. John Harris, who was once her manager, remembered doggedly how beautiful she had been as he rose in the silent ele- vator toward the room where Deir- dre sat waiting for hitn. Since the theater fire that had 134 destroyed her a year ago, he had never been quite able to let him- self remember her beauty clearly, except when some old poster, half in tatters, flaunted her face at him, or a maudlin memorial program flashed her image unexpectedly across the television screen. But now he had to remember. astounding science-fiction

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The elevator came to a sighing stop and the door slid open. John Harris hesitated. He knew in his mind that he had to go' on, but his reluctant muscles almost refused him. He was thinking helplessly, as he had not allowed himself to think until this moment, of the fabulous grace that had poured through her wonderful dancer’s body, remem- bering her soft and husky voice with the little burr in it that had fascinated the audiences of the whole world. There had never been anyone so beautiful. In times before her, other ac- tresses had been lovely and adulated, but never before Deirdre’s day had the entire world been able to take one woman so wholly to its heart. So few outside the capitals had ever seen Bernhardt or the fabulous Jersey Lily. And the beauties of the movie screen had had to limit their audiences to those who could reach the theaters. But Deirdre’s image had once moved glowingly across the television screens of every home in the civilized world. And in many outside the bounds of civilization. Her soft, husky songs had sounded in the depths of jun- gles, her lovely, languorous body had woven its patterns of rhythm in desert tents and polar huts. The whole world knew every smooth mo- tion of her body and every cadence of her voice, and the way a subtle radiance had seemed to go on be- hind her features when she smiled. And the whole world had mourned her when she died in the theater fire. Harris could not quite think of her as other than dead, though he knew what sat waiting him in the room ahead. He kept remember- ing the old words James Stephens wrote long ago for another Deirdre, also lovely and beloved and un for- gotten after two thousand yeass. The time comes when our hearts sink utterly, When we remember Deirdre and her tale. And that her lips are dust. . . . There has been again no woman born Who was so beautiful ; not one so beauti- ful Of all the women born — That wasn’t quite true, of course • — there had been one. Or maybe, after all, this Deirdre who died only a year ago had not been beau- tiful in the sense of perfection. He thought the other one might not have been either, for there are al- ways women with perfection of fea- ture in the world, and they are not the ones that legend remembers. It was the light within, shining through her charming, imperfect features, that had made this Deir- dre’s face so lovely. No one else he had ever seen had anything like the magic of the lost Deirdre. Let all men go apart and mourn to- gether— No man can ever love her. Not a man Can dream to be her lover. . . . No man say — What could one say to her? There are no words .-*■ That one could say to her. No, no words at all. And it was going to be impossible to go through with this. Harris knew it over- Jto WOMAN BORN m

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whehningly just as his finger touched the buzzer. But the door opened almost instantly, and then it was too late. Maltzer stood just inside, peer- ing out through his heavy specta- cles. You could see how tensely he had been waiting. Harris was a little shocked to see that the man was trembling. It was hard to think of the confident and imper- turbable Maltzer, whom he had known briefly a year ago, as shaken J'ke this. He wondered if Deirdre herself were as tremulous with sheer nerves — but it was not time yet to let himself think of that. “Come in, come in,” Maltzer said irritably. There was no reason for irritation. The year’s work, so much of it in secrecy and solitude, must have tried him physically and mentally to the very breaking point. “She all right?” Harris asked in- anely, stepping inside. “Oh yes . . . yes, she’s all right.” Maltzer bit his thumbnail and glanced over his shoulder at an in- ner door, where Harris guessed she would be waiting. “No,” Maltzer said, as he took an involuntary step toward it. “We’d better have a talk first. Come over and sit down. Drink?” Harris nodded, and watched Maltzer’s hands tremble as he tilted the decanter. The man was clearly on the very verge of collapse, and Harris felt a sudden cold uncer- tainty open up in him in the one place where until now he had been oddly confident. “She is all right?” he demanded, taking the glass. ]S(t “Oh yes, she’s perfect. She’s so confident it scares me.” Maltzer gulped his drink and poured an- other before he sat down. “What’s wrong, then?” “Nothing, I guess. Or . . . well, I don’t know. I’m not sure any more. I’ve worked toward this meeting for nearly a year, but now — well, I’m not sure it’s time yet. I’m just not sure.” He stared at Harris, his eyes large and indistinguishable behind the lenses. He was a thin, wire- taut man with all the bone and sinew showing plainly beneath the dark skin of his face. Thinner, now, than he had been a year ago when Harris saw him last. “I’ve been too close to her,” he said now. “I have no perspective any more." All I can see is my own work. And I'm just not sure that’s ready yet for you or anyone to see.” “She thinks so ?” “I never saw a woman so confi- dent.” Maltzer drank, the glass clicking on his teeth. He looked up suddenly through the distorting lenses. “Of course a failure now would mean — well, absolute col- lapse,” he said, Harris nodded. He was think- ing of the year of incredibly pains- taking work that lay behind this meeting, the immense fund of knowledge, of infinite patience, the secret collaboration of artists, sculp- tors, designers, scientists, and the genius of Maltzer governing them all as an orchestra conductor gov- erns his players. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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He was thinking too, with a cer- tain unreasoning jealousy, of the strange, cold, passionless intimacy between Maltzer and Deirdre in that year, a closer intimacy than any two humans can ever have shared be- fore, In a sense the Deirdre whom he saw in a few minutes would be Maltzer, just as he thought he de- tected in Maltzer now and then small mannerisms of inflection and motion that had been Deirdre’s own. There had been between them a sort of unimaginable marriage stranger than anything that could ever have taken place before. “ — so many complications,” Maltzer was saying in his worried voice with its faintest possible echo of Deirdre’s lovely, cadenced rhythm. (The sweet, soft huski- ness he would never hear again.) “There was shock, of course. Ter- rible shock. And a great fear of fire. We had to conquer that be- fore we could take the first steps. But we did it. When you go in you’ll probably find her sitting be- fore the fire.” He caught the star- tled question in Harris’ eyes and smiled. “No, she can’t feel the warmth now, of course. But she likes to watch the flames. She’s mastered any abnormal fear of them quite beautifully.” “She can — ” Harris hesitated. “Her eyesight’s normal now?” “Perfect,” Maltzer said. “Per- fect vision was fairly simple to provide. After all, that sort of thing has already been worked out, in other connections. I might even say her vision’s a little better than perfect, from our own standpoint.” He shook his head irritably. “I’m not worried about the mechanics of the thing. Luckily they got to her > before’ the brain was touched at all. Shock was the only danger to her sensory centers, and we took care of all that first of all, as soon as communication could be established. Even so, it needed great courage on her part. Great courage.” He was silent for a moment, staring into his empty glass. “Harris,” he said suddenly, with- out looking up, “have I made a mis- take ? Should we have let her die?” Harris shook his head helplessly. It was an unanswerable question. It had tormented the whole world for a year now. There had been hundreds of answers and thousands of words written on the subject. Has anyone the right to preserve a brain alive when its body is de- stroyed? Even if a new body can be provided, necessarily so very un- like the old? “It’s not that she’s — ugly — now,” Maltzer went on hurriedly, as if afraid of an answer. “Metal isn’t ugly. And Deirdre . . . well, you’ll see. I tell you, I can’t see myself. I know the whole mechanism so well — it’s just mechanics to me. Maybe she’s — grotesque. I don’t know. Often I’ve wished I hadn’t been on the spot, with all my ideas, just when the fire broke out. Or that it could have been anyone but Deirdre. She was so beautiful — Still, if it had been someone else I think the whole thing might have failed completely. It takes more than just an uninjured brain. It NO WOMAN B OK N 397

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takes strength and courage beyond common, and — well, something more. Something — unquenchable. Deirclre has it. She’s still Deirdre. In a way she’s still beautiful. But I’m not sure anybody but myself could see that. And you know what she plans?” .“No — what?” “She’s going back on the air- screen.” Harris looked at him in stunned disbelief. “She is still beautiful,” Maltzer told him fiercely. “She’s got cour- age, and a serenity that amazes me. And she isn’t in the least worried or resentful about what’s happened. Or afraid what the verdict of the public will be. But I am, Harris. 1’tn terrified.” They looked at each other for a moment more, neither speaking. Then Maltzer shrugged and stood up. “She’s in there,” he said, gestur- ing with his glass. Harris turned without a word, not giving himself time to hesitate. He crossed toward the inner door. The room was full of a soft, clear, indirect light that climaxed in the fire crackling on a white tiled hearth. Harris paused inside the door, his heart beating thickly. He did not see her for a moment. It was a perfectly commonplace room, bright, light, with pleasant furniture, and flowers on the tables. Their perfume was sweet on the dear air. He did not see Deirdre. Then a chair by the fire creaked as she shifted her weight in it. The high back hid her, but she spoke. And for one dreadful mo- ment it was the voice of an automa- ton that sounded in the room, metal- lic, without inflection. “Hel-lo — ” said the voice. Then she laughed and tried again. And it was the old, familiar, sweet huskiness he had not hoped to hear again as long as he lived. In spite of himself he said, “Deirdre!” and her image rose be- fore him as if she herself had risen unchanged from the chair, tall, golden, swaying a little with her wonderful dancer’s poise, the lovely, imperfect features lighted by the glow that made them beautiful. It was the crudest thing his memory could have done to him. And yet the voice — after that one lapse, the voice was perfect. “Come and look at me, John,” she said. He crossed the floor slowly, forc- ing himself to move. That instant’s flash of vivid recollection had nearly wrecked his hard-won poise. He tried to keep his mind perfectly blank as he came at last to the verge of seeing what no one but Maltzer had so far seen or known about in its entirety. No one at all had known what shape would be forged to clothe the most beautiful woman on Earth, now that her beauty was gone. He had envisioned many shapes. Great, lurching robot forms, cylin- drical, with hinged arms and legs. A glass case with the brain float- ing in it and appendages to serve its needs. Grotesque visions, like nightmares come nearly true. And 138 ASTOUNDTXfi SCIENCE FICTION

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each more inadequate than the last, for what metal shape could possibly do more than house ungraciously the mind and brain that had once enchanted a whole world ? Then he came around the wing of the chair, and saw her. The human brain is often too complicated a mechanism to func- tion perfectly. Harris’ brain was called upon now to perform a very elaborate series of shifting impres- sions. First, incongruously, he re- membered a curious inhuman figure he had once glimpsed leaning over the fence rail outside a farmhouse. For an instant the shape had stood up integrated, ungainly, impossibly human, before the glancing eye re- solved it into an arrangement of brooms and buckets. What the eye had found only roughly humanoid, the suggestible Drain had accepted fully formed. It was thus now, with Deirdre. The first impression that his eyes and mind took from sight of her was shocked and incredulous, for his brain said to him unbelievingly, "This is Deirdre' She hasn’t changed at all!” Then the shift of perspective took over, and even more shock- ingly, eye and brain said, “No, not Deirdre — not human. Nothing but metal coils. Not Deirdre at all — ” And that Was the worst. It was like walking from a dream of someone beloved and lost, and facing anew, after that heartbreaking reassur- ance of sleep, the inflexible fact that nothing can bring the lost to life again. Deirdre was gone, and this was only machinery heaped in a flowered chair. Then the machinery moved, ex- quisitely, smoothly, with a grace as familiar as the swaying poise he remembered. The sweet, husky voice of Deirdre said, “It’s me, John darling. It really is, you know.” And it was. That was the third metamorpho- sis, and the final one. Illusion steadied and became factual, real. It was Deirdre. He sat down bonelessly. He had no muscles. Fie looked at her speechless and unthinking, letting his senses take in the sight of her without trying to rationalize what he saw. She was golden still. They had kept that much of her, the first im- pression of warmth and color which had once belonged to her sleek hair and the apricot tints of her skin. But they had had the good sense to go no farther. They had not tried to make a wax image of the lost Deirdre. (No woman horn who was so beautiful — Not one so beautiful, of all the women born — ) And so she had no face. She had only a smooth, delicately mod- eled ovoid for her head, with a . . . a sort of crescent-shaped mask across the frontal area where her eyes would have been if she had needed eyes. A narrow, curved quarter-moon, with the horns turned upward. It was filled in with some- thing translucent, like cloudy crys- tal, and tinted the aquamarine of the eyes Deirdre used to have. HO WOMAN BORN

