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SATURN MAGAZINE OF £C!ENCE-FICT;ON AND FANTASY VCl. 1, No. 5 MARCH. 1900 4 CONTENTS RED FLAG bVER THE MOON by Romney Boyd 4 THE ORZU PROBLEM by Lloyd Biggie, Jr 12 THE SKITZ AND THTJJNSKITZ by Jefferson Highe 25 SPUTNIK SHOES by Charles A. Steams 39 THE POWDER OF HYPERBOREA by Clark Ashton Smith .... 52 NEVER MARRY A VENERIAN by Charles L. Fontenay 63 REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET by Ray Cummings 66 THE STARS ARE WAITING by Marion Zimmer Bradley 84 ALAREE by Robert Silver berg 95 SHAGGY DOG by Charles E. Fritch 109 Editor and Publisher ROBERT C. SPROUL s A(t Director A> WILLIAM CLARK Editorial Consultant -*<• DONALD A. WOLLHEIM SATTHX. MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY is published bi- monthly by OANDAR PUBLISHING CpMPANY, INC., at 1 Appleton Street, H'Olvoke, MuSb. Editorial office, 218 W. 48 St., New York 36, N. Y. Copyright 1958 by CANDAR PUBLISHING GO., ING. Entered as Second Class Matter at the Post Office at Holy- oke, Mass. Single copy 35c; Subscriptions: Yearly (6 issues) : U. S. and possessions $2.00: Canada $2.25; Foreign $2.50. All material submitted must be accompanied by self- addressed, stamped envelope. The publishers assumes no responsibility for un- solicited material. The names of all characters used in these stories are fictitious; any rwamblance to persons living or dead is coincidental, PRINTED IN THE U. S, A.

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SATURN £s« PRESENTS THE STARTLING FACTS After Sputnik and Mutfnik, what? Science- fiction has been talking about space-flight for years while the politicians laughed it off as "Buck togers " stuff. SATURN dares to present a realistic analysis of what the future of space- flight is really going to be.

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RED FLAG OVER THE MOON by ROMNEY BOYD After Sputnik and Muttnik, what 2 Science- diction has been talking about space-flight for years jvhile the politicians goofed. SATURN dares to present a grimly realistic analysis of what the future of space-flight is really going to be. A MOUNTAIN of self-de- c e p t i o n came crashing down on the heads of the Wes- tern world on October 4, 1957, when the ominous beep-beep- beep of a man-made moon came circling the globe. For that satellite, the first actual step in the conquest of outer space, was not — as ten thou- sand science- fiction' stories would have had it and as mil- lions of lines of smug newspa- per and magazine stories had predicted- — was not an Ameri- ' can invention. Only a few weeks earlier Russian claims to having per- fected a powerful rocket ca- pable of intercontinental cargo travel (the cargo being, of course, atomic warheads) were pooh-poohed. From the White House on down to the lowliest politicos, the report was greet- ed with shrugs, smiles of scorn for such obvious poppycock, and jeers that it was mere propaganda. But as it turned out the Soviets were not mak- ing scarehead stories, they were coldly stating facts. They produced a rocket ca- pable’ of penetrating outer space. They blasted off a mini- ature globe many times heavier than our most ambitious plans had projected and at a higher altitude — and they then said that it was just an advance trial, a mere preliminary to the real thing. And while the Russians were preparing to complete this first successful space break- through, what were we doing? 4

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5 RED FLAG OVER THE MOON We had postponed our efforts at putting up an earth satellite from an indefinite time in the fall of 1957 to an equally in- definite time in the early sum- mer of 1958. Our officials ye re engaged in refereeing a ridiculous dispute between the Air Force and the Army as to which of several half-finished rocket programs should be scrapped and which kept. The earth satellite we planned and couldn’t bring about on sched- ule was to be. a piddling little thing of about twenty pounds, to be sent up — if we were lucky — to about three hundred miles. Of course once the Sputnik, as the Soviets call their moon, was up and going, there was a great scurrying and to-do in the circles of the brave gentle- men who compose the United States rocket leaders. Efforts were made to say that, well, the Russians were p little ahead of, but not much — a few months maybe — we weren’t in , a race anyway — besides we’d soon outstrip them with our know-how. The facts are otherwise. The size and weight and height of the Sputnik shows that the Russians are not just a few months ahead, but at least two years ahead; that they possess the means and tech- nique to plan space operations many times greater than those in our present capacity; and that they are forging ahead without halt, without inter-de- partmental arguments, and without a lot of shoddy lobby- ing to see into whose corpora- tive pockets the /iew "few bil- lions of defense money is go- ing to- be funnelled. In plain language, this is all going^to mean that the Rus- sians are going to be the first to conquer space, the first to reach the moon, the first to set up a permanent base on the moon. W/’E ARE SORRY to have ” to make this observation so bluntly. But it is the pe- culiar quality of a magazine of this sort, a science-fiction mag- azine whose readers are ac- customed to view the future with intelligent eyes rather than with the blinkers that/ ‘family” magazines impose, to be able to present an unpleas- ant aspect of the future in its true light. } I know that it is possible to raise objections, but for the most part these objections will be derived from the soft soap that is going to be dished out heavily by the culprits who

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6 SATURN were responsible for our fum- bling failure to keep ahead of the Soviets in a field where we certainly once had a head start. Raise these objections if you will, but a two-year lead in rocketry with the full con- sciousness of the importance of the outcome is not to be over- come so easily. The Soviets, having brought to world atten- tion their leadership ih the field, must nov -edouble their national effort to keep it. You can Test assured that they Snow this and that, while we are holding post-m o r t e m s and emergency committee meetings, they will be plunging ahead with tests, plans, and vaster engineering operations. They have publicly stated their ob- jectives— and stated them with- out all the evasiveness we give to ours. The United States has the means to make up the loss — if time permits. We have an in- c^u-tiyial apparatus far superior vto bat of the Soviets, but da we have the time to spare?'' Are our leaders willing to take a stand quick enough and firm er, gh? What is more — are they willing to scrap fast some of the rubbish they have clut- tered up our rocket projects with? What exactly does a Soviet victory in moon-flight mean? Well, the moon is a permanent fixed space platform, from which every part of the Earth’s surface can be surveyed tele- scopically down to the smallest detail. To construct a telescope in the low-gravity airlessness of the moon’s surface is a sim- ple matter compared with tele- scope construction on Earth. With great ease and speed, lenses can be arranged, on sim- ple skeleton frameworks, vir- tually fixed on the Earth — which, please remember, is a fixed object in the lunar skies. Observations will be a hundred times clearer there because of the lack of an obscuring at- mosphere. It would be no problem to set, almost at once a spy ob- servatory on Luna that will be able to spot every movement on Earth of a troop of soldiers or even of a single automobile. There will be no military se- crets left. The next step, following the observatory, would be the set- ting of a rocket-artillery base on the moon. From such a point, it would be no problem to fire direct rocket shots at any activity on the Earth’s surface the Lunar Station didn’t like. What is more it would be vastly difficult for

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RED FLAG OYER THE MOON 7 the Earth to fire back. In addition to these obvious military advantages, there is also the tremendous boost to science that working on the moon will give. Conditions of piatter in low gravity and in outer space are still not sub- ject to experiment to the Earth-bound. The certainty of making great discoveries, and great strides in the conquest of nature is taken for granted once we have reached outer space. The qualities of various elements at temperatures near absolute zero are already sus- pected to hold tremendous po- tentials for energy liberation — and such temperatures could be had without much difficulty during the two-week long lunar nights. The world’s chemists would sell their souls for a chance at such experimentation. The Russians, who have had a bug on engineering education (they are outstripping us in the number of srudents and graduates — another scandal) since 1945, know all about * these possibilities. They are giving their rocket and space travel men the same type of high priority drive that the U.S.A. gave the atomic bomb project during World War II. The cold fact is that Soviet achievement of the moon is going to make them the mas- ters of the Earth. They know it — and what is worse, until October 4, 1957, apparently the Pentagon didn’t know it. 'TPHERE ARE men among the rocket engineers of America who’’ knew thii. too. Such men as G. Harry Stine, whose book EARTH SATEL- LITES" AND THE RACE FOR SPACE SUPERIORITY, published by Ace Books short- ly before the advent of the Sputnik, put the case with clarity and passion. In his unique thirty-five cent news- stand paperback, Stine out-* lined what America planned to do in the launching of its own earth satellite, the Vanguard, and then went on to outline what American engineers saw as the next steps along the line. These steps consisted of ad- vanced designs of cargo-carry- ing rockets and man-carrying t rockets — the ICBM — and then of a vast and elaborate proj- ect to construct a manned space station — an Earth Sat- ellite as large as a small £ity, with a permanent crew of en- gineers and researchers. This space station in turn would serve as the place where the first moon-exploration rockets

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8 SATURN would be put together and then launched. It would act to serve the same defensive and re- search purposes that the moon would serve. Possibly^ this is still the of- ficial United States program. If it is, it is going to be too badL/or us. Because the Rus- sians stated the answer quite clearly a few' months ago. One of their scientists pointed out that construct^ of this colos- sal space platform was a waste of* time and an evasion 'of the obvious. For the obvious, said this Soviet rocketman, is that a really permanent and stable space platform already exists — and that was Luna itself. The Russian logic called for by-passing any such man-made platform and for setting up shop without delay on the moon itself. The sense here should be self-evident. Stine admits in his book (which is must read- N in|[ for everyone interested in this space race) that his space station is entirely indefensible in time of war. At the very out- break of hostilities it could be blasted from existence by one easily aimed H-bomb warhead rocket (since its orbit would be but a few hundred miles from Earth). But the moon, old Luna, cannot be knocked out of the sky no matter how many H-bombs we plaster its surface with. It is a permanent station in the sky. If shelled from Earth, the occupants have merely to set up their posts on the other side of the moon, the side forever turned away from Earth, and they will be safe from all that Earth-stationed enemies can do. In his book Stine outlines with great ingenuity and en- thusiasm the plan for the con- struction of this space plat- form. This is basically the one originated by Darrell C. Ro- mick. It calls for the construc- tion of this city in the sky by the piecing together of hun- dreds of thousands of small sections, each transported up to orbit by means of huge three-stage rockets. It would call for the construction of these rockets in mass quantity — about as many as an auto- mobile plant can turn out cars! The cost y:ould be in the bil- lions and the task would take about four years to complete. Four years to complete, bil- lions in costs, and not worth a single cent in wartime! No wonder the Russians are smil- ing today. They have stated their objective — the moon it- self. They are driving for it in the most* direct fashion.

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RED FLAG OVER THE MOON 9 Their plans call for the fur- therance of multi-stage rock- ets capable of delivering a car- go-head vast distances. They claim to have already pro- duced the ICBM, and their cl/iim includes an invention that will deliver it with precision on any target they name. The fact that their present rocket strength is sufficient to lift an object of 184 pounds a height of five hundred and sixty miles, and impart to it a speed of 18,000 miles per hour., proves that they have the ability. It is simple mathematics to figure out what the same rocket pow- er could do in lifting an object that might weigh only five or ten pounds. Considering that each pound of payload calls for hundreds of pounds of fuel, obviously this rocket is quite capable, as it now stands, of delivering an object — a tiny one — to the moon itself. Or around the moon. Or on its way to the planet Venus. Such are actually their an- nounced plans. They will first ■^send robot rockets around the moon for observation. Then they will send one or two on to Mars and Venus. Next they will start landing bits of cargo on a selected spot on the lun- ar surface — parts of stations, necessary equipment. When all is ready, they will deliver a man to put the stuff together and set up their station. With a high priority drive they can do all this within five years. Certainly they could drive a missile to the moon’s surface right now — if they haven’t al- ready done so By the time. +his magazine is in print. But G. Harry Stine, in ad- vancing' the* case for the arti- ficial space plaiSorm, was only supporting what happened to be the*"most advanced AmePr- can thought about our own space rocket capacities in 1957. Our plans for an earth satel- lite one weighing only twenty pounds, had been announced originally for the fall of 1957. But they had been vague and were finally set back six or eight months. Doubtless these plans ar being hastily revised, but the fact still remains that America does not have the ability to ' put a satellite of Sputnik’s weight up there. We can’t do it. Stine was exceedingly aware of the menace of space, of the desperate need for getting up there first. His book is a Vig- orous and fearless examination of the vital importance to America of our space opera- tions- and our space defenses. He pointed out how the decline

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10 SATURN and fall of the empires of the past, from the Persian and Ro- man to the British, was in each case due to the failure of these empires to keep up with tech- nical developments outside their frontiers. Let the United States fail to keep its technical lead and we face" the same his- toric fate. T ET’S FACE it* we were ^caught ff»t-footed. Our projects were tied up :n argu- nveftts between builders as to which design was the more ideal. Our Project Vanguard was lingering for lack of suffi- cient cash and manpower. The leaders of our country had their heads buried in the sands of golf courses, hoping like the ostrich that what they weren’t willing to see would therefore cease to exist. A week after Sputnik had electrified the world, too many of these lead- ers were already busy trying , to ^tick their heads back in , the golf traps — denying the ob- vious, shrugging it off, pre- tending we had bigger plans all the time, and so forth. Such lea. :s would do well to study the last days of the Roman Empire and meditate on them. What can the rest of us do, especially those of us who, through science-fiction, know how real and vital space flight is going to be to the human future. We can do something — we can do our utmost to sway public - opinion behind a new crash program for rocket engineering and space flight. ^ In spite of the fact that America has more science-fic- tion m-ga/.ines and science-fic- tion readers than any other country in the world (and here again Russia is a close sec- ond), we have always been shy of publicly admitting belief in space travel. Buck Rogers may be a household word, but seri- ous people smile when they hear it. When the first Ameri- can society of space-travel en- thusiasts was formed back in 1931, it took the name of the American Interplanetary Socie- ty and called its journal Astronautics. But as soon as it grew large and began to at- tract practical engineers to its ranks, it embarrassedly changed it£>name to the con- servative American Rocket Society and its magazine to Jet Propulsion. To this day rocket engineers would rather talk in public only about bal- listic missiles, jet planes, and cargo rockets, and avoid pub- lic references to any “wild” ideas of moon-flight. It is this’ curious reluctance

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RED FLAG OVER THE MOON 1 1 to admit publicly what is ac- tually the heart’s desire of eve- ry rocket man that has helped to hold back our progress. Mention moon-flying to a con- gressman and he’d think you crazy. Instead talk about V-2s i and missiles. That sounds more businesslike. This sort of nonsense has got to stop. Rocket men must speak out and name their ob- jective boldly and clearly. We want the moon! We want it now, and we want it for the free world! We have the means, we have the will — give us the money and we will give you the universe! That’s the way the Russians talk. They state their objec- tives without blushing. They never hesitated to put pictures of space rockets on the covers of even the most sedate of sci- ence journals. Their govern- ment bureau in charge of rock- etry is boldly called the Min- istry for Interplanetary Com- munication ! S c i e n c e-fiction readers should speak out plainly. We can collar our acquaintances, write our congressmen, put let- ters in the newspapers, come out openly. Stop the nonsense, clear the decks, build the space-ships now. If we don’t/ then in a few years-we *hre going to be able to stand out our back yards and look at a real new Soviet Satellite. It’s going to be sprbig white sphere in the night sky with yery familiar features. It’s going to be called Luna; there’ll be a red flag stuck on a mast in the middle of the Sea of Serenity and another on the top of Tycho. And the Man in the Moon will be broad- casting down to Earth every day — in Russian. That’s the way it’s prob- ably going to be. THE END

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THE ORZU PROBLEM by LLOYD BIGGLE, JR. All he did was to obey orders — but out in the galaxy sizes can be terribly deceptive! A LL RIGHT. So I’ve been Grade 7, and <*nce I went from in the government service Grade 2 all the way down to for twenty years, and my rat-'i Grade 8. I never blamed a - ing is only Grade 10. That one but myself for those demo- isn’t my fault. The Special tions. When a man pulls a Problems Section is a tough boner, he has to live with it. place to work. I’ve been up and This last time, though, I was down plenty of times during at the top — a bona fide Grade those twenty years. I’ve 1, and the only one on this dropped from Grade 3 down to Base. Central Administration 12

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13 THE ORZU PROBLEM bounced me all the way to Grade 10 without a hearing, and I hadn’t done a thing. I was as innocent as a man can be in these corrupt times, and I can prove it. It began with a letter, and * the Chief brought’ it in him- self. The Chief fakes a person- al inferest in the members of his staff, and when he comes up with a first class stinker, he likes to see the expression on the face of the man that gets it. He leered at me, and slid the letter across my desk. “Special Problems Section, Base XVI,” I read. “Requisi- tion: With all possible dispatch furnish one pair live Orzus to Galaxia Zoological Gardens. Details as to capture and ship- ment are left to your discre- tion.” “Pretty good joke,” I said. “I suppose we tell them to go chase their own Orzus?” “We do not,” the Chief said. I didn’t like* his tone of voice. I snapped, “Since when does the Galaxia Zoological Gardens have any authority over Special Problems?” “Ever since the Galactic Commission passed a special resolution ordering all Special Problems Sections to extend full cooperation. Galaxia Zoo- logical Gardens are to have a prize .collection of monstrosi- ties from all over the galaxy. An added tourist attraction for the capital, they say, and may- be it’s a good idea. If the col- lection is hideous enough, it might make the politicians look good.” “One pair live Orzqs, com- ing up,” I said. With considerable reluctance I laid askle the problem of the decreasing bi,rth rate on Par- mo, and went down to the li- brary to stalk my Orzus^r- Normally a problem of this type is no problem at all. Spe- cial Problems simply passes the request along to the local Colonial Administrator. The Administrator finds someone in his organization who can carry it out, and sends Special Prob- lems a billing for any expense involved. Special Problems passes the billing along, with appropriate padding, of course, to the department that origin- ated the request. And the prob- lem is buried in an Action Tak- 'zn file. The library had a new girl in the reference section — a trim little redhead with ''green eyes and the kind of figure I didn’t think they allowed out on the perimeter. “Where did you come from?” I said. “I thought this

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SATURN 14 Base had some kind of regula- tion against being beautiful.” “I’ve heard that line eighty- seven times in the last four days,” she said. “And I came out here to marry a man in the Supply Department.” “Dial me one pair of Orzus,” I said.,. She did. We worked out elev- en different ways to spell Orzu, and all we got was a blank screen. , I went to see the Chief. “Just tell me one thing,” I'said. “What’s an Orzu?” The Chief laughed. “Maybe that’s why it’s a special prob- lem.” Sometimes his sense of humor is positively malicious. I went back to my desk and prepared a message for the Director of the Galaxia Zoo- logical Gardens. “With regard to your request for one pair Orzus, please advise as to planet and species desired.” I hoped he’d assume that this ^sector was overpopulated iwith Orzus and their near rela- tions, and he’d have to do some research before he bothered me again., With luck, he might even 'decide to forget about his Orzus. I sent the message down to Communications, and went back to my problem of the birth rate on Parmo. I also went back to the problem of the little redhead. I’ve been married eleven times, at various Bases around the galaxy, and that doesn’t in- clude a number of unofficial cohabitation experiments. With due modesty I might say I’ve had a measure of practical ex- J perience that no psych-condi- tioning can touch, and it took me just three days to eliminate the opposition and take over. There was only one draw- back. She was a girl with old- fashioned ideas. No cohabita- tion for her — it had to be mar- riage or nothing. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get married.” We set a date. My work was going along nicely. There is nothing quite like a decreasing- birth-rate problem for a man planning to get married. Then back came the reply from the Director of Galaxia Zoological Gardens, by high-priority space relay. “Orzus desired native to planet Amicus, Pron II, Sector 1169,” he wrote. “Reference Journal of Galactic Explora- tions, Vol. LXVI, No. 5, p. 1043.” Whereupon I wrote out a requisition for one pair of live Orzus, to be shipped to the Galaxia Zoological Gardens, and addressed it to the Colo- nial Administrator on Arnicus.

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THE ORZU PROBLEM It was that simple. I sent it down to Communications. Communications sent it right back with a sarcastic note to the effect that there was no Colonial Administrator on Ar- nicus. In fact, there wasn’t ‘anybody on Arnicus. The place wasn’t, deemed fit for human habitation. Back to the library I went, and my redhead wasn’t exact- ly pleased to find me there on business. I checked out the reel of the appropriate number of the Journal of Galactic Ex- ploration, and dug up a few survey reports on Arnicus. I started reading, and what I found would have curled my hair if I had any. Arnicus is a super-tropical world, with two continents at its polar caps, and five thousand miles of boil- ing ocean separating them. The average temperature at its poles is 200 Fahrenheit in the shade, with lots of shade, in the form of sliitiy, swampy jungle. Orzu himself was specifical- ly designed for populating nightmares— a giant reptile, nine feet high at the shoulders, fifteen feet long, and with a bristling crop of tentacles where his nose should .have been. It was also claimed that he had three eyes. I doubted 15 that the explorer had gotten close enough to count accurate- ly, but on an Orzu one eye, more or less, couldn’t have much influence on the total effect. I wrote up a little report on the generally hellish nature of Orzu and his fenvironment, and took it to the Chief. He read it through as if he enjoyed it im- mensely. ‘“When do you leave?” he sa$. “When do I leave?” I squalled. “Listen, I cffn’t leave. I’m getting married next week.” “You don’t say,” he said. He pulled my file, and went through it, counting slowly. “. . .eight, nine, ten, eleven! It isn’t as if it were something that hasn’t happened before. You’ll have plenty of time to get married after you collect the Orzus.” He grinned happi- ly. “I’m glad this came along. I’ve been wanting to get you onto a, normal-gravity hasp so you can see how much weight ybu’ve put on.” “That’s a great idea,” I $aid. “Send me back to Terra for that leave I was supposed to have last year. I think the girl would like that. But leave Orzu out of it.” “I’ll fix it up with Explora- tion to get you a ship and

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16 SATURN crew,” he said. “But you go along to boss the operation. Either you bring back Orzu, or you stay on Arnicus and grow your own tentacles. Special Problems has a reputation to maintain.” As you know, Special Prob- lems has top priority over any department except the military. It took just three days to get an expedition together - and equip it. The military cooperat- ed with the loan of a space cruiser. As I had figured, my little redhead didn’t take kindly to the idea. She was looking for- ward to getting married, which is an excellent state of mind for a woman to be in. When I told her we’d have to wait she threw a tantrum and quite a few other things. The same night I saw her down by the space port strolling with her man from the Supply Depart- ment. And when I went down to the library to wish her good >by, she told me not to hurry back. T LEFT for Arnicus with a Space Navy crew, a dozen experienced explorers, and the best equipment Base could pro- vide. And there were several things wrong. No one on board had ever been to Arnicus be- fore— and few of us were pleased at the prospect of go- ing there. My explorers were hardened individualists. The first day they got into violent arguments over Orzu and how best to cope with him. After three hours they’d split up into factions that weren’t on speaking terms. The man in charge of the project was me, and I was more concerned about my red- head than Orzu. Also, I’d never before been in charge of any- thing that involved more than one female filing clerk. It was not a pleasant trip. On the fourteenth day I. stood with the Captain on the bridge, absorbing my first view of Arnicus. What I saw made me sick. The planet was wrapped in swirling dirty, yel- low-brown clouds, and where I caught a glimpse of land I saw nothing but a hideous purple vegetation. The captarh snapped out the necessary orders to put the ship into a polar orbit. “Which continent do you want to start with?” he said. “I’d just as soon forget the whole thing,” I said. “But as long as I can’t, take your pick. Wherever you’d prefer to land.” “Land?” He stared at me.

