Venture v02n04 (1958 07)

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SaCNCl fICTION TWO BOOMS a novelet by C> Af • Kofnbfutk % .■> mfoMt 0, Simuk I tester del key ^ 35 Cents i

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SC/BhTCB f/CTJON Two Dooms ( novelet ) C. M. Kornbluth 4 Science: The Clash of Cymbals Isaac Asimov 50 Books: On Hand . . . Offhand Theodore Sturgeon 55 Contact Between Equals Albert Stroud 59 The Biggest Damned Martini in the Universe John Novotny 73 The Money Tree ( novelet ) Clifford D. Simak 80 Lady of Space Lester del Rey 116 Venturings The Editor, Frederik Pohl, and Theodore Sturgeon 129 Cover by Emsh, illustrating “Lady of Space^’ Interior illustrations by Giunta and Hurwits Joseph W. Ferman, Publisher Robert P. Mills, Editor Venture Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 4, Whole No. W, J^i// T958. Published bi-monthly by Mercury Press, Inc., at 35^ a copy. 12-issue subscriptions $4.00 in U.S.A. ctnd possessions, Canada and the Pan American Union; $5.00 m ail other countries. Publication office. Concord, N.H. Editorial and General offices, 527 Madison Ave., New York 22, N. Y. Entered as second class matter at the Post Office at Concord, N.H., under the act of March 3, 1879. © 1958, by Mercury Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Protection secured under the International Copyright Convention and the Pan American Convention. Printed in U.S.A, All submissions must be accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. The publisher assumes no responsibility for return of unsolicited manuscripts. Isaac Asimov, Contributing Science Editor Theodore Sturgeon, Book Editor Anthony Boucher, Advisory Editor Normo tev/ne, £c//#or/a/ Assistant George Saf^er^ Art Director

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"My name is Dr. Edward Royland," he said. "I do atomic power research." "That's a lie," said the Nazi, standing in the New Mexico sunshine. "There is no such thing as atomic power. Which of our concentration camps have you escaped from?" Two Dooms a novelet by a M. KORNBLUTH “. . . why should we he tender To let an arrogant piece of flesh threat us, Play judge ami executioner all himselfF’ 1 It was May, not yet summer by five weeks, but the afternoon heat under the corrugated roofs of Manhattan Engineer District’s Los Alamos Laboratory was daily less bearable. Young Dr. Edward Royland had lost fifteen pounds from an already meager frame Cymbeline, IV, 2 during his nine-month hitch in the desert. He wondered every day while the thermometer crawled up to its S:45 peak whether he had made a mistake he would re- gret the rest of his hfe in accept- ing work with the laboratory rather than letting the local draft board have his carcass and do what they pleased with it. His 5

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6 VENTUI^E SCIENCE FICTION University of Chicago classmates were glamorously collecting rib- lx)ns and wounds from Saipan to Brussels; one of them, a first-rate mathematician named Hatfield, would do no more first-rate mathematics. He had gone down, burning, in an Eighth Air Force Mitchell bomber ambushed over Lille. “And what. Daddy, did you do in the war?” "Well, kids, it’s a little hard to explain. Tliey had this stupid atomic bomb project that never came to anytiiing, and they tied up a lot of us in a Godforsaken place in New Me.xico. We figm’ed and we calculated and we fooled with uranium and some of us got radiation burns and then the war was over and they sent us home.” Royland was not amused by tlris prospect. He had heat rash under his arms and he was wait- ing, not patiently, for the Com- puter Section to send him his figures on Phase 56c, which was the (goddam childish) code des- ignation for Element Assembly Time. Phase 56c was Royland’s own particular baby. He was under Rotschmidt, supervisor of Weapon Design Teack III, and Rotschmidt was under Oppen- heimer, who bossed tlie works. Sometimes a General Groves came through, a fine figure of a man, and once from a window Royland had seen the venerable Heniy L, Stimson, Secretary of War, walking slowly down their dusty street, leaning on a cane and surrounded by yoimg staff officers. That’s what Royland was seeing of the war. Laboratory! It had sounded in- viting, cool, bustling but quiet. So every morning these days he was blasted out of his cot in a barracks cubicle at seven by “Oppie’s whistle,” fought for a shower and shave wth thiity- seven other bachelor scientists in eight languages, bolted a bad cafeteria breakfast and went through the barbed-wire Re- stricted Line to his "office”— an- other matchboard-walled cubicle, smaller and hotter and noisier, witli talking and typing and clack of adding machinfes all around him. Under the circumstances he was doing good work, he sup- posed. He wasn’t happy about be- ing restricted to his one tiny problem. Phase 56c, but no doubt he was happier than Hatfield had been when his Mitchell got it. Under the circiun stances . . . they included a weird haywire arrangement for computing. In- stead of a decent differential an- alyzer machine they had a human sea of office girls with Bur- roughs desk calculators; the girls screamed “Banzai!” and charged on differential equations and swamped them by sheer volume; they clicked them to death with their little adding machines. Roy-

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Ttvo Dooms 1 land thought hungrily of Conant’s huge, beautiful analog differen- tiator up at M.I.T.; it was prob- ably tied up by whatever the mysterious “Radiation Labora- tory” there was doing. Royland suspected that the “Radiation Laboratory” had as much to do with radiation as his own “Man- hattan Engineer District” had to do with Manhattan engineering. And the world was supposed to be trembling on the edge these days of a New Dispensation of Computing which would obso- lete even the M.I.T. machine- tubes, relays and binary arith- metic at blinding speed instead of the suavely turning cams and the smoothly extruding rods and the elegant scribed cmwes of Conant’s masterpiece. He decided that he wouldn’t like that; he would like it even less than he liked the little office girls clack- ing away, pushing lank hair from their dewed brows with undis- tracted hands. He wiped Iris own brow with a sodden handkerchief and per- mitted himself a glance at his watch and the thermometer. Five- fifteen and 103 Fahrenheit re- spectively. He thought vaguely of getting out, of fouling up just enough to be released from the project and drafted. No; there was the post- war career to think of. But one of the big shots. Teller, had been irrepressible; he had rambled out- side of his assigned missioir again and again until Oppenheimer let him go; now Teller was working with Lawrence at Berkeley on something that had reputedly gone sour at a reputed quarter of a billion dollars— A girl in khaki knocked and entered. “Your material from the Computer Section, Dr. Royland. Check them and sign here, please.” He counted the dozen sheets, signed the clipboarded fomi she held out and plunged into the material for thirty minutes. When he sat back in his chair, the sweat dripped into his eyes unnoticed. His hands were shak- ing a little, though he did not know that either. Phase 56c of Weapon Design Track III was finished, over, done, successfully accomplished. Tire answer to the question “Can Uo.ss slugs be as- sembled into a critical mass within a physically feasible time?” was in. The answer was “Yes.” Royland was a theory man, not a Wheatstone or a Kelvin; he liked the numbers for themselves and had no special passion to grab for wires, mica and bits of graphite so that what the num- bers said might immediately be given flesh in a wonderful new gadget. Nevertheless he could visualize at once a workable atomic bomb assembly within the framework of Phase 56c. You have so many microseconds to assem-

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8 VENTtTHE SCIENCE FICTION ble your critical mass without it boiling away in vapor; you use them by blowing the sub- assemblies together with shaped charges; lots of microseconds to spare by that method; practically foolproof. Then comes the Big Bang. Oppie’s wliistle blew; it was quitting time. Royland sat still in his cubicle. He should go, of course, to Rotschmidt and tell liini; Rotschmidt would probably clap him on the back and pour him a jigger of Bols Geneva from the tall clay bottle he kept in his safe. Then Rotschmidt would go to Oppenheimer. Before sunset the project would be redesigned! Track I, Track II, Track IV and Track V would be shut down and their people crammed into Track III, tlie one with the paydirt! New excitement would boil through the project; it had been torpid and souring for three months. Phase 56c was the first good news in at least that long; it had been one damned blind alley after an- other. General Groves had looked sour and dubious last time ai'ound. Desk drawers were slamming throughout the coiTugated, sun- baked building; doors were slam- ming shut on cubicles; down the corridor, somebody roared with laughter, strained laughter. Pass- ing Royland’s door somebody cried impatiently: “—aber was kan Man tun?” Royland whispered to himself: ‘“You damned fool, what are you thinking of?” But he knew— he was tliinking of tlie Big Bang, the Big Dirty Bang, and of torture. Tlie judicial torture of tlie old days, incred- ibly cruel by today’s lights, stretched the whole body, or crushed it, or burned it, or shattered the fingers and legs. But even that old judicial tor- ture carefully avoided tlie most sensitive parts of the body, the generative organs, though damage to these, or a real threat of dam- age to these, would have pro- duced quick and copious confes- sions. You have to be more or less crazy to torture somebody that way; tlie sane man does not think of it as a possibility. An M.P. corporal tried Roy- land’s door and looked in. “Quit- ting time, professor,” he said. “Okay,” Royland said. Mechan- ically he locked his desk drawers and his files, turned his window lock and set out his waste-paper basket in the corridor. Click the door; another day, another dollar. Maybe the project loas break- ing up. They did now and then. The huge boner at Berkeley proved that. And Royland’s bar- racks was light two physicists now; their cubicles stood empty since they had been drafted to M.I.T. for some anti-submarine thing. Groves had not looked happy last time around; how did

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Two Dooms 9 a general make up his mind any- way? Give them three months, then the axe? Maybe Stimson would run out of patience and cut the loss, close the District down. Maybe F.D.R. would say at a cabinet meeting, “By the way, Henry, what ever became of—?” and that would be the end if old Henry could say only that the scientists appear to be optimistic of eventual success, Mr. President, but that as yet there seems to be nothing concrete— He passed through the barbed wire of the Line under scrutiny of an M.P. lieutenant and walked down the barracks-edged com- pany street of the maintenance Poops to their motor pool. He wanted a jeep and a trip ticket; he wanted a long desert drive in the twilight; he wanted a dinner of frijoles and egg plant with his old friend Charles Miller Naha- taspe, the medicine man of the adjoining Hopi reservation. Roy- land’s hobby was anthropology; he wanted to get a little drunk on it— he hoped it would clear his mind. u Nahataspe welcomed him cheerfully to his hut; his million wrinkles all smiled. “You want me to play informant for a while?” he grinned. He had been to Car- lyle in the 1880’s and had been laughing at the white man ever since; he admitted that physics was funny, but for a real joke give him cultural anthropology every time. “You want some nice unsavory stufE about our institu- tionalized homosexuality? Should I cook us a dog for dinner? Have a seat on the blanket, Edward.” “What happened to your chairs? And the funny picture of McKinley? And— and everything?” The hut was bare except for cooking pots that simmered on the stone-curbed cenPal hearth. “I gave the stuff away,” Naha- taspe said carelessly. “You get tired of things.” Royland thought he knew what that meant. Nahataspe believed he would die quite soon; these particular Indians did not believe in dying encumbered by posses- sions. Manners, of course, forbade discussing death. The Indian watched his face and finally said: “Oh, it’s aU right for ijou to talk about it. Don’t be embarrassed.” Royland asked nervously: “Don’t you feel well?” “I feel terrible. There’s a snake eating my liver. Pitch in and eat. You feel pretty awful yourself, don’t you?” The hard-learmed habit of security caused Royland to evade the question. “You don’t mean that literally about the snake, do you Charles?” “Of course I do,” Miller in- sisted, He scooped a steaming

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iO VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION gourd full of stew from the pot and blew on it. “What would an untutored child of nature know about bacteria, viruses, toxins and neoplasms? What would I know about break-the-sky medi- cine?” Royland looked up sharply; the Indian was blandly eating. “Do you hear any talk about break-the-sky medicine?” Royland asked. “No talk, Edward. I’ve had a few dreams about it.” He pointed witli his chin toward the Labora- tory. “You fellows over there shouldn’t dream so hard; it leaks out.” Royland helped himself to stew without answering. The stew was good, far better than the cafe- teria stuff, and he did not have to guess the source of the meat in it. Miller said consolingly: “It’s only kid stuff, Edward. Don’t get so worked up about it. We have a long dull story about a horned toad who ate some loco-weed and thought he was the Sky God. He got angry and he tried to break the sky but he couldn’t so he slunk into his hole ashamed to face all the other animals and died. But they never knew he tried to break die sky at all.” In spite of himself Royland de- manded : “Do you have any stories about anybody who did break the sky?” His hands were shaking again and his voice almost hys- terical. Oppie and the rest of them were going to break the sky, kick humanity right in the crotch, and unleash a prowling monster that would go up and doivn by night and day peering in all the windows of all the houses in the world, leaving no sane man ever unterrified for his life and the lives of his kin. Phase 56c, God damn it to blackest hell, made sure of that! Well done, Royland; you earned your dollar today! Decisively the old Indian set his gourd aside. He said: “We have a saying that the only good paleface is a dead paleface, but I’ll make an exception for you, Edward. I’ve got some strong stuff from Mexico that will make you feel better. I don’t Hke to see my friends hurting.” “Peyote? I’ve tried it. Seeing a few colored lights won’t make me feel better, but thanks.” “Not peyote, this stuff. It’s God Food. I wouldn’t take it myself without a month of preparation; otherwise the Gods would scoop me up in a net. That’s because my people see clearly, and your eyes are clouded.” He was busily rummaging tlirough a clay- chinked wicker box as he spoke; he came up with a covered dish. “You people have your sight cleared just a little by the God Food, so it’s safe for you.” Royland thought he knew what the old man was talking about. It was one of Nahataspe’s big-

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Two Dooms 11 gest jokes that Hopi children un- derstood Einstein’s relativity as soon as they could talk— and there was some truth to it. The Hopi language— and thought— had no tenses and therefore no concept of time-as-an-entity; it had noth- ing like the Indo-European speech’s subjects and predicates, and therefore no built-in meta- physics of cause and effect. In the Hopi language and mind all things were frozen together for- ever into one great relationship, a crystalline structure of space- time events that simply were because they were. So much for Nahataspe’s people “seeing clearly.” But Royland gave him- self and any other physicist credit for seeing as clearly when they were working a four-dimensional problem in the X Y Z space vari- ables and the T time variable. He could have spoiled the old man’s joke by pointing that out, but of course he did not. No, no; he’d get a jag and maybe a bellyache from Nahataspe’s herb medicine and then go home to his cubicle with his problem un- resolved: to kick or not to kick? The old man began to mumble in Hopi, and drew a tattered cloth across the door-frame of his hut; it shut out the last rays of the setting sun, long and slanting on the desert, pink-red against the adobe cubes of the Indian settlement. It took a minute for Royland’s eyes to accommodate to the flickering light from the hearth and the indigo square of tlie ceiling smpke hole. Now Nahataspe was “dancing,” doing a crouched shuffle around the hut holding the covered dish before him. Out of the corner of his mouth, without interrupting the rhythm, he said to Royland: “Drink some hot water now.” Royland sipped from one of the pots on the hearth; so far it was much like peyote ritual, but he felt calmer. Nahataspe uttered a loud scream, added ai>ologetically: “Sorry, Edward,” and crouched before him whipping the cover off tlie dish like a headwaiter. So God Food was dried black mushrooms, miserable, wrinkled little things. “You swallow them all and chase them with hot water,” Nahataspe said. Obediently Royland choked them down and gulped from the jug; the old man resumed his dance and chanting. A little old self-hypnosis, Roy- land thought bitterly. Grab some imitation sleep and forget about old 56c, as if you could. He could see the big dirty one now, a hell of a fireball, maybe over Munich, or Cologne, or Tokyo, or Nai'a. Cooked people, fused cathedral stone, the bronze of tlie big Buddha running like water, per- haps lapping around the ankles of a priest and burning his feet off so he fell prone into the stuff.

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12 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION He couldn’t see the gamma radia- tion, but it would be there, in- visible sleet doing the dirty unthinkable thing, coldly burn- ing away the sex of men and women, cutting short so many fans of life at their points of origin. Phase 56c could snuff out a family of Bachs, or five genera- tions of Bernoullis, or see to it that the great Huxley-Darwin cross did not occur. The fireball loomed, purple and red and fringed with green— The mushrooms were reaching him, he thought fuzzily. He could really see it. Nahataspe, crouched and treading, moved through the fireball ' just as he had the last time, and the time before that. Dej^ vu, extraordinarily strong, stronger than ever before, gripped him. Royland knew all this had happened to him before, and re- membered perfectly what would come next; it was on the very tip of his tongue, as they say— The fireballs began to dance around him and he felt his strength drain suddenly out; he was lighter than a feather; the breeze would carry him away; he would be blown like a dust-mote into the circle that the circling fireballs made. And he knew it was wrong. He croaked with the last of his energy, feeling himself slip out of the world: “Charliel Help!” Out of the corner of his mind as he slipped away he sensed that the old man was pulling him now under the arms, trying to tug him out of the hut, crying dimly into his ear: “You should have told me you did not see through smoke! You see clear; I never knew; I nev— ” And then he slipped through into blackness and silence. m Royland awoke sick and fuzzy; it was morning in the hut; there was no sign of Nahataspe. Well. Unless the old man had got to a phone and reported to the Lab- oratory, there were now jeeps scouring the desert in search of him and all hell was breaking loose in Security and Personnel. He would catch some of that hell on his return, and avert it with his news about assembly time. Then he noticed that the hut had been cleaned of Nahataspe’s few remaining possessions, even to the door cloth. A pang went through him; had the old man died in the night? He limped from the hut and looked around for a funeral pyre, a crowd of mourners. They were not there; the adobe cubes stood untenanted in the sunlight, and more weeds grew in the single street than he remembered. And his jeep, parked last night against the hut, was missing. There were no wheelrtacks, and

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2'wo Dooms .13 uncrushed weeds grew tall where the jeep had stood. Nahataspe’s God Food had been powerful stuff. Royland’s hand crept uncertainly to his face. No; no beard. He looked about him, looked hard. He made the effort neces- sary to see details. He did not glance at the hut and because it was approximately the same as it had always been, conclude that it was unchanged, eternal. He looked and saw changes every- where. Once-shai'p adobe corners were rounded; protruding roof beams were bleached bone-white by how many years of desert sun? The wooden framing of the deep fortress-hke windows had crum- bled; the third building from him had wavering soot-stains above its window-holes and its beams were charred. He went to it, numbly think- ing: Phase 56c at least is settled. Not old Rip’s baby now. They’ll know me from fingerprints, I guess. One year? Ten? I feel the same. The burnt-out house was a shambles. In one corner were piled dry human bones. Royland leaned dizzily against the door- frame; its charcoal crumbled and streaked his hand. Those skulls were Indian— he was anthropolo- gist enough to know that. Indian men, women and children, slain and piled in a heap. Who kills Indians? There should have been some sign of clothes, burnt rags, but there were none. Who strips Indians naked and kills them? Signs of a dreadful massacre were everywhere in the house. Bulletpocks in the walls, high and low. Savage nicks left by bayonets — and swords? Dark stains of blood; it had run two inches high and left its mark. Metal glinted in a rib cage across the room. Swaying, he walked to tlie boneheap and tlrrust Iris hand into it. The thing bit him fike a razor blade; he did not look at it as he plucked it out and carried it to the dusty street. Widi his back turned to the burnt house he studied his find. It was a piece of swordblade six inches long, hand-honed to a perfect edge, with a couple of nicks in it. It had stiffening ribs and the usual blood gutters. It had a perceptible curve that would fit into only one shape: the Samurai sword of Japan. However long it had taken, the war was obviously over. He went to the village well and found it choktxl with dust. It was wliile he starred into the dry hole that he first became afraid. Suddenly it all was real; he was no more an onlooker but a frightened and very thirsty man. He ransacked the dozen houses of the settlement and found noth- ing to his purpose — a child’s skeleton here, a couple of cart- ridge cases there. There was only one thing left.

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14 VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION and that was the road, the same earth track it had always been, wide enough for one jeep or the rump -sprung station wagon of tlie Indian settlement that once had been. Panic invited him to run; he did not yield. He sat on the well-curb, took off his shoes to meticulously smooth wrinkles out of his khaki G.I. socks, put the shoes on and retied the laces loosely enough to allow for swell- ing, and hesitated a moment. Then he grinned, selected two pebbles carefully from the dust and popped them in his mouth. “Beaver Patrol, forward march,” he said, and began to hike. Yes, he was thirsty; soon he would be hungry and tired; what of it? The dirt road would meet state-maintained blacktop in three miles and then there would be traffic and he’d hitch a ride. Let them argue with his fingerprints if they felt like it. The Japanese had got as far as New Mexico, had they? Then God help their home islands when the counter- blow had come. Americans were a ferocious people when tres- passed on. Conceivably, there was not a Japanese left alive . . . He began to construct his story as he hiked. In large parts it was a repeated “I don’t know.” He would tell them: “I don’t e.xpect you to believe this, so my feel- ings won’t be hurt when you don’t. Just listen to what I say and hold everything until the F.B.I. has checked my finger- prints. My name is—” And so on. It was midmorning then, and he would be on the highway soon. His nostrils, sharpened by hunger, picked up a dozen scents on the desert breeze: the spice of sage, a whiff of acetylene stink from a rattler dozing on the shaded side of a rock, the throat-tightening reek of tar suggested for a moment on the air. That would be the highway, perhaps a recent hotpatch on a chuck hole. Then a startling tang of suKur dioxide drowned them out and passed on, leaving him stung and sniffling and groping for a handkerchief that was not there. What in God’s name had that been, and where from? Without ceasing to trudge he studied the horizon slowly and found a smoke pall to the far west dimly smudging the sky. It looked like a small city’s, or a fair-sized factory’s, pollution. A city or a factory where “in his time”— he formed the thought re- luctantly—there had been none. Then he was at the highway. It had been improved; it was a two-laner still, but it was nicely graded now, built up by perhaps three inches of gravel and tar beyond its old level, and lavishly ditched on either side. If he had a coin he would have tossed it, but you went for weeks without spending a cent at Los Alamos Laboratory; Uncle took care of everything, from cigarettes

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Two Dooms to tombstones. He turned left and began to walk westward toward that sky-smudge. I am a reasonable animal, he was telling himself, and I will accept whatever comes in a spirit of reason. I will control what I can and try to understand the rest— A faint sben scream began be- hind him and built up fast. The reasonable animal jumped for the ditch and hugged it for dear life. The siren howled closer, and motors roared. At the ear--splitting climax Royland put his head up for one glimpse, then fell back into the ditch as if a grenade had exploded in his middle. The convoy roared on, down the center of the two-lane high- way, straddling the white line. First the tliree little recon cars with the twin-mount machine guns, each filled brimful with tliree helmeted Japanese soldiers. Then the high-profiled, armored car of state, six-wheeled, with a probably ceremonial gun turret astern — nickel - plated gunbaiTels are impractical— and the Japanese admiral in the fore-and-aft hat taking his lordly ease beside a rawboned, hatchet-faced SS of- ficer in gleaming black. Then, diminuendo, two more little recon jobs . . . “We’ve lost,” Royland said in his ditch meditatively. “Ceremo- nial tanks with glass windows— we lost a long time ago.” Had 15 there been a Rising Sun insignia or was he now imagining tliat? He climbed out and continued to ti'udge westward on tlie im- proved blacktop. You couldn’t say “I reject the imiverse”; not when you were as thirsty as he was. He didn’t even turn when the put-putting of a westbound vehi- cle grew loud behind him and then stopped at his side. “Zeegail,” a curious voice said. “What are you doing here?” The vehicle was just as odd in its own way as the ceremonial tank. It was minimum motor transportation, a kid’s sled on wheels, powered by a noisy little air-cooled outboard motor. The driver sat with no more comfort than a cleat to back his coccyx against, and behind liim were two twenty-five pound flour sacks that took up all the remaining room the little buckboard provided. Ihe driver had the leathery Southwestern look; he wore a baggy blue outfit that was ob- viously a uniform and obviously unmilitary. He had a name-tape on his breast above an incompre- hensible row of dull ribbons: MARTFIELD, E., 1218824, P/7 NQOTD43. He saw Royland’s eyes on the tape and said kindly: “My name is Martfield— Paymas- ter Seventh, but there’s no need to use my rank here. Are you all right, my man?” “Thirsty,” Royland said, “What’s the NQOTD43 for?”

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16 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION “You can readl” Martfield said, astounded. “Those clothes—” “Something to drink, please,” Royland said. For the moment nothing else mattered in the world. He sat down on the buck- board like a puppet with cut strings. “See here, fellow!” Martfield snapped in a curious, sbangled way, forcing the words through his throat with a stagy, conven- tional effect of controlled anger. “You can stand until I invite you to sit!” “Have you any water?” Row- land asked dully. With the same bark: “Who do you think you are?” “I happen to be a theoretical physicist—” tiredly arguing with a dim seventh-carbon-copy imi- tation of a drill sergeant. “Oh-hoh!” Martfield suddenly laughed. His stiffness vanished; he actually I'eached into his baggy tunic and brought out a pint can- teen that gurgled. He then forgot all about the canteen in his hand, rogueishly dug Rowland in the ribs and said: “I should have suspected. You scientists! Some- body was supposed to pick you up— but he was another scientist, eh? Ah-hah-hah-hah!” Royland took the canteen from his hand and sipped. So a scien- tist was supposed to be an idiot- savant, eh? Never mind now; drink. People said you were not supposed to fill your stomach with water after great thirst; it sounded to him like one of those puritan- ical rules people make up out of nothing because they sound rea- sonable. He finished the canteen while Martfield, Paymaster Sev- enth, looked alarmed, and wished only that there were three or four more of them. “Got any food?” he demanded. Martfield cringed briefly. “Doc^ tor, I regret extremely that I have nothing with me. However if you would do me the honor of riding with me to my quaiters— " “Let’s go,” Royland said. He squatted on the flour sacks and away they chugged at a good thirty miles an hour; it was a fair little engine. The Paymaster Seventh continued deferential, apologizing over his shoulder be- cause there was no wdndscreen, later- dropped his cringing en- tirely to explain that Royland was seated on Aour— “white flour, imderstand?” An over-the-shoul- der wink. He had a friend in the bakery at Los Alamos. Several buckboards passed the other way as they traveled. At each en- counter there was a peering exam- ination of insignia to decide who saluted. Once they met a sketch- ily-enclosed vehide which fur- nished its driver with a low seat instead of obliging him to sit with legs straight out, and Paymaster Seventh Martfield almost dis- located his shoulder saluting first. The driver of that one was a

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Two Dooms 17 Japanese in a kimono. A long curved sword lay across his lap. Mile after mile the smell of sulfur and sulfides increased; finally there rose before them the towers of a Frasch Process layout. It looked hke an oilfield, but in- stead of ground-laid pipelines and bassdrum storage tanks there were foothills of yellow sulfur. They drove between them— more salutes from baggily-unifonned workers with shovels and yard-long Still- son wrenches. Ofi to the right were tilings that might liave been Solvay Process towers for sul- fm'ic acid, and a glittering horror of a neo-Roman administration- and-labs building. The Rising Sun banner fluttered from its central flagstaff. Music surged as they drove deeper into the ai*ea; first it was a welcome counterirritant to tlie pop-pop of the two-cycle buck- board engine, and then a nuisance by itself. Royland looked, an- noyed, for the loudspeakers, and saw them everywhere— on power poles, buildings, gateposts. Schmaltzy Strauss waltzes bathed them like smog, made thinking just a little harder, made commu- nication just a little more blurry even after you had learned to live with the noise. “I miss music in the wilderness,” Martfield confided over his shoul- der. He throttled down the buck- board until they were just rolling; they had passed some line un- recognized by Royland beyond which one did not salute every- body—just the occasional Japan- ese walking by in business suit with blueprint-roll and sliderule, or in kimono with sword. It was a German who nailed Royland, however: a classic jack-booted German in black broadcloth, black leather and plenty of silver trim. He watched them roll for a moment after exclianging salutes with Martfield, made up his mind, and said: “Halt.” The Paymaster Seventh slapped on the brake, killed the engine and popped to attention beside the buckboard. Royland more or less imitated him. The German said, stiffly but without accent: “Whom have you brought here, Paymaster?” “A scientist, sir. I picked him up on the road retruning from Los Alamos with personal supplies. He appears to be a minerals pros- pector who missed a rendezvous, but naturally I have not ques- tioned the Doctor.” The German turned to Royland contemplatively. “So, Doctor. Yoiu name and specialty.” “Dr. Edward Royland,” he said. “I do nuclear power research.” If there was no bomb he’d be damned if he’d invent it now for these people. “So? That is very interesting, considering that there is no such thing as nuclear power research. Which camp are you from?” The

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18 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION Gennan threw an aside to the Paymaster Seventh, who was hterally shaking with fear at the turn things had taken. “You may go. Paymaster. Of course you will report yourself for harboring a fugitive.” “At once, sir,” Martfield said in a sick voice. He moved slowly away pushing the httle buckboard before him. The Strauss waltz oom-pah’d its last chord and in- stantly the loudspeakers struck up a hoppity-hoppity folk dance. “Come with me,” the German said, and walked off, not even looking behind to see whether Royland was obeying. This itself demonstrated how unhkely any disobedience was to succeed. Royland followed at his heels, which of course were garnished with silver spurs. Royland had not seen a horse so far that day. IV A Japanese stopped them politely inside the administration building, a rimless-glasses, office- manager type in a grey suit. “How nice to see you again. Major Kappell Is there anything I might do to help you?” The German stiffened. “I didn’t want to bother your people, Mr. Ito. This fellow appears to be a fugitive from one of our camps; I was going to turn him over to our liaison group for examination and return.” Mr. Ito looked at Royland and slapped his face hard. Royland, by the insanity of sheer reflex, cocked his fist as a red-blooded boy should, but the German’s re- flexes operated also. He had a pistol in his hand and pressed against Royland’s ribs before he could throw the punch. “All right,” Royland said, and put down his hand. Mr. Ito laughed. “You are at least partly right. Major Kappel; he certainly is not from one of our camps! But do not let me delay you further. May I hope for a report on the outcome of this?” “Of course, Mr. Ito,” said the German. He bolstered his pistol and walked on, trailed by tire scientist. Royland heard him grumble something that sounded like “Damned extraterritoriahty!” They descended to a basement level where all the door signs were in Geiman, and in an office labeled Wissenschaftslichesich- ERHEiTSLiAisoN Roylaiid finally told his story. His audience was the major, a fat officer deferen- tially addressed as Colonel Bieder- man, and a bearded old civilian, a Dr. Piqueron, called in from another office. Royland sup- pressed only the matter of bomb research, and did it easily with the old security habit. His im- provised cover story made the Los Alamos Laboratory a research center only for the generation of electricity.