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Through that, then, she saw the world. Through that she looked without eyes, and behind it, as be- hind the eyes of a human — she was. Except for that, she had no fea- tures. And it had been wise of those who designed her, he realized now. Subconsciously he had been dreading some clumsy attempt at human features that might creak like a marionette’s in parodies of animation. The eyes, perhaps, had had to open in the same place upon her head, and at the same distance apart, to make easy for her an ad- justment to the stereoscopic vision she used to have. But he was glad they had not given her two eye- shaped openings with glass marbles inside them. The mask was better. (Oddly enough, he did not once think of the naked brain that must lie inside the metal. The mask was symbol enough for the woman within. It was enigmatic; you did not know if her gaze was on you searchingly, or wholly withdrawn. And it had no variations of bril- liance such as once had played across the incomparable mobility of Deirdre’s face. But eyes, even hu- man eyes, are as a matter of fact enigmatic enough. They have no expression except what the lids im- part ; they take all animation from the features. We automatically watch the eyes of the friend we speak with, but if he happens to be lying down so that he speaks across his shoulder and his face is upside- down to us, quite as automatically we watch the mouth. The gaze keeps shifting nervously between mouth and eyes in their reversed or- 140 der, for it is the position in the face, not the feature itself, which we are accustomed to accept as the seat of the soul. Deirdre’s mask was in that proper place ; it was easy to accept it as a mask over eyes.) She had, Harris realized as the first shock quieted, a very beauti- fully shaped head — a bare, golden skull. She turned it a little, grace- fully upon her neck of metal, and he saw that the artist who shaped it had given her the most delicate suggestion of cheekbones, narrow- ing in the blankness below the mask to the hint of a human face. Not too much. Just enough so that when the head turned you saw by its modeling that it had moved, lending perspective and foreshort- ening to the expressionless golden helmet. Light did not slip uninter- rupted as if over the surface of a golden egg. Brancusi himself had never made anything more simple or more subtle than the modeling of Deirdre’s head. But all expression, of course, was gone. All expression had gone up in the smoke of the theater fire, with the lovely, mobile, radiant fea- tures which had meant Deirdre. As for her body, he could not see its shape. A garment hid her. But they had made no incongruous attempt to give her back the cloth- ing that once had made her famous. Even the softness of cloth would have called the mind too sharply to the remembrance that no human body lay beneath the folds, nor does metal need the incongruity of doth for its protection. Yet with- out garments, he realized, she would ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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have looked oddly naked, since her new body was humanoid, not angu- lar machinery. The designer had solved his para- dox by giving her a robe of very fine metal mesh. It hung from the gentle slope of her shoulders in straight, pliant folds like a longer Grecian chlamys, flexible, yet with weight enough of its own not to cling too revealingly to whatever metal shape lay beneath. The arms they had given her were left bare, and the feet and ankles. And Maltzer had performed his greatest miracle in the limbs of the new Deirdre. It was a mechanical miracle basically, but the eye appre- ciated first that he had also showed supreme artistry and understand- ing. Her arms were pale shining gold, tapered smoothly, without modeling, and flexible their whole length in diminishing metal brace- lets fitting one inside the other clear down to the slim, round wrists. The hands were more nearly human than any other feature about her, though they, too, were fitted to- gether in delicate, small sections that slid upon one another with the flexibility almost of flesh. The fin- gers’ bases were solider than hu- man, and the fingers themselves tapered to longer tips. Her feet, too, beneath the taper- ing broader rings of the metal ankles, had been constructed upon the model of human feet. Their finely tooled sliding segments gave her an arch and a heel and a flexible j NO WOMAN BORN >41 .

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forward section formed almost like the sollcrets of medieval armor. She looked, indeed, very much like a creature in armor, with her delicately plated limbs and her fea- tureless head like a helmet with a visor of glass, and her robe of chain-mail. But no knight in armor ever moved as Deirdre moved, or wore his armor upon a body of such inhumanly fine proportions. Only a knight from another world, . or a knight of Oberon’s court, might have shared that delicate likeness. Briefly he had been surprised at the smallness and exquisite propor- tions of her. He hacl been expect- ing the ponderous mass of such robots as he had seen, wholly au- tomatons. And then he realized that for them, much of the space had to be devoted to the inadequate mechanical brains that guided them about their duties. Deirdre’s brain still preserved and proved the crafts- manship of an artisan far defter than man. Only the body was of metal, and it did not seem complex, though he had not yet been told how it was motivated. Harris had no idea how long he sat staring at the figure in the cushioned chair. She was still lovely — indeed, she was still Deir- dre— and as he looked he let the careful schooling of his face relax. There was no need to hide his thought from her. She stirred upon the cushions, the long, flexible arms moving with a litheness that was not quite hu- man. The motion disturbed him as the body itself had not, and in m spite of himself his face froze a lit- tle. He had the feeling that from behind the crescent mask she was watching him very closely. Slowly she rose. The motion was very smooth. Also it was serpentine, as if the body beneath the coat of mail were made in the same interlocking sec- tions as her limbs. He had ex- pected and feared mechanical ri- gidity ; nothing had prepared him for this more than human supple- ness. She stood quietly, letting the heavy mailed folds of her garment settle about her. They fell together with a faint ringing sound, like small bells far off, and hung beau- tifully in pale golden, sculptured folds. He had risen automatically as she did. Now he faced her, staring. He had never seen her stand perfectly still, and she was not doing it now. She swayed just a bit, vitality burning inextinguish- ably in her brain as once it had burned in her body, and stolid immobility was as impossible to her as it had always been. The golden garment caught points of light from the fire and glimmered at him with tiny reflections as she moved. Then she put her featureless hel- meted head a little to one side, and he heard her laughter as fa- miliar in its small, throaty, inti- mate sound as he had ever heard it from her living throat. And every gesture, every attitude, every flowing of motion into motion was so utterly Deirdre that the over- whelming illusion swept his mind again and this was the flesh-and- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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blood woman as dearly as if he saw her standing there whole once more, like Phoenix from the fire. “Well, John,” she said in the soft, husky, amused voice he re- membered perfectly. “Well, John, is it I?” She knew it was. Per- fect assurance sounded in the voice. “The shock will wear off, you know. It’ll be easier and easier as time goes on. I’m quite used to myself now. See ?” She turned away from him and crossed the room smoothly, with the old, poised, dancer’s glide, to the mirror that paneled one side of the room. And before it, as he had so often seen her preen before, he watched her preening now, running flexible metallic hands down the folds of her metal garment, turn- ing to admire herself over one metal shoulder, making the mailed folds tinkle and sway as she struck an arabesque position before the glass. His knees let him down into the chair she had vacated. Mingled shock and relief loosened all his muscles in him, and she was more poised and confident than he. “It’s a miracle,” he said with con- viction. “It’s you. But I don’t see how — ” He had meant, " — how, without face or body — ” but clearly he could not finish that sentence. She finished it for him in her own mind, and. answered without self- consciousness. “It’s motion, mostly,” she said, still admiring her own suppleness in the mirror. “See?” And very lightly on her springy, armored feet she flashed through an enchainment of brilliant steps, swinging round with a pirou- ette to face him. “That was what Maltzer and I worked out between us, after I began to get myself un- der control again.” Her voice was somber for a moment, remembering a dark time in the past. Then she went on, “It wasn’t easy, of course, but it was fascinating. You’ll never guess how fascinating, John ! We knew we couldn’t work out anything like a facsimile of the way I used to look, so we had to find some other basis to build on. And motion is the other basis of recog- nition, after actual physical like- ness.” She moved lightly across the car- pet toward the window and stood looking down, her featureless face averted a little and the light shining across the delicately hinted curves of the cheekbones. “Luckily,” she said, her voice amused, “I never was beautiful. It was all — well vivacity, I suppose, and muscular co-ordination. Years and years of training, and all of it engraved here” — she struck her golden helmet a light, ringing blow with golden knuckles — “in the habit patterns grooved into my brain. So this body . . . did he tell you? . . . works entirely through the brain. Electromagnetic currents flowing along from ring to ring, like this.” She rippled a boneless arm at him with a motion like flowing water. “Nothing holds me together — noth- ing!— except muscles of magnetic currents. And if I’d been some- body else — somebody who moved differently, why the flexible rings would have moved differently too, guided by the impulse from another 143 NO WOMAN BORN

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brain. I'm not conscious of doing anything I haven’t always done. 'The same impulses that used to go out to my muscles go out now to — this.” And she made a shuddering, serpentine motion of both arms at him. like a Cambodian dancer, and then laughed wholeheartedly, the sound of it ringing through the room with such full-throated mer- riment that he could not help seeing again the familiar face crinkled with pleasure, the white teeth shin- ing. “It’s all perfectly subconscious now,” she told him. “It took lots of practice at first, of course, but now even my signature looks just as it always did — the co-ordination is duplicated that delicately.” She rippled her arms at him again and chuckled. “But the voice, too,” Harris pro- tested inadequately. “It’s your voice, Deirdre.” “The voice isn’t only a matter of throat construction and breath con- trol. my darling Johnnie! At least, so Professor Maltzer assured me a year ago, and I certainly haven’t any reason to doubt him !” She laughed again. She was laughing a little too much, with a touch of the bright, hysteric overexcitement he remembered so well. But if any woman ever had reason for mild hysteria, surely Deirdre had it now. The laughter rippled and ended, and she went on, her voice eager. “He says voice control is almost wholly a matter of hearing what you produce, once you’ve got ade- quate mechanism, of course. That’s why deaf people, with the same 144 vocal chords as ever, let their voices change completely and lose all in- flection when they’ve been deaf long enough. And luckily, you see, I’m not deaf !” She swung around to him. the folds of her robe twinkling and ringing, and rippled up and up a clear, true scale to a lovely high note, and then cascaded down again like water over a falls. But she left him no time for applause. “Per- fectly simple, you see. All it took was a little matter of genius from the professor to get it worked out for me! He started with a new variation of the old Vodor you must remember hearing about, years ago. Originally, of course, the thing was ponderous. You know how it worked — speech broken down to a few basic sounds and built up again in combinations produced from a keyboard. I think originally the sounds were a sort of ktch and a shooshing noise, but we’ve got it all worked out to a flexibility and range quite as good as human now. All I do is — well, mentally play on the keyboard of my . . . my sound-unit, I suppose it's called. It’s much more complicated than that, of course, but I’ve learned to do it un- consciously. And I regulate it by ear, quite automatically now. If you were— here — instead of me, and you’d had the same practice, your own voice would be coming out of the same keyboard and diaphragm instead of mine. It’s all a matter of the brain patterns that operated the body and now operate the ma- chinery. They send out very strong impulses that are stepped up as ASTOUNDING 8CIHNCK -FICTION

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much as necessary somewhere or other in here — ” Her hands waved vaguely over the mesh-robed body. She was silent a momeht, look- ing out the window. Then she turned away and crossed the floor to the fire, sinking again into the flowered chair. Her helmet-skull turned its mask to face him and he could feel a quiet scrutiny behind the aquamarine of its gaze. “It’s — odd,” she said, “being here in this . . . this . . . instead of a body. But not as odd or as alien as you might think. I’ve thought about it a lot — I’ve had plenty of time to think — and I’ve begun to realize what a tremendous force the human ego really is. I’m not sure I want to suggest it has any mystical power it can impress on mechanical things, but it does seem to have a power of some sort. It does instill its own force into inanimate objects, and they take on a personality of their own. People do impress their per- sonalities on the houses they live in, you know. I’ve noticed that often. Even empty rooms. Apd it happens with other things too, espe- cially, I think, with inanimate things that men depend on for their lives. Ships, for instance — they always have personalities of their own. “And planes — in wars you always hear of planes crippled too badly to fly, but struggling back anyhow with their crews. Even guns ac- quire a sort of ego. Ships and guns and planes are ‘she’ to the men who operate them and depend on them for their lives. It’s as if machinery with complicated moving parts al- most simulates life, and does ac- quire from the men who use it— well, not exactly life, of course — but a personality. I don’t know what. Maybe it absorbs some of the actual electrical impulses their brains throw off, especially in times of stress. “Well, after awhile I began to accept the idea that this new body of mine could behave at least as re- sponsively as a ship or a plane. Quite apart from the fact that my own brain controls its ‘muscles.’ I believe there’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental con- ception and gestation, and the re- sult responds to the minds that cre- ated them, and to all human minds that understand and manipulate them.” She stirred uneasily and smoothed a flexible hand along her mesh- robed metal thigh. “So this is my- self,” she said. “Metal — but me. And it grows more and more my- self the longer I live in it. It’s my house and the machine my life de- pends on, but much more intimately in each case than any real house or machine ever was before to any other human. And you know, I wonder if in time I’ll forget what flesh felt like — my own flesh, when I touched it like this — and the metal against the metal will be so much the same I’ll never even notice?” Harris did not try to answer her. He sat without moving, watching her expressionless face. In a mo- ment she went on, “I’ll tell you the best thing, John,” she said, her voice softening to the NO WOMAN BORN 145