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THE ORZU PROBLEM “You want me to put this ship down in a swamp? Nothing do- ing. W e stay in an orbit, and you ferry your men and sup- plies down by flyer.” “Now just how am I going to get a pair of Orzus into this t ship by flyer?” “That’s your problem. But I’d suggest that you concen- trate on small Orzus. There’s the size of the air lock to con- sider.” I hadn’t thought of that. There were, in fact, a number of things I hadn’t thought of, as I found out when I started conferring with my exploration team on the subject of what to do with Orzu if we actually caught him. My right-hand man was a veteran explorer named Jan Garish. A small, wizened man with a leathery, wrinkled face and a drooping mustache in which he took an obnoxious pride. He had spent most of his life knocking around in various galactic hell-holes. Though he’d never been on'Arnicus, he dif- - fered from the rest of us in that he was looking forward to it. “First thing we do,” he said, “we test atmosphere. We get chemist to make some. We get engineer to make pressure cage. We get zoologist to tell us what 17 Orzu maybe eats. Then we catch Orzu, put him in cage. He lives, we tow cage up to ship. He don’t live, we make chemist and zoologist try again, and we catch more Orzu. Simple, eh?” Simple. I longed for the good, old, bring ’em back alive days, when a zoo only collect- ed specimens from its own planet. * The captain gave me the ship’s chemist for my exclu- sive'use, and that worthy* in- dividual rubbed his hands to- gether, stroked the two or three hairs surviving on his bald head, and vowed, Space, yes, he could duplicate the Arnicus atmosphere. He could duplicate any atmosphere — but he couldn’t say for how long. How much of the stuff would Orzu be breathing per hour? Wouldn’t it maybe be better to simply compress enough of the real thing to get Orzu to the zoo, and then let the zoo vqprry about it? * I didn’t know, and I left it up to him. The zoologist wasn’t so easy. He was a member of m/ ex- ploration team, but he hadn’t volunteered for the job. I asked him how we’d pack back enough vegetation to keep Orzu alive. He said he didn’t know,

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18 SATURN that was my problem — and anyway, Orzu was probably carnivorous. That possibility hadn’t oc- curred to me, and in my last sleep on board the cruiser I was caught in a weird night- mare in which my little red- head developed a third green eye, sprouted long red tenta- cles, and tried to stuff me into a food synthesizer. > HE FLYER spiraled down 'over the north pole, 1 keep- ing well away from the ocean. My chemist warned that it might be one churning vat of poison, and I didn’t argue with him. Also, we wanted to keep as far from the smouldering equator as possible. We skimmed over several hundred square miles of jungle without sighting a clearing, and finally we eased the flyer straight down through the trees. Tangled vines caught at it. Huge purple leaves flapped against the ports, and stuck there, blinding the pilot. It whs raining globules of some un- mentionable liquid. We had special atmosphere suits with a built-in cooling ap- paratus. We climbed into them, and Jan Garish was the first man out the air lock. He begged me for the job, and I gave in with appropriate re- luctance. He took one step, and sank into the slimy mud up to his hips. “Welcome to Amicus,” I said. , The rain left a sticky film on my face plate, and I had to > keep wiping it off to see. I scrambled around Garish, found solid ground — I only sank in to my knees — and looked about. The others fol- lowed me. We stood shifting from one foot to the other, and watching each other to see if one of us would suddenly sink in over his head. Garish floundered out of sight into the flapping vegeta- tion, and quickly floundered back again. “We’re in a swamp,” he said. No one denied it. “Well,” he said, “it gets worse in that direction. May- be it’ll get better the other way.” A good man, Garish. We found solid ground, and I be- gan to feel better. I’d been wondering how anything as big as Orzu could exist in a swamp. We moved the flyer, brought out our tents, and made a camp. The chemist set up a laboratory in the flyer, and gleefully went to work on the atmosphqre. My explorers went

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THE ORZU PROBLEM back to their argument about how best to catch Orzu, if we could locate him. The locating didn’t worry me. If Orzu was around at all, he wouldn’t be easy to overlook. Nine feet high, the report had said. 4 While the rest of us were hacking out a clearing around the camp, Jan Garish took three men on a preliminary survey of our surroundings. “Don’t try to bring in Orzu all by yourself,” I told him. “No,” Garish said, after giving the possibility careful consideration. “Maybe we find tracks, though.” “I don’t even want you tracking him, yet. He might have a nasty temper. If you find a place that looks as if a battle cruiser has ploughed through the jungle, just get back here fast.” We had the camp in order, and I was relaxing in my tent, comfortably sealed off from the sulphurous A ripe us atmos- phere, when he returned. He stomped out of the air lock, >*pulled off his suit, and sat down glumly. “Nothing,” he said. “No Orzu?” “No nothing. Don’t like the looks of this place. No birds. No animals.” “Just be patient,” I said. 19 “Maybe Orzu sleeps in the daytime.” “Maybe.” He grunted, and it was not an optimistic grunt. The following day we or- ganized our search. We split into three parties, and combed the jungle, working out away from the swamp. Nothing. We shifted our camp, -and kept moving away from the swamp until we ran into anoth- er swaitip. Nothing. At the end of a week we went back to the ship tqr replenish our supplies, and then we tried again. Noth- ing. Another week, and still a third, we stumbled and threshed our way through that putrid _ jungle. We slopped through swamps. We hacked our way through the thick, purple, slifne-coated veg- etation. We tripped over trail- ing vines that always looked like snakes, but never were. We chaffed in those cooled at- mosphere suits, and we sweat- ed in-' them, too, from sheer neyvous frustration. Nothing. The fourth week started out like the first three. Then, on the second day, I came floun- dering out of a swamp and found a trail — not a very big trail, to be sure, but something had passed that way. I divided my men into two groups, and

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20 SATURN we started out to follow that trail in both directions. I led one party, or rather, I ran on ahead of it. “Hey, take it easy,” some- one called. “Maybe Orzu bites.” I didn’t slow down. I’d stopped being afraid of Orzu. All I wanted to do was get my hands on hirn. I tore down that winding trail, widening the gap between myself and the others, and suddenly I'came to a sharp turn and blundered into. . . A TENT. A couple of men ** standing there, their at- mosphere suits sticky with slime. Two, three more men hurrying out of the tent and gaping at me. Two more tents in the background, and beyond them, half buried in the purple jungle, the .crumpled remains of a small space yacht. They swarmed down on me and pumped my hand. Both hands. They climbed all over me. They mobbed the other men as they came up. They leaped and howled with joy, and maybe they wept a little, top. I couldn’t tell, with them wearing suits. When the celebration had quieted down, one of them, who seemed to be the leader, took mfe aside and started the hand shaking all over again. “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “Thought we were done for. We crashed two weeks agp. Smashed most of our equip- ment, and we’re almost out of air, and — say, what are you doing here?” } I sighed. “Looking for Orzu.” He took two quick steps backwards, and then he jumped at me again, clamped a stranglehold on my neck, and pounded me on the back. “Man, you must be an expert! But how did you manage it in this jungle?” “What are you talking about?” I said. “And who are you, anyway?” He stepped back again. “Why, I’m Orzu. Who did you think I was?” It was my turn to back away, and we were almost too far apart for normal conversa- tion. “Orzu?” I repeated blankly. , “Stephen Orzu. I’m heading a research party for the Uni- versity of Arcturus.” We got into his tent, some- how, and I told him my story. The air was thin, and he looked completely exhausted, but he laughed until he fell off his chair and rolled on the floor. *

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THE ORZU PROBLEM 21 “You came all the way to Arnicus and spent three weeks in the jungle looking for...” He gasped for breath. “Orzu,” I said. “But there isn’t any Orzu!” he panted. 4'There is an Orzu,” I said, feeling the way a child must on Star-Festival Night, when someone says, “There isn’t a Galactic Spirit.” I gave him a photo-copy of the report from the Journal of Galactic Exploration. He read it carefully, and rolled over onto the floor again. I quieted him down, and got him back onto his chair. “According to this ...” I began. “I know,” he said. “I wrote that myself for the Journal. But they left out some of it. They left out the part that said the creature’s extinct!” He sat there, tears running down his face and laughter choking him, and tl*?re wasn’t anthing that I could say. Not a thing. * “I named it after myself,” he said finally. “I discovered it — discovered some skeletal re- mains, that is — and I’ve always wanted something like that named after me. The Bureau of Explorations has to approve it before it becomes official, but that’s a routine matter.” “Oh,” I said. “You’re quite a few thou- sand years too late to capture Otzu alive.” “You don’t say,” I said. “I can show you some lovely bones.” “No, thank yop. I never was very interested in bones.” He cut short another spasm of laughter, and said thought- fully, “You know, I wonder if this could be myTault. I wrote that letter in a hurry, and I just might have neglected' to mention that Orzu is extinct. I’ll have it corrected in the next issue of the Journal.” “I wish you would,” %I said. “Otherwise, some naive clerk might get sent Orzu-hunting.” Eventually Scientist Orzu recovered sufficiently to show us the specimens he’d collected. There was life on Arnicus — - lots of it, in fact. But it was small, and in our search for a nine-foot-high Orzu, we’d over- looked it altogether. He showed* us some nasty- looking reptiles, some odd in- sects, and an assortment of other small creatures. And /a prize specimen. “This should interest you,” he said. “This Is Orzu’s ninth cousin on his stepfather’s side.” It was Orzu, all right, in the

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22 SATURN miniature. Tiny reptiles three inches long, but with all the tentacles, and the three eyes, and probably the evil disposi- tion that old Orzu had. I tried to pick one up, and it bit me. “I based my description of old Orzu on these,” Scientist Orzu told us. “They could be direct descendents, but more likely they’re another branch of the family. We’ll probably never know, because fossil remains are hard to come by on this planet. Cute little fel- lows, aren’t they?” They looked repulsive to me, but I had an inspiration. “Let’s call these things Orzu,” I said, “and ship a couple off to the Galaxia Zoological Gardens.”. I wanted to salvage some mea- sure of success from my three weeks in the Anicus jungle. “Oh, no!” Scientist Orzu bellowed, rearing back indig- nantly. “I want my name on the big fellow. You wouldn’t understand, of course, but it’s a life-long ambition with me — to have a giant fossil narhed after me. This may be my last chance. You have to discover orte of those things to have the privilege of naming it, and Space knows when I’ll get away on another field trip.” He ducked into a tent, and came out with an armful of bones. “Look at him!” he purred. I know a fanatic when I see one, and I didn’t press the point. “Then how about Mor- zu?” I said. He beamed at me. “I have a better idea. Let’s name St after you!” “No, thank you,” I said, when I had my shuddering un- der control. “Well, Morzu sounds good.” He chuckled. “I guess it will see more zoo than Orzu, at that! ” I wasn’t carrying a blaster, and probably it was just as well for Orzu that I wasn’t. The scientist had already solved the problem of atmos- phere and diet for his speci- mens, so we sent the ship a mission accomplished message, and started packing. Everyone was happy except Jan Garish, who went around mumbling be- cause he wouldn’t be able to set foot on the southern con- tinent. We ferried our own equipment, and Orzu’s, up to the cruiser, along with two ex- tra pairs of Morzus for' the zoo, and in the words of the Gap- tain we got the hell out of there. WHEN WE reached Base, ** I left the space port on the

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THE ORZU PROBLEM 23 run to look for my little red- head. She’d moved, and when I located her new address her husband came to the door. She’d married her man from the Supply Department, and he gave me a brief description of* what would happen to me if I tried to bother her, and slammed the door in my face. At that point I was boiling hotter than the ocean on Ami- cus. I tore back to the space port and got the Morzus shipped to Galaxia by slow freighter, hoping they’d die be- fore they got there. I spent two hours composing a mes- sage for the Director of the Zoological Gardens. I told him that Orzu was rare and almost never seen alive/ but I was shipping him not one pair, but two, of practically the same thing — a first cousin we were calling Morzu. I added some details about diet and atmos- phere that Scientist Orzu had supplied, and a few precautions on the care of Morzus that I made up on the spot. I also told him that the creatures were extremely active, and he would have to provide an un- usually large amount of space per animal if they were to thrive. I sent the message off, and hoped for the worst. I was still steaming mad the next morning, when Scientist Orzu called at my office. Why not? I’d lost my girl, and spent three weeks in that jungle hell, and all for nothing. It was nearly a year later that I learned the fate of the Director of the Galaxia Zoolo- gical Gardens. As I’d hoped, he assumed bhat Morzus were roughly the same si^e as Orzus, and he worked day and night to have a sealed cage ready for them when they arrived. It was an enormous cage, some thirty:, feet high and covering four acres, with a transparent ceil- ing so that the visitors could walk around on top and look down on the giant reptiles. Of course he invested a lot of money in expensive heating and atmospheric equipment, the total bill running into the hundreds of thousands of credits. Along with the Morzus we’d sent him specimens of Arnicus soil and jungle vegetation, and when .he’d gotten a roaring jungle going in his cage, some- one turned the Morzus loose there, maybe thinking they would grow up to the size qf old Orzu. Those microscopic reptiles disappeared into that four-acre jungle, and the last I heard the zoo personnel were still looking for them. The

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SATURN 24 Director was fired for squan- dering the tax payers’ money. I expected a reprimand, and it wasn’t long in coming. Two weeks after I saw the news re- lease about the director, I was knocked from Grade 1 down to Grade 10, fined two years of seniority, and confined to Base for eighteen months. It was all done without a hearing, as I said, but I knew I deserved it, I didn’t even file an appeal. I considered it worth it, at that price, and when I think of the zoo person- nel beating through that Ami- cus jungle looking for Morzus, I still get laughing fits. Then the trial brief arrived, and you could have warped me twice around a comet. It wasn’t the Galaxia Zoo that filed the complaint — it was Scientist Orzu! A balder con- coction of lies I have never seen. My party, he said, kept him starving in the jungle for two weeks without bothering to rescue him. We caused irre- parable damage to valuable scientific specimens by forcing him to pack his belongings with ¥ndue and unnecessary haste. We appropriated to our own use four valuable specimens as the price of getting him off Arnicus at all. We made no ef fort to salvage his thorough! smashed space yacht, whic was government property. And so it went, through four and a half pages. My screams of prote; could have been heard as>fai away as Sirius, but it was too late for counteraction. Why, I asked myself. Why? What did I ever do to him, except sav his life? But it proved to be very simple. Orzu had suffered a crushing defeat. He had to take it out on someone, and I’d insulted him. It turned out that another scientist had done some browsing on Arni- cus fifty years before, and he found skeletal remains of the same reptile that Orzu wanted to name Orzu. He also had the same idea about getting the big fellow named after himself, and he got his claim in first, by forty-nine years and six months. 4 So I got demoted and fined for something I didn’t do, and still maintain that I’m inno- cent. It certainly isn’t my fault that the official name for Orzu’s pet fossil is Smith. THE END

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THE SKITZ AND THE UNSKITZ by JEFFERSON HISHE For that slick chick of the future, things had to be “xeal skitz” to be right . . . but, my, what queer notions that Boston longhair had about how a girl should behave! TPHE FIRST burring of the telephone sent an icy drill probing at the bedrock of her sleep and she sat up in the rumpled bed, groping like a drowning person clutching for salvation at the empty air. The room circled and slowly came to rest. Squalor of sleep hung over it like mist over a swamp. Oh God, I’m drunk, she thought and reached for the phone again. Then she realized that it was not the phone which was ringing but the clock and she thought, who’s crazy enough to get up at this hour? Rut the clock hands told her that it was nearly one P.M., and she remembered that this was to be the Day and the Night. She lit a cigarette and her hand went automatically to the switch on the table beside her. A side of the room flared into light and sound as the expen- sive Spellcaster went to work, and an Army colonel, in full color and tridi, stepped out of the wall with a world map in his hands and began to talk of the Quasiwar. It was another of the priority spells which all stations were being forced to cast. She flicked off the switch irritably, wishing, as she had a thousand times, that the Qua- si— which had been going on all her life — might finally come to something definite. With the switch off, the col- or went out of the room ancf the nfiasma of sleep and living came back on the tide of shad- ow. Better get up she 25

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26 SATURN thought, pushing against the feeling of guilt and terror that she knew was lurking in some corner of her morning mind. It’s a beautiful morning, a beautiful day, she told herself as she touched the switch and a wall became a window and the hard bright day flushed the room with light. With the coming of the light, the lost and guilty feeling canje, as she knew it would, and she went on with the litany, like a morning prayer. Beautiful m orr n i n g, beautiful morning, she crooned to the high noon outside; I’m so happy, I’m having so much fun, it’s such a wonderful thing to be alive. She caught a glimpse of her- self in the mirror — she was very pretty and blonde and small and strongly curved — and thought that she looked sallow and h'ungover und blamed it on the harsh light. But she did not touch the switch to control the terrible daylight that came through the wall. Must be outward-going, she crooned to herself and caught a robe quickly around her body; I have so much fun; I have such a good time. * The litany did not help, as it never really did. The scream- of a Banshee car came up from the street, there was a clap of laughter from its occupants and for a moment the sunlight from the wall was blurred by the oily smoke of the Ban- shee’s jet. In the moment of si- lence she heard the tapping sticks of the Hands. I’m a free woman, I’m happy, I have fhn, she told herself, but it was no good, and she spoke aloud into the silence: “Better joy-pop.” And went across to the closet that housed the Psychomat. When she was inside, she be- gan to feel better at once. The red light of the Cosmone came on as she lay down on the couch; she heard the hiss of the concealed valve as the di- luted carbon monoxide began to flow, and she did not even feel the prick of the needle as it went into her thigh. Curled . like a foetus on the low couch she felt relaxed and at ease. “I want to tell you, Father,” she said, whispering into the neu- tral ear of the Confessomech, “about v$Len I was a little girl'...” \V7TIEN SHE came out of ” the Psychomat ten min- utes later she felt that she was healed. She began to dress rap- idly, first the glass stilt shoes, then the new blouse with the peekaboo windows at the breasts, then the lovely long

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28 SATURN backless dress. Now, she felt, she was armored for the Day, and she went down the hall to Louise’s bedroom. She entered without knock- ing, going past the wall where the indefatigable colonel was still booming away in full col- or, now engaged in balancing a globe on his index finger. She nodded briefly at the young man who was just put- ting on his tie and who said, “Morning, Jill,” and blew a kiss at her as he went out the door. “ 'Bye, doll,” Louise called after the young man. A woman as long and slen- der as a s n a k e, dark, with a red slash of a mouth and dark mineral eyes, she moved over on the bed, patting the edge of the bed for Jill to be seated, and switched off the colonel. “Geez, the army is getting cute men these days,” she said. “No wonder we’re winning the Qua- si. Did you watch the spell? Real skitz.” “No. I don’t like that kind of thing.” “Honey, you must be real hung*1 not to go for that." “To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel very well this morning.” “Oh?” Louise looked at Jill noncommittally and reached languidly for a cigarette. “Who are you sleeping with these days, dear?” “Why, no one, much. No one in particular and not very often.” “No wonder you feel de- “No,” Jill said. “It’s not that, really.” “Harry?” “Of course not!" Jill said indignantly. “You were abso- lutely right about him. He wanted to marry me — can you imagine? I haven’t seen him in weeks.” “That’s good. I thought you were going irresponsible for awhile there, doll. You were getting to be almost like hus- band and wife together. He looked too much like Tony.” “I know.” Jill felt herself blushing. She too had thought, uneasily, of Harry’s resem- blance to her ex-husband. Why does she always put me in the wrong, she asked herself re- sentfully. Sure, she has a high Responsibility rating, but does she have to keep waving it at me? .“Who were you with last night?” “No one. I think.” Jill felt the blush on her body deepen- ing. “After all, I did get terri- bly high/’ she said virtuously.

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THE SKITZ AND THE UNSKIlZ 29 "Yes, that’s true, doll. But nobody ! Well, that’s hardly re- sponsible behavior, is it? And considering that this is the Day?” Suddenly, unaccountably, Jill began to cry, and Louise flipped on the switch, filling the room with sound and be- gan to- dress. The colonel was talking about a recent sighting of flying saucers. "It has been fully established,” the colonel said, "that these Sightseers, as the Government Corporation has officially decided to call them, are visitors from anoth- er star system and not, I re- peat, not, an invention of the Other Side. There is nothing to fear from them. Perhaps they are interested in learning from us. We may regard them as tourists none the less.” He went into a complicated and self-satisfied explanation of the Sightseers* and Louise, fin- ished dressing, whistled into the Service Warp and came to- ward the bed with a long glass of Hashicola. "Drink this, doll.” Jill took a long pull at the drink and felt better at once, but she put the glass down on the table. "I can’t drink much of it,” she said. "Hashicola — ” Louise began. "I don’t care what the AMA says,” Jill told her rebelliously. "I know it’s bad for my heart.” "The Association of Medi- cal Advertisers knows what is best,” Louise said stiffly. Then she softened and sat down on the side of the bed and put her arm around Jill. "Look, doll,”^ said said. “I know how it is. Everybody’s nervous before the Night. Even old timers like me. That’s why the Amalgamated sends us out to live for a month or two with neophytes before they take the tests.” "Yes,” Jill said meekly. Then: “I feel guilty!” she blurted. Louise looked at her for a long moment. “I think you’d better learn to watch your language,” she said coldly. "I’m sorry — I didn’t mean it that way. I just mean wrong. Mixed up. Unskitz.” "That’s not very responsible talk,” Louise said quietly. "I thought you had the stuff to get through the confirmation tonight. I could be wrong.” She let the insinuation lie ther£ be- tween them for a moment. Then she said softly: "Been thinking of Tony again?” "Maybe.” "Well,” Louise said briskly,

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30 SATURN "if that’s all. For a moment I thought it was really something bad. Now finish your drink like a good girl.” Jill took another long drink and put the glass down. “I don’t really need any more,” she said. “I had ten minutes of psycho this morn- ing. Wonderful.” She stretched luxuriously. “Seemed like months.” “That’s all right,” Louise said judiciously. “But you don’t want to overdo it. I know lots of Joy Girls use it, but it gets them finally. They begin to live in a trance state and it’s hard to be a real activist when you’re like that. And the next thing Amalgamated drops you. When the hard stuff gets you that way, you’re hooked, and the next thing, once they take away the Psychomat, you’ll be wanting to work.” “That’s not fair!” Jill said angrily. She heard the tapping of the Hands going by in the street and shuddered. "Come here, doll,” Louise said. She put her arm around Jill’s shoulder and led her to the high window. In the noon sun the stucco and glass and chrome lashed and glittered. “Lift your eyes to the hills.” ; Jill looked up at the great I houses, all angles and plate glass, that went up the terraced sides of the mountains. She saw the geometrized gardens and the emerald flash of the swimming pools. “All that,” Louise said. “All of it’s your playground after today. You won’t be a Petty- Responsible after tonight — you’ll be a part of Amalgamat- ed Joy with the whole world at your feet. And now look at that.” She pointed down into the depths of the street. The Hands were coming off the noon shift in hundreds. Dressed alike, each wearing his Spellbinder hat with the small screen six inches in front of his face, each with the white cane with its electronic eye to guide him, the Hands tapped along the sidewalks toward home. Involuntarily, Jill drew back. “Yes,” Louise said. “Think of it — two dimensional spells — no color— nothing but prior- ity programs and you have to watch them all the way to and from the factory. That’s what happens when you become a work-addict, if you haven’t got the stuff for Amalgamated.” “I know,” Jill sighed. I sup- pose it's my Petty-Responsible mentality. After all, taking care of* the gallery is a little like — well — like work.” '

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THE SKITZ AND THE UNSKITZ 31 “I know. But you can see where it would lead. After all, if everybody were to become a work -addict, what would hap- l>en to the machines? Econom- ic chaos. Some of us have got to be responsible.” “Yes, of course.” “That’s better. Now, drink.” Without protest Jill finished the drink. The talk had helped, and now with the Hashicola in her blood stream (but with, in spite of the AMA, just the tini- est itching at the end of her nose) she began to feel warm and responsible all over and she thought that she would get a real shot of something from the Service Warp. The thought of Tony came into her mind momentarily, but she put it away and whistled into the Warp and began her second litany: I’m so happy! I’m hav- ing fun! I’m having fun! JY^OST DAYS no one came to the little gallery with its old-fashioned grapho-morphic |urt, but today, as Jill and Louise came down to the shop from the apartment above, someone was waiting to get in. Jill was on the point of telling him that tonight was the Night, and that the gallery was closed, but the Warp had given her what she needed and she felt relaxed and easy. She touched the contol button and the field that served as a door flickered out and she saw that he was a young man, handsome, she thought, in spite of the glasses he wore. Beside her, Louise whistled a confirmation and swayed toward him on her ten inch heels. For a moment of blurry panic Jill thought, he looks like Tony, and then, but now they all do. Then she flicked the switch opening the walls to the light. “Tony Madison’s gallery?” the man asked. He had a touch of accent which Jill could not place. “I’m Jill Madison,” she said. “We have some of his work here; all that’s left.” “But the artist?” “No,” she said stiffly. “Not here.” He turned away and pressed the button under the first of the art works. It was a nude — - a particularly distorted one, she thought — of herself. It was in slow motion. “Amazing!” the young man said. ( “You’re a collector?” “Collector? Well, in a small way, yes.” “From the East, I bet,” Louise said. “That’s where they go for this unskitz stuff.”