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Two Dooms 19 The three heard him out in silence. Finally, in an amused voice, tire colonel asked: “Who was this Hitler you mentioned?” For that Royland was not pre- pared. His jaw dropped. Major Kappel said: “Oddly enough, he struck on a name which does figure, somewhat in- famously, in the annals of the Third Reich. One Adolf Hitler was an early Party agitator, but as I recall it he intrigued against the Leader during the War of Triumph and was executed.” “An ingenious madman,” the colonel said. “Sterilized, of course?” “Why, I don’t know. I suppose so. Doctor, would you—?” Dr. Piqueron quickly examined Royland and found him all there, which astonished them. Then they thought of looking for his camp tattoo number on the left bicep, and found none. Then, thoroughly upset, they discovered that he had no birth nmnber above his left nipple either. “And,” Dr. Piqueron stam- mered, “his shoes ai-e odd, sir— I just noticed. Sii’, how long since you’ve seen sewn shoes and braided laces?” “You must be hungry,” the colo- nel suddenly said. “Doctor, have my aide get something to eat for —for the doctor.” “Major,” said Royland, “I hope no harm will come to the fellow who picked me up.” “Have no fear, er, doctor,” said the major. “Such humanity! You are of German blood?” “Not that I know of; it may be,” “It must be!” said the colonel. A platter of hash and a glass of beer arrived on a tray. Royland postponed everything. At last he demanded: “Now. Do you believe me? There must be fingerprints to prove my story still in exist- ence.” “I feel like a fool,” the major said. “You still could be hoaxing us. Dr. Piqueron, did not a Ger- man scientist establisli that nu- clear power is a theoretical and practical impossibihty, that one always must put more into it than one can take out?” Piqueron nodded and said rev- erently: “Heisenberg, 1953, dur- ing the War of Triumph. His group was then assigned to elec- trical weapons research and pro- duced the blinding bomb. But this fact does not invalidate the doctor’s story; he says only that his group was attempting to pro- duce nuclear power.” “We’ve got to research this,” said the colonel. “Dr. Piqueron, entertain this man, whatever he is, in your laboratory.” Piqueron’s laboratory down the hall was a place of astounding simplicity, even crudeness. The sinks, reagents and balance were capable only of simple qualitative and quantitative analyses; various works in progress testified that

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20 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION they were not even strained to their modest limits. Samples of sulfur and its compounds were analyzed here. It hardly seemed to call for a “doctor” of anything, and hardly even for a human being. Machinery should be con- tinuously testing the products as they flowed out; variations should be scribed mechanically on a moving tape; automatic controls should at least stop the pi'ocesses and signal an alarm when varia- tion went beyond limits; at most it might correct whatever was going wrong. But here sat Pique- ron every day, titrating, precipi- tating and weighing, entering results by hand in a ledger and telephoning them to the works! Piqueron looked about proudly. “As a physicist you wouldn’t understand all this, of course,” he said. “Shall I explain?” “Perhaps later, doctor, if you’d be good enough. If you’d first help me orient myself—” So Piqueron told him about the War of Triumph (1940-1955) and what came after. V In 1940 the realm of der Fuehrer (Herr Goebbels, of course— that strapping blond fel- low ivith the heroic jaw and eagle’s eye whom you can see in the picture there) was simul- taneously and treacherously in- vaded by the misguided French, the sub-human Slavs and the perfidious British. The attack, for which the shocked Germans coined the name blitzkrieg, was timed to coincide with an in- ternal eruption of sabotage, well- poisoning and assassination by the Zigeunerjuden, or Jewpsies, of whom little is now known; there seem to be none left. By Natmre’s ineluctable law, the Germans had necessarily to be tested to the utmost so that they might fully respond. There- fore Germany was overrun from East and West, and Holy Berlin itself was taken; but Goebbels and his court withdrew like Bar- barossa into the mountain fast- nesses to await their day. It came unexpectedly soon. The deluded Americans launched a million- man amphibious attack on the homeland of the Japanese in 1945. The Japanese resisted with almost Teutonic courage. Not one Ameri- can in twenty reached shore alive, and not one in a hundred got a mile inland. Paiticularly lethal were the women and children who lay in camouflaged pits hug- ging artillery shells and aircraft bombs, which they detonated when enough invaders drew near to make it worth while. The second invasion attempt, a month later, was made up of second-line troops scraped up from everywhere, including oc- cupation duty in Germany. “Literally,” Piqueron said, “the

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Two Dooms Japanese did not know how to surrender so they did not. They could not conquer, but they could and did continue suicidal resist- ance, consuming manpower of the allies and their own woman- power and childpower— a shrewd bargain for tire Japanese! The Russians refused to become in- volved in the Japanese war; they watched with apish delight while two future enemies, as they sup- posed, were engaged in mutual destruction. “A third assault wave broke on Kyushu and gained the island at last. Wliat lay ahead? Only another assault on Honshu, the main island, home of the Emperor and the principal shrines. It was 1946; the volatile, child-like Amer- icans were war-weary and mutin- ous; the best of them were gone by then. In desperation the Anglo- American leaders offered the Russians an economic sphere em- bracing the China coast and Japan as the price of participa- tion.” The Russians grinned and as- sented; they would take that— at least that. They mormted a huge assault for the spring of 1947; they would take Korea and leap off from there for Northern Honshu while the Anglo-Ameri- can forces struck in the south. Surely this would provide at last a symbol before which the Japan- ese might without shame bow down and admit defeat! 21 And then, from the mountain fastnesses, came the radio voice: “Germans! Your Leader calls upon you again!” Followed the Hundred Days Of Glory during which the German Army reconsti- tuted itself and expelled the occu- pation troops— by then, children without combat experience, and leavened by not-quite-disabled veterans. Followed the seizure of the airfields; the Luftwaffe in business again. Followed the drive, almost a dress parade, to the Channel Coast, gobbling up immense mmrition dumps await- ing shipment to the Pacific Theater, millions of warm uni- forms, good boots, mountains of rations, piles of shells and explo- sive that lined the French roads for scores of miles, thousands of two-and-a-half-ton trucks, and lakes of gasoline to fuel them. The shipyards of Europe, from Hamburg to Toulon, had been turning out, furiously, invasion barges for the Pacific. In April of 1947 they sailed against Eng- land in their thousands. Halfway around the world, the British Navy was pounding Tokyo, Nagasaki, Kobe, Hiroshima, Nara. Three quarters of the way across Asia tire Russian Army marched stohdly on; let the decadent Brit- ish pickle their own fish; the glorious motherland at last was gaining her long-sought, long- denied warm-water seacoast. The British, tired women without their

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22 VENTUBE SCIENCE FICTION men, children fatherless these eight years, old folks deathly weary, deathly worried about their sons, were brave but they were not insane. They accepted honorable peace terms; tlrey capi- tulated. With the Western front secure for the first time in history, the ancient Drive to the East was resumed; the immemorial struggle of Teuton against Slav went on. His spectacles glittering with rapture. Dr. Piqueron said: “We were worthy in those days of the Teutonic Knights who seized Prussia from the sub-men! On the ever-glorious Twenty-First of May, Moscow was ours!” Moscow and the monolithic state machinery it controlled, and all the roads and rail lines and communication wii'es which led only to— and from— Moscow. Detroit-built tanks and trucks sped along those roads in the fine, bracing spring weather; the Red Aimy turned one hundred and eighty degrees at last and counter- marched halfway across the Eura- sian landmass, and at Kazan it broke exhausted against the Frederik Line. Europe at last was One and German. Beyond Europe lay the dark and swarming masses of Asia, mysterious and repulsive folk whom it would be better to handle through the non-German, but chivalrous, Japanese. The Japanese were reinforced with shipping from Birkenhead, artil- lery from tlie Putilov Works, jet fighters from Chateauroux, steel from the Ruhr, rice from the Po valley, herring from Norway, timber from Sweden, oil from Romania and laborers from India. American forces were driven from Kyushu in the winter of 1948, and bloodily back across their chain of island stepping- stones during the half-decade that followed. Smi'ender they would not; it was a monstrous affront diat sliield-shaped North America dared to he there between the Gennan Atlantic and the Japa- nese Pacific tlii-ealening both. The affront was wiped out in 1955. For one hundred and fifty years now the Germans and tlie Japa- nese had uneasily eyed each other across the banks of the Missis- sippi. Their orators were fond of referring to that river as a vast frontier unblemished by a single fortification. There was even, in fact, some interpenetration; a Japanese col- ony fished out of Nova Scotia on the very rim of German America; a sulfur mine which was part of the Farben system lay in New Mexico, the very heart of Japa- nese America— this was where Dr. Edward Royland found himself, being lectured to by Dr. Piqueron, Dr. Gaston Pierre Piqueron, true- blue Gennan.

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Two Dooms 23 VI “Here, of course,” Dr. Pique- ron said gloomily, “we are so damned provincial. Little cere- mony and less manners. Well, it would be too much to expect them to assign German Germans to this dreary outpost, so we French Germans must endure it somehow.” “You’re all French?” Royland asked, startled. “French Germans,” Piqueron stifBy corrected him. “Colonel Biederman happens to be a French German also; Major Kap- pel is— hrrmph— an Italian Ger- man.” He sniffed to show what he thought of that. The Italian German entered at that point, not in time to shut off the question: “And you all come from Europe?” They looked at him in baffle- ment. “My grandfather did,” Dr. Piqueron said. Royland remem- bered; so Roman legions used to guard their empire— Romans born and raised in Britain, or on the Danube, Romans who would never in their lives see Italy or Rome. Major Kappel said affably: “Well, this needn’t concern us. I’m afraid, my dear fellow, that your little hoax has not succeeded. He clapped Royland merrily on the back. “I admit you’ve tricked' us all nicely; now may we have the facts?” Piqueron said, surprised: “His story is false? The shoes? The missing geburtsniimmer? And he appears to understand some chem- istry!” “Ah-h-h— but he said his spe- cialty was physics, doctor! Suspi- cious in itself!” “Quite so. A discrepancy. But the rest—?” “As to his birth number, who knows? As to his shoes, who cares? I took some inconspicuous notes while he was entertaining us and have checked thoroughly. There teas no Manhattan Engi- neering District. There was no Dr. Oppenheimer, or Fermi, or Bohr. There is no theory of relativity, or equivalence of mass and energy. Uranium has one use only— coloring glass a pretty orange. There is such a thing as an isotope but it has nothing to do with chemistry; it is the name used in Race Science for a per- missable variation within a sub- race. And what have you to say to that, my dear fellow?” Royland wondered first, such was the positiveness with which Major Kappel spoke, whether he had slipped into a universe of different physical properties and history entirely, one in which Julius Caeser discovered Peru and the oxygen molecule was lighter than the hydrogen atom. He man- aged to speak. “How did you find all that out, major?” “Oh, don’t think I did a skimpy

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VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION 24 job,” Kappel smiled. “I looked it all up in the big encyclopedia.” Dr. Piqueron, chemist, nodded grave approval of tlie majors diligence and thorougli grasp of the scientific method. “You still don’t want to tell us?” Major Kappel asked coax- ingly. “I can only stand by what I said.” ] Kappel shrugged. “It’s not my job to persuade you; I wouldn’t know how to begin. But I can and will ship you off fOrth\vith to a work camp.” “What— is a work camp?” Roy- land unsteadily asked. “Good heavens, man, a camp where one works! You’re obvi- ously an ungleichgeschaltUng and you’ve got to be ^eichgeschaUet.” He did not speak these words as if they were foreign; they were obviously part of the everyday American working vocabulary. GleichgescJuiltet meant to Roy- land something like “coordinated, brought into tune with.” So he would be brought into tune— with what, and how? The Major went on: “You’ll get your clothes and your bunk and your chow, and you’ll work, and eventually your irregular vaga- bondish habits will disappear and you’ll be turned loose on the labor market. And you’ll be damned glad we took the trouble with you.” His face fell. “By the way, I was too late with your friend the Paymaster. I’m sorry. 1 sent a messenger to Disciplinary Con- trol with a stop order. After all, if you took us in for an hour, why should you not have fooled a Pay-Seventh?” “Too late? He’s dead? For pick- ing up a hitchhiker?” “I don’t know what that last word means,” said the Major. “If it’s dialect for Vagabond’, the answer is ordinarily ‘yes.’ The man, after aU, was a Pay-Seventh; he could read. Either you’re keep- ing up your hoax with remarkable fidelity or you’ve been living in isolation. Could that be it? Is there a tribe of you somewhere? Well, the interrogators will find out; that’s their job.” “The Dogpatch legend!” Dr. Piqueron burst out, thunder- struck. “He may be an Abnerite!” “By Heaven,” Major Kappel said slowly, “that might be it. What a feather in my cap to find a living Abnerite.” “Whose cap?” demanded. Dr. Piqueron coldly. “I think I’ll look the Dogpatch legend up,” said Kappel, heading for tlie door and probably the big encyclopedia. “So will I,” Dr. Piqueron an- nounced firmly. The last Roy- land saw of them they were rac- ing down the corridor, neck and neck. Very funny. And they had killed simple-minded Paymaster Martfield for picking up a hitch-

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Two Dooms hiker. The Nazis always had been pretty funny— fat Hermann pre- tending he was young Seigfried. As blond as Hitler, as slim as Goering and as tall as Goebbels. Immature guttersnipes who hadn’t been able to hang a convincing frame on Dimitrov for the Reich- stag fire; the world had roared at their bungling. Huge, corny party rallies with let’s-play-detec- tives nonsense like touching the local flags to that hallowed ban- ner on which the martyred Horst Wessel had had a nosebleed. And they had rolled over Europe, and they killed people. . . . One thing was certain: life in the work camp would at least bore him to death. He was sup- posed to be an illiterate simple- ton, so things were excused him which were not excused an ex- alted Pay-Seventh. He poked through a closet in the comer of the laboratory— he and Piqueron were the same size— He found a natty change of uniform and what must be a civilian suit, somewhat baggy pants and a sort of tunic with the neat, sensible Russian collar. Ob- viously it would be all right to wear it because here it was; just as obviously, it was all wrong for him to be dressed in chinos and a flannel shirt. He did not know exactly what this made him, but Martfield had been done to death for picking up a man in chinos and a flannel shirt. Royland 25 changed into the civilian suit, stuffed his ovra shirt and pants far back on the top shelf of the closet; this was probably conceal- ment enough from those murder- ous clowns. He walked out, and up the stairs, and through the busy lobby, and into the industrial complex. Nobody saluted him and he saluted nobody. He knew where he was going— to a good, sound Japanese laboratory where there were no Germans. Royland had known Japanese students at the University and admired them beyond words. Their brains, frugality, dogged- ness and good humor made them, as far as he was concerned, the most sensible people he had ever known. Tojo and his warlords were not, as far as Royland was concerned, essentially Japanese but just more damfool soldiers and politicians. The real Japa- nese would courteously listen to him, calmly check the facts— He rubbed his cheek and re- membered Mr. Ito and his slap in the face. Well, presumably Mr. Ito was a damfool soldier and politician— and demonstrating for the German’s benefit in a touchy border area full of jurisdiction^ questions. At any rate, he would not go to a labor camp and bust rocks or refinish furniture until those imbeciles decided he was gleich- geschaltet; he would go mad in a month.

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26 VENTURE SCIENCE IfICTION Royland walked to the Solvay towers and followed the glass pipes containing their output of sulfuric acid along the ground until he came to a bottling shed where beetle-browed men worked silently filling great wicker-bas- keted carboys and heaving them outside. He followed other men who levered them up onto hand- trucks and rolled them in one door of a storage shed. Out tlie door at the other end more men loaded them onto enclosed trucks which were driven up from time to time. Royland settled himself in a corner of the storage shed behind a barricade of carboys and lis- tened to the truck dispatcher sweai' at his drivers and the car- boy handlers swear at their car- boys. “Get the goddam Frisco ship- ment loaded, stupid 1 I don’t care if you gotta go, we gotta get it out by midnightl” So a few hours after dark Roy- land was riding west, without much air, and in the dangerous company of one thousand gallons of acid. He hoped he had a care- ful driver. vn A night, a day, and another night on the road. The truck never stopped except to gas up; the drivers took turns and ate sand- wiches at the wheel and dozed oflF shift. It rained the second night. Royland, craftily and per- haps a little crazily, licked the drops that ran down the tar- paulin flap covering the rear. At the first crack of dawn, hunched between two wicker carcasses, he saw they were rolling through irri- gated vegetable fields, and die water in the ditches was too much for him. He heard the trans- mission shift down to slow for a curve, swanned over the tailgate and dropped to the road. He was weak and limp enough to hit like a sack. He got up, ignoring his bruises, and hobbled to one of the brim- ming five-foot ditches; he drank, and drank, and drank. This time puritanical folklore proved right; he lost it all immediately, or what had not been greedily absorbed by his shriveled stomach. He did not mind; it was bliss enough to stretch. The field crop was tomatoes, almost dead ripe. He was starved for them; as he saw the rosy beauties he knew that tomatoes were tlie only thing in the world he craved. He gobbled one so that the juice ran down his chin; he ate the next two delicately, letting his teeth break the crisp- ness of their skin and tlie beauti- ful taste ravish his tongue. There were tomatoes as far as the eye could see, on either side of tlie road, the green of the vines and the red dots of the ripe fruit

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Tivo Dooms graphed by the checkerboard of silvery ditches that caught the first light. Nevei-theless he filled his pockets with them before he walked on. Royland was happy. Farewell to the Gennans and their sordid hash and murderous ways. Look at these beautiful fields! The Japanese are an in- nately artistic people who bring beauty to every detail of daily life. And they make damn good physicists, too. Confined in their stony home, cramped as he had been in the truck, they grew twisted and painful; why should they not have reached out for more room to grow, and what other way is there to reach but to make war? He could be very understanding about any people who had planted these beautiful tomatoes for him. A dark blemish the size of a man attracted his attention. It lay on the margin of one of the swirl- ing five-foot ditches out there to his right. And then it rolled slowly into die ditch with a splash, flmmdered a little and iiroceeded to drown. In a hobbling run Royland broke from the road and across the field. He did not know whether he was limber enough to sivim. As he stood panting on the edge of the ditch, peering into the water, a head of hair surfaced near him. He flung himself down, stretched wildly and grabbed the 27 hair — and yet had detacliment enough to feel a pang when the tomatoes in his tunic pocket smashed. “Steady,” he muttered to him- self, yanked the head toward him, took hold with his other hand and lifted. A surprised face confronted him and then went blank and unconscious. For half an hour Royland, weak as he was, struggled, cursed feebly, and sweated to get that body out of the water. At last he plunged in himself, found it only chest-deep, and shoved the car- cass over the mudslick bank. He did not know by then whether the man was alive or dead or much care. He knew only that he couldn’t walk away and leave the job half-finished. The body was that of a fat, middle-aged Oriental, surely Chinese rather than Japanese, though Royland could not say why he thought so. His clothes were soaked rags except for a leatlier wallet tlie size of a cigar box which he wore on a wide cloth belt. Its sole content was a handsome blue-glazed porcelain bottle. Royland sniffed at it and reeled. Some kind of super-gin! He sniffed again, and then took a conservative gulp of the stuff. While he was still coughing he felt the bottle being removed from his hand. When he looked he saw the Chinese, eyes still closed, accurately guiding the

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28 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION neck of the bottle to his mouth. The Chinese drank and drank and drank, tlien returned the bottle to the wallet and finally opened his eyes. “Honorable sir,” said the Chinese in flat, California Ameri- can speech, “you have deigned to save my unworthy life. May I sup- plicate your honorable name?” “Ah, Royland. Look, take it easy. Don’t try to get up; you shouldn’t even talk.” Somebody screamed behind Royland: “There has been thiev- ing of tomatoes! There has been smasheeng and deestruction of thee vines! Chil-dren you, will bee weet-ness be-fore the Jappa- neese!” Christ, now what? Now a skinny black man, not a Negro, in a dirty loin-cloth, and beside him Hke a pan-pipes five skinny black loin-clothed oflEspring in descending order. All were capering, pointing and threaten- ing. The Chinese groaned, fished in his tattered robes with One hand and pulled out a soggy wad of bills. He peeled one off, held it out and said: “Begone pestilen- tial barbarians from beyond Tian- Shang. My master and I give you alms, not tribute.” The Dravidian, or whatever he was, grabbed the bill and keened: “Een-suffee-cient for the terrible dommage! The Jappa-neese— ” The Chinese waved them away boredly. He said: “If my master will condescend to help me arise?” Royland uncertainly helped him up. The man was wobbly, whether from the near-drowning or the terrific belt of alcohol he’d taken there was no knowing. They proceeded to the road, followed by shrieks to be careful about stepping on the vines. On the road, the Chinese said; “My unworthy name is Li Po. Will my master deign to indicate in which direction we are to travel?” “What’s this master business?” Royland demanded. “If you’re grateful, swell, but I don’t oti>n you.” “My master is pleased to jest,” said Li Po. Politely, face-saving and third-personing Royland until hell wouldn’t have it, he explained that Royland, having meddled with the Celestial decree that Li Po should, while drunk, roll into the irrigation ditch and drown, now had Li Po on his Jiands, for the Celestial Ones had washed theirs of him. “As my master of course will recollect in a moment or two.” Understandingly, he ex- pressed his sympathy with Roy- land’s misfortune in acquiring him as an obligation, especially since he had a hearty appetite, was known to be dishonest, and suffered from fainting fits and spasms when faced with work. “I don’t know about all this,” Royland said fretfully. “Wasn’t there another Li Po? A poet?”

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29 Tico Doams “Your servant prefers to vener- ate his namesake as one of the greatest drunkards the Flowery Kingdom has ever known,” the Chinese observed. And a moment later he bent over, clipped Roy- land behind the knees so that he toppled forward and bumped his head, and performed the same obeisance himself, more grace- fully. A vehicle went sputtering and popping by on the road as they kowtowed. Li Po said reproacMully: “I humbly observe that my master is unaware of the etiquette our noble overlords exact. Such neg- ligence cost the head of my insig- nificant elder brother in his twelfth year. Would my master be pleased to explain how he can have reached his honorable years without learning what babes in their cradles are taught?” Roylaird answered with the whole truth. Li Po politely begged clarification from time to time, and a sketch of his mental hori- zons emerged from his question- ing. That “magic” had whisked Royland forward a century or more he did not doubt for an instant, but he found it difficult to understand why the proper fxmg shut precautions had not been taken to avert a disastrous outcome to the God Food experi- ment. He suspected, from a de- scription of Nahataspe’s hut, that a simjrle wall at right angles to the door would have kept all really important demons out. When Royland described his escape from Gennan territory to Japanese, and why he had ef- fected it, he was very bland and blank. Royland judged that Li Po privately thought him not very bright for having left any place to come here. And Royland hoped he was not right. “Tell me what it’s like,” he said. “This realm,” said Li Po, “under our benevolent and noble over- lords, is the haven of all whose skin is not the bleached-bone hue which indicates the undying curse of tlie Celestial Ones. Hither flock men of Han like my un- worthy self, and the sons of Hind beyond the Tian-Shang that we may till new soil and raise up sons, and sons of sons to venerate us when we ascend.” “What was that bit,” Royland demanded, “about the bleached bones? Do they shoot, ah, white men on sight here, or do they not?” Li Po said evasively: “We are approaching the village where I unworthily serve a^ fortune teller, doctor of fung shut, occasional poet and story teller. Let my master have no fear about his color. This humble one will roughen his master’s skin, tell a circumstantial and artistic lie or two, and pass his master off as merely a leper.”

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30 VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION VIII After a week in Li Po’s village Royland knew that life was good there. The place was a wattle- and-clay settlement of about two hundred souls on the bank of an irrigation ditch large enough to be dignified by the name of “canal”. It was situated nobody knew just where; Royland thought it must be the San Fernando Valley. The soil was thick and rich and bore furiously the year round. A huge kind of radish was the principal crop. It was too coarse to be eaten by man; the villagers understood that it was feed for chickens somewhere up north. At any rate they haivested the stuff, fed it through a great hand-powered sliredder and shade-cmed the shreds. Every few days a Japanese of low caste would come by in a truck, they would load tons of the stuff onto it, and wave their giant radish goodbye forever. Presumably the chickens ate it and Japanese then ate the chickens. The villagers ate chicken too, but only at weddings and fu- nerals. The rest of the time they ate vegetables which they cul- tivated, a quarter-acre to a family, the way other craftsmen facet diamonds. A single cabbage might receive, during its ninety days from planting to maturity, one hundred work-hours from grandmother, grandfather, son. daughter, eldest grandchild and on down to the smallest toddler. Theoretically the entire family line should have starved to death, for there are not one hundred energy-hours in a cabbage; some- how they did not. They merely (Stayed thin and cheerful and hard-working and fecund. They spoke English by Imperial decree; the reasoning seemed to be that they were as unworthy to speak Japanese as to paint the Imperial Chrysanthemum Seal on their houses, and that to let them cling to their old languages and dialects would have been politi- cally unwise. They were a mixed lot of Chinese, Hindus, Dravidians and, to Royland’s surprise, low-caste and outcaste Japanese; he had not known there were such things. Village tradition had it that a samurai named Ugetsu long ago said, pointing at the drunk tank of a Hong Kong jail, “111 have that lot,” and “that lot” had been tlie ancestors of these villagers trans- ported to America in a foul hold practically as ballast and settled here by the canal with orders to start making their radish quota. The place was at any rate called The Ugetsu Village, and if some of the descendants were teetotal- lers, others hke Li Po gave color to the legend of their stalling point. After a week the cheerful pre- tense that he was a sufferer from

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Txvo Dooms 31 Hansen’s disease evaporated and he could wash the mud off his face. He had merely to avoid the upper-caste Japanese and espe- cially the samurai. This was not exactly a stigma; in general it was a good idea for everybody to avoid the samurai. In the village Royland found his first love and his first religion both false. He had settled down; he was getting used to the Oriental work rhythm of slow, repeated, inces- sant effort; it did not surprise him any longer that he could count his ribs. When he ate a bowl of artfully-arranged vegetables, the red of pimiento played off against the yellow of parsnip, a slice of pickled beet adding visual and olfactory tang to the picture, he felt full enough; he loas full enough for the ne.xt day’s feeble work in the field. It was pleasant enough to play slowly witli a wooden mattock in the rich soil; did not people once buy sand so their children might do exactly what he did, and envy their in- nocent absorption? Royland was innocently absorbed, then, and the radish truck had collected six times since his arrival, when he began to feel stirrings of lust. On the edge of starvation (but who knew this? For everybody was) his mind was dulled, but not his loins. They burned, and he looked about him in the fields, and the first girl lie satv who was not repulsive he felt abysmally in love with. Bewildered, he told Li Po, who was also Ugetsu Village’s go-he- tween. The story-teller was de- lighted; he waddled off to seek information and returned. “My master’s choice is wise. The slave on whom his lordly eye deigned to rest is known as VashH, daughter of Hari Bose, the distiller. She is his seventh child and so no great dowry can be expected (I shall ask for fifteen kegs toddy, but would settle for seven), but all this humble village kirows that she is a skilled and willing worker in the hut as in the fields. I fear she has the customary lamentable Hindu talent for concocting cur- ries, but a dozen good beatings at the most should cause her to reserve it to appropriate occasions, such as visits from her mother and sisters.” So, according to the sensible custom of Ugetsu, Vashti came that night to the hut which Roy- land shared with Li Po, and Li Po visited with cronies by his master’s puzzling request. He begged humbly to point out that it would be dark in the hut, so this talk of lacking privacy was inexplicable to say the least. Roy- land made it an order, and Li Po did not really object, so he obeyed it. It was a damnably strange night during which Royland learned all about India’s national sport and

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32 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION most highly developed art-form. Vashti, if she found him weak on the theory side, made no com- plaints. On the contrary, when Royland woke she was doing something or other to his feet. “More?” he thought incredu- lously. “With feet?” He asked what she was doing. Submissively she replied: “Worshipping my lord husband-to-be’s big toe. I am a pious and old-fashioned woman.” So she painted his toe with red paint’* and prayed to it, and then she fixed breakfast— curry, and ex- cellent. She watched him eat, and then modestly licked his leavings from the bowl. She handed him his clothes, which she had washed while he still slept, and helped him into them after she helped him wash. Royland thought incre- dulously: “It’s not possiblel It must be a show, to sell me on marrying her— as if I had to be sold!” His heart turned to custard as he saw her, without a moment’s pause, turn from dressing him to polishing his wooden rake. He asked that day in the field, round- about-fashion, and learned that this was the kind of service he could look forward to for the rest of his life after mairiage. If the woman got lazy he’d have to beat her, but this seldom hap- pened more than every year or so. We have good girls here in Ugetsu Village. So an Ugetsu Village peasant was in some ways better off than anybody from “his time” who was less than a millionaire! His staiwed dullness was such that he did not realize this was true for only half the Ugetsu Vil- lage peasants. Religion sneaked up on him in similar fashion. He went to the part-time Taoist priest because he was a little bored with Li Po’s current after-dinner saga. He could have sat like all the others and listened passively to the in- terminable tale of the glorious Yellow Emperor, and the beauti- ful but wicked Princess Emerald, and the virtuous but plain Prin- cess Moon Blossom; it just hap- pened that he went to the priest of Tao and got hooked hard. The kindly old man, a tool- maker by day, dropped a few pearls of wisdom which, in his foggy starvation-daze, Royland did not perceive to be pearls of undemonstrable nonsense, and showed Royland how to medi- tate. It worked the first time. Royland bunged right smack through into a 200-proof state of samadhi— the Eastern version of self-hypnotized Enlightenment— that made him feel wonderful and all-knowing and left him without a hangover when it wore off. He had despised, in college, the type of people who took psychology courses and so had taken none himself; he did not know a thing about self-hypnosis except as just