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old Intimacy he remembered so well that he could see superimposed upon the blank skull the warm, in- tent look that belonged with the voice. “I’m not going to live for- ever. It may not sound like a — best thing — but it is, John. You know, for awhile that was the worst of all, after I knew I was — after I woke up again. The thought of liv- ing on and on in a body that wasn’t mine, seeing everyone I knew grow old and die, and not being able to stop — “But Maltzer says my brain will probably wear out quite normally — except, of course, that I won’t have to worry about looking old! — and when it gets tired and stops, the body I’m in won’t be any longer. The magnetic muscles that hold it into my own shape and motions will let go when the brain lets go, and there’ll be nothing but a ... a pile of disconnected rings. If they ever assemble it again, it won’t be me.” She hesitated. “I like that, John,” she said, and he felt from behind the mask a searching of his face. He knew and understood that somber satisfaction. He could not put it into words; neither of them wanted to do that. But he under- stood. It was the conviction of mor- tality, in spite of her immortal body. She was not cut off from the rest of her race in the essence of their hu- manity, for though she wore a body of steel and they perishable flesh, yet she must perish too, and the same fears and faiths still united her to mortals and humans, though she wore the body of Oberon’s in- human knight. Even in her death nc she must be unique — dissolution in a shower of tinkling and clashing rings, he thought, and almost envied her the finality and beauty of that particular death — but afterward, oneness with humanity in however much or little awaited them all. So she could feel that this exile in metal was only temporary, in spite of everything. (And providing, of course, that the mind inside the metal did not veer from its inherited humanity as the years went by. A dweller in a house may impress his per- sonality upon the walls, but subtly the walls too, may impress their own shape upon the ego of the man. Neither of them thought of that, at the time.) Deirdre sat a moment longer in silence. Then the mood vanished and she rose again, spinning so that the robe belled out ringing about her ankles. She rippled an- other scale up and down, faultlessly and with the same familiar sweet- ness of tone that had made her famous. “So I’m going right back on the stage, John,” she said serenely. “I can still sing. I can still dance. I’m still myself in everything that matters, and I can’t imagine doing anything else for the rest of my life.” He could not answer without stammering a little. “Do you think . . . will they accept you, Deirdre? After all—” “They’ll accept me,” she said in that confident voice. “Oh, they’ll come to see a freak at first, of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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course, but they'll stay to watch — Deirdre. And come back again and again just as they always did. You’ll see, my dear.” But hearing her sureness, sud- denly Harris himself was unsure. Maltzer had not been, either. She was so regally confident, and dis- appointment would 'be so deadly a blow at all that remained of her — She was so delicate a being now. really. Nothing but a glowing and radiant mind poised in metal, dominating it, bending the steel to the illusion of her lost loveliness with a sheer self-confidence that gleamed through the metal body. But the brain sat delicately on its poise of reason. She had been through intolerable stresses already, perhaps more terrible depths of despair and self-knowledge than any human brain had yet endured before her, for — since Lazarus him- self— who had come back from the dead ? But if the world did not accept her as beautiful, what then? If they laughed, or pitied her, or came only to watch a jointed freak per-, forming as if on strings where the loveliness of Deirdre had once enchanted them, what then? And he could not be perfectly sure they would not. He had known her too well in the flesh to see her objec- tively even now, in metal. Every inflection of her voice called up the vivid memory of the face that had flashed its evanescent beauty in some look to match the tone. She was Deirdre to Harris simply be- cause she had been so intimately familiar in every poise and attitude, through so many years. But peo- ple who knew her only slightly, or saw her for the first time in metal— what would they see? A marionette? Or the real grace and loveliness shining through? He had no possible way of know- ing. He saw her too clearly as she had been to see her now at all, ex- cept so linked with the past that she was not wholly metal. And he knew what Maltzer feared, for Maltzer’s psychic blindness toward her lay at the other extreme. He had never known Deirdre except as a machine, and he could not see her objectively any more than Har- ris could. To Maltzer she was pure metal, a robot his own hands and brain had devised, mysteriously ani- mated by the mind of Deirdre, to be sure, but to all outward seeming a thing of metal solely. He had worked so long over each intricate part of her body, he knew so well how every jointure in it was put to- gether. that he could not see the whole. He had studied many film records of her, of course, as she used to be, in order to gauge the accuracy of his facsimile, but this thing he had. made was a copy only. He was too close to Deirdre to see her. And Harris, in a way, was too far. The indomitable Deirdre herself shone so vividly through the metal that his mind kept super- imposing one upon the other. How would an audience react to her? Where in the scale between these two extremes would their ver- dict fall? For Deirdre. there was only one possible answer. NO WOMAN BORN AST— 6S 147

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“I’m not worried,” Deirdre said serenely, and spread her golden hands to the fire to watch lights dancing in reflection upon their shining surfaces. “I’m still my- self. I’ve always had . . . well, power over my audiences. Any good performer knows when he’s got it. Mine isn’t gone. I can still give them what I always gave, only now with greater variations and more depths than I’d ever have done before. Why, look — ” She gave a little wriggle of excitement. “You know the .arabesque prin- ciple— getting the longest possible distance from fingertip to toetip with a long, slow curve through the whole length? And the brace of the other leg and arm giving con- trast? Well, look at me. I don’t work on hinges now. I can make every motion a long curve if I want to. My . body’s different enough now to work out a whole new school of dancing. Of course there’ll be things I used to do that I won’t at- tempt now — no more dancing sur les point es, for instance — but the new things will more than balance the loss. I’ve been practicing. Do you know I can turn a hundred fouettes now without a flaw ? And I think I could go right on and turn a thousand, if I wanted.” She made the firelight flash on her hands, and her robe rang musi- cally as she moved her shoulders a little. “I’ve already worked out one new dance for myself,” she said. “God knows I’m no choreog- rapher, but I did want to experi- ment first. Later, you know, really creative men like Massanchine or 148 Fokhileff may want to do something entirely new for me — a whole new sequence of movements based on a new technique. And music— that could be quite different, too. Oh, there’s no end to the possibilities! Even my voice has more range and power. Luckily I’m not an actress — it would be silly to try to play Camille or Juliet with a cast of ordi- nary people. Not that I couldn’t, you know.” She turned her head to stare at Harris through the mask of glass. “I honestly think I could. But it isn’t necessary. There’s too much else. Oh, I’m not worried!” “Maltzer’s worried,” Harris re- minded her. She swung away from the fire, her metal robe ringing, and into her voice came the old note of dis- tress that went with a furrowing of her forehead and a sidewise tilt of the head. The head went sidewise as it had always done, and he could see the furrowed brow almost as clearly as if flesh still clothed her. “I know. And I’m worried about him, John. He’s worked so' aw- fully hard over me. This is the doldrums now, the let-down period, I suppose. I know what’s on his mind. He’s afraid I’ll look just the same to the world as I look to him. Tooled metal. He’s in a po- sition no one ever quite achieved before, isn’t he? Rather like God.” Her voice rippled a little with amusement. “I suppose to God we must look like a collection of cells and corpuscles ourselves. But Malt- zer lacks a god’s detached view- point.” “He can’t see you as I do, any- ASTOONDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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how,” Harris was choosing his words with difficulty, “I wonder, though — would it help him any if you postponed your debut awhile? You’ve been with him too closely, I think. You don't quite realize how near a breakdown he is. I was shocked when I saw him just now.” The golden head shook. “No. He’s close to a breaking point, maybe, but I think the only cure’s action. He wants me to retire and stay out of sight, John. Always. He’s afraid for anyone to see me except a few old friends who re- member me as I was. People he can trust to be — kind.” She laughed. It was very strange to hear that ripple of mirth from the blank, un- featured skull. Harris was seized with sudden panic at the thought of what reaction it might evoke in an audience of strangers. As if he had spoken the fear aloud, her voice denied it. “I don’t need kindness. And it’s no kindness to Maltzer to hide me under a bushel. He has worked too hard, I know. He’s driven himself to a breaking point. But it’ll be a complete negation of all he’s worked for if I hide myself now. You don’t know what a tre- mendous lot of geniuses and ar- tistry went into me, John. The whole idea from the start was to re- create what I’d lost so that it could be proved that beauty and talent need not be sacrificed by the de- struction of parts or all the body. “It wasn’t only for me that we meant to prove that. There’ll be others who suffer injuries that once might have ruined them. This was to end all suffering like that for- ever. It was Maltzer’s gift to the whole race as well as to me. He’s really a humanitarian, John, like most great men. He’d never have given up a year of his life to this work if it had been for any one in- dividual alone. He was seeing thou- sands of others beyond me as he worked. And I won’t let him ruin all he’s achieved because he’s afraid to prove it now he’s got it. The whole wonderful achievement will be worthless it I don’t take the final step, I think his breakdown, in the end, would be worse and more final if I never tried than if I tried and failed.” Harris sat in silence. There was no answer he could make to that. Pie hoped the little twinge of shame- faced jealousy he suddenly felt did not show, as he was reminded anew of the intimacy closer than marriage which had of necessity bound these two together. And he knew that any reaction of his would in its way be almost as prejudiced as Malt- zer’s, for a reason at once the same and entirely opposite. Except that he himself came fresh to the prob- lem, while Maltzer’s viewpoint was colored by a year of overwork and physical and mental exhaustion. “What are you going to do ?” he asked. She was standing before the fire when he spoke, swaying just a lit- tle so that highlights danced all along her golden body. Now she turned with a serpentine grace and sank into the cushioned chair beside her. It came to him suddenly that she was much more than humanly NO WOMAN BORN 149

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graceful — quite as much as he had once feared she would be less than human. “I’ve already arranged for a per- formance,” she told him, her voice a little shaken with a familiar mix- ture of excitement and defiance. Harris sat up with a start. “How? Where ? There hasn’t been any pub- licity at all yet, has there? I didn’t know — ” “Now, now, Johnnie,” her amused voice soothed him. “You’ll be handling everything just as usual once I get started back to work — that is, if you still want to. But this I’ve arranged for myself. It’s . going to be a surprise. I ... I felt it had to be a surprise.” She wriggled a little among the cushions. “Audience psychology is something I’ve always felt rather than known, and I do feel this is the way. it ought to be done. There’s no precedent. Nothing like this ever happened before. I’ll have to go by my own intuition.” “You mean it’s to be a complete surprise ?” “I think it must be. I don’t want the audience coming in with pre- conceived ideas. I want them to see me exactly as I am now first, before they know who or what they’re Seeing. They must realize I can still give as good a perform- ance as ever before they remember and compare it with my past per- formances. I don’t want them to come ready to pity my handicaps — I haven’t got any ! — or full of mor- bid curiosity.’ So I’m going on the air after the regular eight-o’clock telecast of the feature from Teleo MO City. I’m just going to do one spe- cialty in the usual vaude program. It’s all been arranged. They’ll build up to it, of course, as the highlight of the evening, but they aren’t to say who I am until the end of the performance — if the audience hasn’t rceognized me already, by then.” “Audience ?” “Of course. Surely you haven’t forgotten they still play to a theater audience at Teleo City? That’s why I want to make my debut there. I’ve always played better when there were people in the studio, so I could gauge reactions. I think most performers do. Anyhow, it’s all arranged.” “Does Maltzer know?” She wriggled uncomfortably. “Not yet.” “But he’ll have to give his per- mission too, won’t he? I mean — ” “Now look, John! That’s an- other idea you and Maltzer will have to get out of your minds. I don’t belong to him. In a way he’s just been my doctor through a long illness, but I’m free to discharge him whenever I choose. If there were ever any legal disagreement, I suppose he’d be entitled to quite a lot of money for the work he’s done on my new body — for the body it- self, really, since it’s his own ma- chine, in one sense. But he doesn’t own it, or me. I’m not sure just how the question would be decided by the courts — there again, we’ve got a problem without precedent. The body may be his work, but the brain that makes it something more than a collection of metal rings is me, and he couldn’t restrain me ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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against my will even if he wanted to. Not legally, and not — ” She hesitated oddly and looked away. For the first time Harris was aware of something beneath the surface of her mind which was quite strange to him. “Well, anyhow,” she went on, “that question won’t come up. Maltzer and I have been much too close in the past year to clash over anything as essential as this. He knows in his heart that I’m right, and he won’t try to restrain me. His work won’t be completed until I do what I was built to do. And I in- tend to do it.” That strange little quiver of something — something un-Deirdre — which had so briefly trembled be- neath the surface of familiarity stuck in Harris’ mind as something he must recall and examine later. Now he said only, “All right. I suppose I agree with you. How soon are you go- ing to do it?” She turned her head so that even the glass mask through which she looked out at the world was fore- shortened away from him, and the golden helmet with its hint of sculp- tured cheekbone was entirely enig- matic. “Tonight,” she said. Maltzer’s thin hand shook so badly that he could not turn the dial. He tried twice and then laughed nervously and shrugged at Harris. “You get her,” he said. Harris glanced at his watch. “It isn’t time yet. She won’t be on for half an hour.” Maltzer made a gesture of vio- lent impatience. “Get it, get it!” Harris shrugged a little in turn and twisted the dial. On the tilted screen above them shadows and sound blurred together and then clarified into a somber medieval hall, vast, vaulted, people in bright cos- tume moving like pygmies through its dimness. Since the play con- cerned Mary of Scotland, the actors were dressed in something approxi- mating Elizabethan garb, but as every era tends to translate costume into terms of the current fashions, the women’s hair was dressed in a style that would have startled Eliza- beth, and their footgear was en- tirely anachronistic. The hall dissolved and a face swam up into soft focus upon the screen. The dark, lush beauty of NO WOMAN BORN m