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32 SATURN She pushed her breasts against the young man’s shoulder. Joy Girl or not, Jill thought, she’s pretty uncoordinated in spite of all her training. “What she means,” she said, watch- ing the young man edge imper- ceptibly away from Louise, “is that in the East they like prim- itive art of this kind. Out here on the Coast, everyone goes in for the Artomatic. Punch a few buttons and make your own pictures. It’s practically the California Way in art.” ' “I’m told that Mr. Madison has some things painted in the old way,” the young man said. “You know — brush, oil paint, canvas ...” “I’m sure you don’t realize that what you’re asking is. il- legal,” Jill said quietly. “Illegal! I’m terribly sorry,” the young man said. He seemed so upset that Jill smiled a for- giveness at him. Louise snorted. “How far east can you get?” she asked. “I’m sorry,” the young man said. “Permit me to introduce- myself, I am Dr. Liri. I am a cuisator at a museum near Boston.” “Boston!” Louise laughed. “I guess that must be the last museum in the country. After all, things don’t get used up if you save them that way, do they?” “But we think that some things are worth saving.” “Make new ones. Isn’t that what the machines are for? Saving is uneconomical.” “I’m sure Boston knows what’s best for it,” Jill said, wanting to save Liri from a po- litical argument. She tried an- other gambit. “I hear there’s trouble with the Indians in the New England Area.” “Oh no. They never come into the cities, and since few of us go into the country there’s never any real trouble.” Louise was more interested in Art than in the Indian prob- lem. “What do you want these old things of Tony’s for?” she asked. “Some of us think them very fine. And since Mr. Madison seems to have stopped painting we’d like to collect what we can.” “Stopped painting?” Louise laughed. “That’s a good way to put it. Why don’t you get the real story? Ask Jill.” “I used to be married to Tony,” Jill said in answer to Liri’s questioning look. “We broke up.” “Tony always was pretty ir- responsible,” Louise confided to Liri. “But nobody thought

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THE SKITZ AND THE UNSK1TZ 33 I lie’ll go subversive.” She turned to Jill. “Tell him about it, doll. I'ell him what Tony finally started doing.” “He started to paint,” Jill said miserably. “With his hands,” she added, feeling the blush travel from her heels all the way up her back. j| “And was a ’49er,” Louise said. “Went east with the pioneers.” “You don’t know that for sure,” Jill protested. “Nobody really knows what happened to him.” “I’m sorry this has been so upsetting for you,” Liri said. “I would not have asked if I had known that you were — ” “It’s all right,” Jill said. “It doesn’t disturb me. But this is the Day and if you don’t mind, I’d like to close up the gallery. I’ve got a lot of things to do.” “Of course. Again I want to apologize.” He seemed so genuinely sor- ry that Jill relented a bit. “Some other time,” she said. “I’d like to, but I’m afraid that may not be possible,” He hesitated a moment. “Perhaps I could take you to lunch?” “You’re a sweethear t,” Louise said. “Of course she’ll go to lunch with you. I have to be running along anyway.” “Doll!” she whispered to Jill as they were closing up the gallery. “This may be a real piece of luck, maybe just the one you need in the rites to night. Play him big, honey. Try to find out his RR.” Then she was gone and Jill and the young man were in the street. Around them the great white buildings leaped at the sky, the big houses flashed their chrome geometry on the hills, an occasional Hand tapped along the street. “I don’t suppose,” Liri said, “That it’s practical to walk to a restaurant.” Jill laughed. Maybe he’ll turn out to be Fun, she thought. Now that Louise was gone she felt more relaxed. “In these shoes? We’ll get the belt line down at the cor- ner^” T TAT.F WAY down the block a group of Hands were digging a ditch to lay a sewer pipe. The great machine built for, the work stood by in stoic idleness while a timer with a stop watch and guards with B guns cradled in their arpis watched to see that the Hands did not work a second longer than the time allotted to them. Without their spell-binder hats, the Hands worked bareheaded and with their shirts off.

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34 SATURN laughing and talking as their shovels shifted the earth. One of them was singing. Shudder- ing, Jill moved to the far edge of the walk. “They seem happy,” Liri said. “Work-addicts,” Jill told him. “Couldn’t stand responsi- bility. They’re a terrible drain on the economy, people say, but it keeps them from revolu- tion. Don’t you have them where you come front?” “Not quite the same. But it’s not such a big place.” “Los Angeles is the biggest of the Thirteen States,” Jill said proudly. “Four-fifths of the population of the whole continent.” She wondered why she should be trying to impress a proper Bostonian. He did not seem impressed. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “can we go out to the beach on this belt line? I’ve got a hydro- jet out there and we could eat on board.” Hydrojet! Jill thought;, he must have a fabulous Louise was right. „ They got onto the belt line at the corner, moved across to the Express side, and were whipped westward through the canyons at a dizzying speed. At the beach a water taxi took them out to the jet. It was the most luxurious craft Jill had even seen. While she scouted it, reading sign like an Apache, Liri was busy with other things. “What do you want for lunch?” he called. “Oh, anything. Some All- Purpose, I suppose. Plenty of drinks.” “No All-Purpose on board,” he said. “But I’ll see what 1 can put together.” After a while he called to her and she went out onto a small sundeck where he was just finished putting food on a table. “You mean you cooked it?” She could hardly believe it. “Yes.” “But it’s — it’s like work]” “Pleasant hobby,” he said. “Anyway there aren’t any servants here.” “I suppose it’s all right.” She picked at the food on her plate — it was real meat — without enthusiasm and was shocked — it tasted very good. A slow understanding came to her and she looked at Liri al- most with awe, seeing his Work in cooking the lunch as the eccentricity of one rich and powerful enough to afford it. “You must have a tremen- dous RR,” she said boldly. Liri ' was not interested in

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THE SKITZ AND THE UNSKITZ . 35 the subject. “I suppose so,” he said. “You said something about the Day. What did that mean?” “You don’t know about the Day and the Night? Oh, I sup- pose they do things differently in Boston, but I thought every- one knew about the Day. It’s C Day. That’s California Day. Or mayBe it’s Consumer’s Day. Some people even say it means Capitalist Day — it started so long ago that no one can really remember.” “Why does it mean so much to you?” “Because that’s the day Amalgamated Joy makes its selections. I thought everyone knew that.” “I’ve been out of touch, I’m afraid. And is this selection so important to you?” “It’s the day all the Joy Girls and all the contenders are tested. That’s how our Responsibility Rating is de- termined. Some of the old girls are dropped out and some of the neophytes are confined. I’m a neophyte.” “And if you’re selected?” “I’m a full-fledged Responsi- ble, then. I give up the gallery; it means just about everything. I become one of the Veblenite elite— a perfect User.” “Veblen?” “You know,” she said impa- tiently. “Theory of the Leisure Class — that’s the book all government theory is based on, they say.” “I see. You use, but you don’t make anything.” “Right.” “And the Hands?” “They didn’t have the abili- ty to be Users, that’s why they have to drug themselves with work. In the past only a handful of people had the strength of character to be wholly Users. But now, with the training of Amalgamate Joy, lots of us can. And it’s more deiribcratic.” “And your husband? He didn’t like that?” “No, Tony didn’t like it. Reactionary type, always talk- ing of the old days. Maybe he did go east with the Pioneers. People say there have begun to be settlements all through the Unoccupied Territories — Iowa, Illinois, North Dakota.” She stopped, a little hazy about the geography. “Tell me,” he asked. “Are you happy?” “Happy? Of course, I’m happy.” Suddenly, terribly, she began to cry. “It’s too hard,” she sobbed, thinking of the Day, of the eleminatioris com- ing up. “It’s too hard.”

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36 SATURN “Why don’t you give it up?” interested. Want to know what “I can’t. Where would I their visitors might be like. So go?” they sort of pick up samples.” “It can be arranged,” he “But that’s not fair! It’s said. kidnapping! It’s — ” As she blacked out, she was “It’s pretty high-handed,” he asking herself, how could I admitted. “But they don’t have got so drunk? harm you, you know.” “You mean they’ve kept you WHEN SHE WOKE UP, all this time?” her first thought was that ' -*■ could get in the mar- she was in her bed -in her chine and go back any time, apartment. Then she saw the But I like it here. I have plen- man sitting in a chair against W of time to paint, there s mo the opposite wall. He was red- hustle and bustle. I'm free, headed and angular and hand- “Irresponsible seems to be some and completely impossi- a better word,” she sniffed, ble. “Let’s not quarrel, kitten,” “Hello, Jill,” he said. he said. “All that talk about “Tony!” • Responsibility and Fun and He came across and sat Wholly Using — that’s what down on the bed beside her. wrecked you and me before. “Tony! How did Liri — did Here all we have to do is be he bring, me to the Unoccupied ourselves. It’s a real chance for Territories?” - us to start over, to be happy : “Farther than that, kitten, together.” This is another planet, another She started to object, to say star system.” that what he meant by happi- “How could he have?” ness was irresponsible and “That gadget,” he said, wrong and bad. But she re- pointing across the room to membered that it was still the what looked to Jill like a tricy- Day, in her mind the Hands cle in an odd no-shape kind of went tapping down all the box. , streets, her nose itched from “Then he was one of the Hashicola and she was worn Sightseers.” out from her strenuous joy. “Observers, they call them- She thought of Louise, felici- selves. When a country gets ty’s athlete, and her. constant close to space flight, they get advice. Then she put her arms

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THE SKITZ AND THE UNSKITZ 37 around Tony and pulled him down beside her. For a week it was perfect. Everything was new and strange. Tony painted in the mornings — mostly sketches of her— and in the afternoon they took care of his homestead since hfe raised most of his own fopd. When she got over her first feelings about the work taboo she found it fun of a limited sort. She was sur- prised that there were no flow- er machines in the garden but only old-fashioned roses, lark- spur, lupin. She found that there were oak, chestnut and willow trees not just, as she had believed, palms. There was no Spellcaster, though. There was not even old-fashioned radio. This lack of material had been at first merely offensive; later she missed them as means of diver- sion and asked him about them. “We don’t need that stuff, kitten,” he said. He went over to her and put his arms around her. “Aren’t we the stuff of our own pleasure?” She pulled herself away. “That’s not what I mean, Tony,” she said. “That’s fine, but after that, what is there to do?” A week later she had begun to feel something like cabin fever. She was posing for him and now suddenly the question she had asked knotted itself in her throat and she got down from the stand and asked again. “But what is there to do?” Tony put down the brush and wiped his hands. “You’ve got to decide that for yourself, Jill. Nobody can tell you. You might make a life out of just being yourself here, with me. Or we could move to town and you could get some job that you liked. There’s plenty to be done.” “But I can’t do anything,” she said sullenly. “You could learn.” “But "work’s no jun\ ” “I can’t help you then.” Suddenly she saw that it was going to be a real quarrel. “You mean you won’t,” she told him. “I can’t.” “You don’t really care about me. All you care about is what you call your work.” She began to cry, pitying her- self and wanting him to pity her. “I’ll go back,” she sobbed. “I’ll go back right now.” She went over to the queer tricycle contraption at the other end of the room. “Jill, I want to help you. If

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38 SATURN you know how I' can, then tell me.” ^ “No ! ” she said, screaming now, knowing that she had moved him. “You don’t really want to help. It’s just the way it was before. You’re selfish! Selfish! You don’t really care about me.” “Jill, for God’s sake! What do you want me to do?” “Come back with me,” she said. “I can’t do that.” Now they were both silent and she knew that it had turned deadly serious and that she had only one more card to play. “I’ll go,” she said in a high warning voice like a parent threatening a child. Tony said nothing. “Damn you,” she screamed, crying again. “You won’t help me. And I want to be happy! I’ve got a right to be happy. I want to have fun!” She pressed a button on the tricycle. She was in her old apart- ment. Through the wall, from Louise’s room she heard a high hysterical giggle, the clink of glasses, a monotonous and furious sound of lovemaking; a Banshee blasted in the street and then there was the ticking progress of the Hands, and over and around and through the other noises she heard her own voice screaming, I want to be happy! I want to have fun! THE END

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SPUTNIK SHOES by CHARLES A. STEARNS He found a rtew way to play hookey — by taking a little stroll int outer space! TT TOOK them twelve min- utes to do in Wilty Martin. That is an all-tin16 record. Willy, who for several years had gone quietly about his business of cleaving the skulls of lovely young worsen with a hatchet, as they slept, knew that death often comes easily, and must have been surprised that in his case it took so long. By the time they finished with him, he was parboiled and basted to a turn, and no long-

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40 SATURN er had the slightest interest in exposing the grey matter of slumbering females. When he had cooled off enough to be approachable, the prison doctor came in, ex- amined him, and pronounced him well done. The men came with a litter, unshackled him from the Chair, and bore him off in triumph. He had lost, but with a flourish. And, as was customary in that sovereign state, they re- moved Willy’s scorched prison garments from him and clad him in a cheap, but neat, blue serge suit. They took off his heavy shoes, which, it is sig- nificant to note, were not of leather, but an obscure ersatz material which had carbonized and was as hard and crackly as glass ‘when the thing was over. Had anyone bothered to measure — which they did not — the electric potential of the shoes, they would have discov- ered a faint, but quite discern- able magnetic field of curious properties building up in that strange material. It should have been dimagnetic, but it was not. It had subtly changed. They put the shoes, with the clothing, in a cardboard box that had once carried canned peaches, and replaced them with thin, patent-leather ox- fords which would do for the state-sponsored funeral. Will Martin, as someone remarke* had extremely small, neat fee After being washed and shav - en, the cadaver of Willy was taken to Potter’s Field and in- terred with scant ceremony, and the malignant influence which that young man had cast upon a world he did not under- stand should have been gone forever. Should have been. PROFESSOR SACCHA- RINO, sere and disillu- sioned at fifty-two, sat like Siva the Destroyer with folded arms and idling brain, effect- ing effortlessly the apathetic silence, if not the respect, of his rabble brood. , He was a plump, gouty man, with receding hair and receding hopes. He was not, in particu- lar, day dreaming, for all of the dreams of a specialized failure past middle age are dead, and he had once been a specialist. Once. But now there were only a one-room country school and forty grub- by waifs between himself and starvation. Having once been a practic- ing instructor of economics in

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SPUTNIK SHOES 41 a famous and exclusive New England private school, he un- derstood this full well, and loathed the vacuous faces be- fore him as he had objectively loathed them for four years. Once, Professor Saccharino was fond of telling himself, he had liked young people. In fact, it had beyn his excessive af- finity for one of the older girl students at the New England school which had forced his banishment to this intellectual Siberia. In a manner of speak- ing, he had been banned in Boston, and had come west for his health. It was late spring, and flies swarmed through the open, screenless windows. He swatted them angrily, but his urchins knew better than to try it. Bit- terly enough, he supposed they had learned that he was a mas- ter in the old, heavy-handed tradition. Actually, in these dull, end- less hours, he would have looked with gratefulness upon an infringement of regulations, and today he was not disap- pointed. He did not recognize the breach at once, but when the realization was borne upon him at last, and he saw who it was that -had transgressed, he ex- ulted quietly, and sat, observ- ing the criminal from the cor- ner of his eye, savoring his po- sition. It was the boy known, ironi- cally enough, as Brainy Phelps. He had a large, useless head, a hideous complexion, and ears that were somewhat cylindrical. In considering tfcis gargoyle, whom he considered his per- sonal nemesis, Professor Sac- charino liked to remind him- self that such Huck Finnish atavisms as Brainy Phelps were on their way out, evolu- tionwise. Like the vermiform appendix and the wisdom tooth, they could be consid- ered as a nasty reminder of man’s earthy origin. The act was incredible enough. Brainy had simply un- buttoned his shirt, and was ex- amining, with intent to incise with jackknife, a boil upon his stomach. Nor was Professor Saccha- rino the only person who viewed this operation with in- terest. In the next seat sat Cassandra Watson, who, though still in the eigth grade, was almost fifteen years of age. Cassandra was old for her age. All of the men who sat on the green benches in front of- the general store as she came flouncing by agreed that

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42 SATURN she was old for her age. Cassandra liked males of all shapes, ages, and sizes. Brainy Phelps, ignorant of this fact, was engrossed in his pustulec- tomy. He was thirteen and had no interest in girls. Cassandra leaned over and pinched him. It was strictly a playful pinch, but playful pinches have a habit of sting- ing. “Quit that,’’ said Brainy, in a low voice. She did.it again. He lashed out with his bare foot, T^ie foot was like rhinoc- eroushide, and the sturdy nail raked her shin, bringing a trickle of blood. Cassandra yowled. It was at this time that the Assyrian came down, like a wolf on the fold. ORAINY PHELPS was a ■ young man inured to or- dinary pain, and rather philo- sophical about the unfairness of boyhood, but when it was all over he felt faint. He had expected his hind- quarters to bum incessantly, and to that end he had fol- lowed Professor Saccharino docilely into the cloakroom. This, in itself, should have aroused his suspicions, for the administration of justice usual- ly took place before the eyes of the school, as a warning. He was trustful, however, and the first inkling he had that all was not well, came with brutal swiftness, in the form of a fist in his mouth. Afterward, as a critical vet- eran, he had to admit that it had been a pretty fair beatijag. Even his Old Man couldn’t have done better. He was locked in the cloakroom, alone for the remainder of the after- noon with his seditious thoughts, and peace reigned outside his prison. But peace was not in his soul. Professor Saccharinio had not laid a hand on Cassandra Watson. The beating might have been considered the di- vine right of kings and school- master, but that was injustice. The longer he thought about it, the madder he got. “Hell,” he told himself, looking up at the small window. “I could get out of here if I wanted to.” Professor Saccharino’s top- coat, the fine relic of better days, hung on a hanger against the wall. He spat upon it, and for a moment the coat was the object of all his resentment. He backed away and favored it with a calculating look. Then he took out his jackknife and opened it. So often is crime

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SPUTNIK SHOES 43 accomplished in a momentary passsion and repented at lei- sure. A dozen quick strokes and the die of his future was irre- trievably cast forever. The coat hung in shreds. In another moment, heart poundin«, he had scaled the lunch pail racks, thrust a leg through the window, and dropped to the ground, where he availed himself of free flight across the field and into the brush. ORAINY PHELPS had nev- er owned more than one or two pairs of shoes in his life, there was nothing farther from his mind than footwear as he picked his way through the Dumps. The Dumps were for the city of Topeka, which was some twelve miles distant, and they were a huge, strange and wonderful acreage. Presently he trod upon a broken bottle, which pained him considerably and would have penetrated any ordinary foot, and he was • hopping about, cussing the glass, when he discovered the shoes of Wil- ly Martin. They were of a dead, char- coal black, and curled slightly at the toes, and they had no strings, so that he could step into them with ease and even shuffle around a little. The state had not given Willy Mar- tin shoestrings for fear that he might cheat it of its pleasure. The inner soles, touching the pads of his feet, made them tingle as when he used to walk on the dry ice that Aeolus Green, the grocer, threw out behind his store. . This did not frighten him. Instead of removing the shoes, as he should have done, he delved into his capacious pock- ets and brought out a ball’ of string. He unsnarled a few feet of .it and sat down to lace the shoes securely upon his feet. He got up and took a few wide-legged steps, admiring the shoes. They flopped a little, but they didn’t fall off. A raw, red gully stretched in front of him. Beyond lay the open meadow. He had vaulted that gully a thousand times, but never as now. When he rose in the air, the shoes clicked together, ex- actly as a nail clicks to a mag- net, and stuck! His feet were rudely jerked from under him. A mighty force swished him along through the grass and weeds. His shoulders and back bumped against the high plac- es, but the feet remained a

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44 SATURN good twelve inches above the ground, impelled by some strange, invisible undertow. Brainy thought at first that some hidden cable had snarled him, but he soon saw that noth- ing was attached to his shoes. He didn’t cry out. It hap- pened too swiftly. But his head, bumping the ground, and his bruised elbows, gave him food for hurried thought, and then as suddenly as it had begun, his heels were digging a fur- row in the turf, and he came to rest. He sat up. He was a hundred yards from where he had start- ed, and he seemed to have run into a gently rising hillock. He bent over and pried his feet loose from one another, with some effort, and observed them with stunned silence. He was not notably superstitious, but that he had discovered something wonderful — and per- haps terrible — he could not doubt. He made as if to remove the shoes, then hesitated. The pow- er seemed to accumulate only when the shoes were together, indicating that they somehow complemented each other. (His own reason was somewhat fog- gier, but that was the idea.) If be removed them, and they got together, he would never see them again. Also, someone might take them away from him. Brainy Phelps sighed, took a good, hard look at his feet, and stood up. He took a cau- tious step, then another. Noth- ing happened. He inched the shoes closer together. Still closer. They clicked together and he felt a kind of lateral strain upon the material. Then, very lightly, he leaped. It was not more than a couple of inches that he leaped, but he was instantly scooting along on his stomach. His clawing hands caught a bush and hung on grimly until he could dou- ble up his legs and pry the shoes apart. “Godlemighty!” he testified. PRESENTLY Brainy Phelps found himself gazing, with foreboding, upon his own door- step. He had arrived home with conscious effort, for he would rather have been almost anywhere else on earth. He knew his limitations, however, and figured, practically, that he might as well eat once more before running away, if he could get by with it. He went in and the Old Man was lying, fully clothed, on the couch, snoring. He wore a green silk cowboy shirt and

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SPUTNIK SHOES 4 , tooled cowboy boots with red leather tops. The boots had cost thirty dollars. They were fine boots. An expensive, broad-brimmed white Stetson hung upon the corner of the chair. The Old Man w'as really only a millworker, but he al- ways dressed like a rodeo cow- boy and it made Brainy real proud to see him walk down the street, even if he didjiave to walk a block behind. There were a couple of bottles in bed with the Old Man, and he smelled pretty high, so there wasn’t any danger for a while of his waking up. It was at such times that he was able to steal enough money out of the Old Man’s pockets to buy food for them. He made good money, and seldom missed a dollar or two. Of course, when he did, it meant a good lambasting, but they had to eat. Brainy found some beans and threw them in the pot along with yesterday’s greens. Then he cut some long strips of hog jowl and added them to the concoction, which as anybody knows makes real eating. He could hardly wait, it made him so hungry. There was some cornbread that the widow Fisher, who had her cap set for the Old Man, had sent over, and he put that irf the oven to warm while the other cooked.- Then he went out behind the woodshed and sat down on a log to think. His thoughts were practical. “If a body could lock his arms about his knees, and lean for- ward in just the right position, he might be able to keep from bumping the ground.” He had the ominous feeling that the strange force of the shoes con- tinually accelerated them, and that they might have no top speed within the imagination of man. A -body couldn’t be too careful with a thing like this. First he made certain that no one was in sight, and then he aimed himself at a little juniper bush, assumed a scien- tific position, and jumped. He soared along, just brushing the tops of the weeds, and jt was a wonderful, exhilarating feeling. The juniper gently caught him. His heart pounded all over again with the excitement of discovery., To tell the truth, he had had a notion that it was all a dream, what had hap- pened back there at the Dumps. He was preparing to take off again, but a car was roar- ing up the lane. He watched

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46 SATURN it with fascination until he could recognize the driver. Then he ducked behind the shed. Professor Saccharino got out of the car. He picked his way fastidiously through the mounds of tin c a n s and rub4 bish on the front lawn, and knocked on Jhe front door. The mutilated coat was over his arm, and his round face was an implacable mask. Maybe the Old “Man wouldn’t wake up. Maybe he would give up and go away. But he didn’t give up. He just kept knocking louder, un- til the Old Man, inside, bel- lowed like a bull, and asked who the hell it was waking him up in the m i d d 1 e of the night. When the Old Man was real drunk, dynamite wouldn’t wake him. He heard them talking to- gether. “Boy, come here!” That was the Old Man. He didn’t breathe. Stealthi- ly he drew himself up to the rear window of the shed and slithered onto the flat tin roof, where .he lay flat', hoping they wouldn’t see him. “I’m a cornin’ out there to you, boy!” The Old Man took off his broad, fancy belt, care- fully removed the expensive gold buckle, and took a couple of swipes at the air for prac- tice. “There he is — on the roof!” screamed Professor Sacchari- no suddenly. They had spied him, then. He stood up shakily. The Old Man put the belt behind his back and smiled a crooked, hypocritical smile. “Come down here, son,” he said. “See here,” snapped Pro- fessor Saccharino. “I mean to have payment for this coat af- ter the boy is disciplined. I want that understood, sir.’’ “Shut your mouth,” the Old Man said. “You boy! Come down here.” “No,” said Brainy. The Old Man’s mouth sagged. He had never before been openly defied. He snatched a splintered plank from the ground, threw it, and it whistled through the air, barely missing Brainy’s ear. Brainy retreated to the oth- er side of the "roof. Beyond lay the open fields and the prairie. Beyond that, Topeka, and vaguely a billion miles away, the mountains and free- dom. He heard a scuffling sound behind him. The Old Man was ' coming up.