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Two Dooms 33 demonstrated by this very nice old gentleman. For several days he was offensively religious and kept trying to talk to Li Po about tire Eightfold Way, and Li Po kept changing the subject. It took murder to bring him out of love and religion. At twilight they were all sitting and listening to Ae story teller as usual. Royland had been there just one month and for all he knew would be there forever. He soon would have his bride offi- cially; he knew he had discovered The Trutli About the Universe by way of Tao meditation; why should he change? Changing de- manded a furious outburst of energy, and he did not have energy on that scale. He metered out his energy day and night; one had to save so much for tonight’s love-play, and then one had to save so much for tomor- row’s planting. He was a poor man; he could not afford to change. Li Po had reached a rather interesting bit where the Yellow Emperor was declaiming hotly: “Then she shall die! Whoever dare transgress Our divine will—” A flashlight began to play over their faces. They perceived tliat it was in the hand of a samurai with kimono and sword. Every- body hastily kowtowed, but the samurai shouted irritably ( all samurai were irritable, all the time): “Sit up, you fools! I want to see your stupid faces. I hear there’s a peculiar one in this flea- bitten dung-heap you call a vil- lage.” Well, by now Royland knew his duty. He rose and with do\vncast eyes asked: “Is the noble protector in search of my unworthy self?” “Ha!” the samurai roared. “It’s true! A big nose!” He hurled tire flashlight away (all samurai were nobly contemptuous of tlie merely material), held his scabbard in his left hand and swept out the long curved sword with his right. Li Po stepped forward and said in his most enchanting voice: “If the Heaven-bom woidd only deign to heed a word from this humble—” What he must have known would happen happened. With a contemptuous backhand sweep of the blade the samurai beheaded him and Li Po’s debt was paid. Tire ti-unk of the story teller stood for a moment and then fell stiffly forwai'd. The samurai stooped to wipe his blade clean on Li Po’s ragged robes. Royland had forgotten much, but not everytliing. With the vil- lagers scattering before him he plunged forward and tackled the samurai low and hard. No doubt the samurai was a Brown Belt judo master; if so he had nobody but himself to blame for tm-ning his back. Royland, not remember- ing that he was barefoot, tried to kick the samurais face in. He

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34 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION broke his worsliipful big toe, but its untrimmed horny nail removed the left eye of the warrior and after that it was no contest. He never let the samurai get up off the ground; he took out his other eye with the handle of a rake and then killed him an inch at a time with his hands, his feet, and the clownish rustic’s traditional wea- pon, a flail. It took easily half an hour, and for the final twenty minutes the samurai was scream- ing for his mother. He died when the last light left the western sky, and in darkness Royland stood quite alone with the two corpses. The villagers were gone. He assumed, or pretended, that they were within earshot and yelled at them . brokenly: “I’m sorry, Vashti. I’m sorry, aU of you. Tm going. Can I make you understand? “Listen. You aren’t living. This isn’t life. You’re not making any- thing but babies, you’re not chang- ing, you’re not growing up. That’s not enough! You’ve got to read and write. You can’t pass on any- thing but baby-stories like the Yellow Emperor by word of mouth. The village is growing. Soon your fields will touch the fields of Sukoshi Village to the west, and then what happens? You won’t know what to do, so you’ll fight with Sukoshi Village. “Religion. No! It’s just getting drunk the way you do it. You’re set up for it by being half-star\'ed and then you go into samadhi and you feel better so you tliink you understand everything. No! You’ve got to do things. If you don’t grow up, you die. All of you. “Women. That’s wrong. It’s good for the men, but it’s wrong. Half of you are slaves, do you understand? Women are people too, but you use them like animals and you’ve convinced them it’s right for them to be old at thirty. For God’s sake, can’t you try to think of yourselves in their place? “The breeding, the crazy breed- ing—it’s got to stop. You frugal Orientals! But you aren’t frugal; you’re crazy drunken sailors. You’re squandering the whole world. Every mouth you breed has got to be fed by the land, and the land isn’t infinite. “I hope some of you understood. Li Po would have, a little, but he’s dead. “I’m going away now. You’ve been kind to me and all I’ve done is make trouble. I’m sorry.” He fumbled on the ground and found the samurai’s flashlight. With it he hunted the village’s outskirts until he found the Japa- nese’s buckboard car. He started the motor with its crank and noisily rolled down the dirt track from tire village to the highway. IX Royland drove all night, still westward. His knowledge of

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Two Dooms southern California’s geography was inexact, but he hoped to hit Los Angeles. There might be a chance of losing himself in a great city. He had long since abandoned hope of finding present-day counterparts of his old classmates like Jimmy Ichimura; obviously they had lost out. Why shouldn’t they have lost? The soldier-poli- ticians had won the war by hap- penstance, so all power to the sol- dier-politicians! Reasoning under the great natural law post hoc ergo propter hoc, Tojo and his crowd had decided: fanatic feudalism won the war; therefore fanatic feudalism is a good thing, and it necessarily follows that the more fanatical and feudal it is, the better a thing it is. So you had Siokoshi Village, and Ugetsu Vil- lage; Ichi Village, Ni Village, San Village, Shi Village, dotting that part of Great Japan formerly known as North America, breed- ing with the good old fanatic feudalism and so feudally averse to new thought and innova- tions that it made you want to scream at them— which he had. The single weak headlight of his buckboard passed few otliers on the road; a decent feudal vil- lage is self-contained. Damn them and their suicidal cheerfulness! It was a pleasant trait; it was a fool in a canoe ap- proaching the rapids saying: “Chin up! Everything’s going to 35 be all right if we just keep smil- ing.” The car ran out of gas when false dawn first began to pale the sky behind him. He pushed it into the roadside ditch and walked on; by full hght he was in a tumble- down, planless, evil - smelling, paper-and-galvanized-iron city whose name he did not know. There was no likelihood of him being noticed as a “white” man by anyone not specifically look- ing for him. A month of outdoor labor had browned him, and a month of artistically-composed vegetable plates had left him gaunt. The city was carpeted with awakening humanity. Its narrow streets were paved with sprawled- out men, women and children beginning to stir and hawk up phlegm and rub their rheumy eyes. An open sewer-latrine run- ning down the center of each street was casually used, ostrich- fashion— the users hid their own eyes while in action. Every mangled variety of English rang in Royland’s ears as he trod between bodies. There had to be something more, he told himself. This was the shabby industrial outskirts, the lowest marginal-labor area. Somewhere in the city there was beauty, science, learning! He walked aimlessly plodding until noon, and found nothing of the sort. These people in the

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36 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION cities were food-handlers, food- traders, food- transporters. They took in one another’s vs^ashing and sold one another chop suey. They made automobiles (Yes! There were one-family automobile fac- tories which probably made six buckboards a year, filing all metal parts by hand out of bar stock!) and orange crates and baskets and coffins; abacuses, nails and boots. The Mysterious East has done it again, he thought bitterly. The Indians-Chinese-Japanese won themselves a nice sparse area. They could have laid things out neatly and made it pleasant for everybody instead of for a minute speck of aristocracy which he was unable even to detect in this human soup . . . but they had done it again. They had bred ir- responsibly just as fast as they could until the land was full. Only famines and pestilence could “help” them now. He found exactly one building which owned some clear space around it and which would sur- vive an earthquake or a flicked cigarette butt. It was the Ger- man Consulate. I’ll give them the Bomb, he said to himself. Why not? None of this is mine. And for the Bomb I’ll exact a price of some comfort and dignity for as long as I live. Let them blow one another up! He climbed the consulate steps. To the black-uniformed guard at the swastika-trimmed bronze doors he said; “Wenn die Licht~ staerke der von einer Flaeche kommenden Strahlung dem Cosi- nus des Winkels zwischen Strahl- richtung und Flaechennornialen proportional ist, so nennen wir die Flaeche eine volkommen streunde Flaeche.” Lambert’s Law, Optics I. All the Goethe he remembered happened to rhyme, which might have made the guard suspicious. Naturally the German came to attention and said apologetically: “I don’t speak German. What is it, sir?” “You may take me to the con- sul,” Royland said, affecting bore- dom. “Yes, sir. At once, sir. Er, you’re an agent of course, sir?” Royland said witheringly; “Sicherheit, bittel” “Yessir. This way, sir!” K The consul was a considerate, understanding gentleman. He was somewhat surprised by Roy- land’s true tale, but said from time to time: “I see; I see. Not impossible. Please go on.” Royland concluded: “Those people at the sulfur mine were, I hope, unrepresentative. One of them at least complained that it was a dreary sort of backwoods assignment. I am simply gambling that there is intelligence in your Reich. I ask you to get me a real physicist for twenty minutes of

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Two Dooms conversation. You, Mr. Consul, will not regret it. I am in a posi- tion to turn over considerable in- formation on— atomic pow'er.” So he had not been able to say it after all; the Bomb was still an obscene kick below the belt. “This has been very interest- ing, Dr. Royland,” said the consul gravely. “You refen'ed to your en- terprise as a gamble. I too shall gamble. ^Vhat have I to lose by putting you en rapport with a scientist of ours if you prove to be a plausible lunatic?” He smiled to soften it. “Very little indeed. On the other hand, what have I to gain if your extraordinary story is quite tiTie? A great deal. I will go along with you, doctor. Have you eaten?” The relief was tremendous. He had lunch in a basement kitchen with the Consulate guards — a huge lunch, a rather nasty lunch of stewed lungen with a floured gravy, and cup after cup of coffee. Finally one of the guards lit up an ugly little spindle-shaped cigar, the kind Royland had only seen before in the caricatures of George Grosz, and as an afterthought of- fered one to him. He drank in the rank smoke and managed not to cough. It stung his mouth and cut the greasy aftertaste of the stew sat- isfactorily. One of the blessings of the Third Reich, one of its gross pleasures. They were just people, after all— a certain censorious, 37 busy-body type of person with altogether too much power, but they were human. By which he meant, he supposed, members of Western Industrial Culture like him. After lunch he was taken by truck from the city to an airfield by one of the guards. The plane was somewhat bigger than a B-29 he had once seen, and lacked propellers. He presumed it was one of the “jets” Dr. Piqueron had mentioned. His, guard gave his dossier to a Luftwaffe sergeant at the foot of the ramp and said cheerfully; “Happy landings, fel- low. It’s all going to be all right.” “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll remem- ber you. Corporal Collins. You’ve been very helpful.” Collins turned away. Royland climbed the ramp into the barrel of the plane. A bucket- seat job, and most of the seats were filled. He dropped into one on the very narrow aisle. His neighbor was in rags; his face showed signs of an old beating. When Royland addressed him he simply cringed away and began to sob. The Luftwaffe sergeant came up, entered and slammed the door. The “jets” began to wind up, making an unbelievable racket; further conversation was impos- sible. While the plane taxied, Royland peered through the win- dowless gloom at his fellow-pas- sengers. They all looked poor.

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38 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION God, were they so quickly and quietly airborne? They were. Even in the bucket seat, Royland fell asleep. He was awakened, he did not know how much later, by the sergeant. The man was shaking his shoulder and asking him: “Any joolery hid away? Watches? Got some nice fresh water to sell to people that wanna buy it.” Royland had nothing, and wordd not take part in the miser- able little racket if he had. He shook his head indignantly and the man moved on with a grin. He would not last long! — petty chiselers were leaks in the effi- cient dictatorship; they were rap- idly detected and stopped up. Mussolini made the trains run on time, after all. (But naggingly Royland recalled mentioning this to a Northwestern University English professor, one Bevans. Bevans had coldly informed him that from 1931 to 1936 he had lived under Mussolini as a student and tourist guide, and therefore had extraordinary opportunities for observing whether the trains ran on time or not, and could definitely state that they did not; that railway time-tables under Mussolini were best regarded as humorous fiction.) And another thought nagged at him, a thought connected with a pale, scarred face named Bloom. Bloom was a young refugee physi- cal chemist working on Weapons Development Track I, and he was somewhat crazy, perhaps. Royland, on Track III, used to see little of him and could have done with even less. You couldn’t say hello to the man without it turning into a lecture on the hor- rors of Nazism. He had wild stories about “gas chambers” and crematoria which no reasonable man could believe, and was a blanket slanderer of the German medical profession. He claimed that trained doctors, certified men, used human beings in experi- ments which terminated fatally. Once, to try and bring Bloom to reason, he asked what sort of ex- periments these were, but the monomaniac had heard that worked out, piffiing nonsense about reviving mortally frozen men by putting naked \vomen into bed with them! The man was probably sexually deranged to be- lieve that; he naively added that one variable in the series of ex- periments was to use women im- mediately after sexual intercourse, one hour after sexual intercourse, etcetera. Royland had blushed for him and violently changed the subject. But that was not what he was groping for. Neither was Bloom’s crazy story about the woman who made lampshades from the tat- tooed skin of concentration camp prisoners; there were people capa- ble of such things, of course, but under no regime whatever do

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Two Dooms 39 they rise to positions of authority; they simply can’t do the work re- quired in positions of authority because their insanity gets in the way. “Know your enemy,” of course —but making up pointless lies? At least Bloom was not the conscious prevaricator. He got letters in Yiddish from friends and rela- tions in Palestine, and these were ladeir with the latest wild rumors supposed to be based on the latest word from “escapees.” Now he remembered. In the cafeteria about three months ago Bloom had been sipping tea with somewhat shaking hand and rereading a letter. Royland tried to pass him with only a nod, but the skinny hand shot out and held liim. Bloom looked up with tears in his eyes: “It’s cruel. I’m tellink you, Royland, it’s cruel. They’re not givink them the right to scream, to strike a futile blow, to sayink prayers Kiddush ha Shem like a Jew should when he is dyink for Consecration of the Name! They trick them, they say they go to farm settlements, to labor camps, so four-five of the stinkink bastards can handle a whole trainload Jews. They trick the clothes off of them at the camps, they sayink they delouse them. They trick them into room says showerbath over the door and then is too late to sayink prayers; then goes on the gas.” Bloom had let go of him and put his head on the table between his hands. Royland had mumbled something, patted his shoulder and walked on, shaken. For once the neurotic little man might have got some straight facts. That was a very circumstantial touch about expediting the handling of pris- oners by systematic lies— always the carrot and the stick. Yes, everybody had been so goddamn agreeable since he climbed the Consulate stepsl The friendly door guard, the Consul who nodded and remarked that his story was not an impossible one, the men he’d eaten with— all that quiet optimism. “Thanks. I’ll remember you. Corporal Col- lins. You’ve been very helpful.” He had felt positively benign toward the corporal, and now re- membered that the corporal had turned around very quickly after he spoke. To hide a grin? The guard was working his way down the aisle again and no- ticed that Royland was awake. “Changed your mind by now?” he asked kindly. “Got a good watch, maybe I’ll find a piece of bread for you. You won’t need a watch where you’re going, fella.” “What do you mean?” Royland demanded. The guard said soothingly: “Why, they got clocks aU over them work camps, fella. Every- body knows what time it is in them work camps. You don’t need

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40 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION no watches there. Watches just get in the way at them work camps.” He went on down the aisle, quickly. Royland reached across the aisle and, like Bloom, gripped the man who sat opposite him. He could not see much of him; the huge windowless plane was lit only by half a dozen stingy bulbs overhead. “What are you here for?” he asked. The man said shakily; ‘Tm a Laborer Two, see? A Two. Well, my father he taught me to read, see, but he waited until I was ten and knew the score, see? So I figured it was a family tiadition, so I taught my own kid to read because he was a pretty smart kid, ya know? I figured he’d have some fun reading hke I did, no harm done, who’s to know, ya know? But I should of waited a couple years, I guess, because the kid was too young and got to bragging he could read, ya know how kids do? I’m from St. Louis, by the way. I should of said first I’m from St. Louis a track main- tenance man, see, so I hopped a string of returning empties for San Diego because I was scared like you get.” He took a deep sigh. “Thirsty,” he said. “Got in with some Chinks, nobody to trouble ya ya stay outta the way, but then one of them cops-like seen me and he took me to the Consul place like they do, ya know? Had me scared, they always tole me illegal read- ing they bump ya off, but they don’t ya know? Two years work camp, how about that?” Yes, Royland wondered. How about it? The plane decelerated sharply; he was thrown forward. Could they brake with those “jets” by reversing the stream or were the engines just throttling down? He heard gurgling and thudding; hydraulic fluid to the actuators letting down the landing gear. The wheels bumped a moment later and he braced himself; the plane was still and the motors cut off seconds later. Their Luftwaffe sergeant un- locked the door and bawled through it: “Shove that goddam ramp, willya?” The sergeant’s as- surance had dropped from him; he looked like a very scared man. He must have been a very brave one, really, to have let himself be locked in with a hundred doomed men, protected only by an eight- shot pistol and a chain of sys- tematic lies. XI They were herded out of the plane onto a runway of what Roy- land immediately identified as the Chicago Municipal Airport. The same reek wafted from the stock- yards; the row of airline build- ings at the eastern edge of the field was ancient and patched but

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Two Dooms 41 unchanged; the hangars though were now something that looked like inflated plastic bags. A good trick. Beyond tire buildings surely lay the dreary red-brick and painted-siding wastes of Cicero, Illinois. Luftwaffe men were yapping at them: “Form up, boys; make a line! Work means freedom! Look tall!” They shuffled and were shoved into columns of fours. A snappy majorette in shiny satin panties and white boots pranced out of an administration build- ing twirling her baton; a noisy march blared from louvers in her tall fur hat. Another good trick. “Forward march, boys,” she shrilled at them. “Wouldn’t y’all just like to follow me?” Seductive smile and a wiggle of the rump; a judas ewe. She strutted off in time to the music; she must have been wearing earstopples. They shuffled after her. At the airport gate they dropped their blue- coated Luftwaffe boys and picked up a waiting escort of a dozen black-coats with skulls on their high-peaked caps. They walked in time to the music, hypnotized by it, through Cicero. Cicero had been bombed to hell and not rebuilt. To his sur- prise Royland felt a pang for the vanished Poles and Slovaks of Al’s old baihwick. There were German Germans, French Germans and even Italian Gennans, but he knew in his bones that there were no Polish or Slovakian Germans. . . . And Bloom had been right all along. Deathly weary after two hours of marching (the majorette was indefatigable) Royland looked up from the broken pavement to see a cockeyed wonder before him. It was a Castle; it was a Nightmare; it was the Chicago Parteihof. The thing abutted Lake Michi- gan; it covered perhaps sixteen city blocks. It frowned down on the lake at the east and at the tumbled acres of bombed-out Chicago at the north, west and south. It was made of steel- reinforced concrete grained and grooved to look like medieval masonry. It was walled, moated, portcullis-ed, towered, ramparted, crenellated. The death’s-head guards looked at it reverently and the prisoners with fright. Royland wanted only to laugh wildly. It was a Disney production. It was as funny as Hermann Goering in full fig, and probably as deadly. With a mumbo-jumbo of pass- words, heils and salutes they were admitted, and the majorette went away, no doubt to take off her boots and groan. The most bedecked of tire death’s-heads lined them up and said affably: “Hot dinner and your beds presently, my boys; first a selection. Some of you, I’m afraid, aren’t well and should be in sick-bay. Who’s sick? Raise your hands, please.”

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42 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION A few hands crept up. Stooped old men. “That’s right. Step forward, please.” Then he went down the line tapping a man here and there —one fellow with glaucoma, an- other with terrible varicose sores visible through the tattered pants he wore. Mutely they stepped forward. Royland he looked thoughtfully over. “You’re thin, my boy,” he observed. “Stomach pains? Vomit blood? Tarry stools in the morning?” “Nossir!” Royland barked. The man laughed and continued down the line. The “sick bay” detail was marched off. Most of them were weeping silently; they knew. Everybody knew; everybody pre- tended that the terrible thing would not, might not, happen. It was much more complex than Royland had realized. “Now,” said the death’s-head affably, “we require some compe- tent cement workers—” The line of remaining men went mad. They surged forward almost touching the officer but never stepping over an invisible line surrounding him. “Me!” some yelled. “Mel Me!” Another cried; “I’m good with my hands, I can learn. I’m a machinist too. I’m strong and young, I can learn!” A heavy middle-aged one waved his hands in the air and boomed: “Grouting and tile-setting! Grout- ing and tile-setting!” Royland stood alone, horrified. They knew. They knew this was an offer of real work that would keep them alive for a while. He knew suddenly how to live in a world of lies. The officer lost his patience in a moment or two, and whips came out. Men with their faces bleed- ing struggled back into line. “Raise your hands, you cement people, and no lying, please. But you wouldn’t lie, would you?” He picked half a dozen volunteers after questioning them briefly, and one of his men marched them off. Among them was the grout- ing-and-tile man, who looked pompously pleased with himself; such was the reward of diligence and virtue, he seemed to be pro- claiming; pooh to those grasshop- pers back there who neglected to leam A Trade. “Now,” said the officer casually, “we require some laboratory as- sistants.” The chill of death stole down the line of prisoners. Each one seemed to shrivel into him- self, become poker-faced, imply that he wasn’t really involved in all this. Royland raised his hand. The officer looked at him in stupefac- tion and then covered up quickly. “Splendid,” he said. “Step for- ward, my boy. You,” he pointed at another man. “You have an intel- ligent forehead; you look as if you’d make a fine laboratory as- sistant. Step forward.” “Please, no!’’ the man begged.

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Two Dooms 43 He fell to his knees and clasped his hands in supplication. “Please nol” The officer took out his whip meditatively; the man groaned, scrambled to his feet and quickly stood beside Royland. When there were four more chosen, they were marched off across tire concrete yard into one of the absurd towers, and up a spiral staircase and down a cor- ridor, and through the promenade at the back of an auditorium where a woman screamed Ger- man from the stage at an audience of women. And through a tunnel, and down the corridor of an ele- mentary school with empty class- rooms full of small desks on either side. And into a hospital area where tlie fake-masomy walls yielded to scrubbed white tile and the fake flagstones underfoot to composition flooring and the fake pinewood torches in bronze brackets that had lighted their way to fluorescent tubes. At the door marked Rassenwis- SENSCHAFT the guard rapped and a fi'osty-faced man in a labora- tory coat opened up. “You requi- sitioned a demonstrator. Dr. Kalten,” the guard said. “Pick any one of these.” Dr. Kalten looked diem over. “Oh, this one, I suppose,” he said. Royland. "Come in, fellow.” The Race Science Laboratory of Dr. Kalten proved to be a de- cent medical setup with an oper- ating table, intricate charts of the races of men and their anatomical, mental and moral makeups. There was also a phrenological head diagram and a horoscope on the wall, and an arrangement of ght- tering crystals on wire which Roy- land recognized. It was a model of one Hans Hoerbiger s crackpot theory of planetary formation, tlie Welteislehre. “Sit there,” the doctor said, pointing to a stool. “First I’ve got to take your pedigree. By the way, you might as well know that you’re going to end up dissected for my demonstration in Race Science III for the Medical School, and your degree of co- operation will determine whether the dissection is performed under anaesthesia or not. Clear?” “Clear, doctor.” "Curious— no panic. I’ll wager we find you’re a proto-Hamitoidal hemi-Nordic of at least degree five . . . but let’s get on. Name?” “Edward Royland.” “Birthdate?” “July second, 1923.” The doctor threw down his pen- cil. “If my previous explanation was inadequate,” he shouted, “let me add that if you continue to be difficult I may turn you over to my good friend Dr. Herzbrenner. Dr. Herzbrenner happens to teach interrogation technique at the Gestapo School. Do— you— now— understand?" “Yes, doctor. I’m sony I cannot withdraw my answer."

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44 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION Dr. Kalten turned elaborately sarcastic. “How then do you ac- count for your remarkable state of preservation at your age of ap- proximately 180 years?” “Doctor, I am twenty-three years old. I have travelled through time.” “Indeed?” Kalten was amused. “And how was this done?” Royland said steadily: “A spell was put on me by a satanic Jewish magician. It involved the ritual murder and desanguination of seven beautiful Nordic virgins.” Dr. Kalten gaped for a moment. Then he picked up his pencil and said firmly: “You will understand that my doubts were logical under the circumstances. Why did you not give me the sound scientific basis for your surprising claim at once? Go ahead; tell me all about it.” xn He was Dr. Kalten’s prize; ho was Dr. Kalten’s treasure. His peculiarities of speech, his other- wise-inexplicable absence of a birth-number over his left nipple, when they got around to it the gold filling in one of his teeth, his uncanny knowledge of Old America, now had a simple scien- tific explanation. He was from 1944. What was so hard to grasp about that? Any sound specialist knew about the lost Jewish Kab- balah magic, golems and such. His story was that he had been a student Race Scientist under the pioneering master William D. Fully. (A noisy whack who used to barnstorm the chaw-and-gallus belt with the backing of Deutches Neues Buro; sure enough they found him in Volume VII of the standard hrtroduction to a Historical Handbook of Race Science.) The Jewish fiends had attempted to ambush his master on a lonely road; Royland per- suaded him to switch hats and coats; in the darkness the substi- tution was not noticed. Later, in their stronghold he was identified, but the Nordic virgins had al- ready been ritually murdered and drained of their blood, and it wouldn’t keep. The diie fate des- tined for the master had been visited upon the disciple. Dr. Kalten loved that bit. It tickled him pink that the sub- men’s “revenge” on their enemy had been to precipitate him into a world purged of the sub-men entirely, where a Nordic might breathe freely! Kalten, except for discreet con- sultations with such people as Old America specialists, a dentist who was stupefied by the gold filling, and a dermatologist who established that there was not and never had been a geburtsnummer on the subject examined, was playing Royland close to his vest. After a week it became apparent that he was reserving Royland for

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Tu>o Dooms 45 a grand unveiling which would climax the reading of a paper. Royland did not want to be un- veiled; there were too many holes in his story. He talked with ani- mation about the beauties of Mexico in the spring, its fair mesas, cactus and mushrooms. Could they make a short trip there? Dr. Kalten said they could not. Royland was becoming rest- less? Let him study, learn, profit by the matchless arsenal of the sciences available here in Chi- cago Parteihof. Dear old Chicago boasted distinguished exponents of the World Ice Theoiy, the Hollow World Theory, Dowsing, Homeopathic Medicine, Curative Folk Botany— That last did sound interesting. Dr. Kalten was pleased to take his prize to the Medical School and introduce him as a protege to Pi’o- fessor Albiani, of Folk Botany. Albiani was a bearded gnome out of the Arthur Rackham illus- trations for Das Rheingold. He loved his subject. “Mother Nature, the all-bounteous one! Wander the fields, young man, and with a seeing eye in an hour’s stroll you will find the ergot that aborts, the dill that cools fever, the tansy that strengthens the old, the poppy that soothes the fretful teething babe!” “Do you have any hallucino- genic Mexican mushrooms?” Roy- land demanded. “We may,” Albiani said, sur- prised. They browsed through the Folk Botany museum and pored over dried vegetation under glass. From Mexico there were peyote, the buttons and the root, and there was marihuana, root, stem, seed and stalk. No mushrooms. “They may be in the store- room,” Albiani muttered. All the rest of the day Roy- land mucked through the store- room where specimens were wait- ing for exhibit space on some rotation plan. He went to Albiani and said, a little wild- eyed: “They’re not there.” Albiani had been interested enough to look up the mushrooms in question in the reference books. “See?” he said happily, pointing to a handsome color plate of the mushroom: growing, mature, sporing and dried. He read: “ ‘ . . . superstitiously called “God Food,” ’ ” and twinkled through his beard at the joke, . “They’re not there,” Royland said. The professor, annoyed at last, said: “There might be some un- catalogued in the basement. Really, we don’t have room for everything in our limited display space— just the interesting items.” Royland pulled himself to- gether and charmed the location of the department’s basement storage space out of him, together with permission to inspect it. And, left alone for a moment, ripped the color plate from the pro-

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VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 46 fessor’s book and stowed it away. That night Royland and Dr. Kalten walked out on one of the innumerable tower-tops for a final cigar. The moon was high and full; its light turned the cratered terrain that had been Chicago into another moon. The sage and his disciple from another day leaned their elbows on a crenel- lated rampart two hundred feet above Lake Michigan. “Edward,” said Dr. Kalten, “I shall read my paper tomorrow be- fore the Chicago Academy of Race Science.” The words were a challenge; something was wrong. He went on; “I shall expect you to be in the wings of the audi- torium, and to appear at my com- mand to answer a few questions from me and, if time permits, from our audience.” “I wish it could be postponed,” Royland said. “No doubt.” “Would you explain your un- friendly tone of voice, doctor?” Royland demanded. “I think I’ve been completely cooperative and have opened the way for you to win undying fame in the annals of Race Science.” “Cooperative, yes. Candid — I wonder? You see, Edward, a dreadful thought struck me today. I have always tliought it amusing that the Jewish attack on Rev- erend Fully should have been for the purpose of precipitating him into the future and that it should have mis-fired.” He took some- thing out of his pocket: a small pistol. He aimed it casually at Royland. “Today I began to won- der why they should have done so. Why did they not simply murder him, as tliey did fliou- sands, and dispose of him in their secret crematoria, and permit no mention in their controlled news- papers and magazines of the dis- appearance? “Now, the blood of seven Nor- dic virgins can have been no cheap commodity. One pictures with ease Nordic men patrolling their precious enclaves of human- ity, eyes roving over every pass- ing face, noting who bears die stigmata of the sub-men, and fol- lowing those who do most care- fully indeed lest race-defilement be committed with a look or an ‘accidental’ touch in a crowded street. Nevertheless the thing was done; your presence here is proof of it. It must have been done at enormous cost; hired Slavs and Negroes must have been em- ployed to kidnap the virgins, and many of them must have fallen before Nordic rage. “This merely to silence one small voice crying in the wil- derness? I— think— not. I think, Edward Royland, or whatever your real name may be, that Jew- ish arrogance sent you, a Jew yourself, into the future as a greeting from the Jewry of that day to what it foolishly thought