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' the actress who was playing the Stuart queen glowed at them in velvety perfection from the clouds of her pearl-strewn hair. Maltzer groaned. “She’s competing with that,” he said hollowly. “You think she can’t?” Maltzer slapped the chair arms with angry palms. Then the quiv- ering of his fingers seemed sud- denly to strike him, and he mut- tered to himself, “Look at ’em! I’m not even fit to handle a ham- mer and saw.” But the mutter was an aside. “Of course she can’t compete,” he cried irritably. “She hasn’t any sex. She isn’t female any more. She doesn’t know that yet, but she’ll learn.” Harris stared at him, feeling a little stunned. Somehow the thought had not occurred to him before at all, so vividly had the illusion of the old Deirdre hung about the new one. “She’s an abstraction now,” Malt- zer went on, drumming his palms upon the chair in quick, nervous rhythms. “I don’t know what it’ll do to her, but there’ll be change. Remember Abelard ? She’s lost everything that made her essen- tially what the public wanted, and she’s going to find it out the hard way. After that — ” He grimaced savagely and was silent. “She hasn’t lost everything,” Har- ris defended. “She can dance and sing as well as ever, maybe better. She still has grace and charm and — ” “Yes, but where did the grace and charm come from ? Not out of 152 the habit patterns in her brain. No,' out of human contacts, out of all the things that stimulate sensitive minds to creativeness. And she’s lost three of her five senses. Every- thing she can’t see and hear is gone. One of the strongest stimuli to a woman of her type was the knowl- edge of sex competition. You know how she sparkled when a man came into the room? All that’s gone, and it was an essential. You know how liquor stimulated her? She’s lost that. She couldn’t taste food or drink even if she needed it. Per- fume, flowers, all the odors we re- spond to mean nothing to her now. She can’t feel anything with tactual delicacy any more. She used to surround herself with luxuries — she drew her stimuli from them — and that’s all gone too. She’s with- drawn from all physical contacts.” He squinted at the screen, not seeing it, his face drawn into lines like the lines of a skull. All flesh seemed to have dissolved off his bones in the past year, and Harris thought almost jealously that even in that way he seemed to be draw- ing nearer Deirdre in her fleshless- ness with every passing week. “Sight,” Maltzer said, “is the most highly civilized of the senses. It was the last to come. The other senses tie us in closely with the very roots of life; I think we per- ceive with them more keenly than we know. The things we realize through taste and smell and feeling stimulate directly, without a detour through the centers of conscious thought. You know how often a taste or odor will recall a memory ASTOUNDING SCIENCE- FICTION

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to you so subtly you don’t know exactly what caused it? We need those primitive senses to tie us in with nature and the race. Through those ties Deirdre drew her vitality without realizing it. Sight is a cold, intellectual thing compared with the other senses. But it’s all she has to draw on now. She isn’t a human being any more, and I think what humanity is left in her will drain out little by little and never be replaced. Abelard, in a way, was a prototype. But Deir- dre’s loss is complete.” “She isn’t human,” Harris agreed slowly. “But she isn’t pure robot either. She’s something somewhere between the two, and I think it’s a mistake to try to guess just where, or what the outcome will be.” “I don’t have to guess,” Maltzer said in a grim voice. “I know. I wish I’d let her die. I’ve done something to her a thousand times worse than the fire ever could. I should have let her die in it.” “Wait,” said Harris. “Wait and see. I think you’re wrong.” On the television screen Mary of Scotland climbed the scaffold to her doom, the gown of traditional scar- let clinging warmly to supple young curves as anachronistic in their way as the slippers beneath the gown, for — as everyone but playwrights knows — Mary was well into middle age before she died. Gracefully this latter-day Mary bent her head, sweeping the long hair aside, kneel- ing to the block. Maltzer watched stonily, seeing another woman entirely. “I shouldn’t have let her,” he was muttering. “I shouldn’t have let her do it.” “Do you really think you’d have stopped her if you could?” Harris asked quietly. And the other man after a moment's pause shook his head jerkily. “No, I suppose not. I keep thinking if I worked and waited a little longer maybe I could make it easier for her, but — no, I suppose not. She’s got to face them sooner or later, being herself.” He stood up abruptly, shoving back his chair. “If she only weren’t so ... so frail. She doesn’t realize how deli- cately poised her very sanity is. We gave her what we could — the artists and the designers and I all gave our very best — but she’s so pitifully handicapped even with all we could do. She’ll always be an abstraction and a ... a freak, cut off from the world by handicaps worse in their way than anything any human being ever suffered be- fore. Sooner or later she’ll realize it. And then — ” He began to pace up and down with quick, uneven steps, striking his hands together. His face was twitching with a little tic that drew up one eye to a squint and released it again at irregular intervals. Harris could see how very near collapse the man was. “Can you imagine what it’s like ?” Maltzer demanded fiercely. “Penned into a mechanical body like that, shut out from all human contacts except what leaks in by way of sight and sound? To know you aren’t human any longer? She’s been through shocks enough al- 153 NO WOMAN BORN

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ready. When that shock fully hits her—’' “Shut up,” said Harris roughly. “You won’t do her any good if you break down yourself. Look — the vaude’s starting.” Great golden curtains had swept together over the unhappy Queen of Scotland and were parting again now, all sorrow and frustration wiped away once more as cleanly as the passing centuries had already expunged them. Now a line of tiny dancers under the tremendous arch of the stage kicked and pranced with the precision of little mechani- cal dolls too small and perfect to be real. Vision rushed down upon them and swept along the row, face after stiffly smiling face racketing by like fence pickets. Then the sight rose into the rafters and looked down upon them from a great height, the grotesquely fore- shortened figures still prancing in perfect rhythm even from this in- human angle. There was applause from an in- visible audience. Then someone came out and did a dance with lighted torches that streamed long, weaving ribbons of fire among clouds of what looked like cotton wool but was most probably as- bestos. Then a company in gor- geous » pseudo-period costumes pos- tured r its way through the new singing ballet form of dance, roughly following a plot which had been announced as Les Sylphides, but had little in common with it. Afterward the precision dancers came on again, solemn and charm- 15* ing as performing dolls. Maltzer began to show signs of dangerous tension as act succeeded act. Deirdre’s was to^e the last, of course. It seemed very long indeed before a face in close-up blotted out the stage, and a master of ceremonies with features like an amiable marionette’s announced a very special number as the finale. His voice was almost cracking with excitement — perhaps he, too, had not been told until a moment before what lay in store for the audience. Neither of the listening men heard what it was he said, but both were conscious of a certain inde- finable excitement rising among the audience, murmurs and rustlings and a mounting anticipation as if time had run backward here and knowledge of the great surprise had already broken upon them. Then the golden curtains ap- peared again.' They quivered and swept apart on long upward arcs, and between them the stage was full of a shimmering golden haze. It was, Harris realized in a mo- ment, simply a series of gauze cur- tains, but the effect was one of strange and wonderful anticipation, as if something very splendid must be hidden in the haze. The world might have looked like this on the first morning of creation, before heaven and earth took form in the mind of God. It was a singularly fortunate choice of stage set in its symbolism, though Harris won- dered how much necessity had fig- ured in its selection, for there could not have been much time to prepare an elaborate set. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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The audience sat perfectly silent, and the air was tense. This was no ordinary pause before an act. No one had been told, surely, and yet they seemed to guess — The shimmering haze trembled and began to thin, veil by veil. Be- yond was darkness, and what looked like a row of shining pillars set in a balustrade that began gradu- ally to take shape as the haze drew back in shining folds. Now they could see that the balustrade curved up from left and right to the head of a sweep of stairs. Stage and stairs were carpeted in black vel- vet ; black velvet draperies hung just ajar behind the balcony, with a glimpse of dark sky beyond them trembling with dim synthetic stars. The last curtain of golden gauze withdrew. The stage was empty. Or it seemed empty. But even through the aerial distances between this screen and the place it mir- rored, Harris thought that the audi- ence was not waiting for the per- former to come on from the wings. There was no rustling, no coughing, no sense of impatience. A presence upon the stage was in command from the first drawing of the cur- tains; it filled the theater with its calm domination. It gauged its tim- ing, holding the audience as a con- ductor with lifted baton gathers and holds the eyes of his orchestra. For a moment everything was motionless upon the stage. Then, at the head of the stairs, where the two curves of the pillared balustrade swept together, a figure stirred. Until that moment she had seemed another shining column in the row. Now she swayed deliberately, light catching and winking and running molten along her limbs and her robe of metal mesh. She swayed just enough to show that she was there. Then, with every eye upon her, she stood quietly to let them look their fill. The screen did not swoop to a close-up upon her. Her enigma remained inviolate and the television watchers saw her no more clearly than the audience in the theater. Many must have thought her at first some wonderfully animate ro- bot, hung perhaps from wires invisi- ble against the velvet, for certainly she was no woman dressed in metal — her proportions were too thin and fine for that. And perhaps the im- pression of robotism was what she meant to convey at first. She stood quiet, swaying just a little, a masked and inscrutable figure, faceless, very slender in her robe that hung in folds as pure as a Grecian chlamys, though she did not look Grecian at all. In the visored golden helmet and the robe of mail that odd like- ness to knighthood was there again, with its implications of medieval richness behind the simple lines. Except that in her exquisite slim- ness she called to mind no human figure in armor, .not even the com- parative delicacy of a St. Joan. It was the chivalry and delicacy of some other world implicit in her outlines. A breath of surprise had rippled over the audience when she moved. Now they were tensely silent again, waiting. And the tension, the an- 155 NO WOMAN BORN

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tioipation, was far deeper than the surface importance of the scene could ever have evoked. Even those who thought her a manikin seemed to feel the forerunning of greater revelations. Now she swayed and came slowly down the steps, moving with a suppleness just a little better than human. The swaying strengthened. By the time she reached the stage floor she was dancing. But it was no dance that any human creature could ever have performed. The long, slow, languorous rhythms of her body would have been impos- sible to a figure hinged at its joints as human figures hinge. (Harris remembered incredulously that he had feared once to find her jointed like a mechanical robot. But it was humanity that seemed, by con- trast, jointed and mechanical now.) The languor and the rhythm of her patterns looked impromptu, as all good dances should, but Harris knew what hours of composition and rehearsal must lie behind it, what laborious graving into her brain of strange new pathways, the first to replace the old ones and govern the mastery of metal limbs. To and fro over the velvet car- pet, against the velvet background, she wove the intricacies of her ser- pentine dance, leisurely and yet with such hypnotic effect that the air seemed full of looping rhythms, as if her long, tapering limbs had left their own replicas hanging upon the air and fading only slowly as she moved away. In her mind, Har- ris knew, the stage was a whole, a background to be filled in com- 16« pletely with the measured patterns of her dance, and she seemed almost to project that completed pattern to her audience so that they saw her everywhere at once, her golden rhythms fading upon the air long after she had gone. Now there was music, looping and hanging in echoes after her like the shining festoons she wove with her body. But it was no orchestral music. She was hum- ming, deep and sweet and word- lessly, as she glided her easy, in- tricate path about the stage. And the volume of the music was amaz- ing. It seemed to fill the theater, and it was not amplified by hidden loudspeakers. You could tell that. Somehow, until you heard the music she made, you had never realized before the subtle distortions that amplification puts into music. This was utterly pure and true as per- haps no ear in all her audience had ever heard music before. While she danced the audience did not seem to breathe. Perhaps they were beginning already to sus- pect who and what it was that moved before them without any fanfare of the publicity they had been half- expecting for weeks now. And yet, without the publicity, it was not easy to believe the dancer they watched was not some cunningly motivated manikin swinging on unseen wires about the stage. Nothing she had done yet had been human. The dance was no dance a human being could have performed. The music she hummed came from a throat without vocal chords. But now the long, slow ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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rhythms were drawing to their close, the pattern tightening in to a finale. And she ended as inhumanly as she had danced, willing them not to in- terrupt her with applause, dominat- ing them now as she had always done. For her implication here was that a machine might have per- formed the dance, and a machine expects no applause. If they thought unseen operators had put her through those wonderful paces, they would wait for the operators to appear for their bows. But the audience was obedient. It sat si- lently, waiting for what came next. But its silence was tense and breath- less. The dance ended as it had begun. Slowly, almost carelessly, she swung up the velvet stairs, moving with rhythms as perfect as her music. But when she reached the head of the stairs she turned to face her audience, and for a moment stood motionless, like a creature of metal, without volition, the hands of the operator slack upon its strings. Then, startlingly, she laughed. It was lovely laughter, low and sweet and full-throated. She threw her head back and let her body sway and her shoulders shake, and the laughter, like the music, filled the theater, gaining volume from the great hollow of the roof and sounding in the ears of every lis- tener, not loud, but as intimately as if each sat alone with the woman who laughed. And she was a woman now. Hu- manity had dropped over her like a tangible garment. No one who had ever heard that laughter before could mistake it here. But before the reality of who she was had quite time to dawn upon her listeners she' let the laughter deepen into music, as no human voice could have done. She was humming a familiar re- frain close in the ear of every hearer. And the humming in turn swung into words. She sang in her clear, light, lovely voice: “The yellow rose of Eden, is blooming in my heart — ” It was Deirdre’s song. She had sung it first upon the airways a month before the theater fire that had consumed her. It was a com- monplace little melody, simple enough to take first place in the fancy of a nation that had always liked its songs simple. But it had a certain sincerity too, and no taint of the vulgarity of tune and rhythm that foredooms so many popular songs to oblivion after their novelty fades. No one else was ever able to sing it quite as Deirdre did. It had been identified with her so closely that though for awhile after her accident singers tried to make it a memorial for her, they failed so conspicuously to give it her unmistakable flair that the song died from their sheer in- ability to sing it. No one ever hummed the tune without thinking of her and the pleasant, nostalgic- sadness of something lovely and lost. But it was not a sad song now. If anyone had doubted whose brain and ego motivated this shining metal NO WOMAN BORN 16?