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SPUTNIK SHOES 47 He put, his feet together, looked down at the shoes, prayed to a divinity he hardly knew, and jumped. At once he was swishing through the air, and the pres- sure upon the tendons of his legs was as if he squatted upon a magic carpet. The Old Man had seen him jump. He slid to the ground and came running around to head him off. But when he saw that Brainy hadn’t landed, but was gliding away just above his head, he cussed and made a grab for him. He w^s still a couple of sheets in the wind, it seemed, and when he saw that he couldn’t quite reach his son, he let loose with a string of cusswords that filled Brainy with grudging admiration. It had been Brainy’s bad judgment to direct his course parallel with, and above the main road, and the Old Man ran along beneath him, high- heeled boots pounding the dust, and getting in a hurried swat with the belt now and then. After a couple of minutes he was out of breath, and Brainy had a brief respite. He thought that he had gotten away, but he saw them climb into Professor Saccharino’s automobile and take after him. The Old Man opened the door and climbed upon the hood, then to the top of the car. He looked like a daredev- il rider, but it really wasn’t too dangerous, for they were only moving about ten miles an hour. The car glided closer, and the Old Man’s lean, ugly face was level with Brainy’s own, and his arms were outstretched like the wings of a big buz- zard. Then Providence inter- vened. The car had to swerve for the corner, and the Old Man fell off. The last thing he heard was the Old Man hollering at him. T>UT THE TRIUMPHANT deliverance of Brainy Phelps from his enemies was not without its drawbacks. He had gained considerable speed by now, and was stirring up quite a breeze, which revived him mentally, and caused him to consider the future. He would continue upon his course, he decided, until he came to a tree. He would grab the tree, climb down and con- t i n u e on foot to the railroad tracks, where he would hitch a ride on a freight to the West Coast. This might be a less pleasant mode of transporta- tion, but until he learned to

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48 SATURN control the magic shoes, it would also be less dangerous and unpredictable. Presently he did pass near to a tree, but it’s topmost branch was beneath his feet and he could not reach it. Then he knew that he was in real trouble. He was gaining altitude. It made a cold band of fear around his stomach. For all his weakness in most of the liberal arts, Brainy was strong in geography, for the simple reason that he was an escapist at heart, and all escapists are good in geography. He was aware of the curvature of the earth, and he sensed the truth — that instead of maintaining their level in flight, the won- derful shoes were in reality moving at a tangent to the sur- face of the earth. He couldn’t have explained it to anybody, but he knew, all the same. That was just after six o’clock. A little before seven, it occurred to him that he could take off the shoes, but he was now fifty feet above the hard and uncompromising ground, and he didn't dare. By eight o’clock it was get- ting dusk, and he could see the outline of the Capitol Build- ing in Topeka. He figured he was doing at least thirty-five miles an hour. Over to the right, a black car that might, or might not be the Professor’s, was follow- ing him, but he welcomed it. And in the outskirts of the city a firetruck, . alerted, followed him for a couple of blocks with extended ladder, but they just couldn’t seem to get together, quite. The ladder got tangled in some electric cables. He could hear lots of sirens. That was all for a while. Just before midnight a helicop- ter appeared above him and put down a rope ladder. He was already a hundred miles west of Topeka and picking up speed. It was only a small ’copter. The ladder blew horizontally in the wind, and the ’copter la- bored to keep up. Finally it fell behind. He was cold, and the wind was harsh in his face. He ducked his head, and dozed once, fitfully and briefly, curled in a kind of ball,. He wished that he had a jacket. They had all given up, and he knew now that he would crash into the mountains, and that would be the end of that. But he didn’t. He opened his eyes in the early light of dawn, and there was frost on, his lids, and he could scarcely*

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SPUTNIK SHOES 49 get his breath. Below him was the gray foothills, and the peaks rose on either side. He was too stiff to move. The sun- rise was the last thing he saw, reflected on the snow-capped summits. The cold pressed in. He grew drowsier, drowsier, and slept, unknowing and un- caring. And Ris velocity, as he hur- tled above the earth, acceler- ated in a steadily increasing curve, and the Earth fell away more rapidly than ever, and presently, had he been able to see it, it would have appeared as a great sphere behind him. The frost of outer night was upon his eyelids, however, and he did not know when he passed the sonic barrier, for he was frozen solid as three-day- old cornpone. HTHE~ FORM of Brainy Phelps, a pitiful little lump of static molecules, drifted among the stars. The strange force that was in the shoes, and which could not have been artifically or na- turally duplicated within a bil- lion years of trying, so precise was its value, had no limita- tions and soon approached light speed. It was all the same to Brainy, of course. Certain watchers, however, from a dark planet within the galactic rim, detected the ap- pearance of a small,, unidenti- fied object one day within their firmament, and being a natur- ally curious race, sent out a ship with tractor beams to capture it and bring it in. It was Brainy, of course, and they detected the singular pow- er in the shoes at once and were very favorably impressed. They had not known that any race other than themselves possessed the secret of space travel — much less without a ship — and they had been around quite a long-time and knew a lot of worlds. But Brainy was indifferent to this too, and it occurred to them that if they would con- verse with him, they must first thaw him out. This they achieved, but it was quite a job, for the molec- ular structure of the body had been broken down, to a great extent, by the freezing and thawing, and the brain, in par- ticular, had almost to be re- built from the cortex up. When they finished, Brainy Phelps yawned broadly and awakened. They talked through the use of pantomime and a few words mutually learned. It was not very satisfactory, and. natural-

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SATURN 50 ly they could not learn from him whence he came, since his term for Earth was meaning- less to them. Just the same, they were able to place his ori- gin with some accuracy be- cause of his trajectory, and the effect of continuous bombard- ment of cosmic radiation upon his cells. They were kind and consid- erate, and it made Brainy feel pretty important the way they took him for a major scientist of his race, even if he couldn’t quite see them. The spectral values of their bodies were such that his eyes were not adapted to the task, and he had to squint, but they were Still only shadows. They were a gregarious race, and were looking, just as aliens always are, for a hospi- table eWorld other than their own to settle on. “You mean an Invasion?” said Brainy who had heard dark rumors of such things be- fore. t “Of dear, no,” they said. “Rather infiltration. We have a very adaptable life-form, and there is a saying here, ‘When in Syxygia, do as the Syxygians do!’ The Terrans will not even know we are there, and we will be able to contribute a little, perhaps, to the native culture. We are peace-loving and com- pletely non-a ggressive. Of course, you must help point out the proper planet.” “I don’t know,” Brainy said. He wasn’t so sure that he want- ed to go back and face the Old Man and Professor Saccha- rino. “What if they find out we’re there?” The aliens shuddered all through their amorphous bod- ies. “Please!” they said. “We mustn’t think about it. It would be so messy!” “Okay,” Brainy said. “When do we leave?’’ “The assumption of human form will take a few hours. Then we may go.” “Make it snappy,” Brainy said. “I’m kind of hungry.” TT WAS FIFTEEN to eight, that mellow spring morning that it happened. Professor Saccharino had not mellowed, however, with the passing of the seasons, and recalled, as in a dream that black afternoon two springs ago when he had been less sure of the inevitability of his drab life than now. Since daybreak this morning he had felt a curious restive- ness, and almost longed for the clamour of settling down to the dajly pattern of study.

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SPUTNIK SHOES SI That, at least, would furnish company for his thoughts. He glanced at the clock on the wall, took the school bell off his desk and went to the door. He jangled it a couple of times and cjrew back to let them pass before him, like a general inspecting his troops. They came in a subdued stream past him, the scrubbed little boys and girls of the primary classes, the all-wise ragamuf- fins and coquettish damsels of ten, and the older students, either sullen or preoccupied by each other. Cassandra Watson came through the door. The passing of the seasons had done won- ders for Cassandra. It was rather too bad that this was her last year. She favored him with a smile and a distracting wiggle. He nodded. An unruly redhead marched before his field of vision. A fa- miliar head. It did not seem strange at the moment, though - he had last seen Brainy Phelps flitting over the tree tops in the gener- al direction of the Pacific Ocean. More featureless faces. Then he saw the head again, and this time there could be no doubt. “You,” he said and grabbed the boy’s arm. Brainy looked up at him and grinned. It was a secret, un- dismayed grin, and it disturbed Professor Saccharino more than he could say. Brainy wriggled loose from his grip and took his seat be- side the other two red-headed boys that were sitting in the front row. Professor Saccharino, ob- serving them, shuddered as though with the ague. There were three of them there, un- combed unbrushed unkempt, waiting to be instructed. They were all identical. He ran to the window and threw up the sash, leaning far out to gulp the fresh air and revive himself, for he felt faint and ill. But it was no good. The schoolyard was full of Brainies. THE END

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THE POWDER OF HYPERBOREA by CLARK ASHTON SMITH The theft of the thirty-nine girdles of virginity! A newly translated legend from the days before Atlantic, on the world’s first inhabited continent. T ET IT BE said as a fore- word to this tale that I have robbed no man who was not in some way a robber of others. In all my long and arduous career, I, Satampra, Zerios of TJzul- darouin, sometimes known as the master-thief have endeav- ored to serve merely as an agent in the rightful redistribu- tion of wealth. The adventure I have now to relate was no ex- ception; though as it happened in the outcome, my own pecuni- ary profits were indeed meager, not to say trifling. Age is upon me now. And sitting at that leisure which I have earned through many haz- ards, I drink the wines that are heartening to age. To me, as I sip, return memories of splen- did loot and brave nefarious enterprise. Before me shine the outpoured sackfuls of djals or pazoors, removed so dexterous- ly from the coffers of iniqui- tous merchants and money- lenders. I dream of rubies red- der than the blood that was shed for them; of sapphires bluer than depths of glacial ice; of emeralds greener than the jungle in spring. I recall the escalade of pronged balconies; the climbing of terraces and towers guarded by monsters; the sacking of altars beneath the eyes of malign idols or sen- tinel serpents. Often I think of Vixeela, my one true love and the most adroit and courageous of my companions in burglary. She has long since gone to the bourn of all good thieves and 52

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53 THE, POWDER OF HYPERBOREA comrades; I have mourned her sincerely these many years. But still dear is the memory of our amorous, adventurous nights and the feats we per- formed together. Of such feats, perhaps the most signal ftnd au- dacious was the theft of the thirty-nine girdles. These .were the golden and jeweled chastity girdles, worn by the virgins vowed to the moon god Leniqua, whose tem- ple had stood from immemorial time in the suburbs of Uzul- daroum, capital of Hyperborea. The virgins were always thirty- nine in number. They were chosen for their youth and beauty, and retired from serv- ice to the god at the age of thirty-one. The girdles were padlocked with' the toughest bronze and their keys retained by the high- priest who, on certain nights, rented them at a high price to the richer gallants of the city. It will thus be seen that the virginity of the priestesses was nominal; but its frequent and repeated sale was regarded as a meritorious act of sacrifice to the god. Vixeela herself had at one time been numbered among the virgins but had fled from the temple and from Uzuldaroum several years before the sacer- dotal age of release from her bondage. She would tell me lit- tle of her life in the temple; I surmised that she had found small pleasure in the religious prostitution and had chafed at the confinement entailed by it. After her flight she had suf- fered many hardships in the cities of the south. Of these too, she spoke but sparingly, as one who dreads the reviving of painful recollections. She had returned to Uzul- daroum a few months prior to our first meeting. Being now a little over age, and having dyed her russet-blonde hair to a raven black, she had no great fear of recognition by Leni- qua’s priests. As was their cus- tom, they had promptly re- placed her loss with another and younger virgin, and would have small interest now in one so long delinquent. at THE TIME of our fore- gathering, Vixeela had al- ready committed various petty larcenies. But, being unskilled, she had failed to finish any but the easier and simpler ones, and had grown quite thin from starvation. She was still attrac- tive and her keenness of wit and quickness in learning soon

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54 SATURN endeared her to- me. She was small and agile and could climb like a lemur, I soon found her help invaluable, since she could climb through win- dows and other apertures im- passable, to my greater bulk. We had consummated sev- eral lucrative burglaries, when the idea of entering Leniqua’s Jemple and making away with the costly girdles occurred to me. The problems offered, and the difficulties to be overcome, appeared at first sight little less than fantastic. But such ob- stacles have always challenged my acumen and have never daunted me. Firstly, there was the prob- • lem of entrance without detec- tion and serious mayhem at the hands of the sickle-armed priests who guarded Leniqua’s fane with baleful and incorrup- tible vigilance. Luckily, during her term of temple service, Vix- eela had learned of a subter- ranean adit, long disused but, she believed still passable. This entrance was through a tunnel, the continuation of a natural cavern located somewhere in the woods behind Uzuldaroum. It had been used almost univer- sally -by the virgins’ visitors in former ages. But the visitors now entered openly by the tem- ple’s main doors or by posterns little less public; a sign, per- haps, that religious sentiment had deepened or that modesty had declined. Vixeela had never seen the caveri^ierself but she knew its approximate location. The tem- ple’s inner adit was closed only by a flagstone, easily levitated from below or above, behind the image of Leniqua in the great nave. Secondly, there was the se- lection of a proper time, when the women’s girdles had been unlocked and laid aside. Here again Vixeela was invaluable, since she knew the nights on which the rented keys were most in demand. These were known as nights of sacrifice, greater or lesser, the chief one being at the moon’s full. All the women were then in repeat- ed request. Since, however, the fane on such occasions would be crowd- ed with people, the priests, the virgins and their clients, a seemingly insurmountable dif- ficulty remained. How were we to collect and make away with the girdles in the presence of so many persons? This, I must ad- mit, baffled me. Plainly, we must find some way in which the temple could

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THE POWDER OF HYPERBOREA 55 be evacuated, or its occupants rendered unconscious or other- wise incapable during the peri- od needed for our operations. I thought of a certain sopor- ific drug, easily and quickly vaporized, which I had used on more than one occasion to put the inmates of a house asleep. Unfortunately the drug was limited in its range and would not penetrate to all the chambers and alcoves of a large edifice like the temple. More- over it was necessary to wait for a full half hour, with doors or windows opened, till the fumes were dissipated; other- wise the robbers would be over- come together with their vic- tims. There was also the pollen of a rare jungle lily, which, if cast in a man’s face, would induce a temporary paralysis. This too I rejected. There were too many persons to be dealt with, and the pollen could hardly be obtained in sufficient quanti- ties. At last I decided to consult the magician and alchemist, Ve- ezi Phenquor, who, possessing furnaces and melting-pots, had often served me by converting . stolen gold and silver into in- gots or other safely unrecogniz- able forms. Though skeptical of his powers as a magician, I regarded Veezi Phenquor as a skilled pharmacist and toxicolo- gist. Having always on hand a supply of strange and deadly medicaments, he might well be able to provide something that would facilitate our project. We found Veezi Phenquor decanting one of his more noi- some concoctions from a still bubbling and steaming kettle into vials of stout -stoneware. By the smell I judged that it must be something of special potency; the exudations of a polecat would have been innoc- uous in comparison. In his ab- sorption he did not notice our presence until the entire con- tehts of the kettle had been de- canted and thevials tightly stoppered and sealed with a blackish gum. “That,” he observed with unctuous complacency, “is a love-philter that would inflame a nursing infant or resurrect the powers of a dying nonagen- arian. Do you — ” “No,” I said emphatically. “We require nothing of the sort. “What we need at the mo- ment is something quite differ- ent.” In a few terse words I went on to outline the problem, adding: “If you can help us, I am

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SATURN 56 sure you will find the melting down of the golden girdles a congenial task. As usual, you will receive a third of the prof- its.” Veezi Phenquor creased his bearded face into a half-lubri- cious, half-sardonic smile. “The proposition is a pleas- ant one from all angles. We will free the temple-girls from in- cumbrances which they must find uncomfortable, not to say burdensome; and will, turn the irksome gems and metal to a worthier purpose — notably, our own enrichment.” As if by way of afterthought, he added: “It happens that I can supply you with a most unusual prep- aration, warranted to empty the temple of all its occupants in a very short time.” Going to a cobwebbed cor- oner, he took down from a high shelf and abdominous jar oT un- colored glass filled with a fine grey powder and brought it to the light. “I will now,” he said, “ex- plain to you^the singular prop- erties of this powder and the way in which it must be used. It is truly a triumph of chemis- try, and more devastating than a plague.” We were astounded by what he told us. Then we began to laugh. t “It is to be hoped,” I said, $ “that none of your spells and * cantraips and involved.” Veezi Phenquor assumed the h expression of one whose feel- ; ings have been deeply injured. “I assure you,” he protested, y “that the effects of the powder, , though extraordinary, are not beyond nature.” After a moment’s meditation he continued: “I believe that I can further your plan in other ways. After the abstraction of the girdles, there will be the problem of transporting unde- tected such heavy merchandise across a city which, by that time, may well have been aroused by the horrendous crime and busily patrolled by constabulary. I have a plan . . . . ” We hailed with approval the ingenious scheme outlined by Veezi Phenquor. After we had discussed and settled to our| satisfaction the various details,! the alchemist brought out cerj tain liquors that proved mors; palatable than anything of hi^ we had yet sampled. We thea returned to our lodgings, I carl rying in my cloak the jar o| powder, for which * Veezi Phec quor generously refused to a<J cept payment. We were fille

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57 THE POWDER OF HYPERBOREA with the rosiest anticipations of success, together with a modi- cum of distilled palm-wine. Discreetly, we refrained' from our usual activities during the nights that intervened be- fore the next full moon. We kept closely to our lodgings, hoping that the police, who had long suspeeted us of numerous peccadilloes, would believe that we had either quitted the city or retired from burglary. A LITTLE before midnight, on the evening of the full moon, Veezi Phenquor knocked discreetly at our door — a triple knock as had been agreed. Like ourselves, he was heavily cloaked in peasant’s homespun. “I have procured the cart of a vegetable seller from the country,” he said. “It is loaded with seasonable produce and drawn by two small asses. I have concealed it in the woods, as near to the cave-adit of Leni- qua’s temple as the overgrown road will permit. Also, I have reconnoitered the cave itself. “Our success will depend on the utter confusion created. If we are not seen to enter or de- part by the rear adit, in all like- l Hood no one will remember its stence. The priests will be ■ arching elsewhere. “Having removed the girdles and concealed them under our load of farm produce, we will then wait till the hour before dawn when, with other vege- table and fruit dealers, we will enter the city.” Keeping as far as we could from the public places, where most of the police were gath- ered around taverns and the cheaper lupanars, we circled across Uzuldaroum and found, at some distance from Leni- qua’s fane, a road that ran country-ward. The jungle soon grew denser and the houses fewer. No one saw us when we turned into a side road over- hung with leaning palms and closed in by thickening brush. After many devious turnings, we came to the ass-drawn cart, so cleverly screened from view that even I could detect its presence only by the pungent aroma of certain root-vegeta- bles. Those asses were well- trained for the use of thieves: there was no braying to betray their presence. We groped on, over hunching roots and between clustered boles that made the rest of the way impassable for a cart. I should have missed the cave; but Veezi Phenquor, pausing, stooped before a low hillock to part the matted creepers, show-

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58 SATURN ing a black and bouldered aper- ture large enough to admit a man on hands and knees. Lighting the torches we had brought along, we crawled into the cave, Veezi going first. Luckily, due to the rainless season, the cave was dry and our clothing suffered only earth-stains, such as would be proper to agricultural workers. The cave narrowed where piles of debris had fallen from the roof. I, with my width and girth, was hard put to squeeze through in places. We had gone an undetermined distance when Veezi stopped and stood erect before a wall of smooth mason- ry in which shadowy steps mounted. Vixeela slipped past him and went up the steps. I followed. The fingers of her . free hand were gliding over a large flat flagstone that filled the stair- head. The stone began to tilt noiselessly upward. Vixeela blew out her torch and laid it on the top step while the gap widened, permitting ~~a dim, flickering light to pour down from beyond. She peered cau- tiously over the top of the flag, which became fully uptilted by its hidden mechanism and then climbed through motioning us to follow. We stood in the shadow of a broad pillar at one side of the ' back part of Leniqua’s temple, ! No priest, woman or visitor was J in sight but we heard a con- f fused humming of voices at ‘I some vague remove. Leniqua’s 1 image, presenting its reverend 1 rear, sat on a high dais in the M center of the nave. Altar fiits, I golden, blue and green, flamed I spasmodically before the god, j making his shadow writhe pn Jf the floor and against the rear wall like a delirious giant in a dance of copulation with an un- seen partner. Vixeela found and manipu- lated the spring that caused the flagstone to sink back as par! of a level floor. Then the three of us stole forward, keeping in the god’s wavering shadow. The nave was still vacant but noise came more audibly from open doorways at one side, resolving i itself into gay cries and hysteri- I cal laughters. I “Now,” whispered Veezi ] Phenquor. I drew from' a side-pocket ' the vial he held given us and pried away the wax with a sharp knife. The cork, half- rotten with age, was easily re moved. I poured the vial’s con tents on the back bottom step of Leniqua’s dais — a pale