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Two Dooms 47 would be the triumphant Jewry of this. At any rate, the pubhc questioning tomorrow will be con- ducted by my friend Dr. Hertz- brunner, whom I have mentioned to you. If you have any little secrets, they will not remain secrets long. No, no! Do not move towards me. I shall shoot you dis- abhngly in the knee if you do.” Royland moved toward him and the gun went off; there was an agonizing hammer blow high on his left shin. He picked up Kalten and hurled him, scream- ing, over the parapet two hundred feet into the water. And collapsed. The pain was horrible. His shin- bone was badly cracked if not broken through. There was not much bleeding; maybe there would be later. He need not fear that the shot and scream would rouse the castle. Such sounds were common in the Medical Wing. He dragged himself, injured leg trailing, to the doorway of Kalten’s living quarters; he heaved himself into a chair by the signal bell and threw a rug over his legs. He rang for the diener and told him very quietly: “Go to the medical storeroom for a leg U-brace and whatever is neces- sary for a cast, please. Dr. Kalten has an interesting idea he wishes to work out.” He should have asked for a syringe of morphine — no he shouldn’t. It might affect the time-distortion. When the man came back he thanked him and told him to turn in for the night. He almost screamed getting his shoe off; his trouser leg he cut away. The gauze had arrived just in time; the wound was begin- ning to bleed more copiously. Pressure seemed to stop it. He constructed a sloppy walking cast on his leg. The directions on the several five-pound cans of plaster helped. His leg was getting numb; good. His cast probably pinched some major nerve, and a week in it would cause permanent paraly- sis; who cared about that? He tried it out and found he could get across the floor ineffi- ciently. With a strong-enough bannister he could get down stairs but not, he thought, up them. That was all right. He was going to the basement. God - damning the medieval Nazis and their comball castle every inch of the way, he went to the basement; there he had a windfall. A dozen drunken SS men were living it up in a corner far from the censorious eyes of their company commander; they were playing a game which might have been called Spin the Cor- poral. They saw Royland limping and wept sentimental tears for poor ol’ doc with a bum leg; they carried him two winding miles to the storeroom he wanted, and shot the lock off for him. They de-

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VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 48 parted, begging him to call on ol’ Company K any time, bes’ fellas in Chicago, doc. OF Bruno here can tear the ann off a Litvak shirker with his bare hands, honest, doc! Jus’ the way you twist a drumstick off a turkey. You wan’ us to get a Litvak an’ show you? He got rid of them at last, clicked on the light and began his search. His leg was now ice cold, painfully so. He rummaged through the uncatalogued botani- cals and found after what seemed like hours a crate shipped from Jalasca. Royland opened it by beating its corners against the concrete floor. It yielded and spilled plastic envelopes; through the clear material of one he saw the wrinkled black things. He did not even compare them with the color plate in his pocket. He tore the envelope open and crammed them into his mouth, and chewed and swallowed. Maybe there had to be a Hopi dancing and chanting, maybe there didn’t have to be. Maybe one had to be calm, if bitter, and fresh from a day of hard work at differential equations which ap- proximated the Hopi mode of thought. Maybe you only had to fix your mind savagely on what you desired, as his was fixed now. Last time he had hated and shunned the Bomb; what he wanted was a world without the Bomb. He had got it, all right! ... his tongue was thick and the fireballs were beginning to dance around him, the circling circles ... XIII Charles Miller Nahataspe whis- pered: “Close. Close. I was so frightened.” Royland lay on the floor of the hut, his leg unsplinted, unfrac- tured, but aching horribly. Drow- sily he felt his ribs; he was merely slender now, no longer gaunt. He mumbled; “You were working to pull me back from this side?” “Yes. You, you were there?” “I was there. God, let me sleep.” He. rolled over heavily and col- lapsed into complete unconscious- ness. When he awakened it was still dark and his pains were gone. Nahataspe was crooning a healing song very softly. He stopped when he saw Royland’s eyes open. “Now you know about break-the- sky medicine,” he said. “Better than anybody. What time is it?” “Midnight.” “I’ll be going then.’’ They clasped hands and looked into each others’ eyes. The jeep started easily. Four hours earlier, or possibly two months earlier, he had been worried about the battery. He chugged down the settlement

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Two Dooms 49 road and knew what would hap- pen next. He wouldn’t wait until morning; a meteorite might kill him, or a scorpion in his bed. He would go directly to Rotschmidt in his apartment, defy Vrow Rot- schmidt and wake her man up to tell him about 56c, tell him we have the Bomb. We have a symbol to offer the Japanese now, something to which they can and will surrender. Rotschmidt would be philo- sophical. He would probably sigh about the Bomb: “Ah, do we ever act responsibly? Do we ever know what the consequences of our decisions will be?” And Royland would have to try to avoid answering him very sharply: ‘Tes. This once we damn well do.” WE’D LIKE TO SUGGEST . . . If you enjoy Venture Science Fiction, you will enjoy some of the other fine Mercury Publications, now on sale: • FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICIION-Venture’s tap-flight sister magazine features, in its July issue, Gordon R. Dickson’s odyssey of space adventure, "Brother Charlie.” In addition, read a penetrating analysis of our future by C. M. Kornbluth, an unusual fantasy-satire by Isaac Asimov, and other high-quality tales by Mildred Clingerman, Roy Vickers, and many others, Plus a short story by Jules Verne never before published in English! • MERCURY MYSTERY MAGAZINE-AfMMT August issue fea- tures an exciting original suspense novel by one of the outstanding writers of the "hard-boiled” school, Ed Lacy. Brought to you months in advance of its hard-cover publication, LISTEN TO THE NIGHT is a fast-paced tale about a strange series of murders in a small toivn. In addition, entertaming mystery shorts by Willard Marsh, Marvin Rossman, many others. • BESTSELLER MYSTERY MAGAZINE No. 2\Q>-Cornell Wool- rich, favorite of mystery fans for years, brings his flare for atmosphere- laden suspense to the featured novel in Bestseller’s latest issue; THE BLACK PATH OF FEAR . . . the hair-raising story of a mission of vengeance in a world of the living dead. Also: true-life and fictional stories of crime by Craig Rice, B. M. Atkinson, Jr. and others.

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Though it may not seem likely, galaxies often run into each other. Two of them are doing so at this instant— and in a most improbable manner. THE CLASH OF CYMBALS by ISAAC ASIMOV About twjenty yeahs ago, the most reputable theories of the origin of planets involved the col- lision, or near-collision, of two stars. Considering the distances between stars and their velocities, it seemed perfectly obvious that stars practically never collided and that our own planetary family must have been the result of a nearly miraculous accident. E. E. Smith (of skylahk and LENSMAN fame) knew this and was in a spot. His tremendous epics required many stellar sys- tems in the Galaxy, and his scien- tific integrity insisted he supply these systems in some plausible way. He got off the spot ingeni- ously, by postulating the collision, not of two stars, but of two Galaxies. With two Galaxies colliding, stellar collisions would apparently become a matter of course, and after the two Galaxies had sepa- rated, both Galaxies would be simply lousy with planets. Doc Smith assumed one of the Galaxies was ours and was all set. However, it might seem that Galaxies are even less likely to collide than stars are. The average Galaxy has a radius of 15,000 light years and is separated from its nearest neighbors by an average of 3,000,000 hght years. For its size this is a smaller separation than in the case of stars, but the Universe is expanding and the Galaxies are retreating from one another. Consequently — no colli- sions. In the last two decades, though. 50

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51 Science; The Clash of Cymbals there have been two develop- ments: First, astronomers are increas- ingly aware that Galaxies, like stars, may exist in clusters. For in- stance, there is, in the constella- tion Coma, a region of space 2.600.000 light years in diameter that contains 500 Galaxies. Within that cluster, Galaxies are sepa- rated by average distances of only 300.000 light years, and, in the center of the cluster, Galaxies may be only 30,000 light years apart. Furthermore, within such clusters, not expansive forces but inter- Galactic gravitation is predomi- nant. In those clusters, therefore. Galactic collisions become quite conceivable and it is even argued that some of the more crowded Galaxies may have undergone anywhere from 5 to 30 collisions in the five billion years that Galaxies have existed. Secondly, colliding nebulae have actually been seen as a result of the recent development of radio astronomy. A “radio-star” is any strong source of radio waves any- where in the sky. The second strongest such source is a point in the constellation Cygnus. As radio astronomers painstakingly narrowed down the precise posi- tion of the object doing the radiat- ing, it became ever plainer that it was coming from nothing witliin our Galaxy. It seemed, in fact, to be coming from a rather peculiar nebula with a distorted shape some 200,000,000 light years dis- tant. Closer investigation explained why the nebula had a distorted shape. It wasn’t a nebula; it was two nebulae meeting head on! The two flattened disks were mak- ing an almost perfect kiss out of it. It wasn’t an angle shot or a graz- ing slice; they were coming to- gether like a pair of well-directed cymbals; surely the most tremen- dous crash of cymbals humanity ever witn^ed. One might think that the radio- wave radiation resulting from such a colhsion would come from smashing stars, but it seems quite certain that it comes instead from colliding interstellar dust. In fact, the two colliding Galaxies in Cygnus don’t radiate from the point where their nuclei (which contain 90 percent of the stars but practically no dust) collide. In- stead, the radiation comes from the outer regions of both Galaxies where there are relatively few stars but veritable heaps of dust. The total radio-wave radiation from the outer edges of the Galaxy is ten times as energetic as is all the light radiated by all the stars in both Galaxies. (Doc Smitlr was at least ten years ahead of tlie professionals in this respect, so I think we can list “colliding Galaxies” as one of the better s-f-predictions-that-came- true.) Now, then, what about star col-

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52 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION lisions in such a case? As science fiction fans, we naturally want to know how near right Doc Smith’s intuitive guess was. Suppose our Sun, for instance, were heading straight for the nu- cleus of another Galaxy. Ought we to close oru eyes, put our hands over our ears and wait for a resounding crash? Well, the nucleus of a Galaxy averages about 30,000 light years in the long diameter and contains a few hundred billion stars, so that the average distance between stars is about one light year. Two average stars would be in collision if their centers were within a mil- lion miles of each other. There- fore, by comparing the volume of a sphere of a million miles radius, with one of a light year radius (a light year being equal to 5,880,000,000,000 miles), it turns out tliat there is 200,000,000,000,- 000,000,000 (two hundred quin- tillion) times as much “non-colli- sion space” as “colhsion space” in a Galactic nucleus. (The spiral arms of a Galaxy are much more sparsely populated with stars than is the nucleus and may be ignored. ) To put it another way, if our Sun were placed, at random, in a spot within a Galactic nucleus, the chances that it would be in col- lision with another sun would be only 1 in 200,000,000,000,000,000,- 000. But if the Sun were not just placed in the Galactic nucleus but moved through it from end to end, it would occupy at one time or another in its travels, all points in a cylinder 430,000 miles in radius and 30,000 light years in length. The volume of such a cylinder would be 20,000,000,000,- 000 times the volume of the Sun. That means that tlie chance of colliding with a star at some point in its travels is that many times better than the chances of collid- ing at one particular point, or 1 chance in 10,000,000. Still not enough to warrant seri- ous worry, perhaps. But the Sun is only one star, What if a whole Galactic nucleus of stars— 200,000,000,000 of them— move through another Galactic nucleus, as in the case of the col- liding Galaxies in Gygnus. Of course, not all would pass along the full length of the nucleus — some stars would only graze it. Let’s say that the average “cylin- der length” for the various stars is 15,000 light years. Allowing for 200,000,000,000 cylinders of that length, the odds for at least one collision of stars become 1,000 to 1 in favor; and the odds are there- fore even for the occurrence of 1,000 such collisions. The time it takes for two Gal- axies to work their way through a collision is estimated to be 100,- 000 years. This means that if you are on a planet involved in such a cymbal-clashing affau, you will

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Science: The Clash of Ctjmbals witness a star-collision on an aver- age of once a century. ... Not very exciting, considering. Nor, for that matter, would 1,000 planetary systems per Galaxy (assuming the collision-theory of planet formation to be true) quite satisfy Doc Smith, I think, since I imagine he envisioned a thicker population of planets than that. Ironically enough, however, Doc Smith need never have worried. We no longer need colliding stars to explain planets. CiuTent theo- ries seem to lean to planets as natural concomitants of star for- mation, so that now almost every stai' is expected to have planets. If these theories are correct, how- ever, they raise another point. The planets of our Solar Sys- tem, for instance, are no closer than 30,000,000 miles to the cen- ter of the Sun (Mercury) and as far away as over 4,000,000,000 miles (Pluto). In colliding Gal- axies, therefore, a star may come nowhere near colliding with an-, other sun, and yet still be close enough to disrupt the planetary system. Come to think of it, that could be a heck of a note. Suppose the Sun made its way through an- other Galaxy, escaping all colli- sions and then, just as we were on the point of congratulating our- selves, we discovered that our orbit about the Sun had been shifted to the point where life was no longer possible on EarthI 53 Colliding Galaxies, just to round out the subject, bring up thought of anti-matter. Ordinary matter, such as that which makes up the Earth and us, consists of atoms containing positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons in their nuclei, plus neg- atively chai'ged electrons in their outer reaches. A particle resembling the elec- tron but with a positive charge (the anti-electron, or positron) and one resembling the proton but with a negative charge (the anti-proton ) are both now known. Just as a neutron decays to yield a proton (-f-) and an electron ( — ), so an uncharged particle can exist which will decay to yield an anti-proton ( — ) and an anti- electron (-(-)• Such a particle is an anti-neutron. ^Vhen the original super-atom exploded (see last issues article, The Big Bang), the demands of symmetry led us to expect that equal quantities of particles and anti-particles were formed. Anti- particles could then get together to form anti-atoms (made up of anti-protons and anti-neutrons in the center and anti-electrons in the periphery.) Such anti-atoms would compose anti-matter (or contraterrene matter, as it was called in s f some years ago. ) But if so, where is the anti- matter? There are three possible answers: 1) The demands of symmetry

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VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 54 aren’t demanding. In 1956, the Law of Conservation of Parity was disproved. This means, essen- tially, that the universe need not be symmetrical. Possibly the orig- inal super-atom formed only par- ticles plus few, if any, anti-par- ticles. 2) The demands of symmetry are demanding. Both particles and anti-particles exist. If so, they can’t exist too closely together since a particle and an anti- particle annihilate one another on contact, their total mass being converted to energy. Since Galax- ies were originally formed (it is thought) out of individual dust clouds which were themselves stable and not indulging in mu- tual annihilation, then a Galaxy as a whole, must be either matter or anti-matter. Our Galaxy is ob- viously matter. Are half the total number of Galaxies anti-matter? We might visit other Galaxies arid see if we blow up. Or we might observe as many colliding Galax- ies as possible. Radio-wave emis- sion looks reasonable, but if two colliding Galaxies are emitting a flood of gamma-rays instead, one or the other ( we couldn’t tell which) could be anti-matter. Of course, if both were anti-matter, it would be radio-waves again. 3) The demands of symmetiy are too demanding. Both particles and anti-pai-ticles were foimed out of the original super-atom but were shot off in opposite di- rections, so to speak. Two uni- verses are formed; one of matter ( ours ) and an anti-universe of anti-matter. Each would be wrap- ped in its own curved space-time continuum and be beyond the reach of the other. Of course, there is no necessary connection between universe and anti-universe, but my symmetrical mind likes to imagine a complete symmetry; and somewhere in the anti-Universe ( my symmetrical mind imagines ) , sitting in an anti- chair on an anti-Earth, anti- Asimov is completing an anti- article on colliding anti-Galaxies . . . and speculating on the exist- ence of matter.

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ON HAND Twice i’ve been mad this double- month, in ways which call for rather meticulous description of the cause-for-choler. Mad the first derives from The Ugglians (Philo- sophical Library, 90 pp, $3.00) by one L. M. Fallaw. So graceless, pedestrian, and nan'atively inept a work must excuse its excessive price— even its very existence— on some added, rare, or unique qual- ity, and this specimen attempts such a justification by assuming the stance of social satire. Heaven knows good social satire is rare in these times ( when a good comedian dares to strike at no more significant a target than a network vice-president) and ur- gently needed (when for clear and painful reasons we avoid any objective look at ourselves). Now, I am not taking exception to Fal- law’s choice of target. In this yam of an African potentate, Ugg, and Uggla his consort, who canoe to America to save our souls, the author lays heartily about him and flicks many of mine own ene- mies, My quarrel is rather with how it’s done; and ‘how it’s done’ is the very maiTow of good satire, ANIMAL FARM, PENGUIN ISLAND, gulli\'er’s travels, FLATLAND, pilgrim’s progress and Everyman are each successful satires, but they have this in common: each is a rollicking good story. You read all the way through because you don’t know what’s going to happen, and you care. You can’t predict, because the plot is so good; you care because you like and/or identify with the protag- onist. The plots are so very good that they can carry large blocks of readers who don’t need to know they are reading satire, like chil- dren and GULLIVER, mathemati- cians and FLATLAND. And each is fable, analog, parallel. This last important point has escaped Fal- law altogether, and in attacking chromium, Christianity, and cu- pidity within our borders, he calls it all by name. Presenting no analogies, he grants you no in- sights. When Dean Swift tells you of the generations-long warfare between two nations which stems 55

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56 VENTUKE SCIENCE FICTION from the Big-Endian and Little- Endian factions, and you learn that originally this was a differ- ence of opinion on where to crack your breakfast egg, a little light goes on in your mind and you say delightedly, “Why, just like—!” When Ugg takes off on theologi- cal hypocrisies or the almighty bureaucrat, naming names, you give him no credit for directness, but lightless, say “Ugh.” If you could like or dislike Ugg, or even care, it might be different, but the way he’s drawn, he has all the wit and cleverness of a smart- alecky kid dropping his pants to shock an inoffensive maiden aunt. So— I’m angry; but not in the least at Fallaw, who gives ample evidence of not knowing what he’s doing here, but at the pub- lishers of the book. I’m mad because they elevated their noses to look so far for good satire, when right in front of them lies the work of men in our field like Fritz Leiber, Alfred Bester, Fred Pohl, and a baker’s dozen of oth- ers in the s f field who can not only write rings around the ham- handed Fallaw, but can with deft- ness an4 acidity really make us look at ourselves. Fury the second has a some- what similar base, though I strike at the author and not the pub- lisher. Here again I am offended at the appearance of the ques- tionable from a matrix of excel- lence; and here again I must stip- ulate most carefully in order to be understood. In his Fads & Fal- lacies in the Name of Science (Dover T394, 363 pp, $1.50) Mar- tin Gardner has written a mag- nificent catalog of human gulli- bility. I can think of no single volume more certain to delight you than this fresh, clear, well- written account of pseudo’s and quasi’s, cranks and crackpots who have at one time or another promulgated The Word in science and psychology, social theories and religion. Well annotated and indexed, with bibliographical sources carefully cited, the book is a pleasure to read and its sub- ject-matter a source of repeated astonishment and amaze— to say nothing of the gusty paroxysms of laughter it will afford you. I am angry because most of the book is so very fine that I resent the carelessness which permits one single carping critic a hand- held, however small. The slip Gardner made is a little one, but in a book of this kind, with the fine clear medicated breeze it blows through the festers of fanat- icism, no single carelessness should be permitted, lest it be used by the very microbes it is sent to cauterize. I refer to his footnote on dia- netics, wherein he leaves his stated subject to go on to psionics and give it a drubbing. He de- scribes Campbell’s demonstration, at the 1956 World S F Conven-

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57 Books: On Hand . . . Offhand tion, of “his second and ‘more jrrecise’ version of the Heirony- mous machine.” What then follows is a description of the machine’s supposed function, and effects, with references to Campbell’s “sol- emnly informing” his audience of this and that about the machine in particular and psionics gen- erally. Then: “Someone at the lecture stood up and asked the obvious question: had Campbell tried varying the circuit or even removing it altogether to see if tire device still worked? No, Campbell hadn’t tried that. . . Following which, Gardner ends his note with an utterly unjusti- fied grouping of psionics with dianetics and the Shaver mys- tery, an erroneous identification of “the number of Campbell’s readers who are impressed by this nonsense” with “the average fan”— two very different things— and an eyebrow-raising castiga- tion of the latter— that’s you, chum— by category. Now let it be crystal clear that I am not here rising to the de- fense of psionics (which hasn’t come up with anything but spec- ulative material), or Campbell (who’s eminently capable of de- fending himself) or fans, who by now are case-hardened— like gongs they sound when struck, but it doesn’t hurt. My objections arise solely from Gardner’s mis- use of the episode at the conven- tion. Campbell was anything but solemn in his presentation and the fans started no landslides in the direction of psionics; there were more doubters than fascinatees, and more non-committally inter- ested thair those who bought the idea outright. What Gardner missed altogether, however, is the sigiral point that Campbell had two machines with him for the specific pm'pose of demon- strating the kind of change which Gardner claims he did not make. The first was a ‘breadboard’ model with all its intestines show- ing-tubes, prism, coils and all, Tlie second was a glossy product in a wrinkle-finished case with handsome store-boughten con- trols. Having demonstrated that both gadgets worked, where and for whom they worked, as well as each other, Campbell un- screwed the top plate of the pret- tified No. 2 model and with huge joy demonstrated to all that it contained nothing but the tviring diagram of Heironymous’s ma- chine, drawn in India ink! If this kind of jollity is shaverism or hubbardism, then Gardner and I are Doctors of Scientology. What bothers me is that tire brilliant Gardner a) could have found out so much about the demonstration without learning it all, and then b) could have so tilted what he found. ... Be all this as it may, do buy this magnificent book. You’ll have fun, and learn a lot about the straight by these clear-

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58 VENTUBE SCIENCE FICTION headed examinations of the crooked and the tickle-wiggly. Quickly send a dime to the American Association for the Ad- vancement of Science for their pamphlet An Inexpensive Science Library, which lists hundreds of paperbacks in a score of discip- lines of all degrees of difficulty including not very. Write also to Library of Science, 59 Fourth Ave,, N. Y.j for details of their book club. Place is a treasure house. . . . Mentor books launch- ing a monumental series on the history of scientific thought from 5th century B.C. to Einstein. ... Tlianks again for your nomina- tions for the s f stories you con- sider worthy of inclusion in a collection of great and permanent hterature. If you haven’t sent your choice yet, please do. Youse guys amaze mel Offhand— BOOK and TITLE TYPE & TIME BUY IT- Creation of the Universe George Gamow Mentor MD 214 144 pp 50<! Non-fiction Illustrated, Indexed —positively! Like all Gamow, readable, reasonable, well organized. Spectacular photos, clever informative cartoons. The Human Body Elbert Tokay Signet Key D355 244 pp 50(i Non-fiction Illustrated, Indexed —if you want a concise reference, compact body atlas, and no-nonsense prose commendably noting fact vs. theory. Man Into Space Hermann Oberth Harper 232 pp $4.50 Non-fiction Illustrated, Indexed —and you’ll have just about the most fascinating ex- ample of projective thinking in space literature. Years ahead of his time. Medicine and Man Ritchie Calder Mentor D217 256 pp 504 Story of medical science and dis- covery. Indexed. —if you’re interested in who discovered what, and how; and in how it works on what; and in how that works. A good book. The Earth and its Atmosphere Ed. D. R. Bates Basic Books 324 pp $6.00 Compendium, 15 papers, introduc- tion, index, iUus. —for solidest background yet between two covers on the IGY. Some of it pedantic, but all sound and interesting. Only a Trillion Isaac Asimov Abelard-Schuman 195 pp $3.50 Non-fiction, plus one fiction and one non-fact. —and you buy Asimov at his very best, and that’s guaranteed prime pleasure. Here at last in hard covers is thiotimoline and my favorite Hemoglobin & the Universe. The Inhabited Universe Gatland and Dempster McKay 182 pp $3.95 Non-fiction with index and superb illus. —if you possibly can. A fearless examination of the outer limits of knowledge, soundly centered. Might be called physical philosophy. Fine.

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CONTACT BETWEEN EQUALS by ALBERT STROUD When he saw fhe world for fhe first time, if was much as he had imagined if. But in fhe back room, a heavy, breathing fhing pushed impatiently against the wall, and promised, "I'm going to get you . . Alicia came over to my daybed with a rustle of cotton and a whisper of silk, and bent over me with a breath of perfume. “Will? It’s time. Are you awake, Will?” Awake? Because I’d been lying there motionless, it hadn’t oc- curred to her that I might be counting the chimes from the clock in its hand-rubbed wooden case on the mantel. “Dr. Champley’s here. Will.” “I know. I heard him drive up.” I opened my eyes with a brush of lashes against the loosely-wound gauze that swathed my head, and let in the light. The light was white. Alicia’d taught me during the past week— she’d played colored Hghts on the gauze, and taught me the names of the colors. We had also talked about perspective, and about the perception of shape and texture from a distance; I’m sure Dr. Champley had outlined a program of education, to get me a little re-oriented ahead of time. Alicia had been surprised how easily it had gone. She ought not to have been. I’d listened to talk- ing books all my life, and there was radio, of course. And forty years of hearing people in con- versation around me. I was a graduate of Harvard Business School. I was a millionaire— five and six times the millionaire my father had been. That did not happen by accident. It could not have happened to a man who did not think intelligently, analytically, and systematically. I had an exact picture of the world, in one-to-one correspondence with the world perceived by the sighted. My re- orientation would consist of no more than simple transposition from one system to the other. Champley had gotten out of his car, parked on the gravel road fronting the cottage. He came up the flagstone steps to the porch, opened tlie screen door, crossed the porch, knocked briefly, opened the front door, and stepped brisk- 59

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60 VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION ly into the room. The screen door of the porch sighed shut on its air spring, and latched. “Hello, Doctor,” Alicia said. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Schaeffer. Is Mr. Schaeffer awake?” It was a long speech for him. I put it away in my mind, to flesh out what little I knew about him. Up to now, he’d been httle more than someone Alicia’d talked about a great deal; the famous, brilliant young surgeon who’d become in- terested in William Schaeffer’s case, and who thought he could do something about it. I’d taken considerable thought on all the factors involved. But Champley had been all business during the brief examination in his oflSce — a few gentle touches around the face, a lifting of my lids, a click of the unseen flashlight, a thought- ful grunt or two, and one mut- tered word: “Maybe.” No buttering up, no bedside manner. I’d liked that. All the other verdicts had come from men who went through elaborate lec- tiu-es to hide their inability. And it was always definite: “Yes,” or “No.” The second had at least been right. The first had been humbug. Well, Champley’d brought it off, as far as we could tell at the moment. Alicia said it had only taken an hour’s operating time. I’d come out of anesthesia in the ambulance, leaving Champley ’s clinic, and the most diiScult part of the whole business had been remembering not to move my eyes at all for thirty-six hours. The ambulance had brought Alicia and me to this lake cottage of Cham- pley’s, because it was nearer his clinic than any of my lodges. Alicia and I had spent the week here alone, without distractions, working toward this time. Well, I thought. I’m here, and he’s here, and I’m getting impa- tient. “Doctor?” “Yes, Mr. Schaeffer. Right here.” He came across the raffia rug in crepe-soled shoes: He was wear- ing a tweed suit— a nubby tweed, that rubbed as he moved his arms and legs— and he smelled of after- shave lotion. “You smelled like iodoform in your office.” And he had mot met me at his clinic. An anesthetist had put me under. I knew damn- ably little about him. Except, of course, for what Alicia had told me. “Yes,” he said. “Well, now, let’s see what I look like.” Bandage shears clicked in his hand. Alicia put her cool fingers on my shoul- der. There was a cold, greasy feeling of metal sliding along my cheek. The gauze pulled slightly. Then it lay limp across the bridge of my nose. “Try to keep your eyes closed, Mr. Schaeffer. Just for the mo- ment. Let the light come through the Uds before you open them.”

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Contact Between Equals 61 “All right.” He lifted the gauze, and the light was pink. I lay quietly, gathering myself. I did not feel grossly excited. But all week I had been extremely rest- less and ill-at-ease. Perhaps I would not let myself feel excite- ment. Perhaps this was excite- ment. Now, of course, the feeling was strongest of all, with things approaching their climaxes. I did not open my eyes until Champley asked me to. I opened them slowly, and all I saw at first were blurred colors. That was all right. All that was familiar. But there was the new business of focussing to be done, and that took some time. Binocular vision was something I understood in theory— though I had some rather distorted images of what a lens might be — but I had to teach myself control of the necessary muscles. After that, I had to make for myself all the discoveries a baby makes— what human beings looked like, where my hands and feet were; all the momentous things. I made them. I made them slowly and carefully. Alicia and Cham- pley were patient. Finally I felt sure of myself. Alicia, it seemed, had yellow hair, and was wearing a green dress. Champley was rather taller than she. He had black hair, and his suit was brown. It was all rather strange, seeing things which had previously only occupied rela- tive positions. But we got thi'ough it all, and easily enough. I went outside with them, finally, wearing smoked glasses. I stood like a child with an open primer. “Mountains. Forest. Sky. Clouds. Lake. Cottage. Cliff.” The cottage was built out from the side of the steep slope, with only the front porch touching earth at the edge of the narrow road that led down to the lake. The remainder was supported on pilings. I was made uneasy by all these things, but I shuffled my feet on the gravel of the road and turned my head so the breeze crossed my cheek, and then I was comfortable. We went back into the cottage, and I sat down on the edge of the daybed. I suppose I was feehng a certain bravado at my new skill. I searched over the room. Daybed here. Fireplace there, with clock. Chairs, table, another small table with a slick-faced box on it. “That would be a television set, wouldn’t it?" “Yes, but that’s for another day,” Champley said quickly. “We don’t want too much strain.” He opened a fresh package of gauze, and brought out two eyepads. Alicia stood in the center of the room, her legs bathed by a bar of sun- light exactly as I had heard a similar scene described in a book. The impression generated by the author had been one of youth and wannth. Alicia . . . Well, Alicia.