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suppleness, they could doubt no longer. For the voice was Deirdre, i and the song. And the lovely, poised i grace of her mannerisms that make up recognition as certainly as sight of a familiar face. She had not finished the first line of her song before the audience knew her. And they did not let her finish. The accolade of their interruption was a tribute more eloquent than polite waiting could ever have been. First a breath of incredulity rip- pled' over the theater, and a long, sighing gasp that reminded Harris irrelevantly as he listened to the gasp which still goes up from mati- nee audiences at the first glimpse of the fabulous Valentino, so many generations dead. But this gasp did not sigh itself away and vanish. Tremendous tension lay behind it, and the rising tide of excitement rippled up in little murmurs and • spatterings of applause that ran to- gether into one overwhelming roar. It shook the theater. The television screen trembled and blurred a little to the volume of that transmitted applause. Silenced before it, Deirdre stood gesturing on the stage, bowing and bowing as the noise rolled up about her, shaking perceptibly with the triumph of her own emotion. Harris had an intolerable feeling that she was smiling radiantly and that the tears were pouring down her cheeks. He even thought, just as Maltzer leaned forward to switch off the screen, that she was blowing kisses over the audience in the time- honored gesture of the grateful actress, her golden arms shining as she scattered kisses abroad from the featureless helmet, the face that had no mouth. “Well?” Harris said, not with- out triumph. Maltzer shook his head jerkily, the glasses unsteady on his nose so that the blurred eyes behind them seemed to shift. “Of course they applauded, you fool,” he said in a savage voice. “I might have known they would under this set-up. It doesn’t prove anything. Oh, she was smart to surprise them — I admit that. But they were applauding themselves as much as her. Excitement, grati- tude for letting them in on a his- toric performance, mass hysteria — you know. It’s from now on the test will come, and this hasn’t helped any to prepare her for it. Morbid curiosity when the news gets out — people laughing when she forgets she isn’t human. And they will, you know. There are always those who will. And the novelty wearing off. The slow draining away of humanity for lack of contact with any human stimuli any more — ” Harris remembered suddenly and reluctantly the moment that after- noon which he had shunted aside mentally, to consider later. The sense of something unfamiliar be- neath the surface of Deirdre’s speech. Was Maltzer right? Was the drainage already at work? Or was there something deeper than this obvious answer to the ques- tion? Certainly she had been through experiences too terrible for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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ordinary people to comprehend. Scars might still remain. Or, with her body, had she put on a strange, metallic something of the mind, that spoke to no sense which human minds could answer? For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Then Maltzer rose abruptly and stood looking down at Harris with an abstract scowl. “I wish you’d go now,” he said. Harris glanced up at him, star- tled. Maltzer began to pace again, his steps quick and uneven. Over his shoulder he said, “I’ve made up my mind, Harris. I’ve got to put a stop to this.” Harris rose. “Listen,” he said. “Tell me one thing. What makes you so certain you’re right? Can you deny that most of it’s specula- tion— hearsay evidence ? Remem- ber, I talked to Deirdre, and she was just as sure as you are in the opposite direction. Have you any real reason for what you think ?” Maltzer took his glasses off and rubbed his nose carefully, taking a long time about it. He seemed re- luctant to answer. But when he did, at last, there was a confidence in his voice Harris had not ex- pected. “I have a reason,” he said. “But you won’t believe it. Nobody would.” “Try me.” Maltzer shook his head. “No- body could believe it. No two peo- ple were ever in quite the same relationship before as Deirdre and 1 have been. I helped her come back out of complete — oblivion. I knew her before she had voice or hearing. She was only a frantic mind when I first made contact with her, half insane with all that had happened and fear of what would happen next. In a very literal sense she was reborn out of that condi- tion, and I had to guide her through every step of the way. I came to know her thoughts before she thought them. And once you’ve been that close to another mind, you don’t lose the contact easily.” He put the glasses back on and looked blurrily at Harris through the heavy lenses. “Deirdre is wor- ried,” he said. “I know it. You won’t believe me, but I can — well, sense it. I tell you, I’ve been too close to her very mind itself to make any mistake. You don’t see it, maybe. Maybe even she doesn’t know it yet. But the worry’s there. When I’m with her. I feel it. And I don’t want it to come any nearer the surface of her mind than it’s come already. I’m going to put a stop to this before it’s too late.” Harris had no comment for that. It was too entirely outside his own experience. He said nothing for a moment. Then he asked simply, “How?” “I’m not sure yet. I’ve got to decide before she comes back. And I want to see her alone.” “I think you’re wrong,” Harris told him quietly. “I think you’re imagining things. I don’t think you can stop her.” Maltzer gave him a slanted glance. “I can stop her,” he said, in a curious voice. He w.ent on quickly, “She has enough already — she’s nearly human. She can live nor- KO WOMAN BORN 159

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mally as other people live, without going back on the screen. Maybe this taste of it will be enough. I’ve got to convince her it is. If she retires now, she’ll never guess how cruel her own audiences could be, and maybe that deep sense of — dis- tress, uneasiness, whatever it is — won’t come to the surface. It mustn’t. She’s too fragile to stand that.” He slapped his hands to- gether sharply. “I’ve got to stop her. Bor her own sake I’ve got to do it!” He swung round again to face Harris. “Will you go now?” Never in his life had Harris wanted less to leave a place. Briefly he thought of saying simply, “No I won’t.” But he had to admit in his own mind that Maltzer was at least partly right. This was a mat- ter between Deirdre and her cre- ator, the culmination, perhaps, of that year’s long intimacy so like marriage that this final trial for su- premacy was a need he recognized. He would not, he thought, forbid the showdown if he could. Per- haps the whole year had been build- ing up to this one moment between them in which one or the other must prove himself victor. Neither was very well stable just now, after the long strain of the year past. It might very well be that the mental salvation of one or both hinged upon the outcome of the clash. But because each was so strongly moti- vated not by selfish concern but by solicitude for the other in this strange combat, Harris knew he must leave them to settle the thing alone. He was in the street and hailing ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-£'ICTI0N

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a taxi before the full significance of something Maltzer had said came to him. “I can stop her,” he had declared, with an odd inflection in his voice. Suddenly Harris felt cold. Malt- zer had made her — of course he could stop her if he chose. Was there some key in that supple golden body that could immobilize it at its maker’s will? Could she be imprisoned in the cage of her own body? No body before in all history, he thought, could have been designed more truly to be a prison for its mind than Deirdre’s, if Malt- zer chose to turn the key that locked her in. There must be many ways to do it. He could simply withhold whatever source of nourishment kept her brain alive, if that were the way he chose. But Harris could not believe he would do it. The man wasn’t in- sane. He would not defeat his own purpose. His determination rose from his solicitude for Deirdre; he would not even in the last extremity try to save her by imprisoning her in the jail of her own skull. For a moment Harris hesitated on the curb, almost turning back. But what could he do? Even granting that Maltzer would resort to such tactics, self-defeating in their very nature, how could any man on earth prevent him if he did it subtly enough ? But he never would. Har- ris knew he never would. He got into his cab slowly, frowning. He would see them both tomorrow. He did not. Harris was swamped with excited calls about yesterday’s performance, but the message he was awaiting did not come. The day went by very slowly. Toward evening he surrendered and called Maltzer’s apartment. It was Deirdre's face that an- swered, and for once he saw no remembered features superimposed upon the blankness of her helmet. Masked and faceless, she looked at him inscrutably. “Is everything all right?” he asked, a little uncomfortable. “Yes, of course,” she said, and her voice was a bit metallic for the first time, as if she were thinking so deeply of some other matter that she did not trouble to pitch it prop- erly. “I had a long talk with Malt- zer last night, if that’s what you mean. You know what he wants. But nothing’s been decided yet. ' Harris felt oddly rebuffed by the sudden realization of the metal of her. It was impossible to read any- thing from face or voice. Each had its mask. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “Exactly as I’d planned,” she told him, without inflection. Harris floundered a little. Then, with an effort at practicality, he said, “Do you want me to go to work on bookings, then?” She shook the delicately modeled skull. “Not yet. You saw the re- views today, of course. They — did like me.” It was an understatement, and for the first time a note of warmth sounded in her voice. But the preoccupation was still there, too. “I’d already planned to make them wait awhile after my first per- i«i NO WOMAN BOHN

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\ formance,” she went on. “A couple of weeks, anyhow. You remember that little farm of mine in Jersey, John? I’m going over today. I won’t see anyone except the serv- ants there. Not even Maltzer. Not even you. I’ve got a lot to think about. Maltzer has agreed to let everything go until we’ve both thought things over. He’s taking a rest, too. I’ll see you the moment I get back, John. Is that all right ?” She blanked out almost before he had time to nod and while the be- ginning of a stammered argument was still on his lips. He sat there staring at the screen. The two weeks that went by be- fore Maltzer called him again were the longest Harris had ever spent. He thought of many things in the interval. He believed he could sense in that last talk with Deirdre some- thing of the inner unrest that Malt- zer had spoken of — more an abstrac- tion than a distress, but some thought had occupied her mind which she would not — or was it that she could not? — share even with her closest confidants. He even wondered whether, if her mind was as delicately poised as Maltzer feared, one would ever know whether or not it had slipped. There was so little evidence one way or the other in the unchanging outward form of her. Most of all he wondered what two weeks in a new environment would do to her untried body and newly patterned brain. If Maltzer were right, then there might be some perceptible — drainage — by the 363 time they met again. He tried not to think of that. Maltzer televised him on the morning set for her return. He looked very bad. The rest must have been no rest at all. His face was almost a skull now, and the blurred eyes behind their lenses burned. But he seemed curiously at peace, in spite of his appearance. Harris thought he had reached some decision, but whatever it was had not stopped his hands from shaking or the nervous tic that drew his face sidewise into a grimace at intervals. “Come over,” he said briefly, without preamble. “She’ll be here in half an hour.” And he blanked out without waiting for an answer. When Harris arrived, he was standing by the window looking down and steadying his trembling hands on the sill. “I can’t stop her,” he said in a monotone, and again without pre- amble. Harris had the impression that for the two weeks his thoughts must have run over and over the same track, until any spoken word was simply a vocal interlude in the circling of his mind. “I couldn’t do it. I even tried threats, but she knew I didn’t mean them. There’s only one' way out, Harris.” He glanced up briefly, hollow-eyed be- hind the lenses. “Never mind. I’ll tell you later.” “Did you explain everything to her that you did to me ?” “Nearly all. I even taxed her with that . . . that sense of distress I know she feels. She denied it. She was lying. We both knew. It ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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was worse after the performance than before. When I saw her that night, I tell you I knew — she senses something wrong, but she won’t ad- mit it.” He shrugged. “Well — ” Faintly in the silence they heard the humming of the elevator de- scending from the helicopter plat- form on the roof. Both men turned to the door. She had not changed'at all. Fool- ishly, Harris was a little surprised. .Then he caught himself and re- membered that she would never change — never, until she died. He himself might grow white-haired and senile; she would move before him then as she moved now, supple, golden, enigmatic. Still, he thought she caught her breath a little when she saw Malt- zer and the depths of his swift de- generation. She had no breath to catch, but her voice was shaken as she greeted them. “I’m glad you’re both here,” she said, a. slight hesitation in her speech. “It’s a wonderful day out- side. Jersey was glorious. I’d for- gotten how lovely it is in summer. Was the sanitarium any good, Maltzer ?” He jerked his head irritably and did not answer. She went on talk- ing in a light voice, skimming the surface, saying nothing important. This time Harris saw her as he supposed her audiences would, even- tually, when the surprise had worn off and the image of the living Deirdre faded from memory. She was all metal now, the Deirdre they would know from today on. And she was not less lovely. She was not even less human — yet. Her motion was a miracle of flexible grace, a pouring of suppleness along every limb. (From now on, Har- ris realized suddenly, it was her body and not her face that would have mobility to express emotion; she must act with her limbs and her lithe, robed torso.) But there was something wrong. Harris sensed it almost tangibly in her inflections, her elusiveness, the way she fenced with words. This was what Maltzer had meant, this was what Harris himself had felt just before she left for the country. Only now it was strong — certain. Between them and the old Deirdre whose voice still spoke to them a veil of — detachment — had been drawn. Behind it she was in dis- tress. Somehow, somewhere, she had made some discovery that af- fected her profoundly. And Harris was terribly afraid that he knew what the discovery must Ire. Malt- zer was right. He was still leaning against the window, staring out unseeingly over the vast panorama of New York, webbed with traffic bridges, wink- ing with sunlit glass, its vertiginous distances plunging downward into the blue shadows of Earth-level. He said now, breaking into the light- voiced chatter, “Are you all right, Deirdre?” She laughed. It was lovely laughter. She moved lithely across the room, sunlight glinting on her musical mailed robe, and stooped to a cigarette box on a table, tier fin- gers were deft. tea NO WOMAN BORN