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THE POWDER OF HYPERBOREA 59 stream that quivered and undu- lated with uncanny life and luster as it fell in the god’s shadow. When the vial was empty I ignited the heap of powder. TT BURNED instantly with a clear,^ higlvleaping flame. Immediately, it seemed, the air was full of surging phantoms — • a soundeless, multitudinous ex- plosion, beating upon us, blast- -ifig our nostrils with charnel fe- tors till we reeled before it, choking and strangling. There was however no sense of ma- terial impact from the hideous forms that seemed to melt over and through us, rushing in all directions, as if every atom of the burning powder released a separate ghost. Hastily we covered our noses with squares of thick cloth that Veezi had warned us to bring for this purpose. Something of our usual aplomb returned and we moved forward through the seething rout. Lascivious blue cadavers intertwined around us. Miscegenations of women and tigers arched over us. Monsters double-headed and triple-tailed, goblins and ghouls rose oblique- ly to the far ceiling or rolled and melted to other and more nameless apparitions in lower air. Green sea-t h i n g s, jjke unions of drowned men an cotopi coiled and dribbled dank slime along the floor. of Then we heard the cries _ fright from the temple’s mates and visitors and begaTi to meet naked men and womej* who rushed frantically throuS that army ef beleagueri0^ phantoms toward the exit5- Those who encountered us f&cfi to face recoiled as if we t°° were shapes of intolerable ror. The naked men were mosf!f young. After them came mW dle-aged merchants and ald&f~ men, bald and pot-bellied, sorhe clad in undergarments, some *n snatched-up cloaks too short to cover them below the hq?5' Women, lean, fat or buxo^’ tumbled screaming for the o&x er doors. None of them, we with approbation, had retain^ her chastity girdle. Lastly came the priests, mouths like gaping squares & . terror, emitting shrill cries. -V of them had dropped th~lf sickles. They passed us, blindly disregarding our presence, ran after the rest. The host Ox powder-born specters sr*?*1 shrouded them from view. Satisfied that the temple now empty of its inmates a ^

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SATURN 60 clients, we turned our attention to the first corridor. The doors of the separate rooms were all open. We divided our labors, taking each a room, and remov- ing from disordered beds and garment-littered floors the cast-off girdles of gold and gems. We met at the corridor’s end, where our collected loot was thrust into tire strong thin sack I had carried under my cloak. Many of the phantoms still lingered, achieving new and ghastlier fusions, dropping their members upon us as they began to diswreathe. Soon we had searched all the rooms apportioned to the wom- en. My sack was full, and I had counted thirty-eight girdles at the end of the third corridor. One girdle was still missing; but Vixeela’s sharp eyes caught the gleam of an emerald-stud- ed buckle protruding from un- der the dissolving legs of a hairy satyr-like ghost on a pile of male garments in the corner. She snatched up the girdle and carried it in her hand hence- forward. We hurried back to Leni- qua’s nave, believing it to be vacant of all human occupants by now. To our disconcertion the High Priest, whose name Vixeela knew as Marquanos, was standing before the altar, striking blows with a long phal- lic rod of bronze, his insignia of office, at certain apparitions that remained floating in the air. , Marquanos rushed toward us with a harsh cry as we neared him, dealing a blow at Vixeela that would have brained her if she had not slipped agilely to one side. The High Priest stag- gered, nearly losing his balance. Before he could turn upon her again, Vixeela brought down on his tonsured head the heavy chastity girdle she bore in her right hand. Marquanos top- pled like a slaughtered ox be- neath the pole-ax of the butch- er, and lay prostrate, writhing a little. Blood ran in rills from the serrated imprint of the great jewels on his scalp. Whether he was dead or still living, we did not pause to as- certain. ' W/E MADE our exit without ” delay. After the fright they had received, there was small likelihood that any of the tem- ple’s denizens would venture to return for some hours. The movable slab fell smoothly back into place behind us. We hur- ried along the underground passage, I ' carrying the sack

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THE POWDER OF HYPERBOREA and the others preceding me. in order to drag it through strai- tened places and over piles of rubble when I was forced to set it down. We reached the creep- er-hung entrance without inci- dent. There we paused awhile before emerging into the moon- streaked woods, and listened cautiodsly to cries tliat dimin- ished with distance. Apparently no one had thought of the rear adit or had even realized that there was any such human mo- tive as robbery behind the in- vasion of terrifying specters. Reassured", we came forth from the cavern and found' our way back to the hidden cart and its drowsing asses. We threw enough of the fruits and vegetables into the brush to make a deep cavity in the cart’s center in which our sackful of loot was then deposited and covered over from sight. Then, settling ourselves on the grassy ground, we waited for the hour before dawn. Around us after awhile, we heard the furtive slithering and scampering of small animals that devoured the comestibles we had cast away. If any of us slept, it was, so to speak, with one eye and one ear. We rose in the horizontal sifting of the last moonbeams 61 and long eastward-r u n n i n g shadows of early twilight. Leading our asses, we ap- proached the highway and stopped behind the brush while an early cart creaked by. Si- lence ensued, and we broke from the wood and resumed our journey cityward before other carts came in sight. In our return through out- lying streets we met only a few early passers, who gave us no second glance. Reaching the neighborhood of Veezi Phen- quor’ house, we consigned the cart to his care and watched him turn into the courtyard un- challenged and seemingly unob- served by others than our- selves. He was, I reflected, well supplied with roots and fruits. We kept closely to our lodg- ings for two days. It seemed unwise to remind the police of our presence in Uzuldaroum by any public appearance. On the evening of the second day our food supply ran short and we sallied out in our rural cos- tumes to a nearby market which ve had never before pa- tronized. Returning, we found evi- dence that Veezi Phenquor had paid us a visit during our ab- sence, in spite of the fact that all the doors and windows had

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62 SATURN been, and still were, carefully locked. A small cube of gold reposed on the table, serving as paper-weight for a scribbled note. \ The note read: “My esteemed friends and companions: After removing the various gems, I have melt- ed down all the gold into ingots,, and am leaving one of them as a token of my great regard. Unfortunately, I have learned that I am being watched by the police and am leaving Uzul- daroum under circumstances of haste and secrecy, taking the other ingots and all the jewels in the ass-drawn cart, covered up by the vegetables I have provientially kept, even though they are slightly stale by now. I expect to make a long jour- ney, in a direction which I can- not specify — a journey well be- yond the jurisdiction of our lo- cal police, and one on which I trust you will not be perspica- cious enough to follow me. I shall need the remainder of our loot for my expenses, et cetera. Good luck in all your future ventures. Respectfully, Veezi Phenquor “POSTSCRIPT: You too are being watched, and I advise you to quit the city with all feasible expedition. Marquanos, in spite of a well-cracked maz- zard from Vixeela’s blow, re- covered full consciousness late yesterday. He recognized in Vixeela^ a former temple-girl through' the trained dexterity of her movements. He has not been able to identify her; but a thorough and secret search is being made, and other girls have already been put to the thumb-screw and toe-screw by Leniqua’s prieste. * “You and I, my dear Satam- pra, have already been listed, though not yet identified, as possible accomplices of the girl. A man of your conspicious height and bulk is being sought. The Powder of the Fetid Ap- paritions, some traces of which were found on Leniqua’s dais, has already been analyzed. Unluckily it has been used be- fore both by myself and other alchemists. “I hope you will escape on other paths than the one I am planning to follow.” THE END

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NEVER MARRY A VENERIAN by CHARLES L. FONTENAY The Casanovas of Venus had reputations that were system wide, but still how could a girl resist such a super-dreamboat ! T ASSA met Tobi at one of the with an amused shock, that she sidewalk cafes in Lotus, the had permitted herself to be most cosmopolitan metropolis “picked up.” of Venus, and it was not until Tobi, tall and dark, waved much later that she realized, away the waiter who ap- 63

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64 SATURN proached when Lassa gave him smiling permission to share her table. “Nothing,” said Tobi. “I just wish to sit and watch the passers-by, and perhaps amuse this charming young lady with my idle conversation.” He did amuse her. He fas- cinated her. He knew more about Venus and things Ven- erian than anyone else she had met on this extended vacation. His knowledge went far be- yond common things, too. He was brilliant and understand- ing. Lassa was surprised to learn they had been talking for three hours, when Hal ap- peared beside their table. “Miss Virdo, your mother sends word that you should be getting dressed for the party tonight,” said Hal. “Thank you, Hal,” she said. “Tell Mother I’ll be up right away.” Hal bowed slightly and left them. “A very gracious gentle- man,” remarked Tobi, and Las- sa read into his tone a faint reproach for not having in- troduced Hal. She smiled. “Hal is a robot,” she ex- plained. “The Virdo family ro- bot, A remarkable likeness to the human, don’t you think?” “I’m surprised he is still a servant,” said Tobi. “On Ven- us, you know, robots have equal rights with humans.” “Hal’s loyalty is built into him,” she said. “We had him built on Luna especially for this trip. No broadcast power here, you know, so we have to plug him in every night to re- charge his generators. And now I’m sorry, but I really must go.” They saw each other often after that, dancing, driving through the colorful sand hills, swimming in the artificial lake north of Lotus. “You are the first really in- telligent woman I have ever known, Lassa,” Tobi told her soberly. “Most women are all body and no brains.’’ “But don’t you like my body too, Tobi?” she asked, a little piqued. “Your face and body are perfect,” he assured her. “I admire perfection, but it is very rare.” So the time came when, Tobi having said nothing about it., she asked him to marry her. “Are you sure it’s me you admire, Lassa, and not just a strong, handsome body?” he asked. There was anxiety in his tone. '

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NEVER MARRY A VENERIAN 65 “You are strong and hand- some, Tobi,” she said, patting his arm. His muscles were like iron. “But I think most of all I love you for your- mind. You are the most brilliant and tal- ented person I have ever known.” Of course, Rico raised tear- ful objections to the engage- ment, as Lassa had expected. Rico was from Earth, and there had been an understand- ing between them. “It wasn’t so much for my sake, Lassa,’’ Rico implored. “But at least choose an Earth- man to marry. Don’t you know Venerian law? Don’t you know that on Venus a wife becomes her husband’s slave and cannot divorce him?” “Please, Rico,” she said stiff- ly. “I certainly am not marry- ing Tobi with the idea of di- vorcing him.” The wedding^ in the great Cathedral of the Golden Lotus, went off like clockwork. The bride and groom fled in a show- er of real Terrestrial rice, and by nightfall were established in a room of the beautiful Ho- tel Venus de Milo, on the far side of the lake. They passed up supper, though Lassa objected that “I’ve never sat across a table from you since the day we met.” But Tobi was tired. His shoulders drooped and his movements were slow. It made her wonder if he was as young as he looked. They retired to the bridal suite. In the tub, Lassa relaxed in a bubble bath and luxuriat- ed in delicious trepidation. “How many brides,” she wondered, “go through this range of emotions on their wed- ding nights? Do all of them wonder if they have made the right choice? Do all of them think, all at once, ‘I don’t real- ly know the man I married at all?’ ” Clean and soft, she emerged into the bedroom in filmy negligee. Tobi had removed h,is shirt, but that was all. He was sitting in the big easy chair, waiting for her. “Is something wrong, Tobi?” she asked in alarm. “You aren’t ill, are you?” “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. As she approached, he lifted his hand and held out to her the plug end of an electric cable. “What’s this?” she asked. He turned his back to her. Horrified, she saw the socket between his shoulder blades. “Plug me in,” he ordered. THE END

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REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET by RAY CUMMINGS The last story of one of science-fiction’s original greats — and as timely as tomorrow’s headlines. TTHE VOICE of the Hittag tant hills. And you could see city was always a restless, thfc blotch of its glow-lights, muttering murmur, floating Sometimes the voice would rise here from far off over the dis- as though in anger. Sometimes 66

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REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET the blotch would spread, then die away and surge again. Restless; active with the strug- gle for accomplishment. To Jan, as he stretched sprawled on the blue sward, comfortable and lazy with the fullness of the food inside him, it seemed that the intruding presence of the distant Hittags was the only dissonance here in his lit- tle world. The shimmering blue pool at his feet was beautiful. Mara’s music, as she played and sang to herself after the evening meal, was sweet and gentle like herself. The per- fume of the flowers massed around the garden and Mara’s dwelling here, the shining opa- lescence of the eternal twilight, seemed to make Jan’s soul ex- pand so that life was holding everything that one could want. But always — all Jan’s young life — the jangle of the Hittag’s was off there beyond the pur- ple hills. Now little Mara came through the dwelling entrance into the garden. Her stringed lute was in her hand. Her long pale hair, the pale draped robe, shimmered blue in the warm dimness. Her gentle beauty was like an aura around her. "Jan?” He stirred on the sward. “Yes, Mara? Here I am.” He 67 sat up, smiling, extended his hand as she came to him so , that he drew her down, reclin- ing beside him. “Play more, Mara.” The stirring flying things cheeped to join her music, lit- tle vivid blobs of color as they flitted among the blue-gold leaves. The fountain of the t pool was a soft background of harmony. But the Hittag splotch in the blur of distance was mut- tering loud tonight. Jan could see that Mara’s blue eyes were troubled. He stopped her music. “What is it, Mara? There is something wrong?” It seemed such a momentous question. “Old Mama Megan,” she said. “To the very aged must come a divination? Don’t you think so?” “What of her?” “She tells me that now we should fear Hido.” ■ That terrible word fear. Word so incongruous here in the little realm of the Marans that one might grow from childhood to maturity and scarcely hear it uttered. Fear Hido? How could they fear Hido who for so long had done the few simple tasks of gather- ing the food from the lush

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SATURN fields/ serving it, and keeping their ’ 'dwelling in order? Hido with his dwarfed, ugly little body, ;his imp-grin and comical gestures and jokes that always made you laugh — why should the dread word fear be invoked, because of him? “Mama Megan reminds me that once he was a Hittag,” Mara was saying. So long ago, when still Jan’s mother and father were living and Jan was very small, Hido had come ; beaten and scourged by the Hittags, he had come like a refugee to the Marans. No Hittag had bothered to chase him. No Hittag, busy, restless with his civilized strug- gle toward what he called achievement, would ever both- er with anything concerning the little race of Marans off here in the secluded hills. To the great Hittags, the simple Ma- rans were savaares. Unimpor- tant in the restless Hittag world. Jan himself knew little of them, but it was enough. Their present ruler, him whom they called HittagH, surely was a madman, lashing them on, mad with lust of power to lift him- self and push down others who might oppose him. Life for the Hittags was a struggle always to create complexities. A life of fear. A life with violence and bloodshed, and they called it civilization’s upward struggle! To Jan, it was the reality of savagery. Nature was benign here in this world peopled only by the Hittags and Marans. Surely, there was nothing to struggle against. Jan’s father .had once said a strange word, and tried to explain what it was. Sickness. A thing that ended lives before their life- span of time. It was not here. Only age at last could kill. Or sudden accident or violence. For the simple Marans, acci- dents was rare. Violence, the Hittags created. But why? Why? Jan, now that he and Mara had reached maturity so that soon children would be coming, knew that there was no answer to that. He could only be thankful that surely their children would be spared such struggle. “Mama Megan wishes you to come to her,” Mara wa saying. “Come now?” “Yes, that would be best. Soon she will be sleeping.” JAN ROSE to his feet, stretching his long, slim body. He was much taller than Mara. Taller, really, than most

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REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET of the Marans. A little differ- ent, too. His eyes were blue, like Mara’s; his blond hair was cut shorter, but still it was like hers. Yet about him there was something very different. A different cast of feature, perhaps a sort of sternness, in- congruous to his gentle nature. He could remember that his father had been the same, per- haps even his mother also. There was a mystery about Jan. It used to trouble him a little, when he was a question- ing child. Now suddenly it was troubling him again. Old Mama Megan would know. With her great age and wis- dom, surely she would be able to tell him. He thought now that tonight he would ask her. Pulling Mara by the hand, Jan strode into the dwelling room, where Hido was remov- ing the evening food. The mis- shapen dwarf, with his ugly grinning face, pointed chin and bulbous nose, set down his tray and did a little mock dance, waving his thick arms and jig- ging so that his stone brace- lets tinkled. “Laugh,” he said. “Who but Hido shall always make you laugh? Go hasten to your love- couch, I wish you well.” “Hido, shush,” Mara said. “And life is merry and we i9 are wise to keep it . so.” He was still jigging as he vanished with his tray. ! They found old Megan in her wood-chair, quiescent with the weight of great age. The opal sheen form outside lay spread on her thin wrinkled face, as though it were a sort of glory. Her hands were fold- ed in her lap among the leaves of her robe. She was so old now that to Jan it seemed that only her glowing eyes were really alive. She greeted them silently, with one hand stirring into a gesture so that they sat down on the leaf-strewn floop before her, hand in hand like little children who had been sum- moned. Then she said, “I have not told you, but now I should. It will be soon now that I am gone from you.” “Mama Megan — -” Mara gave a little cry; Jan just si- lently stared. It is the way of life, but you can never quite get use to it, the inevitable passing of the old whom you love. Mara’s mother, and her mother and hers, were here, with no thought yet of dying. Now Megan, oldest of them all, had found her time drained out. Jan realized it; so many of the old- had tried to explain

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SATURN 70 it. Nature tells you, with lit- tle warning signals that you cannot miss. And now old Megan knew, so that she had sent for them. “Mama Mega n — ” Jan touched her hand with a ca- ress, but she smiled gently. “It is not for sorrow, the ways of wise nature,” Megan said. “But there are things now, I must tell you. Things of the Maran Secret. I have been its Custodian, you know.” They knew it, of course. The Maran Secret. To all the young it was a mysterious thing, a thing you could not even be- gin to understand. A legend. A tradition. Yet everyone knew it was very real. From out of the dim past, down through the generations unnumbered, some- one always was the Custodian. Near the end, warned by na- ture that time had run out, al- ways the Custodian must pass it on to someone else, this knowledge of the Maran Se- cret. “To us both, Mama Me- gan?” Jan and Mara spoke to- gether. “Yes, I have decided. You two, still so young yet being as one, with your coming children.” “Now?” They held their breath. “Yes. Perhaps you will be surprised. There is nothing that I can tell you save where it is.” “The Secret?” Her words were puzzling. Always Jan had thought it was something which was to be explained. But now old Megan was telling them it was nothing of that. Merely it was something that was hidden here, with Megan’s knowledge only that she knew where it was hidden. “But what is it?” Jan mur- mured. Her grey, palsied head shook with negation. “I do not know. Through the ages, always it has bfeen here. They say it has a container, indestructible by time. It lies there, buried in the ground.” She was telling them the place. Not far from here, out in the nearest little valley be- tween the twin hills. Now they were the Custodians and could find it if need be. “Find it if need be?” Jan echoed. “If need be for what? And you don’t know what it is? You talk riddles, Mama Me- gan.” . She was still gently smiling. “The new Custodians must know what I know. I must tell you now something of the his- tory of the Marans. You have not been taught it. Perhaps

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71 REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANE! that is because we Marans fee! it is a little shameful. There was once a time when the Ma- rans here were struggling up- ward, building a great civiliza- tion.” “Like the Hittags,” Mara breathed. The smile on Megan’s pallid lips was ironic. “Yes. Like the Hittags. The Hittags were primitive then — just little rov- ing tribes far away. The Ma- rans were the Great Race. They were learned in science. They built great cities — vast, complicated ways of living, working very hard with frantic urge to satisfy needs which they created for themselves.” Megan’s thin, shaking arm gestured vaguely toward the window oval where it shone with • the opalescent distance outside. “Their cities are out there now, buried in the ruins of time. And we, here, are all that is left.” 1 “But what happened?” Jan demanded. “They got tired of working? Tire# of working, for nothing at all?” “Perhaps they reached the peak that man is allowed to go,” Megan said. “I do not know. I am not wise enough to interpret the ways of . God. I know only that their science at last tampered with nature too freely. Some engine of death which they had found with which to murder each other, at last turned against them. There was the Great Catastrophe. And then there was nothing left but a world in ruins, and little remnants of struggling beings left in the chaos.” “And that’s — us?” Jan mur- mured. “Out of them, our world as we have it here now, has come,” Megan said. “The span of ten times my long life. But these Marans who were left — surely they had learned their lesson.” Her thin, quavering old voice took on a sudden warmth, almost as though in talking of this, she were young again. “A lesson learned from the lash of an unthinkable hor- ror. Those chastened Marans, suddenly saw what fools their forebears had been. And they lived for the things that all mankind really wants. So that now, as you see and feel, we are happy here.” “And now the Hittags are doing it all over again.” Mara said. “Yes. I suppose so.” “But Mama Megan,” Jan said. “You forget to tell us about the Maran Secret.” It was something left from

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SATURN 72 the great Maran civilization. Something the pitiful survivors found intact in the ruins. They had a temptation to preserve it, so that always to now, it had been kept hidden here. “To be used if need be,” Jan said. “What did you mean by that?” Old Megan shook her head. “Words that the Custodian be- fore me passed down. Perhaps, originally, one might have thought he could have a need to use the hidden thing, what- ever it is. We cannot imagine that — not now — because it is a thing diabolic.” How different from what Jan and Mara always had pic- tured the Maran Secret to be! Just a shuddering, unknown thing, diabolic. r\ LD MEGAN’S eyesight ^ was dim, her hearing blurred. Jan and Mara had their backs to the door oval; they were intent, so. that the little noise there behind them- went unnoticed. Megan did not see the moving shadow as now it slid away.- Megan was saying, “There is no one in the world now — perhaps even among the Hit- tags save their madman ruler — who would want our Secret. But always I have remembered that Hido is a Hittag. I want- ed to tell you that — though perhaps it means so little as a warning that I do great in- justice to the clowning fellow. But they say now that HittagH is desperate. There is someone else there among them who lusts for the Leadership.” Jan had heard of it. In his mind there was a dim picture of the boastful madman, lurk- ing in his . tower — the Great Leader, yet fearing everybody and everything. His mind, warped, twisted, bringing mad fits of rage, so that alternately he would order murder done, and threaten suicide if ever his power were successfully as- sailed. Suddenly Jan remembered what he had wanted to ask her. “Mama Megan,” he said. “My father and my mother — how is it they were not very old, like you, yet they passed and were gone?” Megan’s face clouded. Her eyes looked away. “They died,” she said.* “One quite soon after the other. You were very small.” “Yes, I know. I can remem- ber them a little. Was it an accident?” “No.” “Violence?” A shudder was within Jan.

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73 REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET "Violence?” she echoed. "Oh no. They were here. Right here In this house. I was' with them.” "Then — what?” he demand- ed. “They called it a meaning- less word,” she said. “A sick- ness. Perhaps, like I feel now. Jan, child, question me no more. Your father told me lit- tle. Almost nothing. What lit- tle it was, I could not under- stand.” “I am not just like the Marans,” Jan declared. “I know it. There is something different.” "Question me not. Your fa- ther left you a message. You have it written down.” "To be opened, only if ever great and terrible danger comes to me,” Jan said bitterly. "Yes, I have it.” He touched his chest. “I have it always on me, as you told me I must. Yet never can I open it, of course. For how can great and terrible danger come to a Ma- ran?” A little while ago he could have said that sincerely. Yet now, somehow, it sounded empty, fatuous. Old Megan was sagging in" her chair, her little strength drained from the talk. Mara said, “Jan, we must go.” Then they left her. Present- ly on their couch Jan lay with Mara in his arms with the soft warm redolence of the opales- cent air caressing them. The little shining pool outside their window splashed with music to lull them. Surely they felt old- er. Not children now. The new Custodians. Jan was thinking of the mys- tery of it. A thing diabolic, so ironically to be treasured from generation to generation just because that was the tradition, the 'command of ancestors long gone. He was thinking too of the mystery of himself, the message from his father that he could not open. Never had he wondered about it more than now. And he was thinking of his love for Mara and hers for him. And their coming child. Surely they were very singu- larly blessed . . . He knew that he had been asleep. Mara, warm here in his arms, was asleep. But some- thing had awakened him. Something horrible. Then he knew it was a scream he had heard, because now it was re- peated— a scream, gurgling off horribly into a moan. It awakened Mara. She gasped in fear, with her arms around him. "Jan!”