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62 VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION “Wait,” I said. “I want to talk to you both.” “Of course,” Champley said. “But you can do that just as well with your eyes bandaged.” “No. I want to watch your faces move. Sit down together in front of me.” Alicia raised her eyebrows toward Champley. Champley did not change expression in response. He made a faint wet sound when he moved his tongue away from the roof of his mouth. He moved to one of the two chairs in front of the fireplace and swung it around. He moved the other for Alicia, and both of them sat down. I looked from one to the other, and fastened my glance on Cham- pley. “Well, you delivered,” I said. “That excuses a great deal. But I won’t give you Alicia and a fee in addition. You’ll have to be satis- fied with just her.” I had, for the first time, the opportunity to see that situation in which a writer inevitably says: “A look of consternation passed between them, and they burst into furious bickering. They began denying their guilt vehemently, and, in the end, fell to blaming each other for having been care- less.” Alicia disappointed me. She merely turned to Champley and said; “I told you he was smarter than eitlier one of us.” Champley shrugged as though it hardly mat- tered, though it took me a mo- ment’s thought to understand what it was he had done with his shoul- ders. He said nothing, and con- tinued to watch me with his face in repose. I took that for a sign of confidence, and did not like it. “Very weU,” I said, “we under- stand each other. I’m grateful for your skill, Champley. I trust your other patients will enable you to support Alicia. But I can’t under- stand why you and she went to all this trouble. Or where it all profits her. Does she think a sighted man will live to a riper old age than a blind one? And if so— I repeat— where has all this profited her?” I did not like their reaction pat- tern. Not at all. I stood up and be- gan prowling about the room. “Sit down. Will!” Alicia said nervously. That was more like it. But, why now? “Why?” “You’re making me nervous.” “Why now? Why must I sit still? Why must my eyes be ban- daged immediately? What will I see? Why does this cottage seem a great deal bigger from the out- side than the living room, bed- room, bath and kitchen I know?” A look passed between them. It might have been consternation. Apparently, it had paid me to watch my feet as I walked and so learn the visual length of my aver- age stride. “What’s behind the kitchen?” I walked toward it, and Champley was up facing me, his

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63 Contact Between Equals schooled control deteriorating far enough to let me see it was a panic move. “There’s nothing back there,” he said. And that, of course, was pat- ently ridiculous. I pushed by him and strode into the kitchen. There was a clear space along the wall, between a white box that was the refrigerator and the sink with its dripping faucet. There were arc- ing scuff marks on the floor. There was a door there, without a han- dle, hidden in the butted planks of the panehng. I ran my hands over it. I found no way of open- ing it. Something on the other side, quite large, and breathing, rolled up and nudged against it. The planking creaked. I turned quickly and went back into the living room. Alicia was tugging at the baseboard plug of the television set. “Now, why,” I said, “would tliat be the most important action you could take to keep me in ignor- ance?” “It was loose. Will! I was push- ing it back in!” she cried. She was practically out of control. I shook my head. “Alicia.” Champley tried to stop me from going to the television set. He was impelled by urgency, but I was William Schaeffer. I brushed him aside and cHcked the left-hand switch. Alicia stepped back. The screen blazed up. It was flat, uncolored, and I could not adjust to that immediately. I scarcely heard what noise the set might be making. There was something pictured on it tliat I had never seen before, naturally enough, moving something like a mouth. Once I had absorbed that, I could listen. “. . . going to get you,” it— or, rather, another com- ponent of the set said. The deliv- ery was calm, without much in- tonation. Alice turned the set off sharply. “That’s enough. Will. You’ll— you’ll hurt your eyes.” I almost laughed. But I was also curious. “What was that thing, anyway?” “A children’s program,” Cham- pley said. “Well, all right, but what, spe- cifically, was that thing?” “A monster,” Alice said irritably. “Please let Dr. Champley bandage your eyes now.” “A monster, eh?” An entire body of literature had suddenly come clear to me. “Fascinating.” I turned the set on again. “Champley,” the monster prom- ised in its unhurried tone, “I’m going to get you soon.” Then the screen went blank. I turned the set off and turned around. “What a fantastic coincidence!” Champley said. “Oh, it couldn’t have said ‘Champley,’ ” Alicia exclaimed. “It must have been another name like •i. » it

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64 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION “It said ‘Champley,’ ” I told her. I went back to the daybed and sat down. “All this is very inter- esting.” “Oh, Willi” Alicia snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous! It was some kihd of a coincidence. You hai>- pened to tune in some children’s program at just the right instant.” “And the monster was pro- nouncing just the right name? Odd. How many Champleys do you suppose there are?” I was not feeling much elation. Cats may enjoy cat-and-mouse. I am not a cat. What I wanted was informa- tion. Champley said nothing. Alicia continued to pay out her pathetic rope; “This whole thing is . . . insane! You know very well there aren’t any real monsters, and, if there were, what would they be doing on television?” “Communicating,” I said, “Now. Doctor Champley. Ytdiy would a monster want to get you?” “Nothing’s going to get me,” Champley said. “No doubt you think so,” I said. “But you have already been proven a less effective human be- ing tlian myself. I have no doubt there are other things in the Universe, as w^ell, that could best you. The question is, where do I fit into your escape plan?” And where did he meet this monster, and what had he done to incur its enmity? And so forth. But, first of all, why did he need me, why did he need me com- pletely functional, and what did it profit Alicia? I went quickly into the bed- room, and located the bureau by touch, with my eyes shut. I had no time to waste. With my hands, I found her purse. I opened my eyes, and opened the purse. It was full of gimcracks and written information in the form of a stuffed wallet. All I learned was that she cairied a great deal of money, but it was her reaction to my search that I wanted most. “He’s in my wallet!” she cried in the living room. She was at the bedroom door immediately. “Stay out of my personal possessions!” she blazed. I nodded gratefully. “Thank you very much, dear. You’ve been an unfailing help. Now— what’s in your wallet that could give you away?” I thumbed through the leaves of a ring-bound insert. “Ah. These would be photographs.” Like tire television picture, they were flat and colorless under their protective celluloid. She tried to snatch them, and I slapped her hand. Carefully I studied the pictures. Alicia and Champley on the steps of an elaborate home. Alicia and Champley in a car, she at the wheel. Nothing else of interest, unless one counted a dozen poses of Alicia in her beauty-contest winning days.

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Contact Between Equals I pursed my lips, and toned toward her. Something caught the corner of my eye. It was a glassy color picture, almost life-sized, of a dark, narrow-faced man. It hung from the back of ' the bedroom door, and moved. “Who’s that?” I asked sharply. “That?” She laughed. “Why, that’s a mirror. That’s i/otf. Will!” “The Devil it is!” I snapped. Why do they think the blind don’t know what they look like? Those pathetic scenes in the novels— the blinking eyes, fresh out from un- der the bandages; the upheld hand mirror; the wondering gasp: ‘Is— is that me?’ Claptrap. Move the muscles of a face for forty years— feel the flesh twist— shave it, touch it . . . what, in Heaven’s name, do they think a blind man would have most immediately available for his study of the world, if not his own body? Color, no. Texture, shape, diagrammatic configuration, yes. At the very least, no one could ever foist a total stranger on . . . I stopped dead still and touched my face. And it wasn’t mine. I thought of the photo- graphs. Alicia and Champley? “Champley!” I flung the wallet into the living room. I thmst Alicia out of the way. Champley was standing just inside the living room, a hypodermic syringe wait- ing in his hand. I knocked it aside and closed my hands on his throat. “What did you do?” I 65 asked calmly, calmly increasing the pressure. “How did we trade bodies?” He could not answer, and pawed feebly at my arms. After a little while, I found myself able to let him go. I pushed him into a chair. “Well,” I said, “now I know what it profits Alicia.” Alicia, dab- bing at her eyes, slumped on the arm of Iris chair and stroked his neck. I marched back and forth across the room, taking stock. “All right. The monster comes out from behind that secret door. He has no other escape, unless its down a drop great enough to loll or seriously injm-e him. I say es- cape because he has an urgent desire but cannot as yet fulfill it. Q.E.D., you’ve got him caged in there. But he’s working loose, and you don’t dare go near him to se- cure him once more. All right. He comes out, he rolls into this room. What does he find? Does he find a blind stranger? No, he finds Doctor Champley. He eats me, and you and Alicia live happily ever after. Good. So far, there’s logic. “More logic: you need a per- fectly functioning Doctor Champ- ley. You want Alicia. Both of you want my money. Ergo: You switch with me, while ostensibly restoring my sight. You do restore my sight, because you’re having no trouble seeing out of my eyes.

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66 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION Very good. Everybody’s problem is solved. You perform these two complicated operations inside of an hour. Hold. Alicia says you do it inside an hour. No matter. You perform these complicated opera- tions. That’s marvelous enough, considering you had to be operat- ing on yourself part of the time. How’d you do it— brain trans- plant? Good trick. Transmigration of souls? Just as good, but more complicated. Settle for brain transplant. Dandy trick. Impos- sible. How did you operate on yourself? You trusted another doctor? Faugh! You wouldn’t trust your own mother. “All right. You can do two im- possible things before breakfast. I don’t believe a word of it. No. You’ve got an automatic surgical machine, or machines. No such thing e-xists. No operative tech- nique exists which would leave you and me walking around nor- mally inside of a week, without a scar or a twinge. You’re the one with the new eyes, and you’re holding up perfectly. You’ve got hold of some fantastic medical techniques Johns Hopkins never heard of. \^ere’d you get ’em? What about you is different from every other living soul? You’ve met and offended a monster. Monster. Backtrack that. Alien. Alien being from some other world. Some other world with superior science. All right. “All right, that’s the source of your skill. Why does the monster hate you? Why did he give you medical skills? How did you get him caged in here?” I stopped and drove my fist into my open palm. “Done!” I swung toward Champley and pointed my finger between liis eyes. “The alien was sick. He probably crashed. He was injured, and told you how to help him. You agreed to patch him up, but you ran out on him instead, and started in on becoming a Park Avenue surgeon. Now you’re fat and frightened. The monster’s go- ing to get you. ^Vhat to do? You find a substitute for yourself— and I’m tin; patsy. Prove me wrong.” Champley’s mouth opened. “Prove me wrong!” Champley shook his head. “No. . . .” he said huskily. “Y’r right.” “And what are you going to do about it?” Alicia demanded tri- umphantly. “Are you going to force Louis to re-transplant?” She laughed. “You cant do it. You can kill him, you can beat him— nothing you can do to him can possibly be as bad as what a loathsome thing like that beast would do to him. You can’t even buy your way out. You can’t think your way out. No one but Louis can set up the surgical machine, and he would sooner die. But— kill him and what have you gained?” “Kill him? Kill my own body?

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Contact Between Equals That wouldn’t be my land of thinking, Alicia. Let’s try another tack.” “You can try all you want to. You’re boxed in, Will.” “I doubt it. No part of this plan has gone right for you. I see no reason why the rest of it should.” “None of the other parts were important.” “I was referring to the general level of intelligence displayed.” “I hope you don’t wonder why I’d be glad to get rid of you.” “In the most horrible way you could conjure up. Yes.” I smiled. “I never wonder about anything, Alicia. I find out.” There was a perceptible creak- ing from the back of the cottage. Something quite large was press- ing against the kitchen wall. “What happens if I run for it?” I said thoughtfully. “No. That’s no good. One, I’d be on foot and ig- norant. You’d have a car to head me off. Two, it would talce me some time to establish my iden- tit}', and some time longer before I dared tell anyone I had a monster locked up in a summer cottage. Three, Champley might be able to pass for me, with yoixr coaching. Most important, that’s a sloppy approach to tire problem. The problem’s here, and we’re all here. Let’s get at it.” “Never make it,” Champley said, rubbing his tlnroat. “You’re good as dead. And you’re wel- come.” 6T I sat down. “You two don’t count. Only the situation gives you your power. All right, change the situation. Disarm you. Make friends with the alien.” “Wish you luck,” Champley said. “He’s been back there for eight years. He was in agony when he crawled in, and he’s been in agony ever since. He hasn’t eaten. He hasn’t rested. He’s been in there, while I waited for him to die, and I wouldn’t be sur- prised if the only thing that keeps him alive is hate.” His voice went up in trembling hysteria, badly controlled. “He won’t die! I waited. I waited, and he didn’t die. He only grew more desperate. You can hear him. He doesn’t care anymore how much he hurts himself. He won’t die until he gets to me.” Then he re- membered what he’d done to me, and bared his teeth in joy. It must have been an especially virulent degree of fear that had been haunting him. “Let’s think about this mon- ster,” I said. “Monster’s what you call him. Let’s try calling him an alien. Stranger in a strange land. Hurt. Lost his transportation— his spaceship, his whatd’youcallit, whatever he uses— or he’d limp home. All right. He’s trapped, and hurt. Eight years? He’s tough. But he can’t function well. Along comes a native. What were you, Champley — medical student? Mail-order college quack? Some-

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VENTUBE SCIENCE FICTION 68 body who might help. He estab- lishes communication. “Ah. Hoio, Champley? How did you talk to each other?” “Why don’t you try torturing me to find out?” “Umn. Might. Later. Let’s see if I can work around you. ... It wasn’t television. That’s one-way. Does he ordinarily talk in electro- magnetic frequencies? When he’s among his own kind? Interesting. All I need is a microphone and a transmitter, then. None available. Out. All right. How did you talk to him. What kind of wig-wag system’d you use? Telepathy? No. Or this plan of yours would have collapsed a-borning.” I looked up at Champley. “No —it couldn’t be: plain English speech? This whole substitution would never stand up . . . or, wait, yes it would. Monster comes out, propelled by years of hatred. Sees Champley— sees me. Champley says: ‘Wait! I’m really William Schaeffer.’ Does the monster listen. Does it stop? Would I? “Plain English speech does it, Champley. All I have to do is go in the kitchen and talk to it while it’s still trapped.” Champley reached into his pocket and brought out a flat, glittering blued thing. “All right, Schaeffer. That did it,” he said. He pointed it at my knee, and I realized it was a gun. When he fired it, there was a loud noise, and my thigh wrenched as though a swinging girder had jabbed it. I cupped it in my hands and stared at it, grinding my lips be- tween my teeth. “Does it hurt. Will?” Alicia miumured. “Don’t worry,” Champley told her. “It hurts. Now— Schaeffer; are you going to sit stiU and do what I teU you, or are you going to try to talk to the monster? I can crip- ple your other leg. And then your arms. I can leave you helpless on that bed. I suppose I could even break your s]pine. All I have to do is bandage you up, put new clothes on you over the bandages, and I don’t think the monster’ll stop to inspect you too closely.” There was a wet look to his and Alicia’s faces. That would be perspiration, I thought. Champley said: “I don’t like you, Schaeffer. You’re too slip- pery. Too quick. I’m not as smart as you are. The only thing I can do is be completely ruthless.” “That’s not reserved for the ex- clusive use of the stupid,” I said. He licked his lips. “I don’t want to break you up, Schaeffer. If possible, I want you moving when the monster comes out.” He looked at me with a narrow-eyed smile. “I’d think you’d prefer to have a chance to run for it.” “Hobble for it,” Alicia said. “Crawl for it. Yes,” I said, “no doubt that would be the ordinary man’s preference. Perhaps it’s mine.”

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69 Contact Between Eqtuth “Quit itl” Champley cried, “rm the man wdth the gun. Quit trying to take the initiative away from me! Now— be reasonable, damn you! You sit quiet and stop trying to wiggle out of this, and maybe you’ll be in shape to get away from it when it comes out.” “I will make no further moves toward contacting tlie alien,” I said. He relaxed. “Good. Now— roll up the leg of your pants. Alicia, get a compress out of my bag. We can’t have him bleeding to death.” “He’ll grab me if I go over to him!” Alicia cried. “Ill have the gun on him!” Champley said angrily. “He won’t try anything!” “He’ll try anything!” Ahcia an- swered back. “Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” Champley cried. “Would you rather have the monster grab meP Now, do what you’re told!” “Don’t shout at me!” “All right,” Champley said in a hard voice, seething with tem- per. “I’ll just point the gun at you. That’s better than shouting.” Something massive rolled against the kitchen wall, and the house trembled. “Just you remember some- thing!” Alicia shouted at Champ- ley. “Just you remember this plan of yours doesn’t work out at all without me! Even if you get away from the monster, you’re nothing without me!” “By God, I might just try it and see if you’re right about that or not!” “Champley. Alicia,” I said. I took my hands away from my thigh and watched the blood spurt. It was pumping out with considerable force. That would be an arterial flow, I thouglit, raising my eyes and looking at them calmly. “My God!” Alicia whispered. “Get that compress,” Champley said. “Get it quick! He’s doing that deliberately!” They hurried through the busi- ness of compressing my leg. It would have been absolutely stupid to take physical action against them. They weren’t my antagonists. The house shook again. Some- tliing broke in the kitchen wall with a loud crack. Champley wiped his face. Alicia jumped up and stood erect. “I’m getting out of here. I’m go- ing to wait out ill the car.” “You stay here and finish tying up that compress! And when you’re through with that, you’re going to wipe up the rug and get new pants on Schaeffer.” “Shut up, the two of you,” I said. I reached down and tied the bandage. Getting to my feet, I started across the room. “Sit down, Schaeffer!” Champ- ley shouted. “I’m going into the bedroom to change my trousers. I’m not going

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VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 70 to try to contact the alien. You and Alicia had better get busy at getting the blood off the floor.” I made my clumsy way into the bedroom, hoping I had not over- estimated the amount of blood I could spare and still continue to function normally. If they were going to keep on quarreling, I needed a quiet place to think. They were irritating me with their pettiness. Tlie monster had cut into the television circuits. He hadn’t done it with apparatus. If he’d had any sort of machinery in there with him, he would long ago have con- verted it into a cutting tool. He would not be smashing himself bodily against that wall. Not in his condition. No matter how wrought-up he was. All right, he could use electromagnetics with- out apparatus. That was one extra- normal ability be had. One. If it was his only one, why did he waste that one possible trump card on a melodramatic gesture? Was he a fool? If he was a fool, I could either handle him on the spur of the moment or else no logical plan would work against him. Stop planning? No. Assume he knows what he’s doing. Assume more than one difference between him and a human being. Keep planning. What kind of difference? Where’s a pipeline into his brain? What do I use to get a hold on him? Why was he breaking out exactly now? His fury was reach- ing a climax, but how had he known Champley was in the cot- tage at just this time? Had he heard Champley’s— my —voice? I’d been in the cottage a week. Why was he moving now, and only now. I hadn’t heard him be- fore today. Were his ears sharper than mine? Was my voice Champley’s? No. No, by God. My brain used vocal cords in a different way from Champley’s. Champley and I were about of a size, and our voices roughly in the same range, but Champley’s vocal cords couldn’t possibly be identical in length and thickness with mine. “Alicia!” “What?” she asked shrilly from the other room. “Nothing.” I fastened the belt of tlie fresh pair of trousers. It was much more my voice than it was Champley’s. It wasn’t mine, but close enough to it to fool me through gauze wrapped carefully over my eyes and ears. The alien couldn’t have recog- nized it. He had some other way of knowing. ... The cottage shook. I stepped quickly out into the living room. The kitchen wall broke down. There was a Imch, a tearing of nails out of wood, and something remorseless came rolling into the living room.

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71 Contact Between Equals Alicia screamed, and Champley cried: “There he is— over there— that’s Champley.” The alien made straight for Champley, took him, reached out, and took Alicia. ’They himg in the air. “I have a business proposition to make,” I said to the alien. From somewhere on itself, the alien said: “Let’s hear it.” Alicia drove the car', with Champley lolling beside her, his mouth slack and wet. The alien sat on the back seat beside me, covered by a blanket like a bundle of old clothes. From time to time, the alien reached out with part of itself and stroked Champley’s neck. Whenever he did, Champley burst into tears. “Oh, God,” Alicia mumbled to herself all the way into New York. “Oh, God, it’s all edges and angles and thorns. All black and all slick and all rolling.” “We’re agreed, then,” I said to the alien. “As soon as Champley aird I have re-exchanged bodies, I will use the machine to heal you. Then my subsidiary corpora- tions will begin construction of a new interstellar vessel for you. In return, you will pass to us as much scientific knowledge as we are capable of encompassing.” “Agreed,” the alien said from under his covering. “You’re much more satisfying to deal with than that other one.” “I should have known you’d recognize Champley no matter what disguise he was wearing.” “Recognize? Champley? I thought all you people were named Champley.” “No,” I said slowly, “I, for in- stance, am William Schaeffer.” “Interesting,” tlie alien said. “Well. Now I have to revise my warning. I like you, but tliat’s be- side the point. We’re engaged in business. I have to say that if you betray me, I will get you, William Schaeffer. You understand that?” “It’s the best practical basis for doing business. Clear-cut.” “Yes. We’re both practical men,” the alien said. “I thought Champley was the best I could do, and took the chance. It’s a shame I can’t read minds, or I wouldn’t have made the mistake. But I can literally see the pres- ence of practicality, like a glow shining around a man’s mind.” “You can,” I said. “Certainly,” the alien told me. “I’m amazed at the difference in degree between you and Cham- pley. It’s the only worthwhile measure of intelligence. And as you said, practicality is the only worthwhile rule of conduct. In any environment, it’s mandatory always to deal with the most practical creature and discard the others before they can muddle tire picture. The ability to sense practicality directly is an invalu- able survival trait. It has raised

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72 VENTUBE SCIENCE FICTION my people to the heights. It is what separates us from the ani- mals. It is the test of humanity.” The alien touched me gently with part of himself. I felt noth- ing that would make me laugh or cry. It was simply a contact be- tween two equals. He said, “That’s why I took steps to re- move Champley and that other person from any effective inter- ference betw^een us. I could in- stantly sense a brotlier in you.” And so we rode into New York City. So I became William Schaeffer, again. And now there is an alien race in the stars which is today a friend of Mankind. BRINGING YOU TWO WORLDS OF ADVENTURE VENTURE— Science fiction with a flare for the dramatic, the offbeat— that’s the fare offered by F&SF’s new sister magazine. Also, in each bi-monthly issue: Theodore Sturgeon’s book reviews, Isaac Asimov’s column on science. FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION - Longtime favorite with science fiction readers, F&SF each month features top-notch tales by the field’s best-known writers: Heinlein, Anderson, Asimov, Sturgeon, many others. Plus informative articles on s f. SPECIAL OFFER; You can now subscribe to both F&SF and VENTURE at the special rate of $7.00 for 12 issues of each. Or, if you prefer, single- magazine subscriptions are available. Just fill out the coupon below. Worlds of Adventure Ve-Juiy-8 Mercury Press, Inc. 527 Madison Ave., New York 22, N. Y. Please enter my subscription to: □ 12 issues of VENTURE Science Fiction ($4.00) □ 12 issues of FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ($4.00) Q 1 2 issues of each magazine above (SPECIAL OFFER: $7.00) □ I enclose. Name Address City. Zone. State.

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The computer was buzzing, the big telescope was ready, the little blonde in the bath towel was walking into P.F.C. Dower's darkroom. But, in the midst of all this efficiency, there was the problem of . The Biggest Damned Martini in the Universe by JOHN NOVOTNY General Augustus “Augie” Borr- mann was a big man. He studied the empty glass, then whirled it in his hand, making the olive race around tire sloping side like a motorcycle on an inner wall. He set the glass down and, pouring from a well-iced pitcher, he drowned the olive in a pale flood. He smiled thoughtfully— General Borrmann was a thoughtful man. “Sure the moon is important,” he said softly to his drink. “I know that better than they do. And Colonel Englert is exactly the man for the job.” He sipped slowly and consid- ered the personnel assigned to the Moon Flight Experiment. “Englert, Martino, Schiela, Foran, Young. All handpicked. For once I have the right men for the right job.” He looked out the window in the general direction of the Pen- tagon, smiled again, and raised his glass in salute. “And with all your procedures. forms, and meetings, I don’t tliink you have time to louse up this operation,” he whispered, and drairk deeply. He set the empty glass on the desk. “Hm,” he said, thoughtful once more. “Just to make sure I’d better make another inspection.” He buttoned his blouse, and left the office. General Borrmann did not consider himself a gam- bling man. . . . Colonel Englert surveyed the big room with a certain amount of satisfaction. For the first time in months he was unable to raise a finger and point at a man who was goofing. Corporal Hulle stood at the big chart marking the Moon Queen’s progress, and he was erasing. Colonel Englert was elated. It meant that Hulle had dravra the line too long but— blessed be this rare occasion— he had caught the error himself. It had been very embarrassing for the entire de- 73

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74 VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION partment three weeks ago Tues- day when General Borrmann walked in, looked at the big chart, and thunderously demanded to know how in hell the test rocket was travelling 189,000 miles an hour— 87 feet underground. In fact. Colonel Englert wondered why the General hadn’t trans- ferred the Moon Flight Experi- ment to another command at that very moment. “Well done. Corporal,” Colonel Englert called warmly. Hulle looked around, smiled, and held the eraser triumphantly aloft. The Colonel turned his s\vivel chair, hoping that the rear caster would remain in place, and nodded ap- provingly toward Sergeant Young. The radar man had removed all the chalk tic-tac-toe marks from the big radar screen and even had his eyes open, watching the blip. “How’s she doing, Sergeant?” the Colonel inquired loudly. He suspected Young of being able to sleep with his eyes open. The Sergeant leaned forward to check the blip and the Colonel felt just a little ashamed. “The Moon Queen is coming home fast and true, sir. She should land in about two hours,” Young reported. “Excellent.” The officer sat a bit straighter in his chair. This was the sort of efficiency he had often dreamed about but despaired of ever see- ing. The computer was buzzing. spinning, and flashing along the rear wall; happily keeping its electronics under control. Lieu- tenant Foran, the programmer, was not inviting sudden electro- cution by jabbing his long screw- driver at the memory drums. The little blonde in the bath towel walked down the hall toward the photographic dark room. O’Don- nell had completed his calibration studies on landing stress and Sommerville had the big telescope ready for— “Blonde in a bath towel!” Colonel Englert muttered, hurling himself from the chair. “There is no such assignment in this de- partment.” He stalked around the big desk, walked across the center of the room, then down the hall. He halted in front of the door marked: Dark Room Do not enter under any circumstances By order of P.F.C. Dower The Colonel grasped the door- knob and attempted to disobey P.F.C. Dower’s order. The knob rotated many himdreds of degrees but the door remained closed. “Can’t’cha read the sign,

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75 The Biggest Damned Martini in the Universe stupid?” P.F.C. Dowers voice came loud and clear. “This is Colonel Marcus Chest- erman Englert!” the olBcer an- nounced, standing rigidly at at- tention. There were twenty sec- onds of magnificent silence before P.F.C. Dower issued another subdued report. “I have something in the de- veloper.” Colonel Englert’s eyes flashed fire. “P.F.C. Dower-!” “I mean— part of my project is developing,” Dower amended im- fortunately. “It damned well better not be what I think it is,” Englert shouted nastily. “Open this door!” It opened and P.F.C. Dower appeared. Colonel Englert eyed him dp and down. “I am pleased to see that you have your trousers on,” he said caustically. “I never got them off, sir,” Dower said unthinkingly. “You were rattling the knob and—” “Good heavens, man!” the Colonel shouted. “Don’t you ever think before you speak?” “You was the one doing the thinking,” Dower said indignantly. “I said my pants didn’t come off and they didn’t!” “Merely because I rattled the doorknob,” Colonel Englert in- sisted. P.F.C. Dower smiled and shook his finger at the officer. “There you go— thinking again.” The Colonel drew himself up. He breathed deeply and then spoke softly with superb self- control. “P.F.C. Dower. Are you going to stand there and tell me that you wouldn’t— if you could— with that blonde I saw come in here?” he inquired. Dower looked him in the eye. “Would you, sir?” The Colonel reddened and then permitted his shoulders to slump. “I’ve done it again,” he mut- tered dejectedly. “With magnifi- cent strategy and aplomb I’ve suc- ceeded in getting myself into the same damned corner I get in every time I talk to you. Let me say that next time I will ask no questions, I will make no obser- vation, I will merely order imme- diate court martial— or execution —whichever is applicable.” “I knew you’d take it like a good Joe in the long run,” Dower smiled. The Colonel nodded hopelessly. “May I ask your official ex- planation for having a naked blonde in an Air Force installa- tion?” he asked. “Certainly,” P.F.C. Dower re- sponded. “I am making spectrum checks photographically to choose a correct monochromatic light source for our measurements in millionths of an inch. Her skin tone happens to be perfect for this experiment.” Colonel Englert brushed his

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76 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION hand across his eyes, nodded, and turned away. The door closed slowly. “Carry on,” the Colonel mur- mured automatically. He walked a few steps, stopped, and spun around. “That wasn’t meant as—” He closed his mouth resolutely and marched back to his desk. “The hell with it,” he told him- self, sitting down. “The Moon Queen is coming in faster than scheduled,” Ser- geant Young shouted urgently. The Colonel pushed himself up. “Nope,” Sergeant Young cor- rected. “I thought it was a blip but it was some of that lousy G.I. chalk.” Englert sank back as the non- com brushed at the screen with his sleeve. “It won’t erase,” Sergeant Young shouted. Colonel Englert pushed again and disappeared behind the desk. He picked him- self up. “Sergeant, I am having trouble with my caster,” he said wearily. "Will you make up your mind?” “It’s the ship, sir. She’s coming in.” The computer sprang to life and Lieutenant Foran grabbed his screwdriver. “Hold it,” the Colonel com- manded. Foran hesitated. “Give it a chance,” Englert said gently. Corporal Hulle waited and then bent over the speed printer. He straightened and raced to his chart. “Where is she. Corporal?” “Minus three miles, sir,” Hulle responded. He gulped audibly and erased his last line. “Three thousand miles out, sir.” “Why aren’t they on radio?” Englert demanded anxiously. SommerviUe backed against the console and flicked the switch to “on.” The Moon Queen’s voice flooded the big room. "... the hell is going on? I’ll bet Dower is running another crap game.” The Colonel grabbed the micro- phone. “No crap game. Captain Mar- tino,” he said crisply. “Why are you so late in reporting?” “I’ve been on the air for the last hour,” Captain Mai'tino said wearily from three thousand miles out. “It seemed logical that P.F.C. Dower was up to something.” Colonel Englert looked back toward the darkroom. “I suggest we get down to busi- ness,” he said hastily. “You are ahead of schedule.” “Shall I turn around and flit about space for a few minutes?” Captain Martino inquired testily. The big room went silent. “Have you been drinking, Cap- tain?” Colonel Englert demanded. “If you must know— yes,” Mar- tino reported. “And you will be too. I’m landing in twelve min- utes and will explain then.”