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''Have one ?” she said, and carried the box to Maltzer. He let her put the brown cylinder between his lips and hold a light to it, but he did not seem to be noticing what he did. She replaced the box and then crossed to a mirror on the far wall and began experimenting with a series of gliding ripples that wove patterns of pale gold in the glass. "Of course I’m all right,” she said. “You’re lying.” Deirdre did not turn. She was watching him in the mirror, but the ripple of her motion went on slowly, languorously, undisturbed. “No,” she told them both. Maltzer drew deeply on his ciga- rette. Then with a hard pull he unsealed the window and tossed the smoking stub far out over the gulfs below. He said, “You can’t deceive me, Deirdre.” His voice, suddenly, was quite calm. “I created you, my dear. I know. I’ve sensed that uneasiness in you growing ancl growing for a long while now. It’s much stronger to- day than it was two weeks ago. Something happened to you in the country. I don’t know what it was, but you’ve changed. Will you ad- mit to yourself what it is, Deirdre? Have you realized yet that you must not go back on the screen?” “Why, no,” said Deirdre, still not looking at him except obliquely, in the glass. Her gestures were slower now, weaving lazy patterns in the air. “No, I haven’t changed my mind.” She was all metal — oytwardly. She was taking unfair advantage of her own metai-hood. She had with- drawn far within, behind the mask of her voice and her facelessness. Even her body, whose involuntary motions might have betrayed what she was feeling, in the only way she could be subject to betrayal now, she was putting through ritual motions that disguised it completely. As long as these looping, weaving patterns occupied her, no one had any way of guessing even from her motion what went on in the hidden brain inside her helmet. Harris was struck suddenly ancl for the first time with the complete- ness of her withdrawal. When he had seen her last in this apartment she had been wholly Deirdre, not masked at all, overflowing the metal with the warmth and ardor of the woman he had known so well. Since then — since the performance on the stage — he had not seen the familiar Deirdre again. Passionately he wondered why. Had she begun to suspect even in her moment of tri- umph what a fickle master an audi- ence could be? Had she caught, perhaps, the sound of whispers and laughter among some small portion of her watchers, though the great majority praised her? Or was Maltzer right? Perhaps Harris’ first interview with her had been the last bright burning of the lost Deirdre, animated by excite- ment and the pleasure of meeting after so long a time, animation sum- moned up in a last strong effort to convince him. Now she was gone, but whether in self-protection against the possible cruelties of hu- man beings, or whether in with- drawal to metal-hood, he could not ASTOUNDING SCIENCR-FICTION

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guess. Humanity might be draining out of her fast, and the brassy taint of metal permeating the brain it housed. Maltzer laid his trembling hand on the edge of the opened window and looked out. He said in a deep- ened voice, the querulous note gone for the first time, “I’ve made a terrible mistake, Deirdre. I’ve done you irreparable harm.” He paused a moment, but Deirdre said nothing. Harris dared not speak. In a moment Maltzer went on. “I’ve made you vulner- able, and given you no weapons to fight your enemies with. And the human race is your enemy, my dear, whether you admit it now or later. 1 think you know that. I think it’s why you’re so silent. I think you must have suspected it on the stage two weeks ago, and verified it in Jersey while you were gone. They’re going to hate you, after awhile, be- cause you are still beautiful, and they’re going to persecute you be- cause you are different — and help- less. Once the novelty wears off, my dear, your audience will be sim- ply a mob.” He was not looking at her. He had bent forward a little, looking out the window and down. His hair stirred in the wind that blew very strongly up this high, and whined thinly around the open edge of the glass. “I meant what I did for you,” he said, “to be for everyone who meets with accidents that might have ruined them. I should have known my gift would mean worse ruin MURKIER . . . by the clock One clue . . . holding the secret of crime, a clue thot only the master-mind of The Shadow con recognize os the in- dicator of death. It's NO TIME FOR MURDER, when Lamont Cranston steps into The Shadow's mysterious role to solve a baffling case. And, in the same big issue, death rides a pony right onto the polo field, while a glamorous ex-showgirl and an Argen- tine polo player lend complications to NO GAME FOR A POOR MAN, by Richard Dermody. Be sure to buy the December issue of THE SHADOW AT ALL NEWSSTANDS NO WOMAN BORN 165

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than any mutilation could be. I know now that there’s only one legitimate way a human being can create life. When he tries another way. as I did, he has a lesson to learn. Remember the lesson of the student Frankenstein ? He learned, too. In a way, he was lucky — the way he learned. He didn’t have to watch what happened afterward. Maybe he wouldn’t have had the courage- — I know I haven’t.” Harris found himself standing without remembering that he rose. He knew suddenly what was about to happen. Fie understood Malt- zer's air of resolution, his new, un- natural calm. He knew, even, why Maltzer had asked him here today, so that Deirdre might not be left alone. For he remembered that Frankenstein, too, had paid with his life for the unlawful creation of life. Maltzer was leaning head and shoulders from the window now, looking down with almost hypno- tized fascination. His voice came back to them remotely in the breeze, as if a barrier already lay between them. Deirdre had not moved. Her ex- pressionless mask, in the mirror, watched him calmly. She must have understood. Yet she gave no sigh, except that the weaving of her arms had almost stopped now, she moved so slowly. Like a dance seen in a nightmare, under water. It was impossible, of course, for her to express any emotion. The fact that her fade showed none now should not, in fairness, be held against her. But she watched so i«« wholly without feeling — Neither of them moved toward the window. A. false step, now, might send him over. They were quiet, listening to his voice. “We who bring life into the world unlawfully,” said Maltzer. almost thoughtfully, “must make room for it by withdrawing our own. That seems to be an inflexible rule. It works automatically. The thing we create makes living unbearable. No, it’s nothing you can help, my dear. I’ve asked you to do something I created you incapable of doing. I made you to perform a function, and I’ve been asking you to forego the one thing you were made to do. I believe that if you do it, it will destroy you, but the whole guilt is mine, not yours. I’m not even ask- ing you to give up the screen, any more. I know you can’t, and live. But I can’t live and watch you. I put all my skill and all my love in one final masterpiece, and I can’t bear to watch it destroyed. I can’t live and watch you do only what I made you to do, and ruin yourself because you must do it. “But before I go, I have to make sure you understand.” He leaned a little farther, looking down, and his voice grew more remote as the glass came between them. He was saying almost unbearable things now, but very distantly, in a cool, passionless tone filtered through wind and glass, and with the dis- tant humming of the city mingled with it, so that the words were curi- ously robbed of poignancy. “I can be a coward,” he said, “and escape the consequences of what I’ve done, ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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but I can’t go and leave you — not understanding. It would be even worse than the thought of your fail- ure to think of you bewildered and confused when the mob turns on you. What I’m telling "you, my dear, won’t be any real news — I think you sense it already, though you may not admit it to yourself. We’ve been too close to lie to each other, Deirdre — I know when you aren’t telling the truth. I know the distress that’s been growing in your mind. You are not wholly human, my dear. I think you know that. In so many ways, in spite of all I could do, you must always be less than human. You’ve lost the senses of perception that kept you in touch with humanity. Sight and hearing are all that remain, and sight, as I’ve said before, was the last and coldest of the senses to develop. And you’re so delicately poised on a sort of thin edge of reason. You’re only a clear, glowing mind animat- ing a metal body, like a candle flame in a glass. And as precariously vul- nerable to the wind.” He paused. “Try not to let them ruin you completely,” he said after a while. “When they turn against you, when they find out you’re more helpless than they — I wish I could have made you stronger, Deirdre. But I couldn’t. I had too much skill for your good and mine, but not quite enough skill for that.” He was silent again, briefly, look- ing down. He was balanced pre- cariously now, more than halfway over the sill and supported only by one hand on the glass. Harris watched with an agonized uncer- tainty, not sure whether a sudden leap might catch him in time ' or send him over. Deirdre was still weaving her golden patterns, slowly and unchangingly, watching the mir- ror and its reflection, her face and masked eyes enigmatic. “I wish one thing, though,” Malt- zer said in his remote voice. “I wish — before I finish — that you’d tell me the truth, Deirdre. I’d be happier if I were sure I’d — reached you. Do you understand what I’ve said? Do you believe me? Be- cause if you don’t, then I know you’re lost beyond all hope. If you’ll admit your own doubt — and I know you do doubt — I can think there may be a chance for you after all. Were you lying to me, Deirdre ? Do you know how . . . how wrong I’ve made you?” There was silence. Then very softly, a breath of sound, Deirdre answered. The voice seemed to hang in midair, because she had no lips to move and localize it for the imagination. “Will you listen, Maltzer?” she asked. “I’ll wait,” he said. “Go on. Yes or no?” Slowly she let her arms drop to her sides. Very smoothly and quietly she turned from the mirror and faced him. She swayed a little, making her metal robe ring. “I’ll answer you," she said. “But I don’t think I’ll answer that. Not with yes or no, anyhow. I’m going to walk a little, Maltzer. I have something to tell you, and I can’t NO WOMAN BORN 167

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talk standing still. Will you let me move about without — going over?” He nodded distantly. “You can’t interfere from that distance,” he said. “But keep the distance. What do you want to say?” She began to pace a little way up and down her end of the room, moving with liquid ease. The table with the cigarette box was in her way, and she pushed it aside care- fully, watching Maltzer and making no swift motions to startle him. “I’m not — well, sub-human,” she said, a faint note of indignation in her voice. “I’ll prove it in a min- ute, but I want to say something else first. You must promise to wait and listen. There’s a flaw in your argument, and I resent it. I’m not a Frankenstein monster made out of dead flesh. I’m myself — alive. You didn’t create my life, you only preserved it. I’m not a robot, with compulsions built into me that I have to obey. I’m free- willed and independent, and, Maltz- zer — I’m human.” Harris had relaxed a little. She knew what she was doing. He had no idea what she planned, but he was willing to wait now. She was not the indifferent automaton he had thought. He watched her come to the table again in a lap of her pacing, and stoop over it, her eye- less mask turned to Maltzer to make sure a variation of her movement did not startle him. “I’m human,” she repeated, her voice humming faintly and very sweetly. “Do you think I’m not?” she asked, straightening and facing them both. And then suddenly, al- ios most overwhelmingly, the warmth and the old ardent charm was radi- ant all around her. She was robot no longer, enigmatic no longer. Har- ris could see as clearly as in their first meeting the remembered flesh still gracious and beautiful as her voice evoked his memory. She stood swaying a little, as she had always swayed, her head on one side, and she was chuckling at them both. It was such a soft and lovely sound, so warmly familiar. “Of course I’m myself,” she told them, and as the words sounded in their ears neither of them could doubt it. There was hypnosis io her voice. She turned away and began to pace again, and so power- ful was the human personality which she had called up about her that it beat out at them in deep pulses, as if her body were a fur- nace to send out those comforting waves of warmth. “I have handi- caps, I know,” she said. “But my audiences will never know. I won’t let them know. I think you’ll be- lieve me, both of you, when I say I could play Juliet just as I am now, with a cast of ordinary people, and make the world accept it. Do you think I could, John? Maltzer, don’t you believe I could?” She paused at the far end of her pacing path and turned to face them, and they both stared at her without speaking. To Harris she was the Deirdre he had always known, pale gold, exquisitely grace- ful in remembered postures, the in- ner radiance of her shining through metal as brilliantly as it had ever shone through flesh. He did not ASTOUNDING SC IENCTC- F IDT IO S