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74 SATURN “That was Megan! Surely that was Megan!” TN THAT MOMENT, as he and the trembling Mara flung on their leaf-robes, it seemed that a bridge was crossed by Jan. A great gulf spanned. A transition, as though from one world to an-’ other. For a brief interval he stood dazed, trying to encom- pass it. All his life, here among the Marans, the thought of violence was a distant thing. Something apart. Something to be contemplated abstractly as happening somewhere to oth- ers, but never to oneself. Yet here now, embodied in that scream, was the presage of vio- lence. Something — someone — forcing violence. Perhaps Mara was feeling the same. She clung to him. She was gasping, “Megan — in danger — ” Then as he turned and dashed through the dim and silent cubby rooms, Mara was running behind him. Old Megan was not in her chair. She was not on her sleep-couch. She was lying on the flooring. Dead? As they bent over her, the blue-veined waxen eyelids fluttered up. She murmured, “Hido came. He must have listened as I made you Custo- dians— yet he — did not think he had heard clearly enough.” That grinning, hideous dwarf, trying to force more in- formation from Megan, final- ly had knocked her from her couch. Her slow gasping voice now was barely audible. “Jan— other Hittags were here. I saw them here lurking in my corridor. If they — find now the Maran Secret— if the madman Leader gets it — our little world is gone, Jan.” “Megan! Megan!” Mara was bending down, sobbing. She tri'ed to hold the old wom- an’s head in her warm arms. ' But Jan only stood mute, with the turmoil of his thoughts flooding him. Now Megan’s faint voice was saying, “Re- member your father’s message — so that at least you and Mara may save yourselves. I — love you both — my children— good-bye — ” She lay so still. The waxen shell of her lay still, and the evanescent thing which was Megan had fled away. Violence. Megan had died by violence. Unthinkable thing, yet here it was. As he faced it, groped with the reality of it, unprecedented fury rose in Jan. It blurred him, this coping with a wild rush of new emo- tions. Then he turned, shout-

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75 REQUIEM FOR , ed something at Mara. He hardly knew what it was. “Mara — wait — don’t come ! ” The opalescent dimness out- side, the eternal glowing, shim- mering twilight of the little Maran realm, enveloped Jan as he ran. And now he knew that Mara was coming behind him, running with flashing pale limbs and her robe and pale tresses fluttering behind her. The dim hills shone ahead of him as he ran. for the little valley between them. Then suddenly a figure rose up from a leafy copse in front of him. Hido. The dwarf jumped. He flung a rock, but Jan ducked down and then was upon him. It was a blur of horror, this weird new thing that Jan knew was the lust to kill. The gibber- ing dwarf was hard with mus- cle. Jan could feel it as they rolled, pounding wildly at each other. Mara was standing with a hand against her mouth, her wide blue eyes staring at this incredible scene of violence. Now the dwarf had him down, astride him, trying to grip his throat. But the simple work of the fields hardens one. Jan too, had the strength and the youth, so that now he had heaved the heavy dwarf away and leaped to his feet. And k SMALL PLANET plunged again. Jan knew that this time his antagonist was under him; Hido was scream- ing from the blows in his ugly face. He was finished, but Jan did not know it, nor care. How could he know anything, save that he was fighting something which had to be killed? He was oh his feet again. Incredibly there was frenzied strength in * him, enough to lift Hido up. A great jagged rock, Jan’s height, was nearby; and now he was jamming Hido against it, pounding the dwarf’s head against the pointed rock. “Jan! Jan!” He hardly heard Mara’s cry of horror. The dead twisted thing was at his feet, but once more he picked it up, panting, sweating as again he heaved it headfirst to crash soddenly against the rock. Incredible, this lust. It was like a water- maelstrom bursting loose in- side him, a thing once surging that was not to be checked. “You — you — ” His tongue had no epithet, though weirdly he wanted one. He was hurling the limp body, and picking it up and heaving it again . . . then pound- ing it with a rock held in his hand until at last his strength and breath gave out and he

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SATURN 76 dropped back beside it on the were gazing blankly at the hid- ground, spent and trembling. den rock which already had Violence. His first experi- been found and moved, reveal- ence with violence. In that mo- ing the hole down into which rnent Jan knew he hated it, he and Mara climbed to find would always hate it, with a the hidden little place under- revulsion so terrible that it ground. Evidence of strange made his gorge rise. The dim science was here. The forgot- opalescent scene swim dizzily ten science of so long ago — around him. He felt Mara’s smooth and glistening polished shaking arms holding him. walls here underground; a lit- Megan had said there were metal casket here, of a other Hittags here. Jan was strange smooth substance im- Custodian. The thought made pervious Jo time. And the cas- him leap to his feet and he ket was °Pen; its tiny mysten- drew Mara up with him. She ous contents was gone. . . understood, of course, because The new Custodians. Chil- now again she was running be- dren, really, so short a time hind him, trying to keep with ago. Perhaps all the Marans— him as he dashed into the glow- so simple and trusting and ing little valley. gentle a people now — were not much more than children. HE KNEW he was too late, Even old Megan, mistrusting because far up there Hido, yet had made Jan and ahead of him, shapes were flee- Mara Custodians in simple ing. The Hittags. There was a fashion. Only those who live group of them. In that moment by violence, trained to it, will they bounded away and were think to guard in , advance gone in the twilight glow, lit- against a murderous enemy, tie dots vanishing in the dis- “Mara, what can we do?” tance beyond which the Hit- But Jan knew then that it- tag city was a blotch in the was an irrevocable thing. She sky. . . was standing staring at him.j He paused to stare, and And because she was a girl J Mara caught up with him. and more perhaps because she] “Jan, that was the Hittags?” was a woman whose child was “Yes, I think so. They may coming — and the horror of the^ have gotten it.” first violence she had ever Then at last he and Mara seen was flooding her — sud-

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REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET denly now the color of life faded from her face. She stood staring at Jan, puzzled, be- wildered by the feelings with- in her. Perhaps she thought it was death now rushing at her. She gave a soft Tittle cry; her hand went out as though to clutch at him, and she wilted down, lay at his feet. To Jan, she was dead. Faint- ing was something beyond his experience or knowledge. He crouched holding her in his arms, his grief blurring him. Mara and their child, both gone. There was nothing here with Jan but a great, drab void of emptiness, with everything which had been his life sud- denly taken away. Then he saw that she was breathing. It brought hope. “Mara! Oh, my Mara — ” So much time passed. He could not guess how long he sat there in the cold and dank little vault with his dying one in his arms. But death held off. Now a little of the rose- color was coming into her cheeks and lips. She stirred. Her eyes opened. She had come back to him. She and their child. The flooding thank- fulness of it misted his vision, choked his voice so that he could only hold her with his cheek against hers and his 77 fingers winding in her tossed, pale hair. It may have been the full time that one would sleep while he sat there, holding Mara and both of them wondering when death would come. But she was strong with color now. Gradu- ally it came to them that she would not die. “The Hittags took the Ma- ran Secret,” she murmured. “Oh, Jan, what shall we do?” There was nothing they could do. They left the vault open as they had found it. The little valley between the twin peaks glowed around them as they stood wondering what they could do. To Jan then came the presage that though the valley looked the same, certainly everything was dif- ferent now with the Maran Secret gone. A new era, just beginning. An era of danger, of horror. . . 'T'HE VALLEY here was no longer the same. Always it had been like everything here, shimmering with quiet peace and security. Now there were voices Marans running here, shouting, babbling with -the new emotion of terror. “Doomed. Death — death is coming to us all!” “The end of the world — ”

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78 SATURN “Where shall we go — what can we do?” A little way down the valley, as Jan and Mara too were run- ning, they came upon an old Maran sitting on a rock with his hands dangling and on his face the vacancy of bewilder- ment. Jan seized him. “Tell me-” He stared. “My Meeta,” he mumbled. “I cannot find her. I do not know Where she is. I tried to find her—” “They talk of doom and death,” Jan gasped. “The end of the world!” “Yes,” the old Maran said. “The Secret was stolen— have you not heard that? Already news has come to us from the Hittag city. The Hittags them- selves fleeing here — fools ! What fools, those men who call themselves civilized.” Jan was shaking him. “Doom?” “Their madman leader has the Secret. In his impregnable tower he stands laughing at his enemies because with the Secret he is bringing the end of the world, and he laughs and jibes because he is a madman.” Now Jan and Mara were running again, with the bab- bling chaos of terror around them. And others were telling them — the horrible, diabolic science with a madman using it. . . Suddenly in a little blue- green glade with the tinkling splash of a brook at their feet, Jan remembered. He stopped the aimless panic of their flight. “Jan, what is it?” Mara gasped. “That message my father left me.” He remembered it now against the flesh of his chest, under his leaf-robe. “He said, if there were ever terri- ble danger.” Now Jan drew it out. He sat down by the brook, opening the small flat package with the wondering, awed Mara beside him. “Jan, what is it? What does he say?” There were very many words in his father’s small, neat script. For a long time Jan sat reading, his face grim, his eyes puzzled. “Jan, what does he say?” “So much that I cannot un derstand.” A chance at least to save just him and Mara — and their child who was coming. That much seemed clear. Now Jan knew that his mother and fa- ther, and he himself who had not yet been born, had come here from some strange and distant place. Why of course!

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79 REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET A strange and distant place so that they were not just like the Marans. Here was the chance for Jan and Mara to return there. A haven... Jan felt it so. An escape. . . He tried to explain it to Mara. “We must go ourselves and our unborn child.” His whole world was here by the brook, as he stood with his arms around Mara. Every- thing else was doomed by a madman. “There is enough, just for us two ” There was a flat little- vial, and as he opened it, tiny pel- lets rolled out into the palm of his hand. “Now, Mara—” “Oh, Jan, whatever you say — ” She was docile, trust- ing because he gently smiled at her, trying not to show his fear. 'T'HE PELLETS were sweet to the taste. They bubbled on the tongue and were gone. Now Jan and Mara sat by the brook, clutching at each other with a vast and terrible dizzi- ness sweeping them so that they closed their eyes. But still the world swam and swayed with soundless clapping in their heads. Perhaps it was yet an- other form of dying? But then Jan opened his eyes. The dizziness passed. With an incredible. amazement, even though his father’s mes- sage had warned and tried to explain, Jan and Mara stared at the strange scene around them. It seemed all in motion. Everything was dwindling. And drawing closer. The nearby blue-green trees were shrinking down and coming nearer. The little shining brook was nar- rowing and already it was lap- ping against them. Jan could feel the movement under him. But he knew, what the message had said, it was his own body which was moving. Growing larger. He and Mara, swiftly now and with steady accelera- tion, growing gigantic so that everything else seemed dwin- dling into littleness. . . Already the giant bodies of the two of them were sprawled over the ribbon of brook. . . Jan staggered to his feet. To him, Mara was the same, un- changing. “Quick now!” He tried to smile at her again. “Don’t be frightened. I will lead us.” The letter had warned him what to do. The trees here now were down at their knees. The walls of the shining valley were shrinking, rushing forward. For a moment the voices of the

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SATURN 80 panic-stricken Marans and Hittags were little squeaks down among the tiny trees. The valley walls came with a soundless sliding rush. Then one of' them was here at hand, hardly waist high so that Jan leaped up to what always be- fore he had seen as a hilltop. “I’ll lift you, Mara. Quick.” Then he had drawn her up. There was a moment when the valley seemed just a little nar- rowing rift in the ground be- side them. A moment more and it was a crack, so small that when they staggered to their feet again, hardly could they notice it. Now a new vista of rocks and distant mountains was around them. Mountains that shrank with ever increasing speed, coming down, shifting forward. The scene closing to- gether, until again, monstrous titans, they drew themselves upward. j There was no sense of time. ' Jan could tell nothing of that. It seemed a journey endless. Journey into largeness. He | could envisage now that some- where down among the tiny cracks and crevices at his feet : lay the infinitesimal space which held the Maran and Hit- tag world... Now the scene here, dwin- dling and closing together so swiftly, was shining with a new radiance. Long since, the shim- mering opalescence of the lit- tle world down there, had gone. The boulders, crags, and clos- ing, shrinking mountains, were glittering with cold nakedness. Rocks of many facets, prisma- tic with light. Overhead the sky was chang- ing. It was a blur now; but in the blur there seemed to be light which was yellow. A blur of it far off to one side. A definite horizon ' seemed to have come around them. As Jan and Mara stood together, clutching at each other with the glittering ground shrinking under their feet, Jan could see that the tumbled landscape was all down lower than their heads. It spread out and stopped at an abyss. The brink made a dis- tant circle around them. Be- yond it, there was the blur of empty sky coming down. There were shadows in the sky now. High up, monstrous moving shapes with the blur of yellow light on them. The shrinking circle of the abyss came closer. And sudden- ly Jan’s .viewpoint changed so that he saw himself and Mara standing here gigantic. En-

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81 REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET larging giants with a little cir- cular spread of glittering rock under them — a circle shrink- ing until presently in a step he reached its edge. “Jump, Mara! Wait, I’ll go first.” He jumped, and it was less than the '•height of his head. Only waist high when he had lifted Mara down and they stood on a black undulating plain. Beside them now the white glitter of rock from which they had jumped was a little boulder. It shrank. A rock as big as one’s head. Then smaller. . . Mara gasped, shaking as she clutched Jan. And all the world now was a chaos because there were immense titans who seemed to be standing in the far distance, back beyond the edge of the black plain. Human shapes looming far up, with great spread of pink-white faces. They moved, and there was wind here. _ Then a human hand came slowly down toward them. A hand far bigger than their bodies. A voice, roaring from high up overhead, said, “Care- ful, Hal. Not too fast.” A strange language. But Jan remembered. The message had reminded him of the queer language which Ins father and mother had ’taught Mm when he was still a child. They said it was the first language he had ever spoken. They had begged him never to forget it. When they had died, he had practiced it with Mara. Queer words. His father had called them English. “Careful, Hal—” Now the monstrous hand had grasped them so that they were cradled in it. With a rush of wind they were off the black plain and down on a wooden ground, with the towering legs of a giant stretching up over their heads. But the giants were dwindling. . . Then at last the growth had stopped, and Jan and Mara with a group of grave-faced men in size like themselves around them, stood in a room. Lights were overhead. Win- dows were there, with strange- ness that Jan remembered he should call daylight outside them. Strange things, strange sounds out there. YTIS FATHER’S MESSAGE had told him what to ex- pect. This would be a room in the Bureau of Standards, in a place called Washington. His new world. Strange new world for him and Mara and their child . . . _

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82 SATURN He stood holding Mara. Someone said,' “They seemed to understand us.” “Yes,” Jan said. “My father taught me.” Now he saw that the black plain was a smooth square of marble, with a hooded light over it. And in its center, a tiny grain of crystal quartz which held the world into which his father and mother had gone, when his scientist father had discovered the strange drugs so many years ago. Explorer into smallness. His father and mother had remained there and guards night and day had watched the tiny fragment of quartz. .. There was one scientist here they called Hal Matheson — a youngish, goggled fellow, thin- faced with somber eyes. “My father was here to see them go,” he said. “Then you would be Blanchard’s boy? Your mother said, if you were a boy you would be called Jan.” “I am Jan,” he said. Then he explained about Mara. “We came,” he said. “My father’s message told me to come, if terrible danger threatened — ” It was as though his words were timed by fate. One of the men cried out. As Jan turned to gaze at the marble slab, there seemed a tiny aura of something around the grain of quartz. Premonitory aura, and in that same split-second, there was a tiny puff of light. The grain was gone. The end of a world. It was as swift, as simple as that — • And as unimportant. Certainly of no moment here in the vast- ness of this other, teeming world. . . Save perhaps as a symbol. . , A presage. . .a warning. . . Someone here in the room laughed grimly. “Dissolution — hah! That could happen to the best of us — ” “Shut up, Hal! Don’t be ghoulish — ” As though with macabre prophecy he had spoken at just the right instant; the windows brightened with a glare. Jan and Mara felt themselves fall- ing, or knocked down. A white- ness so blinding beat here at the windows that they flung their hands to their closed eyes, yet still could not shut it out. Then it was gone, but there was a great clatter and roaring and breaking glass and" the room shuddering around them and outside, a terrible, distant, immense roaring of horror... Throtigh the shattered win- dow it seemed that Jan could see a vast column of vapour

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REQUIEM FOR A SMALL PLANET surging upward. . . The voices and the shouts and running footsteps were a bewildering chaos, so that Jan could only crouch and hold Mara with her questioning gaze on him like a frightened child ... The voices were shouting such strange things. . . “An H-bomb fell in Vir- ginia— ” “Missed us and fell in Vir- ginia— ” “It’s war! War!” “So what?” That ironic, ghoulish laugh again. “You knew if we waited, we’d get the first one, didn’t you?” War. . .War. . .The cries of it were spreading every- where . . . 83 And Jan crouched huddled, holding Mara . . . Violence . . . Violence . . . He could think of nothing else. The horror of man wanting to create violence. . . Then he was thinking of the blue-green sward outside Mara’s dwelling, the tinkling splashing of the shimmering pool a background to Mara’s music . . . Surely things like that must be the essence of what man really wants. . . If only he knew it . . . Now Jan and Mara were questioning each other with gazes of mute bewilderment. It seemed that their last haven had gone. THE END

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THE STARS ARE WAITING by MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY Everything was top secret except in India. There everything was plain secret, with the top en- tirely off . mm QN A CERTAIN street in ^ Washington, there is a cer- tain building which makes the Pentagon, by comparison, look like Open House. I’m not g°ing to tell you even what street the building is on. If I did, a cer- tain very secret division of the FBI would be breathing down my neck, before you could say

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85 THE STARS ARE WAITING “Security.” So; on this certain street, in this certain building, is a certain room, and I sleep in that room. My name is David Rohrer, and I am an M. D. with certain other qualifications. If you’re getting bored with these equiv- ocations,, read on; I’ll be spe- cific enough in a minute or two. It was on a Tuesday night in 1964; that’s close enough to the actual date. If you’re curi- ous, it was six months to the day after India closed all her frontiers. Of course, you didn’t read about that in the newspa- pers, but if you were a tourist or a missionary going to India, you found out about it the hard way. As I say, on a Tuesday night in 1964, about eleven-thirty, the phone in my room suddenly rang. I swore, sat up, grabbed the thing and put it to my ear. I knew it would be important; there are no outside lines in the building, except a specially sealed off and scrambled wire which goes to the White House, and another one to a room on the top floor of the Pentagon. The room telephones are all in- side communication, easier, and more private, than a public ad- dess system. “Rohrer,” I said curtly. I recognized the voice that answered. You would too; you’ve heard it often enough, telecast from the floor of the Senate. “Get down here, Doc, right away. Flanders is back!” I didn’t even waste time an- swering. I dropped the phone cradle, shoved feet into my shoes, hauled on trousers over my pajamas, grabbed my bag and ran downstairs. The Senator’s room was on the second floor. I could see lights around the crack beneath his door and heard muted voices coming from inside. I shoved the door open. “It’s the Doc!” someone said as I pushed my way through the crowd. The Senator, in striped pa- jamas that would have looked better on a film star, was sit- ting on the edge of the bed, and a group of men whom even the president wouldn’t recognize were gathered around. In the bed which had obviously been occupied, not long ago, by the Senator, a man was lying. He was fully clad — socks, overcoat, but someone* had pulled off his shoes, which were filthy with mud. His head lolled back on the pillow. I could see at that distance that he wasn’t dead; his chest rose and fell

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86 SATURN heavily, and his breathing was a stertorous noise in the room, I pushed some of the police aside and took up his lax hand. “What happened here? What’s the matter?” I asked to nobody in particular. I didn’t actually expect an answer, but curiously enough I got it from the Senator, of all people. “Nothing. He just walked up the front steps and in. Bagley, in the hall, recognized him and sent him up to my room. He k n o c k e d — the regular code knock — so I got up and let him in, and he collapsed.” I glanced at his overcoat while I felt the. thumping pulse. “He’s bone-dry. It’s pouring rain outdoors. Even if he came in a cab, how did he get here without so much as his hair get- ting wet?” “That’s what I’d like to know,” one of the men growled. “There’s something funny going on...” someone mur- mured. “Damned funny.” I let the man’s hand drop and opened my bag. A FTER A brief examination, ** I straightened up. “There isn’t a wound anywhere on him. Not even a bump or concusion on his head. Either he’s fainted from shock — which, judging from his pulse and heartbeat, seems unlikely, or at least a typical — or he’s doped. And I don’t know of any drug that would do that.” I pushed up his eyelid. The eye seemed normal, the pupils neither dilated nor contracted. As I frowned in puzzlement, the man’s eyes suddenly opened. He stared around ra- tionally for a moment, and his eyes came to rest on me. I asked quietly, “How do you feel now?” “I — don’t know.” “Do you know where you are?” “Certainly.” He seemed to make an attempt to sit up; gave it up. “What is your name?” I asked him quietly. “Julian F 1 a n d e r s.” He smiled, and added, “Of course.” The Senator interceded with a question, “How did you get here without getting wet?” A faint look of distress came over his face. “I don’t know.” Another man, who was in at least temporary authority, put in, “When did you leave India, Flanders?” 4 “I don’t know,” “Amnesia,” I said low-toned,

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THE STARS ARE WAITING 87 “partial aphasia.” The man in authority grabbed my arm. “Rohrer, lis- ten! Can you bring him out of it? You’ve got to bring him out of it!” I answered, “I don’t know. Certainly not now. The man’s in no condition — ” “He’s got to be in condi- tion.” I said with some sternness, “His heartbeat is so far above normal that it’s dangerous even to try to make him talk. I’m going to give him a sedative,” bending over my bag, I began to load a hypodermic, “and he must rest in quiet for some hours. After that, perhaps we can question him. He may, of course, come out of it with memory completely restored, if his heart doesn’t fail.” I gave the injection. Flan- ders’ heavy breathing gradually stilled a little; the heartbeat di- minished infinitesimally, but went on thud-thudding at a dangerous rate. A doctor has privileges. I managed to clear everybody out of the room except the top man of the secret police, and told the Senator to go upstairs and climb into my bed; I’d stay with Flanders. Eventually, the building quieted down. To make a long story short, I sat by Flanders, smoking and thinking, until dawn. He slept, breathing heavily, without moving even a finger or -foot, until morning. I knew how odd that in itself was; a normal sleeper, 'even the one who vows that he sleeps like a log, turns over some eighteen times in a normal night. Flanders did not stir. It would have been like watching a corpse, except for the rasping breaths, and the steady thump-thump of his heart when I bent and put a stethoscope to his chest. It would be both foolish and futile to write down the events of the next few days. Important faces came and went, on Wed- n - day, Thursday, Friday. I had to report; No Change. Flanders woke now and then. He knew his name, answered ordinary questions, about his early life, r e c o g n i z e d his wife when a plainclothesman brought her secretly into the building, asked about his chil- dren. But whenever anyone asked a question about any- thing which had happened since the day he had left this house with a secret pass which would smuggle him into India, the an- swer was always the same; the look of acute the.