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The Biggest Damned Martini in the Universe 11 “But you did reach the moon?” Englert asked tensely. “We did,” Martino reported. “In a manner of speaking. I’d rather not explain on radio. Over and out.” The radio went silent. The men stood like statues for a moment, and then rushed to the observa- tion window. They waited. “There she is,” Young said at last. They watched as the big silver ship came down, reversed direction, and settled toward the landing ai'ea tail first. Flame bit out of the tail rockets to cushion the landing. “Whose car is that out there in the middle of the landing area?” Sommerville asked suddenly. “Mine,” Colonel Englert an- swered miserably, as the rocket blast consumed the little sports model and the tail fins touched down. “I forgot I left it there when I inspected the take-off burn.” Young and Hulle rushed out to anchor the ladder that came out of the Moon Queens’ lower port. Englert watched them shaking hands with the crew, and then everyone headed for the office. Captain Martino came through the door first and saluted. Colonel Englert returned the gesture. “Let me congratulate you. Cap- tain, on being the first man to command a successful expedition to the moon,” he said crisply. “This very seci’et experiment, known only to us, is a creditable—. I beg your pardon. Captain . . . is Captain Schiela unable to stand by himself? Must you support him in such an ungainly—” “Captain Schiela is drunk, sir,” Captain Martino said. “An intoxicated navigational of- ficer is a disgrace,” Colonel Englert said. “We got back,” Martino re- torted. “And I’m not too sober myself.” “I trust there is an explanation,” Colonel Englert said stiffly. Cap- tain Martino sat down. Captain Schiela sat down in unison. “You’re not going to like it,” Martino said. “You told me you reached the Moon,” Englert said accusingly. “We followed you on radar. I saw you reach the Moon!” “Within approximately one mile,” Captain Martino said bit- terly. “And then we floated on the atmosphere.” “The Moon has no atmosphere!” Englert exploded. “Don’t kid yourself,” the space flyer said. “I was there and I set the Moon Queen down right on that atmosphere. They can change all the text books.” “There is no living thing visible on the moon,” Colonel Englert said quietly. “If there were an atmosphere there would be.” “Not this atmosphere,” Captain Martino said. “We floated on it like a ship on a sea.”

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78 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION “Liquid?” Englert asked in as- tonishment. Martino nodded. “Clear,” he said. “Tlrat’s why no one saw it. I brought some back.” He reached into his pocket and extracted a bottle of colorless liquid. Colonel Englert accepted it gingerly. He unscrewed the cap carefully and brought it to his nose. Quickly he recapped it and handed it back. “You gave me the wi'ong bot- tle,” he said disdainfully. “The hell I did,” Martino re- sponded. Englert stared at him. “But this is — ” Martino nodded, uncapped the bottle, and took a healthy slug. “Gin,” he said thoughtfully. “Gin,” Colonel Englert repeated weakly. “Just about the best I ever tasted,” the space officer testified. Colonel Englert reached for the bottle and took a deep swallow. He attempted to hand it back but Captain Martino waved him off. “Brought back plenty,” he said ^removing another bottle from his jacket. The Colonel sat silently for a minute. “Then our secret success is no success at all,” he said sadly. “The Moon is unsuited for any installa- tion.” “Unless we can live mider a mile of gin,” Captain Martino said. Captain Schiela came to life. “I would like to vol— volunteer for the next— flight,” he said bravely. Colonel Englert took a very large drink. Martino passed around a few bottles of Moon at- mosphere for the others. A half hour later Colonel Englert smiled. “A passing thought,” he said happily. “We could bring a bottle of vermouth and a jai' of olives and make the biggest damned Martini in the Universe.” “We vdll call ourselves the Under Gin Raiders,” Captain Martino said pontifically. “And we’d operate at forty fifths deep,” Corporal Hulle added. ‘Write a book called 20,000 Leagues Under the Gin,” Young offered. “Mind like a steel rtap,” Lieu- tenant Foran complimented. . . . General Borrmann stared in utter disbelief at the befuddled assemblage. “Everyone report to the Guard- house immediately,” he roared. Colonel Englert stood— unsteadily —his ground. “I would like to report on the Moon,” he said hopefully. “If it’s within my power,” General Borrmann said, “you’ll re- port on Saturn.” Golonel Englert disregarded what he hoped was levity. “Sir, you misunderstand,” he said. “Sir.” He rested a bracing hand on his desk. “Get a ship to the Moon, you said, sir. And we did sir, so. So, sir. . . . and report that the Moon is completely en-

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The Biggest Dammd Mattini in the Universe gulfed in gin, sir,” Colonel Englert concluded proudly. General Borrmann nodded un- derstandingly. He pointed at everyone in the room. “I think you should know,” he said in a voice of ice, “that you’ll all be in the Infantry within the week.” P.F.C. Dower and the blonde chose this moment to come out of the darkroom. General Borr- mann frowned. “What have you been doing, soldier?” he inquired. “And what has she been doing?” “We’ve both been doing the same thing,” the blonde volun- teered cheerfully. “An experiment,” P.F.C. Dower added, not too hopefully. “Well I will be damned,” the General said in tones of awe. “Has the Moon Queen been re- fueled?” he asked. “Standard Practice,” Colonel Englert said. “The ground crew began as soon as she landed.” Borrmann sat on the desk and made a phone call. As he replaced the receiver he stood up and ap- proached Colonel Englert. “The Moon is important. Colo- nel. I have ordered a crew to report at once, and I will per- sonally take command. This en- tire group is confined to quarters— I want no hint of this drunken orgy to escape this room while I am gone. Under penalty of an 79 immediate firing squad. Under- stood?” The General marched out. An hour later the Moon Queen rose on her column of flame and headed for space. When the Moon Queen was twenty thousand miles out. Gen- eral !^rnnann sat down next to Colonel Fenton. “I was sure Englert would louse it up,” he said. “He never did any- thing right before. I always had the perfect excuse when the Pen- tagon asked— ‘Englert is working on it.’ And now what does he do? He gets efficient! Just about wrecks the Bonmann-Fenton Moon Exporting Company. And my retirement only one year off.” Colonel Fenton smiled sympa- thetically. “Well, it couldn’t have gone on forever. Anyhow, we’ll really load up this trip. And after all, it was just luck that you and I reached the Moon on that early test run— let’s hope the Pentagon never hears about that.” “Riglit,” Borrmann said. “Did you pack the special equipment?” Fenton reached into his brief- case and held up a bottle of ver- mouth and a jar of olives. General Borrmann smiled. “Oh,” he said thoughtfully, "when we get back, remind me to ask P.F.C. Dower about a piece of— er— equipment he’s been using. . .

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The Money Tree by CLIFFORD D. SIMAK Perfect fwenfy-dollar bills came floating out over the wall of the Metcalfe estate. Twenty-dollar bills with stems, tike leaves. Chuck climbed the wall and found the money tree.,.. Then the rolla bit him. 80

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a novelet Chuck Doyle, loaded with his camera equipment, was walking along the high brick wall which sheltered the town house of J. Howard Metcalfe from vulgar public contact when he saw the twenty-dollar bill blow across the wall. Now, Doyle was well dried be- hind the ears— he had cut his eye- teeth on the crudities of the world and while no one could jever charge him with being a sophis- ticate, neither was he anybody’s fool. And yet there was no ques- tion, either, about his quick, posi- tive action when there was money to be picked up off the street. He looked around to see if anyone might be watching— some- 81

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82 \’ENTIIRE SCIENCE FICTION one, for example, who might be playing a dirty joke on him, or, worse yet, someone who might appeal' to claim the bill once he had retrieved it. There was small chance there would be anyone, for this was the snooty part of town, where every- one minded his own business and made sure that any uncouth intruders would mind theirs as well— an dfect achieved in most cases Viy high walls or dense hedges or sturdy ornamental fences. And the street on which Doyle now prepai'ed to stalk a piece of currency was by rights no proper street at all. It was an alley that ran between the brick walls of the Metcalfe residence and the dense hedge of Banker J. S. Gregg— Doyle had parked his car in there because it was against traffic regulations to park on the boulevard upon which the houses fronted. Seeing no one, Doyle set Iris camera equipment down and charged upon the bill, which was fluttering feebly in the alley. He scooped it up with the agility of a cat grabbing off a mouse and now he saw, for the first time, that it was no piddling one-dollar affair, or even a five-spot, but a twenty. It was crinkly and so new that it fairly gleamed, and he held it tenderly in his fingertips and resolved to retire to Benny’s Place as soon as possible, and pour himself a libation or two to celebrate Ihs colossal good luck. There was a little breeze blow- ing down the alley and the leaves of tlie few fugitive trees that lined the alley and tlie leaves of the many trees that grew in the stately lawns beyond the walls and hedges were making a sort of subdued symphonic sound. The sun was shining brightly and there was no hint of rain and the air was clean and fresh and die world was a perfect place. It was becoming more perfect by the moment. For over the Metcalfe wall, from which the first bill had flut- tered, other bills came dancing merrily in the impish breeze, swirling in the alley. Doyle saw them and stood for a frozen instant, his eyes bugging out a little and his Adam’s apple bobbing in excitement. Then he was among the bills, grabbing right and left and stuffing them in his pockets, gulping with the fear that one of them might some- how escape him, and ridden by the conviction that once he had gathered them he should get out of there as fast as he could manage. The money, he knew, must belong to someone and there was no one, he was sure, not even on this street, who was so con- temptuous of cash as to allow it to blow away without attempting to retrieve it. So he gathered the bills with

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83 The Morxexj Tree the fervor of a Hack Finn going through a blackberry patch and with a last glance around to be sure he had missed none, streaked for his car. A dozen blocks away, in a less plush locality, he wheeled the car up to the curb opposite a vacant lot and furtively emptied his pockets, smoothing out the bills and stacking them neatly on the seat beside him. There were a lot of them, many more than he had thought there were, and his breath whistled through his teeth. He picked up the pile of cur- rency preparatory to counting it and something, some little stick- like thing was sticking out of it. He flicked it to knock it away and it stayed where it was. It seemed to be stuck to one of the bills. He seized it to pull it loose. It came and the bill came with it. It was a stein, like an apple stem, like a cherry stem— a stem attached quite solidly and natu- rally to one corner of a twenty- dollar bill! He dropped the pile of bills upon the seat and held up the stem and the bill hung from the stem, as if it were growing from the stem, and it was clear to see that the stem not long before had been fastened to a branch, for the mark of recent separation was plainly visible. Doyle whistled softly. A money tree! he thought. But there was no such a thing as a money tree. Tliere’d never been a money tree. There never would be a money tree. “I’m seeing things,” said Doyle, “and I ain’t had a drink in hours.” He could shut his eyes and diere it was— a mighty tree, huge of boU and standing true and straight and high, with spreading branches fully leafed and every leaf a twenty-dollar biU. The wind would rustle all the leaves and would make money-music and a man could lie in the shade of such a tree and not have a worry in the world, just waiting for the leaves to drop so he could pick them up and put them in his pocket. He tugged at the stem a bit and it still clung to tlie bill, so he folded the whole thing up as neatly as he could and stuck it in the watch pocket of his trousers. Then he picked up the rest of the bills and stuffed them in another pocket without counting them. Twenty minutes later he walked into Benny’s Bar. Benny was mopping the mahogany. One lone customer was at the far end of the bar working through a beer. “Gimme bottle and a glass,” said Doyle. “Sho^v me cash,” said Benny. Doyle gave him one of the twenty-dollar bills. It was so fresh and new and crisp that its crinkling practically thundered in the silence of the place. Benny

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VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 84 looked it over with great care. “Got someone making them for you?” he asked. “Naw,” said Doyle. “I pick them off the street.” Beimy handed across a bottle and a glass. “You through work,” he asked, “or are you just beginning?” “I put in my day,” said Doyle. “I been shooting old J. Howard Metcalfe. Magazine in the east wanted pictures of him.” “You mean the racketeer?” “He ain’t no racketeer. He went legitimate four or five years ago. He’s a magnate now.” “You mean tycoon. What kind of tycoon is he?” “I don’t know. But whatever kind it is, it sure pays off. He’s got a fancy-looking shack up on the hill. But he ain’t so much to look at. Don’t see why this maga- zine should want a picture of him.” “Maybe they’re running a story about how it pays to go straight.” Doyle tipped the bottle and sloshed liquor in his glass. “It ain’t no skin off me,” he declared philosophically. “I’d go take pictures of an angleworm if they paid me for it.” “Who would want pictures of any angleworm?” “Lots of crazy people in the world,” said Doyle. “Might want anything. I don’t ask no questions. I don’t venture no opinions. People want pictures taken, I take them. They pay me for it, that is all right with me.” Doyle drank appreciatively and refilled the glass. “Benny,” he asked, “you ever hear of money growing on a tree?” “You got it wrong,” said Benny. “Money grows on bushes.” “If it grows on bushes, then it could grow on trees. A bush ain’t nothing but a little tree.” “No, no,” protested Benny, somewhat alarmed. “Money don’t really grow on bushes. That is just a saying.” The telephone rang and Benny went to answer it. “It’s for you,” he said. “Now how would anyone think of looking for me here?” asked Doyle, astounded. He picked up the bottle and shambled down the bar to where the phone was waiting. “All right,” he told the trans- mitter. “You’re the one who called. Start talking.” “This is Jake.” "Don’t tell me. You got a job for me. You’ll pay me in a day or two. How many jobs do you think I do for you viuthout being paid?” “You do this job for me, Chuck, and I’ll pay you everything I owe you. Not only for this one, but for all the others, too. This is one that I need real bad and I need it fast. You see, this car went off the road and into this lake and the insurance company claims—”

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85 The Money Tree “Where is this car nowF’ “It’s still in the lake. They’ll be lulling it out in a day or two and I need the pictures—” “You want me, maybe, to go down into the lake and take pic- tures underwater?” “That’s exactly the situation. I know that it’s a tough one. But I’ll get the diving equipment and arrange everything. I hate to ask it of you, but you’re the only man I know . . .” “I will not do it,” Doyle said firmly. “My health is too delicate. If I get wet I get pneumonia and if I get cold I have a couple teeth that begin to ache and I’m allergic to all kinds of weeds and more than likely this lake is filled with a lot of water lilies and other kinds of plants.” “I’ll pay you double!” Jake yelled in desperation. “I’ll even pay you triple.” “I know you,” said Doyle. “You won’t pay me nothing.” He hung up the phone and shuffled back up the bar, dragging the bottle with him. “Nerve of the guy!” he said, taking two drinks in rapid suc- cession. “It’s a hell of a way,” he said to Beimy, “for a man to make a living.” “All ways are,” said Benny philosophically. "Look, Benny, there wasn’t nothing wrong with that bill I give you?” “Should there been?” “Naw, but that crack you made.” “I always make them cracks. It goes with the job. Tlie cus- tomers exi>ect me to make them kind of cracks.” He mopped at the bar, a purely reflex action, for the bar was dry and shiny. “I always look the folding over good,” he said. “I’m as hep as any banker. I can spot a phoney fifty feet away. Smart guys want to pass some bad stuff, they figure that a bar is the place to do it. You got to be on your guard against it.” “Catch much of it?” Benny shook his head. “Once in a while. Not often. Fellow in here the other day says tliere is a lot of it popping up that can’t be spotted even by an expert. Says the government is going crazy over it. Says there is bills turning up with duplicate serial numbers. Shouldn’t be no two bills with tire same serial number. When that happens, one of them is phoney. Fellow says they figure it’s the Russians.” “The Russians?” “Sure, the Russians flooding the country with phoney money that’s so good no one can tell the dif- ference. If they turned loose enough of it, the fellow said, they could ruin the economy.” “Well, now,” said Doyle in some relief, “I call that a dirty trick.”

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86 VENTUEE SCIENCE FICTION “Them Russians,” said Benny, “is a dirty bunch.” Doyle drank again, morosely, then handed the bottle back. “I got to quit,” he announced. “I told Mabel I would drop around. She don’t like me to have a snootfull.” “I don’t know why Mabel puts up with you,” Benny told him. “There she is, working in that beanery where she meets all sorts of guys. Some of them is sober and hard working—” “They ain’t got any soul,” said Doyle. “There ain’t a one of them truck drivers and mechanics that can tell a sunset from a scrambled egg.” Benny paid him out his change. “I notice,” he said, “that you make your soul pay off.” “Why, sure,” , Doyle told him, “That’s only common sense.” He picked up his change and went out into the street. Mabel was waiting for him, but that was not unusual. Something always happened and he was always late and she had become resigned to waiting. She was waiting in a booth and he gave her a kiss and sat down across from her. The place was empty except for a new waitress who was tidying up a table at the other end of the room. “Something funny happened to me today,” said Doyle. “I hope,” said Mabel, simpering, “that it was something nice.” “Now I don’t know,” Doyle told her. “It could be. It could, hkewise, get a man in trouble.” He dug into his watch pocket and took out the bill. He unfolded it and smoothed it out and laid it on the table. "What you call that?” he asked. “Why, Chuck, it’s a twenty- dollar bill!” “Look at that thing on the cor- ner of it.” She did, with some puzzlement. “Why, it’s a stem,” she cried. “Just like an apple stem. And it’s fastened to the bill.” “It comes off a money tree,” said Doyle. “There ain’t no such thing,” objected Mabel. “Yes, there is,” Doyle told her, with mounting conviction. “J. Howard Metcalfe, he’s got one growing in his back yard. That’s how he gets all his money. I never could get it figured out how all these big moguls that live in them big houses and drive those block- long cars could manage to make all the money it would take to live the way they do. I bet you every one of them fellows has got money trees growing in their yards. And they’ve kept it a sec- ret all this time, except today Metcalfe forgot to pick his money and a wind came along and blew it off the tree and over the wall and—” “But even if there was such a thing as a money tree,” persisted

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87 The Money Tree Mabel, "they could never keep it secret. Someone would find it out. All of them have servants and the servants would know . . .” "I got that all figured out,” said Doyle. “I been giving this tiling a lot of thought and I know just how it works. Them servants in those big mansions aren’t just ordinary servants. They’re all old retainers. They been in the family for years and they’re loyal to the family. And you know why they’re loyal? It’s because they’re getting their cuts off the money ti'ees. I bet you they salt it all away and when it comes time for them to retire they live the life of Riley, There wouldn’t nobody blab with a setup like that. “And if all those big shots haven’t got something tliat they want to hide, why has every one of them big houses got big walls or thick hedges around the back of them?” "But they have garden parties,” Mabel protested. “I read about them in the society section all the time—” "You ever been to one of them garden parties?” "No, of course I haven’t.” “You bet your boots you haven’t. You ain’t got no money tree. And they don’t invite no one except other people who likewise have money trees. Why do you think all them rich people are so snooty and exclusive?” “Well, even if they have got money trees, what difference does it make? What are you going to do about it?” “Mabel, would you maybe be able to find me a sugar sack or something?” "We have a lot of them out back. I could get you one,” “And fix up a drawstring in it so once I got it full, I could jerk the string and tighten it up so the money wouldn’t all spill out if I had to—” "Chuck, you wouldn’t!” “There’s a tree outside the wall. I can shinny up it. And tliere’s a branch sticking out into the yard. I could tie a rope to that . . “But tliey’d catch you!” “Well, we’ll know if you get tliat sack for me. I’ll go out, hunt up some rope.” “But all the stores are closed by now. You can’t buy a rope.” "Know just where to get some,” said Doyle. “Fellow down the street has eighteen, twenty feet of it fixed up for a swing out back. Took pictures of a kid swinging there just a day or two ago.” “Youll have to drive me over to my place. I can’t fix the sack in here.” “Just as soon as I get back with the rope.” “Chuck?” “Yeah?” “It isn’t stealing, is it— this money tree?” “Naw. If Metcalfe has one, he hasn’t any right to it. It’s fair

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88 \'ENTOHE SCIENCE FICTION game for anyone. It’s more than fair— it just ain’t right for a man to have a thing hke that all to himself,” “And you won’t be caught for having counterfeit . . “Now, how could it be counter- feit?” demanded Doyle, just a bit aghast that she should suggest it. “Nobody’s making it. There ain’t no plates and there isn’t any press. The stuff just grows, hang- ing on that tree.” She hunched over the table toward him. “But, Chuck, it’s so impossible! How could a tree grow money?” “I don’t pretend to know,” said Doyle. “I ain’t no scientist and I don’t catch the lingo, but some of them botany fellows, they can do some funny things. Like that man named Burbank. They can fix it so plants will do most anything they want. They can change the kind of fruit they bear and they can change their size and their growing habits and I haven’t got no doubt at all if someone put his mind to it, he could make a tree grow money.” Mabel shd out of the booth. “I’ll get the sack,” she said. II Doyle shinnied up the tree that grew outside the high brick wall. Reaching the big branch that extended out over the wall, invad- ing the air space over the Met- calfe garden, he crouched quietly. He tilted his head skyward and watched the scared fleeing of light clouds. In another minute or two, a slightly larger cloud, he saw, would close in on the moon and when that happened was the time to drop into the garden. He crouched and watched the garden and there were several trees but there was nothing he could make out that was peculiar about any one of them. Except it seemed, when he listened closely, that the rustling of the leaves of one of them was crisper than the other rustlings. He checked the rope looped in his hand and the sack tucked beneath his belt and waited for the heavier cloud to move across the moon. The house was quiet and still and only showed one faint glim- mer of light in an upstairs room. And the night was quiet as well, except for the rustling of the leaves. The edge of the cloud began to eat into the moon and Doyle moved out on cat feet along the branch. Swiftly he knotted the rope around the branch and let it down. And. having accomplished that, having come this far, he hesitated for an instant, listening hard, straining his eyes for any trace of motion in the darkened rec- tangle of the garden. He could detect none.

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The Money Tree 89 Quickly, he slid down the rope and stole, toward the tree which had seemed to rustle more crisply than the others. He reached it and tlrrust up a cautious hand. The leaves had the size and feel of bills and he plucked at them frantically. He jerked the sack from his belt and thrust the handful of leaves into it and then anotlrer handful and another. Easy, he exulted. Just like pick- ing plums. Just like being in a plum thicket. As easy as pick- ing. .. . Just five minutes, he told him- self. That is all I need. Just five full minutes with no one pester- ing. He didn’t get five minutes. He didn’t get a minute, even. A whirlwind of silent anger came in a quiet rush out of the darkness and was upon him. It bit him in the leg and it slashed him in the ribs and it tore his shirt half off him. It was as silent as it was ferocious, and he glimpsed it in that first startled second only as a floating patch of motion. He stifled the hurt yip of sur- prise and fear that surged into his throat and fought back as silently as the thing attacking him. Twice he had his hands upon it and twice it slipped away and swarmed to the attack again. Then, finally, he got a grip upon it that it could not shake and he lifted it high to smash it to the ground. But as he lifted it, the cloud sailed off the moon and the garden came alight. He saw the thing, then, redily saw it, for the first time, and clamped down his gurgle of amazement. He had expected a dog of some sort. But this was not a dog. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was nothing he had ever heard of. One end of it was all mouth arid the other end of it was blunt and square. It was terrier-sized, but no terrier. It had short, yet powerful legs and its arms were long and sinuous and armed with heavy claws and somehow he had managed to grab it in such a manner that the arms and mur- derous claws were pinned against its body. It was dead white and hairless and as naked as a jaybird. It had a sort of knapsack, or what ap- peared to be a knapsack, strapped upon its back. But that was not the worst of it Its chest was large and hard and gleaming, hke the thorax of a grasshopper and the chest was like a neon-lighted billboard, with characters and pictures and dots and hooks and dashes flashing off and on. Rapid-fire thoughts snaked their way through the fear and horror tlrat tumbled in Doyle’s

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90 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION brain and he tried to get them tracking, but they wouldn’t track. They just kept tumbling round and wouldn’t straighten out. Then all the dots and dashes, all the hooks and symbols cleared off the billboard chest and there were words, human words, in capitals, glowing upon it; LET GO OF ME! Even to the exclamation point. “Pal,” said Doyle, not a little shaken, but nevertheless deter- mined, “I will not let you go. I got plans for you.” He looked swiftly around for the sack and located it on the ground nearby and reached out a foot to pull it closer. YOU SORRY, spelled the crea- ture. “Not,” said Doyle, “so that you could notice.” Kneeling, he reached out swiftly and gi'abbed the sugar sack. Quickly he thrust the crea- ture into it and jerked the draw- string tight. He stood up and hefted the sack. It was not too heavy for him to carry. Lights snapped on in the first floor of the house, in a room fac- ing on the garden, and voices floated out of an open window. Somewhere in the darkness a screen door slapped shut with a hollow sound. Doyle whirled and ran toward the dangling rope. The sack ham- pered him a little, but urgency compensated for the hindrance and he climbed swiftly to the branch. He squatted there, hidden in the shadow of the leaves, and drew up the rope, coiling it awk- wardly with his one free hand. The thing inside the sack began to thrash about and he jerked the sack up, thumped it on the branch. The thing grew quiet at once. Footsteps came deliberately down a shadow-hidden walk and Doyle saw the red glow of a cigar as someone puffed on it. A man’s voice spoke out of the darkness and he recognized it as Metcalfe’s voice. “Henry!” “Yes, sir,” said Henry from the wide verandah.' “Where the devil did the rolla go?” ^ “He’s out there somewhere, sir. He never gets too far from the tree. It’s his responsibility, you know.” The cigar-end glowed redder as Metcalfe puffed savagely. “I don’t understand those rollas, Henry. Even after all these years, I don’t understand them.” “No, sir,” said Henry, ‘"rhey’re hard things to understand.” Doyle could smell the smoke, drifting upward to him. He could tell by the smell it was a good cigar.

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91 The Money Tree And naturally Metcalfe would smoke the very best. No man with a money tree growing in his garden need worry about the price of smokes. Cautiously, Doyle edged a foot or two along the branch, anxious to get slightly closer to the wall and safety. The cigar jerked around and pointed straight at him as Met- calfe tilted his head to stare into the tree. “What was that!” he yelled. “I didn’t hear a thing, sir. It must have been the wind.” “There’s no wind, you fool. It’s that cat again!” Doyle huddled closer against the branch, motionless, yet tensed to spring into action if it were necessary. Quietly he gave him- self a mental bawling-out for moving. Metcalfe had moved off the walk and clear of the shadow and was standing in the moonlight, staring up into the tree. “There’s something up there,” he announced pontifically. “The leaves are so thick I can’t make out what it is. I bet you it’s that goddam cat again. He’s plagued the rolla for two nights hand running.” He took the cigar out of his face and blew a couple of beau- tiful smoke rings that drifted ghost-like in the moonlight. “Henry,” he shouted, “bring me a gun, I think the twelve- gauge is right behind the door.” Doyle had heard enough. He made a dash for it. He almost fell, but he caught himself. He dropped the rope and almost dropped the sack, but managed to hang onto it. The rolla, inside the sack, began to thrash about. “So you want to horse around,” Doyle said savagely to the thing inside the sack. He tossed the bag toward the fence and it went over and he heard it thump into the alley. He hoped, momentarily, that he hadn’t killed it, for it might be valuable. He might be able, he thought, to sell it to a circus. Circuses were always looking for crazy things like that. He reached the tree trunk and slid down it with no great cere- mony and very little forethought and as a result collected a fine group of abrasions on his arms and legs from the roughness of the bark. He saw the sack lying in the alley and from beyond the fence he heard the ferocious bellowing and blood-curdling cursing of J. Howard Metcalfe. Someone ought to warn him, Doyle told himself. Man of his age, he shouldn’t ought to allow himself to fly into such a rage. Someday he’d fall flat upon his face and that would be the end of him. Doyle scooped up the sack and ran as hard as he could to where

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92 VENTUKE SCIENCE FICTION he’d parked the car at the alley’s end. Reaching it, he tossed the sack into the seat and crawled in himself. He took ojff with a rush and wound a devious route to throw off any possible pursuit— although that, he admitted to himself, was just a bit fantastic, for he’d made his getaway before Metcalfe could possibly have put someone on his tail. Half an hour later he pulled up beside a small park and began to take stock of the situation. There was both good and bad. He had failed to harvest as much of the tree-grown money as he had intended and he had tip- ped his mitt to Metcalfe, so there’d not be another chance. But he knew now for a cer- tainty that there were such things as money trees and he had a rolla, or he supposed it was a rolla, for whatever it was worth. And the rolla—so quiet now in- side the sack— in its more active moments of guarding the money tree, had done him not a bit of good. His hands were dark in the moonlight with the wash of blood and there were stripes of fire across his ribs, beneath the torn shirt, where the rollas claws had raked him, and one leg was sodden-wet. He put down a hand to feel the warm moistness of his trouser leg. He felt a thrill of fear course along his nerves. A man could get infected from a chewing-up like that— especially by an unknown animal. And if he went to a doctor, the doc would want to know what had happened to him, and he could say a dog, of course. But what if the doc should know right off that it was no dog bite. More than likely the doc would have to make some report or other— maybe just like he’d have to make a report on a gunshot wound. There was, he decided, too much at stake for him to take the chance— he must not let it be known he’d found out about the money tree. For as long as he was the only one who knew, he might stand to make a good thing of it. Espe- cially since he had the rolla, which in some mysterious manner was connected with the tree— and which, even by itself, without reference to the tree, might be somehow turned into a wad of cash. He eased the car from the curb and out into the street. Fifteen minutes later he parked in a noisome alley back of a block-long row of old apartment houses. He descended from the car and hauled out the sack. The rolla was still quiet. “Funny thing,” Doyle said. He laid his hand against the sack and the sack was warm and the roUa stirred a bit.