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wonder, now, if it were real. Later he would think again that it might be only a disguise, something like a garment she had put off with her lost body, to wear again only when she chose. Now the spell of her compelling charm was too strong for wonder. He watched, convinced for the moment that she was all she seemed to be. She could play Juliet if she said she could. She could sway a whole audience as easily as she swayed himself. In- deed, there was something about her just now more convincingly human than anything he had noticed before. He realized that in a split second of awareness before he saw what it was. She was looking at Maltzer. He, too, watched, spellbound in spite of himself, not dissenting. She glanced from one to the other. Then she put back her head and laughter came welling and choking from her in a great, full-throated tide. She shook in the strength of it. Harris could almost see her round throat pulsing with the sweet low-pitched waves of laughter that were shaking her. Honest mirth, with a little derision in it. Then she lifted one arm and tossed her cigarette into the empty fireplace. Harris choked, and his mind went blank for one moment of blind de- nial. He had not sat here watching a robot smoke and accepting it as normal. He could not! And yet he had. That had been the final touch of conviction which swayed his hypnotized mind into accepting her humanity. And she had done it so deftly, so naturally, wearing her radiant humanity with such rightness, that his watching mind had not even questioned what she did. He glanced at Maltzer. The man was still halfway over the window ledge, but through the opening of the window he, too, was staring in stupefied disbelief and Harris knew they had shared the same delusion. Deirdre was still shaking a little with laughter. “Well,” she de- manded, the rich chuckling making her voice quiver, “am I all robot, after all?” Harris opened his mouth to speak, but he did not utter a word. This was not his show. The byplay lay wholly between Deirdre and Malt- zer; he must not interfere. He turned his head to the window and waited. And Maltzer for a moment seemed shaken in his conviction. 109 NO WOMAN BORN

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“You . . . you are an actress,” he admitted slowly. “But I . . . Fm not convinced I’m wrong. I think — ” He paused. The queru- lous note was in his voice again, and he seemed racked once more by the old doubts and dismay. Then Har- ris saw him stiffen. He saw the resolution come back, and under- stood why it had come. Maltzer had gone too far already upon the cold and lonely path he had chosen to turn back, even for stronger evi- dence than this. He had reached his conclusions only after mental turmoil too terrible to face again. Safety and peace lay in the course lie had steeled himself to follow. He was too tired, too exhausted by months of conflict, to retrace his path and begin all over. Harris could see him groping for a way out, and in a moment he saw him find it. “That was a trick,” he said hol- lowly. “Maybe you could play it on a larger audience, too. Maybe you have more tricks to use. I might be wrong. But Deirdre” — his voice grew urgent — “you haven’t answered the one thing I’ve got to know. You can’t answer it. You do feel— dismay. You’ve learned your own inadequacy, however well you can hide it from us — even from us. I know. Can you deny that, Deirdre ?” She was not laughing now. She let her arms fall, and the flexible golden body seemed to droop a little all over, as if the brain that a moment before had been sending out strong, sure waves of confidence had slackened its power, and the 170 intangible muscles of her limbs slackened with it. Some of the glowing humanity began to fade. It receded within her and was gone, as if the fire in the furnace of her body were sinking and cooling. “Maltzer,” she said uncertainly, “I can’t answer that — yet. I can’t — ” And then, while they waited in anxiety for her to finish the sen- tence, she biased. She ceased to be a figure in stasis — she biased. It was something no eyes could watch and translate into terms the brain could follow ; her motion was too swift. Maltzer in the window was a whole long room-length away. He had thought himself safe at such a distance, knowing no normal hu- man being could reach him before he moved. But Deirdre was neither normal nor human. In the same instant she stood drooping by the mirror she was simultaneously at Maltzer’s side. Her motion negated time and de- stroyed space. And as a glowing cigarette tip in the dark describes closed circles before the eye when the holder moves it swiftly, so Deirdre blazed in one continuous flash of golden motion across the room. But curiously, she was not blurred. Harris, watching, felt his mind go blank again, but less in surprise than because no normal eyes and brain could perceive what it was he looked at. (In that moment of intolerable suspense his complex human brain paused suddenly, annihilating time in its own way, and withdrew to a ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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Perhaps Pm one war older than you are! Believe me, after the last war I saw what hap - penedL Will you let me give you some advice? • If you’ve got a job today— for your own Bake, fellow, be smart! Think: twice before you fight for a wage increase that might force prices up and land you behind the eight-ball in the end. Salt away as much as you can out of your present wages. Put money in the bank, pay up your debts, buy more life insurance. Above all, put every extra penny you can lay your hands on into Uncle Sam’s War Bonds and hold ’em! Nobody knows what’s coming when the Germans and the Japs are licked. Perhaps we’ll have good times. Okay. You’ll be Bitting pretty. Perhaps we’ll have bad times. Then they’re sure to hit hardest on the guy with nothing saved. The best thing you can do for your country right now is not to buy a thing you can get along without. That helps keep prices down, heads off inflation, helps to insure good times after the war. And the best thing you can do for your own Bake, brother, if there should be a depression ahead, is to get your finances organized on a sound basis of paid-up debts — and have a little money laid by to see you through! 4 THINGS TO DO to keep prices down and help avoid another depression 1. Buy only what you really need. 2. When you buy. pay no more than celling price. Pay your ration points in full. 3. Keep your own prices down. Don’t take advantage of war conditions to ask for more — for your labor, your services, or the goods you sell. 4. Save. Buy and hold all the War Bonds you can afford — to help pay for the war and insure your future. Keep up your Insurance. A United States war mernsge prepared by the War Advertising Connell; approved by the Office of War Information; and contributed by this magazine in cooperation with the. Magazine Fob! inhere of America. \

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cool corner of its own to analyze in a flashing second what it was he had just seen. The brain could do it tunelessly; words are slow. But he knew he had watched a sort of tesseract of human motion, a para- ble of fourth-dimensional activity. A one-dimensional point, moved through space, creates a two-dimen- sional line, which in motion creates a three-dimensional cube. Theoreti- cally the cube, in motion, would produce a fourth-dimensional fig- ure. No human creature had ever seen a figure of three dimensions moved through space and time be- fore— until this moment. She had not blurred ; every motion she made was distinct, but not like moving figures on a strip of film. Not like anything that those who use our language had ever seen before, or created words to express. The mind saw, but without perceiving. Neither words nor thoughts could resolve what happened into terms for human brains. And perhaps she had not actually and literally moved through the fourth dimension. Per- haps— since Harris was able to see her — it had been almost and not quite that unimaginable thing. But it was close enough. While to the slow mind’s eye she was still standing at the far end of the room, she was already at Maltzer’s side, her long, flexible fingers gentle but very firm upon his arms. She waited — The room shimmered. There was sudden violent heat beating upon Harris’ face. Then the air steadied again and Deirdre was say- ing softly, in a mournful whisper, 172 “I'm sorry — I had to do it. I’m sorry — I didn’t mean you to know — ” Time caught up with Harris. He saw it overtake Maltzer too, saw the man jerk convulsively away from the grasping hands, in a ludi- crously futile effort to forestall what had already happened. Even thought was slow, compared with Deirdre’s swiftness. The sharp outward jerk was strong. It was strong enough to break the grasp of human hands and catapult Maltzer out and down into the swimming gulfs of New York. The mind leaped ahead to a logical conclusion and saw him twisting and turning and diminish- ing with dreadful rapidity to a tiny point of darkness that dropped away through sunlight toward the shadows near the earth. The mind even conjured up a shrill, thin cry that plummeted away with the fall- ing body and hung behind it in the shaken air. But the mind was reckoning on human factors. Very gently and smoothly Deir- dre lifted Maltzer from the window sill and with effortless ease carried him well back into the safety of the room. She set him down before a sofa and her golden fingers un- wrapped themselves from his arms' slowly, so that he could regain con- trol of his own body before she released him. He sank to the sofa without a word. Nobody spoke for an un- measurable length of time. Harris could not. Deirdre waited pa- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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tiently. It was Maltzer who re- gained speech first, and it came back on the old track, as if his mind had not yet relinquished the rut it had worn so deep. “All right,” he said breathlessly. “All right, you can stop me this time. But I know, you see. I know ! You can’t hide your feel- ing from me, Deirdre. I know the trouble you feel. And next time — next time I won’t wait to talk!” Deirdre made the sound of a sigh. She had no lungs to expel the breath she was imitating, but it was hard to realize that. It was hard to understand why she was not panting heavily from the terrible ex- ertion of the past minutes ; the mind knew why, but could not accept the reason. She was still too human. “You still don’t see,” she said. “Think, Maltzer, think !” There was a hassock beside the sofa. She sank upon it gracefully, clasping her robed knees. Her head tilted back to watch Maltzer 's face. She saw only, stunned stu- pidity on it now ; he had passed through too much emotional storm to think at all. “All right,” she told him. “Lis- ten— I’ll admit it. You’re right. I am unhappy. I do know what you said was true — but not for the rea- son you think. Humanity and I are far apart, and drawing farther. The gap will be hard to bridge. Do you hear me, Maltzer?” Harris saw the tremendous ef- fort that went into Maltzer’s wak- ening. He saw the man pull his mind back into focus and sit up on the sofa with weary stiffness. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST! There’s a Thrill in Bringing a Crook to Justice Through Scientific CRIME DETECTION! I have taught thousands of men and women this exciting, profitable, pleasant profession. Let me teach you, too, in your own home. Prepare yourself in your leisure time to fill a responsible, steady, well-paid position in a very short time and at very small cost. What others have done, you too, can do. Of All American Identif i- 90 /® cation Bureaus Employ Students or Graduates of I. A. S. FREE BOOK! FREE! "The Blue Book of Crime". Tells about some of the most Inter- esting crimes ever perpetrated and how they were solved through tlio very methods taught by I.A.S. Send now — be sure to state your age. This fascinating1 work is easy to learn and the training is inexpensive. You, too, can fit yourself to HU a responsible crime detection job with good pay and steady employment. But don’t delay — get the details now. Let me show you how easily and completely I can pre- pare you for this fascinating work, during spare time, in your own home. You may pay as you learn. Write today for free Crime Book and complete details of course. INSTITUTE OF APPLIED SCIENCE, Dept. 1408, ltSSST.'“,E1S'iI 17a NO WOMAN BOHN