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88 SATURN quickened breathing, and the muttered, disturbed “I— don’t know — ” On Saturday morning, the Senator called me out of the room. “The Chief wants to see you downstairs, Rohrer,” he told me, and I scowled. “I can’t leave my patient — ” The Senator looked disgust- ed. “You know as well as I do, there won’t be any reason you’d have to stay. I’ll baby- sit with him myself.” He gave me" a little shove, “Go on, Doc. I think this is important.” rT1HE CONFERENCE room downstairs was so elabor- ately soundproofed that it might have been on the moon. There were good reasons for that, of course. But it always made me nervous. Secrets have been told in that room for which twenty govern- ments would give anything shoYt of their plutonium stock- piles. After I came in, a guard at the door went through a careful ritual of locking it again, and I turned to look around the table. Some of the men I knew by name. Others I knew by repu- tation or because their faces were familiar to the newspa- pers. The man at the head of the table, who seemed to be In charge, was one of the top men in the FBI, and it was he who spoke first. “Sit down, Dr. Rohrer,” he said courteously, “Can you tell us anything about Mr. Flan- ders?” I took a seat and told them briefly what I knew of the case. I was perfectly candid about admitting that the circum- stances baffled me. When I had finished, the Chief cleared his throat and looked around the table. “I just wanted to add,” he put in unobtrusively, “that there is no use in suggesting that we summon other medical advice.” He coughed, “Dr. Rohrer is probably better qual- ified than any man presently in the United States, and every- one at this table will realize the impossibility of calling in any- one from outside.” He looked back at me, “Is there any chance of restoring Mr. Flanders’ memory and his ability to speak within a few days?” he asked me bluntly, “I may as well add now, Doctor, that for these purposes we must consider Flanders as expend- able. Provided that you can re- store his memory and powers of speech in time to avert what we believe will be a major mili-

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THE STARS ARE WAITING 89 tary catastrophe, you need not worry about the eventual con- sequences in the terms of Flan- ders’ health.” I didn’t like that. No medical man would. At the same time, I realized that the Chief meant exactly what he said. The cold war which America has been fighting, on and off, for the past twenty-two years, was in a stage of minor retrenchment. Our. soldiers were not wearing uniforms and carrying bazoo- kas and badger- jets; they were dodging, like Flanders, in and out of the nets of intrigue. Flanders was not a private in this hierarchy of strategy; in fact, he probably ranked as a brigadier general had there been any way to evaluate worth. I knew, then, how des- perate the situation must be. I told them slowly, “We can try narcosynthsis, hypnosis, electric shock if that fails. I must warn you, however, that Flanders’ heart may fail at any moment.” “It mustn’t!” one man barked, “Not until we know what happened!” He stood up and pounded on the table with something which could have mere irritation or actual hyster- ia, “Chief, can’t you tell Roh- rer why we have to wring out what’s inside Flanders’ head before he conks out?” The man at the head of the table turned toward him and spoke placatingly, “Of course. I have already said that Dr. Rohrer is to be trusted implic- itly.” There were a few minutes of silence; then the Chief began to talk. T HAD KNOWN, of course, -*• when India closed her fron- tiers. In this certain house in Washington that kind of news comes in as a matter of course, although not a whisper of it gets into the papers or even reaches the Pentagon. I had not known that India’s first move had been to cancel all her munitions orders. I learned it now for the first time. Nearly eight months ago, India had quite suddenly can- celled all orders outstanding, in England and in the United States, for munitions, arma- ments and the flood of war sup- plies which the United States has poured out in the name of a prepared Free World united against a sudden move from the other side of the Steel Curtain. With the exception of a sudden recession in the Wall Street tickers, this had had little ef-

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90 .SATURN feet on the world. One of the Indian representatives in the United Nations had made one of the perennial Disarmament Speeches which come from In- dia. This resolution had been shouted down without a vote. Then India had just quietly closed her frontiers. Americans, Englishmen, all foreign citizens, were asked politely to leave the country. At first, we had been fearful that this heralded a sudden shifting of the Indian influence to the Russo-Chinese coalition; however, angry radio messages filtering out, announced that Russian, Chinese and Korean nationals had been expelled even less politely from India. Then the news blackout had begun. India did not withdraw from the U. N., although all out- standing Indian troops were withdrawn from the world’s various fronts. To angry ques- tions, Hindu and Moslem dip- lomats returned equivocal an- swers; they had decided that disarmament was the only way to world peace. Naturally, for the sake of morale, this had been kept out of the newpa- pers; fake speeches and photo- graphs were concocted to keep any hint of the true situation form filtering down to the rest- less public. Planes which crossed the frontier into India were challenged and turned back, without violence but with unquestionable menace. The sea harbors were closed, and from the north came word that the northern entrances to In- dia had all been closed by dy- namiting the rocky and treach- erous passes of the Himalayas. To all intents and purposes, India had simply seceded from the planet Earth, It was apparent to anv poli- tician, the Chief continued, what really had happened. In- dia had simply discovered some great secret weapon and was working for world domination in one great master stroke. If the brainless fools in the U. N. had any sense, he continued, they would have made terms with Russia, to unite and wipe out this menace to Free World and Russo-Chinese coalition both. India, he ranted on, was obviously a traitor to the Free World, and must suffer a trai- tor’s punishment. He glowered around the table and went on in a little more muted mutter; public opinion still had a few fools who kept contending, in loud-mouthed idiocy, that In- dia had simply been seized by

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THE STARS ARE WAITING 91 some sort of Hindu revival of non-violence and Neo-Gandhi- ism, and was actually disarm- ing behind its curtain of si- lence. And while we were stall- ing, he shouted, Norway had suddenly cut off all munitions orders. Her frontiers would be closed any day, and already the slump in the armament indus- tries was threatening a serious world depression ! After a ferocious scowl, he continued, directly at me, not orating now but talking like a badly scared man, “So you can understand, perhaps, Doctor, why we have to know what has happened to Flanders. We sent him secretly to India to find out what’s really been happen- ing. He managed to radio back a code message that he was on the trail, only a week ago Mon- day. This is Sunday. They tell me that he turned up on the steps here Tuesday night. You’ve got to find out what Flanders knows about what’s been happening in India!” He rose in dismissal. I sat still, staring in dismay. I hadn’t believed that anything like this was possible! I said hoarsely, “I’ll do my best, Chief.” T TRIED everything I dared. A There wouldn’t- be much point in detailing the things we tried, because the details wouldn’t mean much to a lay- man, and besides, most of them are still marked Classified. Things like that may not mean much now, but I want to stay on the outside of the Federal prison until the day comes. Anyhow, eventually, on a Tuesday night — another rainy Tuesday, almost exactly a month after the night when Flanders appeared in dry cloth- ing and muddy shoes in the Senator’s bedoom, I knew that he was going to talk, I signalled to the Chief and the Senator, who had been present at all tests, to switch on a dictaphone. There might not be time for much questioning, and there certainly was no margin for re- covering ground which Flan- ders might go over sketchily. We’d have to get it down, word for word, just as he said it, while his strength lasted. The dictaphone began to hum. I gave Flanders the shot, and asked him a few prelimi- nary test questions. Almost ab- ruptly, his stertorous breath- ing stopped; he began to breathe normally and quietly, although the pounding heart- beat continued, on and on, a thunder in my stethoscope. He

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SATURN 92 wouldn’t last long under this dosage. But he’d remember, and we might be able to get his story down. He began to talk .... HE ROOM was silent. There was only the heavy pounding in the stethoscopes and the occasional rasp as one of the listeners shifted his weight. Flanders was a tall, lean man, normally, and he had lost so much weight that he re- sembled a skeleton. His face was. a death-mask molded in yellow wax, and his lips barely moved while his voice was a racking whisper in the still- ness. “Chief — Senator — Doc. I’ve got something to say — don’t in- terrupt me — important I say It. I won’t last long. I’m a — kind of booby-trap. A puzzle. They sent me back — a locked puz- zle— if you could unlock me, then you’re fit to have the an- swer. Sort of a final test.” The whisper receded for a moment, and he took up the story as if there had been no interval, “....went to India, like I was sent, and found out where they kept the govern- ment now. Chief, there isn’t any government any more. Just a lot of happy people. No gov- ernment. No famine. Bright colors . . . food you never tasted, and the ships that come and go every day . . . ships — ” I thought he was delirious, and felt for his pulse. He jerked his hand away in irritation, and I said gently, “What ships, Flanders? All the sea harbors are closed.” And the man smiled, a curi- ously sweet smile, and mur- mured, “Not those harbors. I mean the ships from the stars.” The Senator muttered, “He’s mad as a Hatter!” “No, Doc, Chief — listen,” Flanders’ broken whisper went on, “I seen them. Big ships, whooshing down in the plains. Big spaceport — north of Delhi. I saw one of the men from the stars. I’m a — ” he paused and sighed wearily, “God, I’m tired — I’m a volunteer, lie asked me if I felt like dying to bring the message back. He said I couldn’t go out and 1 ; o, because if they didn’t be) ve me— I mean if you folks didn't believe me — then they couldn’t have anybody spreading stories Can I give you the message? Will you make a record of it’ Then I can — quit — and I’m »>, tired — ” i The Chief started to rise. Imj peratively, with the authority

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THE STARS ARE WAITING 93 of a medical man, I gestured him sharply back. “Sit still I” I said humor ingly to Flanders, “Tell us. We’ve got a dicta- phone.” He muttered in that terrible racked whisper, “Show me — got to see it — -hooked up — my own words—” Over the Chief’s angry ges- ture, I showed Flanders the dictaphone. He leaned back on his pil- lows, smiling. I have never seen a happier smile on the face of a child. He stirred a little and put out his hand, and incredibly I felt the terrible racked heart- beats slowing and easing. And abruptly the emaciated body heaved itself upright, and Flan- ders suddenly spoke in a new, a strong and sharp voice. “Men of America, of the planet which you call Earth,” lie said strongly, “This man Flanders is a volunteer whom we are using to bring you our message. And this is what we have to say. The stars are wait- ing for you. The stars are wait- ing.” A moment’s pause* then that iarp, strong inflexible voice ontinued, “A hundred thou- nd years ago, men’s ances- tors lived on this world and i re a part of the great empire which stretches from in to sun and has so stretch. ice before your planet was burn out of the womb of your little yellow star. Great catacylsms of nature wrecked your planet. Many were evacuated, but many chose to stay with their home world, with the floods, the sunken continents the del- uges and tidal waves. For this they paid a price. They revert- ed to savagery. And savages know no space.” Another, long, quiet pause, while the Senator said in the sharp stillness, “Impossible! This is—” “Shut up!” the chief snapped, for Flanders, or rath- er, the curiously alien voice through Flanders, was speaking again. “ . . . assume that you have reclimbed most of the distance from savagery, and the stars are waiting for you. We have been watching. We are ready to reclaim your world. We make only one condition; there is no war in space. We insist upon trust and sufferance. We insist. We do not show our- selves until we know that you are ready. “Whatever country will tot- ally remove and destroy all weapons of disaster, whatever

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94 SATURN country will close off their frontiers and withdraw com- pletely from a world torn by war, that nation and that peo- ple will be received into the Commonwealth of the Stars. It is so with the state you call India. It is so with ' the state . you call Norway, which today has closed its frontiers. “The invitation is extended equally to all. Lay down your arms. You will be protected in ways you cannot even imagine. You need not fear that your enemies on this Earth will be pemitted to harm you, for they, and not you, are the truly iso- lated. “Display your trust and your will to nonagression. Disarm yourselves. Lay down your arms. The stars are waiting.” The voice trailed off, was si- lent. The thunder in the stetho- scopes began again. Flanders slumped; the rattling breath, tortured, tore through the room, stopped. I let my hand drop from his wrist. “He’s dead, sir,” I said. Before the words were out of my mouth, the Senator was clawing at the telephone. “Get me the President!” THE END

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ALAREE by ROBERT SILVERBERG The ways of star folk are strange and varied, but none so odd as those of that Earth space- ship’s latest crew member. VPTHEN OUR SHIP left its carefully planned trajec- tory and started to wobble through space in dizzy circles, I knew we shouldn’t have passed up that opportunity for an overhauling on Spica IV. My men and I were anxious to get back to Earth, and a hasty check had assured us that the Aaron Burr was in tip-top shape — so we had turned down the offer of an overhaul, which would have meant a month’s delay, and set out straight for home. As so often happen*, what seemed like the most direct route home turned out to be the longest. We had spent far too much time on this survey trip already, and were rejoic- ing in the prospect of ar imme- diate return to Earth waen the ship started turning cartwheels. W i 1 1 e n d,o r f, computer - 95

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96 SATURN man first class, came to me ship, and probably a good deal looking sheepish, a few minutes more so. after I’d noticed we were off “Send me Upper Navigating course. Technician Haley,” I snapped. “What is it, Gus?” I asked. “We’re going to have to find “The feed network’s oscillat- a planet in the neighborhood ing, sir,” he said, tugging at his and put down for repairs.” unruly reddish-brown beard. “It won’t stop, sir.” . TT TURNED OUT there was “Is Ketteridge working on * an insignificant solar system it?” in the vicinity, consisting of a “I’ve just called him,” Will- small but hot white star and a endorf said. His stolid face re- single unexplored planet, Ter- flected acute embarrassment, ra-size, a few hundred million Willendorf always took it per- miles out. After Haley and I sonally whenever one of the had decided that that was the cybers went haywire, as if it nearest port of refuge, I called were his own fault. “You know -a general meeting, what this means, don’t you, Quickly and positively I out- sir?” lined our situation and ex- I grinned. “Take a look at plained what would have to be this, Willendorf,” I said, done. I sensed the immediate shoving the trajectory graphs disappointment, but, gratify- toward him. I sketched out ingly, the reaction was followed with my stylus the confused by a general feeling of resigned circles we had been travelling pitching-in. If we all worked, in all morning. “That’s what we’d get back to Earth sooner your feed network’s doing to or later. If we didn’t, we’d us,” I said. “And we’ll keep on spend the next century flip- doing it until we get it fixed.” flopping aimlessly through “What are you going to do, space, sir?” v After the meeting, we set I sensed his impatience with about the business of recover- me. Willendorf was a good ing control of the ship and put- man, but his psych charts in- ting it down for repairs. The dicated a latent desire for feed network, luckily, gave up officer hood. Deep down inside, the ghost about ninety minutes he was sure he was at least as later; it meant we had to stoke! competent as I was to run this the fuel by hand, but at leasts

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ALAREE 97 it stopped that damned oscil- lating. We got the ship going. Ha- ley, navigating by feel in a way I never would have dreamed possible, brought us into the nearby solar system in hardly any time at all. Finally we swung into our landing orbit, and made ' our looping way down to the surface of the lit- tle planet. I studied my crew’s faces carefully. We had spent a great deal of time together in space— much too much, really, for comfort — and an incident like this might very well snap them all if we didn’t get going again soon enough. I could foresee disagreements, bicker- ing, declaration of opinion where no opinion was called for. I was relieved to discover that the planet’s air was breathable. A rather high nitro- gen concentration, to be sure — 82% but that left 17% for oxygen, plus some miscellane- ous inerts, and it wouldn’t be too rough on the lungs. I de- creed a one-hour free break be- fore beginning repairs. Remaining aboard ship, I gloomily surveyed the scram- bled feed network and tried to formulate a preliminary plan of action for getting the com- plex cybernetic instrument to function again, while my crew went outside to relax. Ten minutes after I had opened the lock and let them out, I heard someone clanking around in the aft supplies cabin. "Who’s there?” I yelled. "Me,” grunted a heavy voice that could only be Willendorf’s. “I’m looking for the thought- converter, sir.” I ran hastily through the corridor, flipped up the latch on the supplies cabin, and con- fronted him. “What do you want the converter for?” I snapped. ‘‘Found an alien, sir,” he said laconically. My eyes widened. The sur- vey chart had said nothing about intelligent extra-terres- trials in this limb of the galaxy, but then again this planet hadn’t been explored yet. I gestured toward the rear cabinet. “The converter hel- mets are in there,” I said. “I’ll be out in a little while. Make sure you follow technique in making contact.” "Of course, sir,” said Will- endorf. He took the converter helmet and went out, leaving me standing there. I waited a few minutes, then climbed the catwalk to the airlock and

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n SATURN peered out. They were all clustered around- a small alien being, who looked weak and inconse- quential in the midst of the circle. I smiled at the sight. The alien was roughly human- oid in s h a p e, with the usual complement of arms and legs, and a pale green complexion that blended well with the muted violet coloring of his world. He was wearing the thought-converter somewhat lopsidedly, and I saw a small, green, furry ear protruding from the left side. Willendorf was talking to him. Then someone saw me standing at the open airlock, and I heard Haley yell to me, “Come on down, Chief!” HTHEY WERE ringed around the alien in a tight circle. I shouldered my way into their midst. Willendorf turned to me. “Meet Alaree, sir,” he said. “Alaree, this is our comman- - der.” “We are pleased to meet you,” the alien said gravely. The converter automatically turned his thoughts into Eng- lish, but maintained the trace of his oddly-infected accent. “You have been saying that you are from the skies.” “His grammar’s pretty sha- ky,” Willendorf interposed. “He keeps referring to any of us as ‘you’ — even you, who just got here.” “Odd,” I said. “The con- verter’s supposed to conform to the rules of grammar.” I turned to the alien, who seemed perfectly at ease among us. “My name is Bry- son,” I said. “This is Willen- dorf,. over here.” The alien wrinkled his soft- skinned forehead in mo- mentary confusion. “We are Alaree,” he said again. “We? You and who else?” “We and we else,” Alaree said blandly. I stared at him for a moment, then gave up. The complexities of an alien mind are often too much for a mere Terran to fathom. “You are welcome to our world,” Alaree said after a few moments of silence. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks.” I turned away, leaving the alien with my men. They had twenty-six minutes left of the break I’d given them, after which we would have to get back to the serious business of repairing the ship. Making friends with floppy-eared ali- ens was one thing; getting back Ito Earth was another. The planet was a warm, friendly sort of place, with

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ALAREE 99 rolling fields and acres of pleasant-looking purple vege- tation. We had landed in a clearing at the edge of a fair- sized copse. Great broad- beamed trees shot up all around us. Alaree returned to visit us every day, until he became al- most a mascot of the crew. I liked the little alien myself, and spent some time with him, though I found his conversa- tion generally incomprehensi- ble. No doubt he had the same trouble with us. The converter had only limited efficiency, af- ter all. He was the only representa- tive of his species who came. For all we knew, he was the only one of his kind on the whole planet. There was no sign of life elsewhere. Though Willendorf led an unauthor- ized scouting party during some free time on the third day, he failed to find a village of any sort. Where Alaree re- turned to every night and how he had f o u n d us in the first place remained mysteries. As for the feed network, progress went slowly. Ketter- idge, the technician in charge, had tracked down the foulup and was trying to repair it without building a completely new network. Shortcuts, again. He tinkered away for four days, setting up a tentative circuit, trying it out, watching it sputter and blow out, build- ing another. There was nothing I could do. But I sensed tension heightening among the crew- men. They were annoyed at themselves, at each other, at me, at everything. On the fifth day, Kittredge and Willendorf finally let their accumulated tenseness explode. They had been work- ing together on the network, but they quarrelled and Ket- teridge came storming into my cabin immediately afterward. “Sir, I demand to be allowed to work on the network by my- self. It’s my specialty, and Willendorf ’s only screwing things up.” “Get me Willendorf,” f said, frowning. When Willendorf showed up I heard the whole story, decid- ed quickly to let Ketteridge have his way — it was, after all, his specialt y — and calmed Willendorf down. Then, reach- ing casually for some papers on my desk, I dismissed both of them. I knew they’d come to their senses in a day or so. T SPENT most of the next day sitting placidly in the

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100 SATURN sun, while Ketteridge tinkered with the feed network some more. I watched the faces of the men. They were starting to smoulder. They wanted to get home and they weren’t getting there. Besides, this was a fair- ly dull planet, and even the novelty of Alaree wore off af- ter a while. The little alien had a way of hanging around men who were busy scraping fuel deposits out of the jet tubes, or something equally unpleasant, and bothering them with all sorts of questions. The following morning I was lying blissfully in the grassplot near the ship, talking to Ala- ree. Ketteridge came to me. By the tightness of his lips I knew he was in trouble. / 1 brushed some antlike blue insects off my trousers and rose to a sitting position, lean- ing against the tall, tough- barked tree behind me. “What’s the matter, Ketter- idge? How’s the feed net- work?” He glanced uneasily at Ala- ree for a moment before speak- ing. “I’m stuck, sir. I’ll have to admit I was wrong. I can’t fix it by myself.” I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder, “That’s a no- ble thing to say, Ketteridge. It takes a big man to admit he’s been a fool. Will you work with Willendorf now?” “If he’ll work with me, sir,” Ketteridge said miserably. “I think he will,” I said. Ketteridge saluted and turned away, and I felt a burst of sat- isfaction. I’d met the crisis in the only way possible; if I had ordered them to cooperate, I would have gotten noplace. The psychological situation no longer allowed for unbending military discipline. After Ketteridge had gone, Alaree, who had been silent all this time, looked up at me in puzzlement. “We do not under- stand,” he said. “Not we,” I corrected. “I. You’re only one person. We means many people.” “We are only one person?” Alaree said tentatively. “No. / am only one person. Get it?” He worried the thought around for a few moments; I could see his browless forehead contract in deep concentration. “Look,” I said. “I’m one person, Ketteridge is another person. Willendorf is another. Each one of them is an inde- pendent individual, an T.” “And together you make We?” Alaree asked brightly. “Yes and no,” I said. “We is composed of many /, but we

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ALAREE 101 still remain /.” Again he sank deep in con- centration; then he smiled, scratched the ear that protrud- ed from one side of the thought-helmet, and said, “We do not understand. But / do. Each of you is — is an 1” “An individual,” I said. “An individual,” he repeat- ed. “A complete person. And together, to fly your ship, you must become a We” “But only temporarily,” I said. “There still can be con- flict between the parts. That’s necessary, for progress. I can alway think of the rest of them as They.” “I — They,” Alaree repeat- ed slowly. “ They .” He nodded. “It is difficult for me to grasp all this. I... think differently. But I am coming to under- stand, and I am worried.” That was a new idea. Ala- ree, worried? Could be, I re- flected. I had no way of know- ing. I knew so cursed little about Alaree — where on the planet he came from, what his tribal life was like, what sort of civilization he had, were all blanks. “What kind of worries, Ala- ree?” “You would not under- stand,” he said solemnly and would say no more. T"1 OWARD afternoon, as golden shadows started to slant through the closely packed trees, I returned to the ship. Willendorf and Ketter- idge were aft, working over the feed network. The whole crew had gathered around to watch and offer suggestions. Even Alaree was there, looking absurdly comical in his copper alloy thought-converter helmet, standing on tiptoe and trying to see what was happening. About an hour later, I spot- ted the alien sitting by himself beneath the long-limbed tree that towered over the ship. He was lost in thought. Evidently whatever his problem was, it was really eating him Toward evening, he made a decision. I had been watching him with a great deal of con- cern, wondering what was go- ing on in that small but unfath- omable mind. I saw him brighten, leap up suddenly, and cross the field, heading in my direction. “Captain ! ” “What is it, Alaree?” He waddled up and stared gravely at me. “Your ship will be ready to leave soon. What was wrong is nearly right again.” He paused, obviously uncer- tain of how to phrase his next