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93 The Money Tree “Still alive,” Doyle told him- self with some relief. He wended his way through a clutter of battered garbage cans, stacks of rotting wood, piles of empty cans; cats slunk into the dark as he approached. “Crummy place for a girl to live,” said Doyle, speaking to him- self. “No place for a girl like Mabel.” He found the rickety back- stairs and climbed them, went along the hall until he came to Mabel’s door. She opened it at his knock, immediately, as if she had been waiting. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him in and slammed the door and leaned her back against it. “I was so worried. Chuck!” “Nothing to worry about,” said Doyle. “Little trouble, that’s all.” “Your hands!” she screamed. “Your shirt!” Doyle jostled the bag gaily. “Nothing to it, Mabel. Got what done it right inside this sack.” He looked around the place. “You got all the windows shut?” he asked. She nodded, still a bit wide- eyed. “Hand me that table lamp,” he said. “It’ll be handy for a club.” She jerked the plug out of the wall and pulled- off the shade, then handed the lamp to him. He hefted the lamp, then picked up the sack, loosened the draw sti'ing. “I bumped it couple of times,” he said, “and heaved it in the alley and it may be shook up considerable, but you can’t take no chances.” He upended the sack and dumped the rolla out. With it came a shower of twenty-dollar bills— the three or four handfuls he had managed to pick before the rolla jumped him. The rolla picked itself off the floor with a show of dignity and stood erect— except that it didn’t look as if it were standing erect. Its hind legs were so short and its front legs were so long that it looked as if it were sitting like a dog. The fact that its face, or rather its mouth, since it had no face, was on top of its head, added to the illusion of sitting. Its stance was prettty much like that of a sitting coyote baying at the moon— or, better yet, an over- sized and more than ordinarily grotesque bullfrog baying at the moon. Mabel let out a full-fledged scream and bolted for the bed- room, slamming the door behind her. “For cripes sake,” moaned Doyle, “the fat’s in the fire for sinre. They’ll think I’m murder- ing her.” Someone thumped on the floor upstairs. A man’s voice bellowed: “Cut it out down there!” The rolkis gleaming chest lit up:

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94 VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION HUNGRY. WHEN WE EAT? Doyle gulped. He felt cold sweat starting out on him. WASSA MATTER? spelled the rolla. GO AHEAD. TALK. I CAN HEAR. Someone started hammering on the door. Doyle looked wildly around and saw the money on die floor. He started scooping it up and stuffing it in his pocket. Whoever was at the door kept on hammering. Doyle finished with the money and opened the door. A man stood there in his under- shirt and pants and he was big and tough. He towered over Doyle by at least a foot. A woman, standing behind him, peered around at Doyle. “What’s going on around here?” the man demanded. “We heard a lady scream.” “Saw a mouse,” Doyle told him. The man kept on looking at him. “Big one,” Doyle elaborated. “Might have been a rat.” “And you, mister. What’s the matter with you? How’d your shirt get tore?” “I was in a crap game,” said Doyle and went to shut the door. But the man stiff-armed it and strode into the room. “If you don’t mind, we’ll look the situation over.” With a sinking feeling in his belly, Doyle remembered the rolla. He spun around. The rolla was not there. The bedroom door opened and Mabel came out. She was calm as ice. “You live here, lady?” asked the man. “Yes, she does,” the woman said. “I see her in the hall.” “This guy bothering you?” “Not at all,” said Mabel. “We are real good friends.” The man swung around on Doyle. ‘Tou got blood all over you,” he said. “I can’t seem to help it,” Doyle told him. “I just bleed all the blessed time.” Tlie woman was tugging at the man’s ann. Mabel said, “I tell you, there is nothing wrong.” “Let’s go, honey,” urged the woman, still tugging at the ann. “They don’t want us here.” The man went reluctantly. Doyle slammed the door and bolted it. He leaned against it weakly. “That rips it,” he said. “We got to get out of here. He’ll keep mull- ing it over and he’ll up and call the cops and they’ll haul us in . . .” “We ain’t done nothing. Chuck.” “No, maybe not. But I don’t like no cops. I don’t want to an- swer questions. Not right now.”

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The Money Tree She moved closer to him. “He was right,” she said. “You are all bloody. Your hands and shirt . . “One leg, too. The rolla give me a working over.” The rolla stood up from behind a corner chair. NO WISH EMBARRASS, he spelled out. ALWAYS HIDE FROM STRANGERS. “That’s the way he talks,” said Doyle, admiringly. "What is it?” asked Mabel, backing away a pace or two. I ROLLA. “I met him under the money tree,” said Doyle. “We had a little fracas. He has something to do with the tree, guarding it or something.” “And did you get some money?” “Not much. You see, this rolla . . HUNGRY, said the rolla. “You come along,” Mabel said to Doyle. “I got to patch you up.” “But don’t you want to hear . . “Not especially. You got into trouble again. It seems to me you want to get in trouble.” She headed for the bathroom and he followed. “Sit down on the edge of the tub,” she ordered. The rolla came and sprawled in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. AINT YOU GOT NO FOOD? it asked. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mabel 95 exclaimed in exasperation, “what is it you want?” FRUIT. VEGETABLES. “Out in the kitchen. There’s fruit on the table. I suppose I have to show you.” FIND MYSELF, the rolla said and left. “I can’t understand that squirt,” said Mabel. “First he chewed you up. Now he’s palsy-walsy.” “I give him lumps,” said Doyle. “Taught him some respect.” “Besides,” observed Mabel, “he’s dying of starvation. Now you sit down on that tub and let me fix you up.” He sat dovra gingerly while she rummaged in the medicine cabinet. She got a bottle of red stuff, a bottle of alcohol, swabs and cotton. She knelt and rolled up Doyle’s trouser leg. “This looks bad,” she said. “Where he got me with his teeth,” said Doyle. ‘Tou should see a doctor. Chuck. This might get infected. His teeth might not be clean or something.” “Doc would ask too many ques- tions. We got trouble enough . . “Chuck, what is that thing out there?” “It’s a rolla.” “Why is it called a rolla?” “I don’t know. Just call it that, I guess.” “I read about someone called a rolla once. Rolla boys, I think

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VENTUBE SCIENCE FICTION 96 it was. Always doing good.” ‘Didn’t do me a bit of good.” “What did you bring it here for, then?” “Might be worth a milUon. Might sell it to a circus or a zoo. Might work up a night club act with it. The way it talks and all.” She worked expertly and quickly on the tooth-marked calf and ankle, cleaning out the cuts and swabbing them with some of the red stuff that was in the bottle. “There’s anotlier reason I brought the rolla here,” Doyle confessed. “I got Metcalfe where I want him. I know sometliing he wouldn’t want no one else to know and I got the rolla and the rolla has something to do with them money trees . . .” “You’re talking blackmail now?” “Nah, nothing like that. You know I wouldn’t never blackmail noone. Just a little private arrangement between me and Metcalfe. Maybe just out of grati- tude for me keeping my mouth shut, he might give me one of his money trees.” “But you said there was only one money tree.” “That’s all I saw, was one. But the place was dark and there might be more of them. You wouldn’t expect a man like Met- calfe to be satisfied with just one money tree, would you. If he had one, he could grow some otliers. I bet you he has twenty-dollar trees and fifty-dollar trees and hundred-dollar trees.” He sighed. “I sure would like to get just live minutes with a hundred-dollai' tree. I’d be set for life. I’d do me some two-handed picking the like you never see.” “Shuck up your shirt,” said Mabel. “I got to get at them scratches on your ribs.” Doyle shucked up his shirt. “You know,” he said, “I bet you Metcalfe ain’t the only one that has them money trees. I bet all the rich folks has them. I bet they’re all banded together in a secret society, pledged to never talk about them. I wouldn’t won- der if that’s where all the money comes from. Maybe the govern- ment don’t print no money, like they say they do ...” “Shut up,” commanded Mabel, “and hold stiU.” She worked swiftly on his ribs. “What are you going to do with the rolla?” she asked. “We’ll put him in the car and drive down and have a talk with Metcalfe. You stay out in the car with the rolla and if there is any funny stuflf, you get out of there. Long as we have the rolla we got Metcalfe across the barrel.” “You’re crazy if you think I’ll stay alone, with that thing in the car. Not after what it done to _ » you. “Just get yourself a stick of stove wood and belt him one with it if he makes a crooked move,”

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The Money Tree ‘I’ll do no such thing,” said Mabel. “I wiU not stay with him.” “All right, then,” said Doyle, “we’ll put him in the trunk. We’ll fix him up with sonae blankets, so* he’ll be comfortable. He can’t get at you there. And it might be better to have him under lock and key.” Mabel shook her head. “I hope that you are doing right. Chuck. I hope we don’t get into trouble.” “Put that stuff away,” said Doyle, “and let us get a move on. We got to get out of here before that jerk down the hall decides to phone the cops.” 'The rolla showed up in the doorway, patting at his belly. JERKS? he asked. WHATS THEM? “Oh, my aching back,” said Doyle, “now I got to explain to him.” JERKS LIKE HEELS? “Sure, that’s it,” said Doyle. “A jerk is like a heel.” METCALFE SAY ALL OTHER HUMANS HEELS “Now, I tell you, Metcalfe might have something there,” said Doyle, judicially. HEEL MEAN HUMAN WITH NO MONEY “I’ve never heard it put quite that way,” said Doyle, “but if that 97 should be the case, you can count me as a heel.” METCALFE SAY THAT WHAT IS WRONG WITH PLANET. THERE IS TOO LITTLE MONEY “Now, that is something that I’ll go along with him.” SO I NOT ANGRY WITH YOU ANY MORE. Mabel said: “My, but he’s turned out to be a chatterbox.” MY JOB TO CARE AND GUARD TREE. I ANGRY AT THE START. BUT FINALLY I THINK POOR HEEL NEED SOME MONEY CANNOT BLAME FOR TAKING. “That’s decent of you,” Doyle told him. “I wish you’d thought of that before you chewed me up. If I could have had just a full five minutes—” “I am ready,” Mabel said. “If we have to leave, let’s go.” Ill Doyle went softly up die walk that led to the front of the Met- calfe house. The place was dark and the moon was riding home-

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98 VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION ward in tlie western sky, just above the tip of a row of pines that grew in the grounds across the sti'eet. He mounted the steps of mel- lowed brick and stood before the door. He reached out and rang the bell and waited. Nothing happened. He rang again and yet again and there was no answer. He tided the door and it was locked. “They flown the coop,” said Doyle, talking to himself. He went around the house into the alley and climbed the tree again. The garden back of the house was dark and silent. He crouched for a long time atop the wall and the place was empty. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and played it downward. It cut a circle of uncertain light and he moved it slowly back and forth until it caught the maw of tortured earth. His breath rasped in his throat at the sight of it and he worked the light around to be sure there was no mistake. There was no mistake at all. The money tree was gone. Someone had dug it up and taken it away. Doyle snapped off the light and slid it back into his pocket. He slid down the tree and trotted down the alley. Two blocks away he came up to the car. Mabel had kept the motor idling. She moved from behind the wheel and he slid under it and shoved the car in gear. “They took it on the lam,” he said. “Tliere ain’t nobody there. They dug up the tree and took it on the lam.” "Well, I’m glad of it,” Mabel said defiantly. “Now you won’t be getting into trouble— not witli money trees at least.” “I got a hunch,” said Doyle. “So have I,” said Mabel. “Both of us is going home and getting us some sleep.” “Maybe you,” said Doyle. “You can curl up in the seat. Me, I got some driving to do.” “There ain’t no place to drive.” “Metcalfe told me when I was taking his i>icture this afternoon about a farm he had. Bragging about all the things he has, you know. Out west some place, near a town called Millville.” “What has tliat got to do with it?” “Well, if you had a lot of money trees . . .” “But he had only one tree. In the backyard of his house.” “Maybe he has lots of them. Maybe he had this one here just to keep him in pocket money when he was in town.” “You mean you’re driving out to this place where he has a farm?” “I have to find an all-night station first. I need some gas and I need a road map to find out where is this Millville place. I bet

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99 The Money Tree you Metcalfe’s got an orchard on that farm of his. Can’t you see it, Mabel? Row after row of trees, all loaded down with money!” IV The old proprietor of the only store in Millville— part hardware, part grocery, part drugstore, with the postofSce in one corner- rubbed his silvery mustache. “Yeah,” he said. “Man by the name of Metcalfe does have a farm— over in the hills across the river. He’s got it named and every- thing. He calls it Merry Hill. Now, can you tell me, stranger, why anyone should name a farm like that?” “People do some funny things,” said Doyle. “Can you tell me how to get tlrere?” ‘Tou asked?” “Sure I asked. I asked you just now . . .” The old man shook his head. “You been invited there? Metcalfe expecting you?” “No, I don’t suppose he is.” “You’ll never get in then. He’s got it solid-fenced. And he’s got a guard at the gate— even got a little house for the guard to stay in. ’Less Metcalfe wants you in, you don’t get in.” “I’ll have a try at it.” “I wish you well, stranger, but I don’t think you’ll make it. Now, why in the world should Metcalfe act like that? This is friendly country. No one else has got their farms fenced with eight-foot wire and barbs on top of that. No one else could afford to do it even if they wanted to. He must be pow- erful scared of someone.” “Wouldn’t know,” said Doyle, “Tell me how to get there.” The old man found a paper sack underneath the counter, fished a stub pencil out of his vest pocket and wet it carefully with his tongue. He smoothed out the sack with a liver-spotted hand and began drawing painfully. “You cross the bridge and take this road— don’t take that one to the left, it just wanders up the river- and you go up this hollow and you reach a steep hill and at the top of it you turn left and it’s just a mile to Metcalfe’s place.” He wet the pencil again and drew a rough rectangle. “Tlie place lies right in there,” he said. “A sizable piece of prop- erty. Metcalfe bought four farms and threw them all together.” Back at the car Mabel was wait- ing irritably. “So you was wrong all the time,” she greeted Doyle. “He hasn’t got a farm.” “Just a few miles from here,” said Doyle. “How is the rolla doing?” “He must be hungry again. He’s banging on the trunk.” “How can he be hungry? I bought him all of them bananas just a couple hours ago.”

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100 VENTUnS SCIENCE FICTION "Maybe he wants company. He might be getting lonesome.” “I got too much to do,” said Doyle, “to be holding any roUds hand.” He climbed into the car and got it started and prdled away into the dusty street. He clattered across the bridge and instead oi keeping up the hollow, as the storekeeper had directed, turned left on the road that paralleled the river. If the map the old man had drawn on the sack was right, he figured, he should come upon the Metcalfe farm from the rear by following the river road. Gentle hills turned into steep bluffs, covered with heavy woods and underbrush. The crooked road grew rougher. He came to a deep hollow that ran between two bluffs. A faint trail, a wagon-road more than likely, unused for many years, angled up the hollow. Doyle pulled the car into the old wagon road and stopped. He got out and, stood for a moment, staring up the hollow. “What you stopping for?” asked Mabel. “I’m about,” Doyle told her, “to take Metcalfe in the rear.” “You can’t leave me here.” “I won’t be gone for long.” “And there are mosquitoes,” she complained, slapping wildly. “Just keep tlie windows shut.” He started to walk away and she called him back. “There’s the rolla back there.” “He can’t get at you as long as he’s in the trunk.” “But all that banging he’s doing! What if someone should go past and hear all that banging going on?” “I bet you there ain’t been any- one along this road within the last two weeks.” Mosquitoes buzzed. He waved futile hands at them. “Look, Mabel,” he pleaded, “you want me to pull this off, don’t you? You ain’t got nothing against a mink coat, have you? You don’t despise no diamonds?” “No, I guess I don’t,” she ad- mitted. “But you hurry back. I don’t want to be here alone when it’s getting dark.” He swung around and headed up the hollow. The place was green— the deep, dead green, the .shabby, shape- less green of summer. And quiet— e.Tcept for the buzzing of mosqui- toes. And to Doyle’s concrete-and- asphalt mind there was a bit of lurking terror in the green quiet- ness of the wooded hills. He slapped at mosquitoes again and shrugged. “Ain’t nothing to hurt a man,” he said. It was rough traveling. The hollow slanted, climbing up be- tween the hills, and the dry creek bed, carpeted with tumbled boul- ders and bars of gravel, slashed erratically from one bluff-side to

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101 The Money Tree the other. Time after time, Doyle had to climb down one bank and climb up the other when the shift- ing stream bed blocked his way. He tried walking in the dry bed, but that was even worse— he had to dodge around or climb over a dozen boulders every hundred feet. The mosquitoes grew worse as he advanced. He took out his handkerchief and tied it around his neck. He pulled his hat down as far as it would go. He waged energetic war— he killed them by the hundreds, but there was no end to them. He tried to hurry, but it was no place to hurry. He was dripping wet with perspiration. He wanted to sit down and rest, for he was short of wind, but when he tried to sit the mosquitoes swarmed in upon him in hateful, mindless numbers and he had to move again. The ravine narrowed and twisted and the going became still rougher. He came aroimd a bend and the way was blocked. A great mass of tangled wood and vines had become wedged between two great trees growing on opposite sides of the steep hillsides. There was no possibility of getting through tlie tangle. It stretched for thirty feet or more and was so thickly interlaced that it formed a solid wall, blocking the entire stream bed. It rose for twelve or fifteen feet and behind it rocks and mud and other rubble had been jammed hard against it by the boiling streams of water that had come gushing down the hollow in times of heavy rain. Clawing with his hands, digging with his feet, Doyle crawled up the hillside to get around one end of the obstruction. He reached the clump of trees against which one end of it rested and hauled himself among them, bracing himself with aching arms and legs. The mosquitoes came at him in howling squadrons and he broke off a small branch, heavy with leaves, from one of the trees, and used it as a switch to dis- courage them. He perched there, panting and sobbing, drawing deep breaths into his lungs. And wondered, momentarily, how he’d ever man- aged to get himself into such a situation. It was not his dish, he was not cut out for roughing it. His ideas of nature never had extended any further than a well- kept city park. And here he was, in the depths of nowhere, toiling up outlandish hills, heading for a place where there might be money trees— row on row of money trees. “I wouldn’t do it,” he told him- self, “for nothing less than money.” He twisted around and exam- ined the tangle of wood and vines and saw, with some astonishment, that it was two feet thick or more

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102 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION and that it carried its thickness unifonnly. And the uphill side of it was smooth and slick, almost as if it had been planed and sanded, although there was not a tool mark on it. He examined it more closely and it was plain to see that it was no haphazard collection of drift- wood that had lieen built up through the yeai's, but that it was woven and interlaced so intri- cately that it was a single piece- had been a single piece even before it had become wedged be- tween the trees. Who, he wondered, could have, or would have, done a job like that? Where would the patience have been mustered and the technique and the purpose? He shook his head in wonderment. He had heard somewhere about Indians weaving brush together to make weirs for catching fish, but there were no fish in this dry stream bed and no Indians for several hundred miles. He tried to figure out the pat- tern of the weaving and there was no pattern that he could detect. Evei-ything was twisted and inter- grown around everything else and the whole thing was one solid mass. Somewhat rested and with his wind at least partially restored, he proceeded on his way, traihng a ravaging cloud of mosquitoes in his wake. It seemed now that the trees were thinning and that he could see blue sky ahead. The tenain leveled out a bit and he tried to hurry, but racked leg muscles screamed at him and he contented himself with jogging along as best he could. He reached more level ground and finally broke free into a clear- ing that climbed gently to the top of a grassy knoll. Wind came out of the west, no longer held back by the trees, and the mosquitoes fell away, except for a small swarm of diehards that went part way up the knoll with him. He reached the top of the knoll and threw himself in the grass, lying flat, panting like a tuckered dog. And there, not more than a hun- dred yards away, was the fence that closed in Metcalfe’s farm. It marched across the rolling, broken hills, a snake of shining metal. And extending out from it was a broad swath of weeds, waist-high, silver-green in the blasting sunlight— as if the ground had been nlowed around the fence for a distance of a hundred feet or so and the weeds sown in the ground as one might sow a crop. Doyle squinted his eyes to try to make out what kind of weeds they were, but he was too far away. Far on the distant ridge was the red gleam of a rooftop among many sheltering trees and to the west of the buildings lay an or-

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103 The Money Tree chard, ordered row on row. Was it, Doyle wondered, only his imagination that the shapes of those orchard trees were the remembered shape of the night- seen tree in the walled garden in the rear of Metcalfe’s town house? And was it once more only his imagination that the green of them was slightly different than the green of other leaves— the green, perhaps, of mint-new currency? He lay in the grass, with the fingers of the wind picking at his sweat-soaked shirt, and wondered about the legal aspects of money that was grown on trees. It could not be counterfeit, for it was not made but grown. And if it were identical with perfectly legal, government-printed money, could anyone prove in any court of law that it was bogus money? He didn’t know much law, but he wondered if there could be any statute upon the books that would cover a point of law like this? Probably not, he concluded, since it was so fantastic that it could not be anticipated and thus would require no rule to legislate against it. And now, for the first time, he began really to wonder how money could be grown on trees. He had told Mabel, off-handedly and casual, so she wouldn’t argue, that a botanist could do anything. But that wasn’t entirely right, of course, because a botanist only studied plants and learned what he could about them. But there were these other fellows— these bio-something or other— who fooled around with changing plants. They bred grasses that would grow on land that would grow no more than thistles, they cross-pollinated com to grow more and bigger ears, they developed grains that were disease-resistant, and they did a lot of other things. But developing a tree that would grow letter-perfect money in lieu of leaves seemed just a bit far- fetched. The sun beat against his back and he felt the heat of it through his drying shirt. He looked at his watch and it was almost three o’clock. He turned his attention back to the orchard and tliis time he saw that many little figures moved among the trees. He strained his eyes to see them better, but he could not be sure— although they looked for all the world like a gang of rollas. He crawled down the knoll and across the strip of grass toward the weeds. He kept low and inched along and was very careful. His only hope of making a deal, any kind of deal, with Metcalfe, was to come upon him unawares and let him know immediately what kind of hand he held. He started worrying about how Mabel might be getting along, but he wiped the worry out. He had enough to worry about with-

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104 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION out adding to it. And, anyhow, Mabel was quite a gal and could take care of herself. He began running through his mind alternate courses of action if he should fail to locate Met- calfe, and the most obvious, of course, was to attempt a raid upon the orchard. As he thought it over, he wasn’t even sure but what a raid upon the orchard might be the thing to do. He wished he’d brought along the sugar sack Mabel had fixed up for him. The fence worried him a little, but he also thinst that worry to one side. It would be time enough to woiTy about the fence once he got to it. He slithered through the grass and he was doing swell. He was almost to the strip of weeds and no one apparently had seen him. Once he got to the weeds, it would be easier, for they would give him cover. He could sneak right up to the fence and no one would ever notice. He reached the weeds and wilted at what he saw. The weeds were the healthiest and thickest patch of nettles that had ever grown outdoors! He put out a tentative hand and the nettles stung. They were the real McCoy. Ruefully, he rubbed at the dead-white welts rising on his fingers. He raised himself cautiously to peer above the nettles. One of the rollas was coming down the slope toward the fence and there was no doubt now that the tilings he’d seen up in the orchard was a gang of rollas. He ducked behind the nettles, hoping that the rolla had not seen him. He lay flat upon the ground and the sun was hot and the place upon his hand tliat had touched the nettles blazed with fire, although it was hard to decide which was the worst— the nettle sting or all the mosquito lumps that had blossomed out on him. He noticed that the nettles were beginning to wave and toss as if they were blowing in the wind and that was a funny deal, for there wasn’t that much wind. The nettles kept on blowing and all at once they parted right in front of him, ninning in a straight line, making a path between him and the fence. The nettles on the right blew to the right so hard they lay flat upon the ground and those to the left blew to the left so hard they were likewise on the ground and the path was there, without a thing to stop one walking to the fence. The rolla stood just beyond the fence and he spelled out a message in large capital letters upon his blackboard chest: COME ON OVER, HEEL! Doyle hesitated, filled with dismay. It was a rotten break that

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105 The Money Tree he had been discovered by this little stinker.- Now the cat was out the bag for sure, and all his toiling up the hollow, all his sneaking through the grass stood for absolutely nothing. He saw that the other rolkis were waddling down the slope toward the fence, while the first rolla still stood there, with the invitation on his chest. Then the lettering on the rolla flickered out. The nettles still stayed down and the path stayed open. The rollas who had been coming down the slope reached the fence and all of them— all five of them— fined up in a solemn row. The first one’s chest lit up with words: WE HAVE THREE MISSING ROLLAS And the chest of the second one: DO YOU BRING WORD TO US ? And the third: WE WOULD LIKE TO TALK TO YOU The fourth: ABOUT THE MISSING ONES The fifth: PLEASE COME TO US, HEEL. Doyle raised himself from where he had been lying flat upon the ground and squatted on his toes. It could be a trap. What could he gain by talking with the rollas ? But there was no way to retreat without losing what little advant- age he might have— there was no choice but to do his best at brazening it out. He rose to his feet and ambled down the nettle-path with as slight a show of concern as he could manage. He reached the fence and hunkered down so that he was almost level with the rollas. “I know where one of the miss- ing rollas is,” he said, “but not the other two.” YOU KNOW ABOUT THE ONE WHO WAS IN TOWN WITH METCALFE? “That’s right.” YOU TELL US WHERE HE IS “I’ll make a deal,” said Doyle. All five of them asked, DEAL? ‘I’ll tell you where he is; you do something for me. You let me up into that orchard for an hour tonight, then let me out again. Without letting Metcalfe know.” They huddled, conferring, their

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106 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION blackboai'd fronts a-squiggle with tlie queer, confusing symbols Doyle had seen on the rolla’s chest back in Metcalfe’s garden. Tlien they turned to face him again, the five of them lined up, shoulder to shoulder: WE CANNOT DO THAT WE MADE AN AGREEMENT AND WE GAVE OUR WORD WE GROW THE MONEY METCALFE DISTRIBUTES IT “I wouldn’t disti'ibute it,” said Doyle. “I promise that I wouldn’t. I’d keep it for myself.” NO SOAP, spelled rolla No. 1. “This agreement that you have with Metcalfe. How come you made it ? ” GRATITUDE, said No. 2. “Don’t mind my snickering, but gratitude for Metcalfe , . HE FOUND US AND HE RESCUED AND PROTECTED US AND WE ASKED HIM WHAT CAN WE DO? “And he said, grow me some money.” HE SAY THE PLANET NEEDED MONEY HE SAY MONEY MAKE HAPPY ALL POOR HEELS LIKE YOU “The hell you say,” said Doyle, aghast. WE GROW IT HE DISTRIBUTE IT BETWEEN US WE MAKE ALL THE PLANET HAPPY "Just a bunch of missionaries!” WE DO NOT READ YOU, CHUM “Missionaries. People who do good.” WE DO GOOD ON MANY PLANETS WHY NOT DO GOOD HERE ? “But money ? ” THAT WHAT METCALFE SAY. HE SAY PLANET HAS PLENTY OF ALL ELSE BUT IS SHORT ON MONEY. “What about the other two rdUas that are missing ? ” THEY DISAGREE THEY LEAVE WE WORRY MUCH ABOUT THEM. “You disagreed on growing money ? They thought, maybe, you should grow something else?” WE DISAGREE ON METCALFE. TWO SAY HE TRICK US. REST OF US SAY HE VERY NOBLE HUMAN

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107 The Money Tree What a bunch of creeps, thought Doyle. Very noble human ! WE TALK ENOUGH NOW WE SAY GOODBYE. They turned around, almost as if someone had shouted orders at them, and went stumping up the slope, back toward the orchard. “Hey!” yelled Doyle, leaping to his feet. Behind him was a rustle and he whirled around. The nettles that had been laid to either side to make the path were rising, wiping out the path! “Hey!” yelled Doyle again, but the rollas paid no attention to him. They went on stumping up the slope, Doyle stood in liis little trampled area, wedged against the fence, and all around him were the nettles— upright and strong and bright in the after- noon. They stretched in a solid mass at least a hundred feet back from the fence and they were shoulder high. A man could manage to get through them. They could be kicked aside and trampled down, but some of them would be bound to peg a man and by the time one got out of there he’d have plenty welts. And did he, at the moment, really want to get out of there? He was, he told himself, no worse off than he had been be- fore. Better off, perhaps, for he was through the nettles. Better off, that is, if those stinking little rollas didn’t run and tattle on him. There was no sense, he decided, in going through the nettles now. If he did, in just a couple of hours or so he’d have to wade back through them once again to reach the fence. He couldn’t climb the fence until it was getting dark and he had no place else to go. He took a good look at the fence and it would be a tough one to get over. It was a good eight feet of woven wire and atop that were three strands of barbed wire, attached to an arm-like bracket that extended outward beyond the woven fence. just beyond the fence stood an ancient oak tree and if he had a rope he could make a lariat— but he had no rope, and if he wanted to get over the fence, he would somehow have to climb it. He hunkered tight against the ground and felt downright miser- able. His body was corrugated with mosquito lumps and the nettle welts on Iris hand had turned into blisters and he’d had a bit more sun than he was accustomed to. And now the upper molar on the left side of his jaw was developing a sort of

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VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 108 galloping ache. All he needed. He sneezed and it hurt his head to sneeze and the aching tootli gave a bounding leap. Maybe, he figured, it was the pollen from those lousy nettles. Never saw no nettles like them before, he told himself, eying them warily. More than likely the rollas had a hand in growing them. The rollas were good with plants. They had developed the money trees and if they could develop money trees there wasn’t any- thing they couldn’t do with plants. He remembered how the nettles had fallen over to the left and right to make a path for him. It had been therolla, he was sure, who had made them do that, for there hadn’t been enough wind to do it and even if there had been a wind, there wasn’t any wind that blew two ways at once. There was nothing like the rollm in the world. And that might be exactly it. They’d said something about doing good on other worlds. But no matter what they’d done on other worlds, they’d sm'e beeii suckered here. Do-gooders, he thought. Missionaries, maybe, from some other world, from some place out in space— a roving band of beings devoted to a cause. And trapped into a ridiculous situation on a planet that might have little, if anything, in common with any other world they’d ever seen. Did they even, he wondered, understand what money was ? Just what kind of story had Met- calfe palmed off on them ? They had arrived and Metcalfe, of all persons, had stumbled onto them and taken them in tow. Metcalfe, not so much a man as an organization that from long experience would know exactly how to exploit a situation such as the rollas offered. One man alone could not have handled it, could not have done all that needed to be done to set up the rollas for the kill. And only in an organization such as Met- calfe headed, long schooled in the essentials of self preservation, could there have been any hope of maintaining the essential secrecy. The rollas had been duped— completely, absolutely fooled— and yet they were no fools. They had learned the language, not the spoken language only, but both the spoken and the written, and that spelled sharp intelligence. Perhaps more intelligence than was first apparent, for they did not make use of sound in their normal talk among themselves. But they had adapted readily, it seemed, to sound communication. The sun long since had dis- appeared behind the nettles and now was just above the tree line of the bluffs. Dusk would be coming soon and then, Doyle told himself, he could get busy.

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109 The Money Tree He debated once against which course he should take. By now the r alias might have told Met- calfe he was at the fence and Metcalfe might be waiting for him, although Metcalfe, if he knew, more than likely would not just wait, but would be coming out to get him. And as for the raid upon the orchard— he’d had trouble enough with just one rolla when he tried to rob a tree. He didn’t like to think what five might do to him. Behind him tlie nettles began to rustle and he leaped to his feet. Maybe, he thought wildly, they were opening up the path again. Maybe the path was opened automatically, at regularly scheduled hours. Maybe the nettles were like four o’clocks or morning glories— maybe they were engineered by the rollas to open and to close the path so many times a day. And what he imagined was tire truth in part. A path, he saw, was opening. And waddling down the path was another rolla. The path opened in front of Ihm and then closed as he passed. The rolla came out into the trampled area and stood facing Doyle. GOOD EVENING, HEEL, he said. It couldn’t be the rolla locked in the trunk of the car down on the river road. It must, Doyle told himself, be one of the two that had walked out on the money project. YOU SICK ? the rolla asked. “I itch just something awful and my tooth is aching and every time I sneeze the top of my head comes off.” COULD FIX. “Sm-e, you could grow a drug- store tree, sprouting linaments and salves and pills and all the otlier junk.” SIMPLE, spelled the rolla. “Well, now,” said Doyle and then tried to say no more. For suddenly it struck him that it would be as the rolla said— very, very simple. Most medicines came from plants and there wasn’t anyone or anything that could engineer a plant the way the rollas could. “You’re on the level there,” said Doyle enthusiastically. “ You would be able to cure a lot of things. You might find a cure for cancer and you might develop something that would hold off heart disease. And there’s the coimnon cold . . SORRY, PAL, BUT WE ARE OFF OF YOU. YOU MADE SAPS OF US. “Then you are one of them that ran away,” said Doyle in some excitement. “You saw tlirough Metcalfe’s game . . .”