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“You . . . you do admit it, then?” lie asked in a bewildered voice. Deirdre shook her head sharply. “Do you still think o f me as deli- cate?” she demanded. “Do you know I carried you here at arm’s length halfway across the room? Do you realize you weigh nothing to me? I could” — she' glanced around the room and gestured with sudden, rather appalling violence — “tear this building down,” she said quietly. “I could tear my way through these walls, I think. I’ve found no 'limit yet to the strength I can put forth if I try.” She held up her golden hands and looked at them. “The metal would break, perhaps,” she said reflectively, “but then, I have no feeling — ” Maltzer gasped, “Deirdre — ” She looked up with what must have been a smile. It sounded clearly in her voice. “Oh, I won’t. I wouldn’t have to do it with my hands, if I wanted. Look — listen !” She put her head back and a deep, vibrating hum gathered and grew in what one still thought of as her throat. It deepened swiftly and the ears began to ring. It went deeper, and the furniture vibrated. The walls began almost impercep- tibly to shake. The room was full and bursting with a sound that shook every atom upon its neigh- bor with a terrible, disrupting force. The sound ceased. The humming died. Then Deirdre laughed and made another and quite differently pitched sound. It seemed to reach out like an arm in one straight di- rection— toward the window. The opened panel shook. Deirdre in- 174 tensified her hum, and slowly, with imperceptible jolts that merged into smoothness, the window jarred it- self shut. “You see?” Deirdre said. “You see?” But still Maltzer could only stare. Harris was staring too, his mind beginning slowly to accept what she implied. Both were too stunned to leap ahead to any con- clusions yet. Deirdre rose impatiently and be- gan to pace again, in a ringing of metal robe and a twinkling of re- flected lights. She was panther- like in her suppleness. They could see the power behind that lithe mo- tion now; they no longer thought of her as helpless, but they were far still from grasping the truth. “You were wrong about me, Maltzer,” she said with an effort at patience in her voice. “But you were right too, in a way you didn’t guess. I’m not afraid of humanity. I haven’t anything to fear from them. Why” — her voice took on a tinge of contempt — “already I’ve set a fashion in women’s clothing. By next week you won’t see a woman on the street without a mask like mine, and every dress that isn’t cut like a chlamys will be out of style. I’m not afraid of humanity! I won’t lose touch with them unless I want to. I’ve learned a lot — I’ve learned too much already.” Her voice faded for a moment, and Harris had a quick and appall- ing vision of her experimenting in the solitude of her farm, testing the range of her voice, testing her eye- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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sight — could she see microscopically and telescopically ? — and was her hearing as abnormally flexible as her voice ? “You were afraid I had lost feeling and scent and taste,” she went on, still pacing with that pow- erful, tigerish tread. “Hearing and sight* would not be enough, you think ? But why do you think sight is the last of the senses? It may be the latest, Maltzer — Harris — but why \lo you think it’s the last?” She may not have whispered that. Perhaps it was only their hearing that made it seem thin and distant, as the brain contracted and would not let the thought come through in its stunning entirety. “No,” Deirdre said, "I haven’t lost contact with the human race. I never will, unless I want to. It’s too easy . . . too easy.” She was watching her shining feet as she paced, and her masked face was averted. Sorrow sounded in her soft voice now. “I didn't mean to let you know,” she said. “I never would have, if this hadn’t happened. But I couldn’t let you go believing you’d failed. You made a perfect ma- chine, Maltzer. More perfect than you knew.” “But Deirdre — ” breathed Malt- zer, his eyes fascinated and still incredulous upon her, “but Deir- dre, if we did succeed — what’s wrong? I can feel it now — I’ve felt it all along. You’re so un- happy— you still are. Why, Deir- dre?” She lifted her head and looked Mtdwett Radio Corporation — since J 1920, famous for fine radios, ond their f factofy-to-you selling plan with savings ^ up to 50% — looks to the post-war fu- j fure. To build the kind of radio you ' want, they ask you now to submit a * letter on the subject: “What I Want In My Post-War Radio.” For the 11 best letters, Midwest will give $1,000.00 in War Bonds, letters , must not exceed 200 words and you may send as many entries as you wish. Letters will be judged on the practical value of the ideas contained therein and the de- cision of the judges will be final. In case of ties, duplicate prizes will be awarded. All entries must be post- marked not later than midnight Decem- ber 31, 1944. Contest is open to all except employees of Midwest Radio Corporation, their advertising agency, and members of their families. Win- ners will be notified on January 31, 3945. Prizes will be awarded as follows: First Prize. . .$500 in War Bonds Second Prize $200 in War Bonds Third Prize. .$100 in War Bonds land eight prizes of a $25 War Bond each. NO WOMAN BORN 178

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at him, eyelcssly, but with a pierc- ing stare. i “Why are you so sure of that?” she asked gently. “You think I could be mistaken, knowing you as I do ? But I’m not Frankenstein . . . you say my crea- tion’s flawless. Then what — ” “Could you ever duplicate this body?” she asked. Maltzer glanced down at his shaking hands. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I — ” “Could anyone else?” He was silent. Deirdre answered for him. “I don’t believe anyone could. I think I was an accident. A sort of mutation halfway between flesh and metal. Something acci- dental and . . . and unnatural, turn- ing off on a wrong course of evo- lution that never reaches a dead end. Another brain in a body like this might die or go mad, as you thought 1 would. The synapses are too delicate. You were — call it lucky — with me. From what I know now, I don’t think a . . , a baroque like me could happen again.” She paused a moment. “What you did was kindle the fire for the Phoenix, in a way. And the Phoenix rises perfect and re- newed from its own ashes. Do you remember why it had to reproduce itself that way?” Maltzer shook his head. “I'll tell you,” she said. “It was because there was only one Phoe- nix. Only one in the whole world.” They looked at each other in si- lence. Then Deirdre shrugged a little. “He always came out of the fire perfect, of course. I’m not weak, Maltzer. You needn’t let that thought bother you any more. I’m not vulnerable and helpless. I’m not sub-human.” She laughed dryly. “I suppose,” she said, “that I ’m — superhuman . ' ’ “But — not happy.” “I’m afraid. It isn't unhappi- ness, Maltzer — it’s fear. I don’t want to draw so far away from the human race. I wish I needn’t. That’s why I'm going back on the stage — to keep in touch with them while I can. But I wish there could be others like me. I’m . . . I'm lonely, Maltzer.” Silence again. Then Maltzer said, in a voice as distant as when he had spoken to them through glass, over gulfs as deep as ob- livion, “Then I am Frankenstein, after all.” “Perhaps you are,” Deirdre said very softly. “I- don’t know. Per- haps you are.” She turned away and moved smoothly, powerfully, down the room to the window. Now that Harris knew, he could almost hear the sheer power purring along her limbs as she walked. She leaned the golden forehead against the glass — it clinked faintly, with a musical sound — and looked down into the depths Maltzer had hung above. Her voice was reflective as she looked into those dizzy spaces which had offered oblivion to her creator. “There's one limit I can think of,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Only one. My brain will wear 178 ASTOUNDING SOIKNCE - FICTION

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out in another forty years or so. Between now and then I’ll learn • . • I’ll change . . . I’ll know (nore than I can guess today. I’ll change — That’s frightening. I don’t like to think about that.” She laid a curved golden hand on the latch and pushed the window open a little, very eas- ily. Wind whined around its edge. “I could put a stop to it now, if I wanted,” she said. “If I wanted. But I can't, really. There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human, and no human brain could leave ’ such possibilities un- tested. I wonder, though ... I do wonder — ” Her voice was soft and familiar in Harris’ ears, the voice Deirdre had spoken and sung with, sweetly enough to enchant a world. But as preoccupation came over her a certain flatness crept into the sound. When she was not listen- ing to her own voice, it did not keep quite to the pitch of trueness. It sounded as if she spoke in a room of brass, and echoes from the walls resounded in the tones that spoke there. “I wonder,” she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice. THE END. How I Became a Hotel Hostess >W. Secures Position Though Without Previous Hotel Experience “Dissatisfied with the long hours and humdrum routine as a clerk, I sent for the Lewis School’s book. Shortly afterwards, I en- rolled. Now hostess of this beautiful resort hotel, earning a splendid salary. I get as much fun out of the gay parties and sparkling enter- tainment I plan and supervise, as the guests. Thanks to Lewis Home Study, Leisure Time Training.” How I Stepped IntOjaBIO PAY Hotel Job C .P Knew Nothing About Hotel Work, Yet Becomes Hotel Steward “Shortly after receiving my di- ploma from the Lewis Hotel Training School, I gave up my job in a power plant and accepted a position obtained for me by the Lewis Placement Bureau as Assistant Manager of a famous Virginia Country Club. Now Steward of this 350-room North Carolina hotel. Have been here eleven months and have^ bad three raises in salary.” STEP INTO A WELL-PAID HOTEL POSITION From coast to coast Lewis-trained men and •women are winning good positions and a sound, substantial postwar future in the hotel, club and institutional field. They are “making good” as Managers, Assistant Managers, Executive Housekeepers, Hostesses and in 55 other types of well-paid positions. Today opportunities are greater than ever. The success of Lewis graduates has proved previous experience unnecessary in this business where you are not dropped because you are over 40. Your business, home, professional or grade school background, plus Lewis Training, qualifies you at home, in leisure time. FREE book tells! how to qualify for a well-paid position ; explains how you are registered FREE of extra cost, in Lewis National Placement Service. Mail the coupon NOW 1 r Lewis Hofei TrainTiig’school “ ■ Room CX-1261. Washington 7, D. C. 8»«eP — - t J Send me your Free Book. I want to know bow to ) | qualify for a well-paid position. | Name | | Address j i City State _i NO WOMAN BOEN 177

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SPACESHIP’S VIEW! ( Continued from page 103) a very marked parallax, so that, standing behind the homemade moon, one-half, or one-quarter of the lens will be visible, but not all. That plays ruinous tricks with de- tail on or near the edge of the moon. At the southern edge of the picture on page 103 — the top edge — there is a marked distortion of the lunar features due to that effect. We’re disappointed — but we do fee! these shots are extremely in- teresting. And — they may inspire someone, more favorably located, to go and do better. In various parts of the United States there are large, white-painted spherical gas-holders, used for storing natural gas under considerable pressure. There may be other large, white spheres or hemispheres. The lunar slides needed for the projector can be ob- tained from Mount Wilson Ob- servatory • or other major astro- nomical observatories. A glib tongue, a convincing air, and — pos- sibly— this article may help to get permission to do the job some dark and moonless night. It will take some long exposures, some real in- genuity in solving problems of pro- jector power-supply, and a large camera, if the thing is to be done right. A sphere would be far handier to use as the projection screen; it may be darned near as difficult as building a spaceship in the first place to hang a camera somewhere to the northwest of a one-hundred-foot hemisphere. But it would be simple to put the slide THE in at a peculiar angle to re-orient the “moon” with respect to your grounded tripod. There is one other form of dis- tortion that is inherent in this pro- cess, and nothing can be done about it for the next fifteen years or so. That is the — call it “opacity shadow.” Our camera spaceship is in a position to see the other side of the Moon — but there is, obvi- ously, nothing in the projected im- age there. The original taking camera was not in a position to see. The same phenomena, on a smaller scale, applies to crater walls, and similar objects. Overcoming that opacity-shadow effect, plus the deleterious effect of the Earth’s atmosphere in making the original telescopic shots, are things that no amount of photo- graphic ingenuity here on Earth can overcome. They can be repaired only by waiting the necessary fif- teen years or so till the first ships capable of circling the Moon are built. Then we’ll see the unseeable craters. In the meantime, we’ll have to try photographic spaceships. Any photographs so obtained will be of great interest. Dr. R. S. Richardson originally suggested this project to me, and helped me with it. Any help I can render, based on what I know won’t work, will be gladly offered. Anyone interested in 8 x 10 glossy prints of these experimental shots published here may obtain them for 50c each,” by writing this magazine. END. ITS ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION

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Genuine Walnut 7" high— 6" wide 4" deep GOOD LUCK LEAF Lives on Air Alone The greatest novelty plant ever discovered! Traditionis-aperson owning one of these plants will have much good luck and success Yours free — for prompt action It will grow in your room pinned to the window curtain This leaf grows a plant at every notch. The small plants may be detached and potted if desired When planted in earth, it grows two feet I oil and blooms beautifully The blooms may be cut and dried and they will hold their beauty for years This plant is being studied b> some of our leading Universities _ and is rating very high in EACH TINY PLANT p|ant evolution RROOUCIS THIS 1 ' NOW YOU SAN BE YOUR OWN WEATHER FORECASTER (now lornor row's Weather today, tells the Weather U itoars Atie , i Why pay $5 or $10 for a barometer when you can predict tha weather yourself, at home, 8 to 24 hours •n advance, with this accurate, inexpensive Weather House forecaster? It’s made like a little Swiss cottage with a thatched green roof and small green shutters. Inside the house is an old witch and a little boy and girl. When the weather’s going to be fine, the little boy and girl come out In front. But when bad weather is on the way the old witch makes an appearance. There is an easy-to-read thermometer on the front of the tottage 'hat shows you the exact temperature. You can depend on knowing the condition of the weather from eight to twenty-four hours in advance with the Weather House, made in the U. S. A. Here is oosi ively the mosi amazing introductory advertising offer over made. Bur must act quickly — mires may Hsr SEND' NO MONEY Sent to You on 100% Satisfaction Guarantee ' Test the Weather House foi accuracy Watch it closely, see how perfectly it predicts the weather in advance, then if you don't agree it s worth many dollar* more than the small cost, simply return your Weather House within todays and get your money back promptly In full without question Almost every day of your life is affected in some way by the weather, and it s such a satisfaction to have a reliable indication of what the weather will be The Weather House comes to you complete and ready to use Ideal for gifts and bridge prizes It will bring new pleasure to everyone in your family The price is only $1 69 COD You must act now to secure this price DOUBLE VALUE COUPON — MAIL TODAY HERE'S WHAT WEATHER HOUSE OWNERS SAY "My neighbors now phone me to "I saw your Weather House at a find out what the weather is going to friend's home and the way be We certainly think the Weather House is marvelous " Mr* I S . Amsterdam. Ohio "Please rush 6 more Weather Houses I want to give them away as gills They are wonderful " Mrs. I F . Booth. Maine friend's home raved about it. one for myself Mrs L R . Chicago. Ill "Ever since I got my Weather House I've been able to plan my affairs a day ahead It's wonderful " Mrs D LB. Shenandoah. Iowa ! Tha Weather Man, Dept. ‘‘S “ _ ! 29 East Madison Street 10 DAY TRIAL COUPON j Chicago 2, Illinois ■ Send at once (I) "Swiss' Weather House and Free Good Luck Leaf ! On arrival. I will pay postman SI 69 plus postage with the under- • standing that the Weather House is guaranteed to work accurately. I Also I can return the Weather House for any reason within 10 days I and get my money back I □ Send C O D □ I Enclose !l 69 You Pay Postage □ 2 for $2 98 (Please print plainly)

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