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102 SATURN statement, and I waited pa- tiently. Finally he blurted out suddenly, “May I come back to your world with you?” Automatically, the regula- tions flashed through my mind. I pride myself on my knowl- edge of the rules. And I knew this one. ARTICLE 101 A No intelligent extra-ter- restrial life is to be trans- ported. from its own world to any civilized world un- der any reason ivhatso- ever, without explicit be- forehand clearance. The penalty for doing so is — And it listed a fine of more credits than was ever dreamt of in my philosophy. I shook my head. “Can’t take you, Alaree. This is your world and you belong here.” A ripple of agony ran over his face. Suddenly he ceased to be the cheerful, roly-poly creature it was so impossible to take seriously, and became a very worried entity indeed. “You cannot understand,” he said. “I no longer belong here.” No matter how hard he pleaded, I remained adamant. When to no one’s surprise Ketteridge and Willendorf an- nounced, a day later, that their pooled labors had succeeded in repairing the feed network, I had to tell Alaree that we were going to leave without him. He nodded stiffly, accepting the fact, and without a word stalked tragically away, into the purple tangle of foliage that surrounded our clearing. He returned a while later or so I thought. He was not wear- ing the thought-c onverter. That surprised me. Alaree knew the helmet was a valuable item, and he had been cau- tioned to take good care of it. I sent a man inside to get another helmet for him. I put it on him — this time tucking that wayward ear underneath properly — and looked at him sternly. “Where’s the other helmet, Alaree?” “We do not have it,” he said. “We? No more I?” “We,” Alaree said. And as he spoke, the leaves parted and another alien — Alaree’s very double — stepped out into the clearing. Then I saw the helmet on the newcomer’s head, and real- ized that he was no double. He was Alaree, and the other alien was the stranger! “I see you’re here already,” the alien I knew as Alaree said to the other. They were stand-

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ALAREE mg about ten feet apart, star- ing coldly at each other. I glanced at both of them quick- ly. They might have been iden- tical twins. “We are here,” the stranger said. “We have come to get you.” I took a step backward, sensing that some incompre- hensible drama was being played out here among these aliens. “What’s going on, Alaree?” I asked. “We are having difficul- ties,” both of them said, as one. Both of them. I turned to the second alien. “What’s your name?” “Alaree,” he said. “Are you all named that?” I demanded. “We are Alaree,” Alaree- two said. “They are Alaree,” Alaree- one said. “And I am Alaree. L” At that moment there was a disturbance in the shrubbery, and half a dozen more aliens stepped through and confront- ed Alarees one and two. “We are Alaree,” Alaree- two repeated exasperatingly. He made a sweeping gesture that embraced all seven of the aliens to my left, but pointed- 103 ly excluded Alaree-one at my right. “Are we-you coming with we-us?” Alaree-two demanded. I heard the six others say something in approximately the same tone of voice, but since they weren’t wearing converters their words were only scrambled nonsense to me. Alaree-one looked at in pain, then back at his seven fellows. I saw an expression of sheer terror in the small crea- ture’s eyes. He turned to me. “I roust go with them,” he said softly. He was quivering with fear. Without a further word, the eight marched silently away. I stood there, shaking my head in bewilderment. WERE scheduled to ^ leave the next day. I said nothing to my .crew about the bizarre incident of the evening before, but noted in my log that the native life of the plan- et would require careful study at some future time. Blastoff was slated for 1100. As the crew moved efficiently through the ship, securing things, packing, preparing for departure, I sensed a general feeling of jubilation. They were happy to be on their way

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104 SATURN again and I didn’t blame them. About half an hour before blastoff, Willendorf came to me. “Sir, Alaree’s down be- low,” he said. “He wants to come up and see you. He looks very troubled, sir.” I frowned. Probably the ali- en still wanted to go back with us. Well, it was cruel to deny the request, but I wasn’t going to risk that fine. I intended to make that clear to him. “Send him up,” I said. A moment later Alaree came stumbling into my cabin. Be- fore he could speak I said, “I told you before, I can’t take you off this planet, Alaree. I’m sorry about it.” He looked up pitiably and said, “You mustn’t leave me!” He was trembling uncontroll- ably. “What’s wrong, Alaree?” I asked. He stared intensely at me for a long moment, mastering himself, trying to arrange what he wanted to tell me into a co- herent argument. Finally he said, “They would not take me back. I am alone.” “Who wouldn’t take you back, Alaree?” “They. Last night, Alaree came for me, to take me back. They are a We — an entity — a oneness. You cannot under- stand. When they saw what I had become, they cast me out.” I shook my head dizzily. “What do you mean?” “You taught me — to be- come an 7,” he said, moisten- ing his lips. “Before, I was part of We — They. I learned your ways from you, and now there is no room for me here. They have cut me off. When the final break comes, I will not be able to stay on this world.” Sweat was pouring down his pale face and he was breath- ing harder. “It will come any minute. They are gathering strength for it. But I am I,” he said triumphantly. He shook violently and gasped for breath. I understood now. They were all Alaree. It was one planet-wide, self-aware corpor- ate entity, composed of any number of individual cells. He had been one of them, but he had learned independence. Then he had returned to the group — but he carried with him the seeds of individualism, the deadly, contagious germ we Terrans spread everywhere. Individualism would be fatal to such a group mind; they were cutting him loose to save themselves. Just as diseased

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ALAREE 105 cells must be exercised for the good of the entire body, Ala- ree was inexorably being cut off from his fellows lest he de- stroy the bond that made them one. I watched him as he sobbed weakly on my acceleration cra- dle. “They.. . are . . . cutting . , . me'. . . loose . . . now ! ” He writhed horribly for a brief moment, then relaxed and sat up on the edge of the cra- dle. “It is over,” he said calm- ly. “I am fully independent.” I saw a stark aloneness re- flected in his eyes, and behind that a gentle indictment of me for having done this to him. This world, I realized, was no place for Earthmen. What had happened was our fault — mine more than anyone else’s. “Will you take me with you?” he asked again. “If I stay here, Alaree will kill me.” I scowled wretchedly for a moment, fighting a brief battle within myself, then I looked up. There was only one thing to do, and I was sure, once I explained on Earth, that I would not suffer for it. I took his hand. It was cold and limp; whatever he had just been through, it must have been hell. “Yes,” I said softly. “You can come with us.” CO ALAREE joined the crew ^ of the Aaron Bwr. I told them about it just before blast- off, and they welcomed him aboard in traditional manner. We gave the sad-eyed little alien a cabin near the cargo hold, and he established him- self quite comfortably. He had no personal possessions. “It is not Their custom,” he said and promised that he’d keep the cabin clean. He had brought with him a rough-edged, violet fruit that he said was his staple food. I turned it over to Kpchnie for synthesizing and we blasted off. Alaree was right at home aboard the Burr. He spent much time with me asking questions. “Tell me about Earth,” Ala- ree would ask. The alien want- ed desperately to know what sort of a world he was going to. He would listen gravely while I explained. I told him of cities and wars and spaceships, and he nodded sagely, trying to fit the concepts into a mind only newly liberated from the gestalt. I knew he could com- prehend only a fraction of what I was saying, but I en- joyed telling him. It made me feel "as if Earth were coming closer that much faster, sim-

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106 SATURN ply to talk about it. And he went around, beg- ging everyone. “Tell me about Earth.” They enjoyed telling him, too, for a while. Then it began to get a little tiresome. We had grown accus- tomed to Alaree’s presence on the ship, flopping around the corridors doing whatever men- ial job he had been assigned to. But though I had told the men why I had brought him with us, and though we all pit- ied the poor lonely creature and admired his struggle to survive as an individual entity, we were slowly coming to the realization that Alaree was something of a nuisance aboard ship. Especially later, when he be- gan to change. Willendorf noticed it first, twelve days out from Alaree’s planet. “Alaree’s been acting pretty strange these days, sir,” he told me. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Haven’t you spotted it, sir? He’s been moping around like a lost soul, very quiet, and withdrawn, like.” “Is he eating well?” Willendorf chuckled loudly. “I’ll say he is! Kechnie made up some synthetics based on that piece of fruit he brought with him, and he’s been stuff- ing himself wildly. He’s gained ten pounds since he came on ship. No, it’s not lack of food!” “I guess not,” I said. “Keep an eye on him, will you? I feel responsible for his being here, and I want him to come through the voyage in good health.” After that, I began to ob- serve Alaree more closely my- self, and I detected the change in his personality to. He was no longer the cheerful, child- like being who delighted in pouring out questions in end- less profusion. Now he was moody, silent, always brood- ing, and hard to approach. On the sixteenth day out — and by now I was worried seri- ously about him — a new man- ifestation appeared. I was in the hallway, heading from my cabin to the chartroom, when Alaree stepped out of an al- cove. He reached up, grasped my uniform lapel, and, main- taining his silence, drew my head down and stared plead- ingly into my eyes. Too astonished to say any- thing, I returned his gaze for nearly thirty seconds. I peered into his transparent pupils, wondering what he was up to. After a good while had passed, he released me, and I saw

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ALAREE something like a tear trickle down his cheek. “What’s the trouble, Ala- ree?” He shook his head mourn- fully and shuffled away. I got reports from the crew- men that day and next that he had been doing this regularly for the past eighteen hours — waylaying crewmen, staring long and deep at them as if trying to express some un- speakable sadness, and walk- ing a’ y. He had approached almost everyone on the ship. I wondered now how wise it had been to allow an extra-ter- restrial, no matter how friend- ly, to enter the ship. There was no telling what this latest ac- tion meant. I started to form a theory. I suspected what he was aim- ing- at, and 'the realization chilled me. But once I reached my conclusion, there was noth- ing I could do but wait for con- firmation. On the nineteenth day, Ala- ree again met me in the corri- dor. This time our encounter was more brief. He plucked me by the sleeve, shook his head sadly and, shrugging his shou- ders, walked away. That night, he took to his cabin, and by morning he was dead. He had apparently died 107 peacefully in his sleep. £(Y GUESS we’ll never under- stand him, poor fellow,” Willendorf said, after we had committed the body to space. “You think he had too much to eat, sir?” ' . “No,” I said. “It wasn’t that. He was lonely, that’s all. He didn’t belong here among us.” “But you said he had bro- ken away from that group- mind,” Willendorf objected. I shook my head. “Not real- ly. That group-mind arose out of some deep psychological and physiological needs of those people. You can’t just declare your independence and be able to exist as an individu- al from then on if you’re part of that group-entity. Alaree had grasped the concept intel- lectually, to some extent, but he wasn’t suited for life away from the corporate mind, no matter how much he wanted to be.” “He couldn’t stand alone?” “Not after his people had evolved that gestalt- setup. He learned independence from us,” I said. “But he couldn’t live with us, really. He needed to be part of a whole. He found out his mistake after he came aboard, and tried to rem-

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108 SATURN edy things.” I saw Willendorf pale. “What do you mean, sir?” “You know what I -mean. When he came up to us and stared soulfully into our eyes -—he was trying to form a nemo gestalt — out of us\ Somehow he was trying to link us to- gether, the way his people had been linked.” “He couldn’t do it, though,” Willendorf said fervently. “Of course not. Human be- ings don’t have whatever need it is that forced those people to merge. He found that out, after a while, when he failed to get anywhere with us.” “He just couldn’t do it,” Willendorf repeated. “No. And then he ran out of strength,” I said somberly, feeling the heavy weight of my guilt. “He was like an organ removed from a living body. It can exist for a little while by itself, but not indefinitely. He failed to find a new source of life — and he died.” I stared bitterly at my fingertips. “What do we call it in my medical report?” asked Ship Surgeon Thomas, who had been silent up till then. “How can we explain what he died from?” “Call it malnutrition /’ I said. THE END STATEMENT REQUIRED BT THE ACT OP AUGUST 34, 1813, AS AMENDED BT THE ACTS OP MARCH 3, 1933, AND JULY 3, 1946 (Title 39. United States Code, Section 233) SHOWING THE OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION OF SATURN MAGAZINE, published bi- monthly at 1 Appl&ton Street, Holyoke, Mass., for Oct. 1, 1957. 1. The name and addr-eiss of the Editor and Publisher is: Robert C. Sproul, 218 West 48th Street, New York 36, N. Y. 2. The owner is: Candar Publishing Company, Inc., 218 West 48 th Street, New York 36, N. Y. The names and ad- dresses of stockholders owning or hold- ing one percent or more of the total amount Of stock are: BERNARD BRILL, 218 West 48th Street, New York 36, N. Y. ; ROBERT JO, SPROUL, 218 West 48th Street, New York 36, New York. 3. The known bondholders, mortga- gees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amounts of bonds, mortgagee, or other securities are: None. 4. Paragraphs 2 and 8 Include, in cases whore the stockholder or security holder appears upon the books of the company as trustee or In any other fiduciary relation, the name of the per- son or corporation for whom such trus- tee is acting; also the statements In the two paragraphs show the affiant’s full knowledge and belief as to the circum- stances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon -the books of the coxn- f»any as trustees, hold stock and secur- ties in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. ROBERT C. SPROUL Editor and Publisher Sworn to and subscribed before me this 27th day of September, 19-67, NATHAN POMERANTZ (My commission expires Marcfa 26, ms.)

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SHAGGY DOG by CHARLES E. FRITCH Did you hear the story about the dog that went in a bar and asked for a drink? Trouble was this, darn pooch just couldn’t get drunk. HELL OF A THING,” the stranger said irri- tably. The fat man with the beer looked at him. “A hell of a thing,” he elaborated, hitting the bar with his open palm, “when a de- cent, respectful law-abiding citizen can’t even hang on a good one!” “Like a double this time?” the bartender said helpfully. “Sure,” the stranger said, waving an amicable hand. “Make it a triple, what do I care.” “You’ll care tomorrow morn- ing,” the fat man said. “Not me,” the stranger said, sure of it. He squinted at the wall chronometer: hours 2346, day 16, month November, year 1976. “I’ve been drinking now for two hours and a half, with no success. I’d like to get good and stinkin’ drunk; I’d like to use vile language and sing ‘Sweet Adeline’ and tell dirty stories. I’d like to have a hang- over a mile long.” He shook his head sadly. “But I won’t.” The fat man sighed and con- templated his beer. “You’re lucky then. I’ll feel lousy on this stuff.” The stranger grunted. He waved an arm to indicate the saloon, with its clean mahog- any bar, its plush carpeting, its red leather walls. “Don’t you guys ever get sick and tired of this?” The fat man looked blank. “I don’t get you,” he said. “Sick and tired of what?” “Yeah,” the bartender mut- tered, leaning forward bellig- erently, “This’s a nice, clean place.” “Sure it is,” the stranger ad- 109

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no SATURN mitted, “and that's just it. You know why it’s a nice, clean place?” The fat man shrugged and hazarded an answer. “Well, the Sterilizing Lights are al- ways on, and the Sweepers come out whenever anyone drops anything, and — ” “Sure,” the stranger explod- ed, “because a goddamn sys- tem of electronics makes it clean, that’s why!” “So what’s wrong with that?” the bartender wanted to know. “So nothing’s wrong with it as far as it goes. But it’s going too far. Science is doing too many things for a man better than he can do it himself; it deans his spills, wipes his nose, and spanks his bottom, that’s what’s wrong. Give me the old fashioned sloppy saloons of the 195G’s, with dried beer on the bar and pretzels and cigarette butts on the floor.” He took his whiskey glass and deliberately tilted it, The amber liquid spilled over the edge and dripped on the bar. “You know what’s happen- ing now, don’t you?” he said. “Under the bar, little stool- pigeon electrons are rushing around like crazy, sending messages to the Sweepers and the Spongers, and the Polish- ers, telling them some nasty human spilled something. Now watch.” At the far end of the bar a small door opened in the red leather wall, and tiny metal in- sects rushed out toward the spilled liquid. Some of them had honey-combed spongeheads which they dipped rhythmical- ly into the whiskey as though quenching a thirst. They drained it, and then others with bristly heads that whirled like brushes whisked past, leaving the now-clean spot for the ones with oilspout heads to spray the bar with a transpar- ent liquid that hardened and gleamed. The stranger watched the “insects” disappear quietly into the wall. “Disgusting,” he said. “Whattaya mean disgust- ing?” the bartender said in an unfriendly tone. “I paid ten thousand bucks for that. I like it and so do all my regular customers. This isn’t the dark ages, buddy; it’s 1976. If you want to be sloppy that’s your business, but running this sa- loon is my business, and I don’t need help from you.” “You’ve already had help from me,”. the stranger said. “I invented that cleaning system.” “You’re bidding,” the fat

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SHAGGY DOG .III man said, impressed. “I wish I were,” the man said seriously. “Say,” the bartender said, pointing - a finger of recogni- tion, “I remember seeing your picture in the paper a while ago. Yeah, sure, you’re Paul Williams.” “Sad, but true,” the stranger admitted, staring into his whis- key glass as though it con- tained some hidden philosophy. He raised the glass and jiggled the fluid in the neon light. “Paul Albert. Williams, elec- tronic genius, maker of metal insects.” He set the glass down and looked up with sudden de- termination. “You fellows like to hear a shaggy dog story?” “Uh, yeah, sure,” the bar- tender said, looking surprised at the question, “I guess so.” “I’ve heard most of ’em,” the fat man said, “but go ahead.” “Not this one, you haven’t.” He reached down to the floor beside him and brought up a black satchel, which he placed on the bar. He opened it, and out hopped a small, shaggy dog. “Forgoshsakes!” the fat man said. “Hey, hey,” the bartender said. “Get that mutt outa here. We don’t allow dogs in here, especially on the bar!” “How does he breathe in there?” the fat man wanted to know, examining the tight black skin of the satchel. “He doesn’t.” “Now, look, Mac — I mean, Mr. Williams — even if you are — ” “Simmer down, I’m not vio- lating sanitary laws. Fido here doesn’t have any fleas.” “No?” the bartender said, unconvinced. “Then how come he’s scratching?” “Because he’s a dog, that’s why. Here, look at this.” He turned the dog over on its back and parted the shaggy fur. The fat man leaned forward and nearly toppled from his stool. “Forgoshsakes,” he said. The bartender’s mouth fell open. “You mean — ” Williams nodded. “The dog’s a robot. Man’s best friend here is a machine.” “But it looks so real,” the fat man said, amazed. The dog righted itself somewhat indig- nantly, shook, and trotted over to lick the fat man’s hand. He felt the fur, ran his finger gently on the damp nose. “It even feels real.” The bartender’s eyes glowed with wonder. “I never would’ve

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SATURN 112 believed it. How did you ever — ” "Hard work, persistence, and clean living,” the scientist said, and drank down the liq- uid in his glass. "I’ll try an- other of those. Hell of a thing when a man can’t even get stinking drunk!” “What about the dog?” the fat man prompted. “Oh, yes, our shaggy dog story. Well, it’s pretty simple actually, It was a natural step in a whole stairway of natural steps; that’s the way these things happen. You keep go- ing and don’t know when to stop. “I started out on a small scale, with little blobs of metal, and gave them a sort of elec- tronic life; I guess I was sur- prised then they actually start- ed taking themselves seriously. Then I started giving them special functions, reasons for existing, by building them with metal legs and brushes and mops; that resulted in the ‘in- sects’ you have in your clean- ing wall there.” The bartender shoved a full glass on the bar. “This one’s on the house.” “Thank s.” The scientist smiled wanly. “Dammit, but I wish I could get drunk!” “And then,” the fat man said, fascinated, “you tried building larger robots.” “Right. That’s where Fido came in. He had a real-life counterpart, you know.” He sipped slowly at the whiskey this time. “Or no,, of course, you couldn’t know. But he did just the same. A small, lovable, shaggy animal that — ” He stopped, suddenly embar- rassed, tilted his head and the glass, and the liquid was gone again. “Fill it up to the top this time. Maybe I can get psychologically drunk after a while.” “Lord,” the bartender said, “you’ll be sick as a dog tomor- row.” “Little Fido here doesn’t ever get sick as a dog.” He ruffled the animal’s fur affec- tionately. “That’s the advan- tage of being mechanical. Of course, you don’t feel hungry either, but you eat dog food because that’s what dogs are supposed to do, and you romp around and play like you’re having fun when you really aren’t, and you stop and sniff trees and hydrants without knowing why. Oh, it’s a dog’s life, all right.” “Uh, what happened to the — uh, real Fido?” the fat man asked. “Dead,’!* the scientist said,

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SHAGGY DOG 113 looking into his refilled glass and remembering. “Oh, sorry,” the fat man said, and somehow he really was. “Dead, and it’s my fault.” The fat man looked away. “It was strange. I made a mechanical Fido and then the real Fido ceased to be'. Sure, he was hit by a car and that’s as good an excuse as any, but there wasn’t any real reason for it. Apparently this world is set up to accommodate only one Fido, so naturally the less than perfect one — the natural one — couldn’t exist. I wasn’t very happy to find that out.” “Yeah,” the bartender said, watching the mechanical dog thump its furry tail against the bar. He wet his lips. “That’s too bad.” “Did you make any more?” the fat man asked. “Yes. I should have stopped probably, but I wanted to avenge Fido’s death, to make it worthwhile. I wanted to lick this thing; I wanted to make mechanical life supplement hu- man life, not destroy it.” He shrugged helplessly. “So far I haven’t succeeded. That’s one reason I don’t exactly approve of all this. Science is much too capable at replacing human things with mechanical things.” He shook his head disparag- ingly, gathered up the wrig- gling dog and placed it careful- ly in the satchel. “It’ll stop before it goes too far,” the fat man said trust- ingly. “There’re some things they can’t replace.” “Sure,” the bartender agreed, grinning, “they invent- ed the phonograph, but I still have my wife;” The fat man glared at him. “Another drink?” “No, thanks,” the scientist said, “I guess there’s not much point in it.” He put some bills on the bar, and a dozen me- chanical insects flew from the wall, picked up the money, and took it away. “Hey!” the bartender said, too surprised to move. The fat man' guffawed. “Next, they’ll be learning to mix drinks and you’ll be re- placed!” “Sorry,” the scientist said, extending more bills, “I guess I’ve only got dirty money.” “It’s better ,than nothing,” the bartender said, taking it. “I guess maybe — nothing per- sonal, understand — but I guess maybe those mechanical gad- gets have faults, too.” The scientist nodded. “Keep saying that, friend, and maybe

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114 SATURN someday you’ll want to tear down that wall.” He walked away, then paused uncertainly at the door. He hesitated some more; then he slowly opened his shirt to reveal the skin un- derneath. “And maybe this’ll help you make the decision.” The fat man and the bar- tender stared. The man turned and walked out, satchel swinging. “What do you make of that?” the fat man wondered, after awhile. “The guy’s a crackpot,” the bartender said knowingly. “I just remember reading in the paper last night that Paul Williams jumped out of a win- dow. Suicide. This one’s a fake. Me tear down a ten thousand buck wall? He’s got rocks in his head. You don’t suppose a normal person would do that' to himself, do you?” “I guess not,” the fat man said thoughtfully. “No, I guess not. Look, give me another beer will you?” The bartender gave him one, but he accidentally spilled some on the bar, and the me- chanical insects came whirling out again, sponging and drying and polishing. “He had enough to make a dozen guys drunk,” the bar- tender said. “The guy just isn’t human.” “You know what I’m going to do?” the fat man said with a sudden resolve. “I’m going to do what he couldn’t do. I’m going to get good and drunk tonight. I’m going to sing songs and tell dirty stories. And I’m going to have myself one lulu of a hangover tomorrow morn- ing and enjoy every painful minute of it.” The bartender stared at him. “But why?” “I don’t know why,” the fat man said, “and I’m not going to give myself time to think of a reason. Set up another beer, and make it quick, huh?” But even later in the night, when he couldn’t remember a great many things, he still wasn’t able to forget the shag- gy dog and its master who couldn’t get drunk and who had a screw in his stomach in- stead of a navel! THE END

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