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110 VENTURK SCIENCE FICTION But the rolla was paying no attention to anything he said. It had drawn itself a Uttle straighter and a little taller and it had formed its lips into a circle as if it might be getting ready to let out a bay and the sides of its throat were quivering as if it might be singing, but there was no sound. No sound, but a rasping shrill- ness that skidded on one’s nerves, a something in the air that set one’s teeth on edge. It was an eerie thing, that sense of singing terror in the silence of the dusk, with the west wind blowing quietly along the tops of the darkening trees, with the silky rustle of the nettles and somewhere in the distance the squeaking of a chipmunk home- ward bound on the last trip of the day. Out beyond the fence came the thumping of awkward running feet and in the thickening dusk Doyle saw the five rollas from the orchard plunging down the slope. 'There was something going on. Doyle was sure of that. He sensed the importance of the moment and the excitement that was in it, but there was no inkling of what it all might mean. The rolla by his side had sent out some sort of rallying call, pitched too high for the human ear to catch, and now the orchard rollas were tumbling down the slope in answer to that call. The five rollas reached the fence and lined up in their customaiy row and their black- board chests were alive with glowing characters— the strange, flickering, nonsensical characters of their native language. And the chest of the one who stood out- side the fence with Doyle also flamed with the fleeting symbols, changing and shifting so swiftly that they seemed to be alive. It was an argument, Doyle thought. The five inside the fence were arguing heatedly with the one who stood outside and there seemed an urgency in the argu- ment that could not be denied. He stood there, on the edge of embarrassment, an innocent bystander pocketed in a family squabble he could not under- stand. The rollas were gesturing wildly now and tlie characters upon their chests glowed more brightly than ever as darkness deepened on the land. A squalling night bii’d flew overhead and Doyle tilted up his head to watch it and as he did he saw the moving figures of running men outlined against the lighter sky on the north ridge of the orchard. "Watch out!” he shouted and wondered even as he shouted why he should have shouted. At the shout the five rollas whirled back to face the fence.

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Ill The Money Tree One set of symbols appeared upon each chest, as if suddenly they might have reached agree- ment, as if the argument might finally be resolved. There was a creaking sound and Doyle looked up quickly. Against the sky he could see the old oak tree was tipping, slanting slowly toward the fence, as if a giant hand had reached out and given it a push. He watched for a puzzled second and the tilt continued and the speed of the fall picked up and he knew that the tree was crashing down upon the fence and the time had come to get out of there. He stepped back a pace to turn around and flee and when he put his foot down there was no solid ground beneath it. He fought briefly to keep from falling, but he didn’t have a chance. He fell and thumped into a crowded cavity and above him he heard the roaring rush of the falling tree and then the jarring thud as it hit the ground and the long, high whine of wires stretched so tight they pinged and popped. Doyle lay quietly, afraid to move. He was in a ditch of some sort. It was not very deep, not more than three feet at the most, but he was cramped at an awkward angle and there was an uncom- fortable stone or root in the middle of his back. Above him was a tracery of limbs and twigs, where the top of the oak had crashed across the ditch. And running through the fallen branches was a roZ/a, mov- ing much more swiftly than one would have thought was possible. From up the slope beyond the smashed-down fence came the bellowing of men and the sound of running feet. Doyle huddled in his ditch, glad of the darkness and of the shelter of the fallen tree. The stone or root was still in his back and he wriggled to get off it. He slid off to one side and put out a hand to catch his balance and his hand came in contact with a mound of stuff that felt like sand. And froze there. For just beyond the ditch, standing among the branches and the nettles, was a pair of legs and the loom of a body extending up into the dark- ness. “They went down that way," said a voice. “Down into the woods. It win be hard to find them.” Metcalfe’s voice answered: “We have to find them. Bill. We can’t let them get away." There was a pause, then Bill said: “I wonder what got into them. They seemed happy up till now.” Metcalfe swore bitterly. “It’s that photographer. That fellow— what’s his name— I saw him when

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VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 112 he was in the tree and he got away that time. But he won’t make it this time. I don’t know what he did or what’s going on, but he’s in it, clear up to his neck. He’s around here somewhere.” Bill moved away a little and Metcalfe said, “If you run into this photographer, you know what to do.” “Sure, boss.” “Medium-sized guy. Has a dopey way about him.” They moved away. Doyle could hear them thrashing through the nettles, cursing as the nettles stung them. Doyle shivered a little. He had to get out and he had to make it fast, for before too long the moon would be coming up. Metcalfe and his boys weren’t fooling. They couldn’t afford to fool in a deal like this. If they spotted him, more than likely they would shoot to kill. Now, with everyone out hunt- ing down the rollas, would be the time to get up to that orchard. Although the chances were that Metcalfe had men patrolling it. Doyle gave the idea some con- sideration and dropped it. There was, now, just one thing to do and that was get to the car down on the river road as fast as he could make it. Cautiously, he crawled out of the ditch. Once out of it, he crouched for long minutes in the tangle of fallen branches, listening for sound. There wasn’t any sound. He moved out into the nettles, following the path that had been crushed down by the men who had pursued the rollas. But, crushed down or not, some of the nettles pegged him. Then he started down the slope, running for the woods. Ahead of him a shout went up and he braked his speed and swerved. He reached a clump of brush and hurled himself behind it as other shouts went up and then two shots, fired in quick succession. He saw it moving above the treetops, rising from the woods— a pale ghost of a thing that rose into the sky, with the red glint of early moonlight on it. From it trailed a twisting line that had the appearance of a vine and from the vine hung a struggling doll-like figure that was screaming thinly. The ghost- like shape was stubby at the bottom and pointed at the top. It had the look about it of a balloon- ing Christmas tree and there was about it, too, even from a distance, a faint familiarity. And suddenly Doyle linked up that familiarity— linked it to the woven mass of vegetation that had dammed the creek bed. And as he linked it up, he knew with- out a question the nature of this Christmas tree riding in the sky. The rollas \rorked with plants

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The Money Tree as Man would work with metals. They could grow a money tree and a protective strip of nettles that obeyed, they could make an oak tree fall and if they could do all that, the growing of a spaceship would not be too hard a job. The ship was moving slowly, slanting up across the ridge, and the doll still struggled at the end of the trailing vine and its screams came down to earth as a fai'-off wailing sound. Someone was shouting in the woods below: “It’s the boss! Bill, do some- thing! It’s the boss!” It w'as quite apparent there was nothing Bill could do. Doyle sprang from his bush and ran. Now was the time to make his dash, when all the other men were yelling and staring up into the sky, where Metcalfe dangled, screaming, from the ti'ailing vine —perhaps an anchor vine, may- haps just a part of the rolla- grown spaceship that had become unravelled. Although, remem- bering the craftsmanship of that woven barrier blocking the creek- bed, it seemed unlikely to Doyle that anything would come un- ravelled from a rolla ship. He could imagine what had happened — Metcalfe glimpsing the last of the roUas clambering up the ship and rushing at them, roaring, firing those two shots, then the ship springing swiftly H3 upward and the trailing vine twisted round the ankle. Doyle reached the woods and went plunging into it. The ground dropped sharply and he went plunging down the slope, stumbling, falling, catching him- self and going on again. Until he ran full tilt into a tree that bounced him back and put ex- ploding stars inside his skull. He sat upon the ground where the impact had bounced him and felt of his forehead, convinced it was cracked open, while tears of pain streamed down his cheeks. His forehead was not cracked and there seemed to be no blood, although his nose was skinned and one lip began to puff. Then he got up and went on slowly, feeling his way along, for despite the moonlight, it was black-dark beneath the trees. Finally he came to the dry stream-bed and felt his way along it. He hurried as best he could, for he remembered Mabel wait- ing in the car. She’d be sore at him, he thought— she’d sure be plenty sore. He had gone and let her tifiink he might be back by dark. He came to the place where the woven strip of vegetation dammed the stream-bed and almost tumbled over it onto the rocks below. He ran the flat of his hand across the polished surface of the

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VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 114 strip of 'weaving and tried to imagine what might have hap- pened those several years ago. A ship plunging down to Eaith, out of control perhaps, and shattering on impact, with Met- calfe close at hand to effect a rescue. It beats all hell, he thought, how things at times turn out. If it had not been Metcalfe, given someone else who did not think in dollar signs, there might now be trees or bushes or rows of vegetables carrying hopes such as mankind had never known before— hope for surcease from disease and pain, an end to poverty and fear. And perhaps many other hopes that no one now could guess. And they were gone now, in a spaceship grown by the two de- serting rollas under Metcalfe’s very nose. He squatted atop the dam and knew the blasted hopes of man- kind, the hope that had never come to be, wrecked by avarice and greed. Now they were gone— but, wait a minute, not entirely gone! For there was a rolla left. He had to believe that the deserting rolla he had never seen was with the others— but there was still his rolla, locked in the trunk of that old heap down on the river road! He got up and stumbled through the darkness to the end of the dam and climbed around the clump of anchor trees. He skidded down the sharp inchne to the stream-bed and went fumbling down the hollow. What should he do, he won- dered. Head straight for Wash- ington? Go to the FBI? For whatever else, no matter what might happen, that one re- maining rolla must be gotten into proper hands. Already there was too much lost. There could be no further chances taken. Placed in govern- mental or scientific hands, that one lone rolla might still retrieve much that had been lost. He began to woriy about what might have happened to the rolla, locked inside the trunk. He re- called that it had been banging for attention. What if it suffocated? What if there were something of im- portance, something about its care, perhaps, that it had been vital that it tell him? What if that had been the reason for its banging on the trunk ? He fumbled down the stream- bed in sobbing haste, tripping on the gravel beds, falling over boulders. Mosquitos flew a heavy escort for him and he flapped his hands to try to clear them off, but he was so worried that they seemed little more than an in- convenience. Up in the orchard, more than likely, Metcalfe’s mob was busy stripping trees, haiwesting no one

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Tlie Money Tree could guess how many millions in brand new, crinkly bills. For now the jig was up and all of them would know it. Now there was nothing left to do but clean out the orchard and dis- appear as best they could. Perhaps the money trees had required 'the constant attention of the rollm to keep on producing letter-perfect money. Otherwise why had Metcalfe had the rolla to tend the tree in town? And now, with the rollas gone, the trees might go on producing, but the money that they grew might be defective and irregular, like the growth of nubbin corn. The slope of the land told him that he was near the road. He went on bhndly and suddenly came upon the car. He went around it in the dark and rapped upon the window. Inside, Mabel screamed. “It’s all right,” yeUed Doyle. “It is me. I’m back.” She unlocked the door and he climbed in beside her. She leaned against him and he put an arm around her. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry that I took so long.” “Did everything go all right. Chuck ? ” “Yes,” he mumbled. “Yes, I imagine that you could say it did.” “I’m so glad,” she said, relieved. “It is all right, then. The rolla ran away.” 115 “Ran away! For God’s sake, Mabel ...” “Now, please don’t go getting sore. Chuck. He kept on with tliat banging and I felt soriy for him. I was afraid, of course, but more sorry than afraid. So I opened up the trunk and let him out and it was O.K. He was the sweetest little chap . . .” “So he ran away,” said Doyle, still not quite believing it. “But he might still be around some- where, out there in the dark.” “No,” said Mabel, “he is not around. He went up the hollow as fast as he could go, like a dog when his master calls. It was dark and I was scared, but I ran after him. I called and kept on follow- ing, but it was no use— I knew that he was gone.” She sat up straight in the seat. “It don’t make no difference now,” she said. “You don’t need him any longer. Although I am sorry that he ran away. He’da made a dandy pet. He talked so nice— so much nicer than a para- keet—and he was so good. I tied a ribbon, a yellow piece of ribbon around his neck and you never seen anything so cute.” “I just bet he was,” said Doyle. And he was thinking of a rolla, rocketing through space in a new- grown ship, heading out for a far-off sun and taking with him possibly some of man’s greatest hopes, all fixed up and cute with a ribbon round his neck.

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Minnie was important. She represented home, love, and faraway Earth. And then she and all these things had to be left behind forever . . . LADY OF SPACE by LESTER DEL REY And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman . . , BEVELATIONS— 12, 1 I’ve never seen a sketch begin with a quotation, and I guess this is a lot less stoiy and more sketch than most of what I’ve put down. Maybe I’m just reminding myself I had the kind of bringing up where I’d remember such things. even out here in space. But it seems to fit, though there’s more to the original verse. If you figure that heaven stands for space above Earth— as it used to mean— then it fits perfectly. There’s no open, official ruling. 116

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Lady of Space but space is supposed to be reserved for men. It was explored by the Services, and they never considered women as much more than necessary nuisances or poor substitutes as clerks, even when they had their Women’s Corps. The Services haven’t changed much since the days when the male Persians fought the male Greeks. A woman in space was unthinkable. She could get there only by stowing away, and you don’t stow away on a rocket based on a modem rocket field. A number of kids tried that once, but it never worked. It could only be done with some pretty high- powered help, and who’d take a risk hke that? All the same, none of us ware too surprised the way it all de- veloped after we’d gained velocity on the second Mars expedition. We didn’t expect what happened, but when it did, we knew it had to be that way. We were still tensed up, all four of us on the leadship, sore from the bursts of acceleration, still a little dizzy from the lack of gravity now, and with our nerves carrying too big a load of the knowledge of how and why we’d been patched together. This wasn’t like the meticu- lously planned first expedition. That had been a Navy project, and could take off from the Navy space platform in its orbit around Earth, using the fifteen thousand 117 miles an hour velocity of that orbit from the start. Ten ships, fifty men— everything made on Earth, shipped up in pieces, and assembled by the biggest crew in space. But in spite of all advan- tages and after orbiting Mars successfully, it never came back; all we had were garbled accounts from the sentry overhead of trouble of some kind on the surface. Now, three years later, we were the Army’s only hope to beat the other services to the planets. But the Army had no platform, and had to use its Moon Base. That meant an almost impossible drain on the smelting of ores and synthesizing of fuel we’d pain- fully developed there; it meant salvaging parts from other ships, driving labor that invited mis- takes. It meant cutting down to twelve men or three ships and counting on prayer for success. With less than a hundred men altogether, we’d done it, though. We’d built the ships in the closest, fastest orbit we could around the Moon. We still lacked speed enough, so we took a page out of Oberth’s old ideas and blasted back toward Earth, giving our ships and fuel the kinetic energy of the fall through all that gravity field. We were less than three hundred miles above Earth, whipping around her, when we made the final blast to use up that energy where the mass of

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118 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION the fuel would do us most good, before we had to caiTy it back up. It took nerve as well as skill to shave things that close; we’d given ourselves a fifty-fifty chance of all ships making it, and our success still didn’t seem quite real. Now we were on our way, still shaken from it all. Ahead of us lay nine months of travel to get to Mars— and to worry about how we’d last there when the solidly planned first expedition went blooey. It hadn’t been worth worrying about until we knew we’d get there— but now it was hitting us all. The skipper was sweating out a final check, knowing he couldn’t get it until he got confirmation; Spai'ks was waiting for that, tensed up and ready to blame receiver failure with every second more it took the laggard Earth stations to report. Pete Loomis, who’d looked sick since before the take-off, was whisthng a harsh monotone over his com- puter. And as second in com- mand, I had to sit there trying to find something to do, which was harder. “Stop that damned whistling!” Captain Benson said suddenly. “Find why we had to use extra fuel, Loomis?” “Because we’re a hundred pounds or more over weight, as I told you before. It checks,” Pete snapped back. The Skipper twisted his lips tautly. “And I checked our weights! I tell you, your machine misread some valve. If we ever get back. I’ll have somebody’s head—” Pete started something, then shut up. Sparks jerked suddenly, and began listening, and we all turned to him. A few seconds later, he looked up and nodded. “We check out. Earth says we’re dead on course.” For a second, that lifted our spirits. Then Pete began whis- tling nervously again, and I watched Benson tense up. I swung around carefully in no-grav. I’d drawn first galley duty, and it would be something to do. She was standing in the door- way, listening with a little frown. She was wearing shorts and halter, with a little cap-affair to hold her hair down. She looked bruised and mussed. She also looked beautiful, as she always did to us. I don’t think a man on Moon Base could have described her; after a few years without seeing another woman, a man loses any basis for comparison. But she looked the way a woman should look to a man— something most women can’t even under- stand, much less try for. “Hello, Johnny,” she said quietly. “We made it, I see.” Her lip was swollen where she must have bitten it, but she had a touch of a smile there.

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Lady of Space The othei's jerked around. Pete had a look of holy ecstasy on his suddenly white face, and the other two were changing from momentary shock to delight. The Skipper nodded at her. “Hi, Min- nie. I guess you’re Pete’s hundred pounds plus, eh? I suppose you had it checked out on tlie Base computer to make sure we were under margin?” “It figured out safe, even allow- ing for emergencies, Ed,” she told him. For a second, the smile vras deeper and almost amused. She must have known we wouldn’t be stupid enough to quiz her about how she’d gotten stowed on board, but the man— or men— who’d done it must have had ways to take care of all the de- tails. How she’d taken care of persuading him was her business. Then she shrugged faintly. “I’ve got coffee and food ready when- ever you can take a break.” Benson looked around for a second before tossing his pencil onto the magnetized table. “Now’s as good a time as any. Sparks, tell the other ships on the short- range set, say we’ll find a way to get her over to them shortly. I’ll relieve you in ten minutes.” “Yes, sir,” Spark said. He was used to lone duty. Then he chuckled. “It’s sure going to be tough on Base while we’re gone.” “They’ll live until we get back,” Pete said, blushing now, and the Skipper nodded. It wasn’t “if” 119 anymore, but “until” we got back. That was Minnie. It was short for Minerva, and I never knew her last name, or much else about her. Maybe if all the men at Base had compared notes, we could have pieced out a fair amount of her history— and someone must have known more than all the rest of us. But she wouldn’t have liked our doing that, and we never tried. She was a great wonder in our heavens, a woman, and the type of miracle that doesn’t need understanding. I met her first my third day on Moon Base, when she’d already been there for two years. I was fresh off Earth, out of the tough- est six years of special training the Army could give, and float- ing on cloud seven at making space. I knew everything there was to know— from piloting a space ship to how men could start from scratch and build stuff out of the few finds that had been made on the Moon without a tenth enough equipment to do it. I was also fresh from a furlough home with my parents and kid sister and a girl friend of hers who’d been almost another sister to me. I knew about what was Right, and I had all of the ideas of Womanhood my family could cram into me. Oh, there’d been a woman or two, and I’d been ashamed of those incidents ever since. To be honest, I still am ashamed of one of them.

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120 VENTUHE SCIENCE FICTION The third day there, I saw Min- nie coming out of the under- ground canteen on her way to the computer shack. It was a shock, because I knew the Army was dead set against women on the moon, or on having mai'ried men sent there. They couldn’t aiford to send up wives at what a single trip cost, and they were right about that. They also felt they couldn’t take the chances for scandal that might come from a few women with all those men so far from home control, par- ticularly since the head of the Military Affairs Committee in Congress was a famous moralist in all his speeches. But I figured that she must be the Com- mander’s wife, and the only ex- ception. It was two days later be- fore I learned better, and that from observation, by accident. She must have seen my expres- sion as she came out of the cham- ber. But her answering look wasn’t shamefaced or strained. She smiled at me and held out her hand. “Hello, Johnny.” I cut her dead, but the smile never changed, and the hand fell back to her side naturally. I heard about her in the weeks following, while I tried to re- establish my faith in the Army and in space. It helped a little to know that she was strictly here without official knowledge. And in time, I even began to see that she might serve a purpose. In the early days, the psychia- trist had been the most impor- tant man on the Base. Half of the cost of maintaining our position on the Moon had been in carry- ing replacements and taking back men. It was something like cabin fever on a major scale; even men who’d been able to take three months solid undersea duty on atomic subs cracked up on the Moon. But some of them came back for a second try— and they all had one thing in common. There was a girl who worked at the recrea- tion center cafeteria, and her name was Mimiie. Men on the way down were told to look her up. Even the psychiatrist, when he cracked up, had her name. Eventually, of course, the Army became officially aware of her— there were officers’ wives and jealous nurses and plenty of others about to see to that. Min- nie disappeared. A month later she was on the Moon. All she ever said was that nobody on Earth helped her, and she only admitted that to make sure nobody there would be told about her. Somehow, somebody established a link that would get her aboard a ship and get her out again without being detected. It must have been quite a link, and it took pull. But the idea was her own— she’d been plan- ning toward it for years, and she made it. Minnie would.

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121 Lady of Space It was the psychiatrist who persuaded the Commander — or so the story went— that the Army couldn’t take the scandal that would come from having a woman able to stow away on an Army ship— not when the Navy was pulling strings and the Air Force was getting appropriations for a trip to the planets. In the end, nobody reported her. She wasn’t on any list. Earth awarded the psychiatrist a higher rank when he found it possible to have fifty men stay on the moon for indefinite periods and get along, and that was that. The surprising thing was that few jealousies sprang up over her. That’s something nobody ever explained— or even bothered with, apparently. Minnie was fair, somehow. She had some personal system of rewards and punish- ments for men— sometlring no man ever fully understood, but which seemed to be inwardly agreed on by the men she used them on. There was one fight during her first month, and after that things settled down. I could recognize all the rea- sons that eventually led to her being as basic to Moon Base as the atomic generator that pow- ered it. I could even recognize that she was somehow unusual —she had to be, or there would have been jealousies and resent- ments. The amount of time she spent in the big computer shack could have caused trouble and rumors, but didn’t; Minnie was fascinated by the computing, as far as the men were concerned, and that was as it should be. But it didn’t fit with my ideas of the men who would lead man- kind out into space and a brighter, nobler day. I’d got my ideas of pioneers from novels, not from the sociological studies of pioneer towns. And it gnawed at me like a cancer in my fiver. Maybe I’d have developed home- sickness anyway, and started ach- ing for my sister and mother; but with Minnie to remind me of women, it was worse. My work on the smelter got sloppy, and my appetite fell off. I had a run-in with my room-mate, and was transferred to single quarters, which only made it worse. And I knew I was going to wash out. Minnie came into my room without even knocking, so quietly that her perfume reached me be- fore I saw her. Somehow, she managed that and a new dress now and then. “Hello, Johimy,” she said. I turned my back to her. Half an hour later, when I thought she’d gone, I turned over, to see her sitting quietly looking at me. “Tliou shalt not suffer a harlot to five,” she said. I started to nod, before I caught myself. “It’s a witch,” I told her. She smiled. “Is it? Down deep, Johnny?”

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122 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION “Get out!” I shouted at her. “All right,” she said. “Tell me why, and maybe I will.” I told her. Great God, how I told her. Everything that had sunk into me as a kid and in school; everything I’d ever thought about being an ofBcer and a space-man; everything I’d resented in hav- ing to remember the pitiful affairs that had bothered me. I heard a sermon by a wandering evan- gelist once, and I used every- thing he’d said against her ty^ of women and improved on it. And finally I fell back on the homilies that had been true in my family. She got up quietly and went out, and I tluew up all over the floor. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t get out of the bunk to clean up. And I was sure she’d gone for good and would never bother me again. And then I started to ciy— not like a grown man, but like a five year old kid. If any man had come in and caught me. I’d have killed him before he could realize what I was doing. I didn’t hear her again. Instead, I felt her lifting me up and stick- ing a container of coffee to my mouth. “Don’t shove it away or you’ll scald my hand as well as your face, Jolmny,” she warned me. So I drank it, while she cleaned up the room. I watched her, and it occurred to me suddenly that I didn’t even feel any rnge to stop her, to take over myself. “You’re no woman,” I blurted out. For the only time, I saw her Avince. Then she sighed. “Women aren’t really synonymous with chivahy, Johnny,” she said quietly. “But maybe you’re right. No woman likes me.” That puzzled me, and did for months, until I realized it had to be true. I was back Eartliside for a month, long after that, and had a chance to see my sister and her friends after she got married. She’d have hated Minnie, and covered the hatred wdth words of utter contempt. To my sister and I guess to most women, Minnie was the complete betrayal of the true feminine. Sex had nothing to do with it, either, though I couldn’t realize it for years. “Even your o\vn mother, I sup- pose,” I said. “My mother trained me for this,” she answered, and now she was back to her normal odd per- sonal pride in what she was. “She planned it all, after my father died in building the first space station. Feeling better?” “I’ll be all right when you get out and stay out,” I told her. She smiled at that, dropped onto the bed, and gathered me up with a strength that belied her years of moon gravity. My head came against her breast and I could feel her hand in my hair.

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123 Lady of Space And I was crying again, but dif- ferently tliis time. She didn’t make a sound— just sat there holding me, with neither contempt nor pity on her face when I caught a glimpse of it. And finally, when the last of it wore off me, she began un- dressing me and then herself. I meant to stop her, but I didn’t. I didn’t want her, but the feel of her against my skin was like a sponge to soak up something in- side me that needed to be drained. There was no passion then, only release, as I drifted into sleep. In the morning she gave the only explanation I ever really got from her. “What are you, Miimie?” I asked. I was still a kid, I guess. But she didn’t seem to mind. “I’m a pacifist in the war be- tween the sexes, Johnny,” she said. So I stayed on the moon, and we got the smelter working, and we built a forging plant, and one of the men found how to make rocket fuel there. And space was everytliing I had ever expected it to be. I saw it happen to other new men, too. But I didn’t mind. And when one out of all who came tried to slip out word on Miimie —and was caught by the Com- mander, from what I heard— I helped spoil his game. The poor . devil was lost in a crater on the ’next exploration, anyhow. And when I got my furlough home, I learned a lot more about Minnie from listening to the crowd around my married sister. I cut my furlough short and got back just when word came through that we’d be making the Mars expedition. I wonder whether I’d have vol- unteered if the back of my mind hadn’t known that Minnie’d find some way not to fail the men who needed her most. I know I wasn’t surprised when she was with us. , . . It took us more than nine montlis of routine to reach an orbit around Mars, and a little burst of power to match course with the ships still circling from the first expedition. We found two sentries aboard one of the ships, both dead with no way of telling how they died; but they must have been mad long before death, and there was no evidence on what had happened below. Nor could we see the signs of the expedition, as we should have been able to. All we could see were sure evidence of vegetation and the dratted canals, bigger and a lot less straight from up here, but still a mystery. We were to take tw'o of the sliips down on atmospheric brak- ing landings, leaving the one and most of the fuel for the return. The two would give us one ship to make the leap back to the re-

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124 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION turn ship, and provide housing besides. And now tlie question of who would be left as sentry finally couldn’t be postponed. Pete volunteered, to everyone’s surprise, suggesting that Minnie be left with him; he was prob- ably idiot enough to believe he could work it that way. At least, he spent a long time with Ben- son. But Benson vetoed it. He’d been spending a lot of time with paper and pencil, and tliere was an odd look around his eyes. He’d been putting off a lot of small decisions, too. But now he ruled tlrat we’d all go down; there was no point in leaving sentiies— tire first expedition had proved that. I suppose I’d had great ideas about exploring another planet, but I didn’t get much out of it. As second in command, I had to handle the home base while Ben- son took our single tractor out exploring. Most of what I saw of Mars was a stinkirrg near-vacuum with a lot of sand that shifted like dry snow in Minnesota dur- ing a blizzard, piling up drifts and wiping them out, while the tlrin, thin wind whirred by the camp all the time. I saw a canal once close up— and saw rrothing. Whatever it was— old channels filled with sand, cracks grown to- gether, or some variation of min- erals on the surface— it was un- detectable from close up, though we took samples and pictures. There were no Martians now, at least ... no signs of any animal life. And the plants were fuzzy things tlrat made dead sticks on Earth look like blooming rose- bushes by comparison. Tire only hopeful thing was the fact that we found a ti'ifle more o.xygen and water than we’d expected. At the surface, Mars’s atmosphere could be compressed iirto a barely breathable mixture, though our hydroponic tanks worked a lot better, with the big sun-power sheets to give us light and heat for tlrem. It was a lousy plairet— one to drive men mad, as somebody said. But sometimes I caught my- self planning on where we’d go on the next trip, and even on how we could settle tlrere. And once in a great while, when Min- nie stayed behind with only me in the base, we talked about times when men would be living here. We found the first exiredition, guided by hints from Earth oir what had been reported. It was nearly buried by sand, but we finally dug it out. Then we had the answer. Madness. Maybe only one man had gone mad out there, with the wind whining and fifty people learning to hate each other through the long months; but one had been enough. They all must have been eating when someone touched off the excava-

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125 Lady of Space tion bomb under their main hall, letting their air out. I saw Minnie cry then. I knew why— or thought I did. Men need something more than discipline to live squeezed together that tightly under such stress and such conditions. And that something Couldn’t be on the Moon with us and here with these poor sufferers at once. There but for the grace of Minnie lay we. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but we all knew it, including Minnie. And she was crying because she’d failed the men who needed her then. Benson watched for a minute and then walked back to the tractor, his face white imder the stubble of beard. Pete’s face was even whiter, but he joined us in the ugly job of salvaging the few records. Benson got drunk that night on half our medicinal grain alco- hol, and I had to drag him back as quietly as I could into our quarters. And then I had to listen while he whispered out the one story he couldn’t get off his chest to Minnie. I’d guessed it concerned her. But it was worse than I thought. A pin-hole in a main fuel tank— probably from an unlikely mete- orite-had let the fuel evaporate and ruined the warning device oil the tank. It was no fault of design or calculation— just ugly luck— but it meant our margin was cut to the bone. Benson had found it in transshipping fuel to the return ship, and had secretly checked with the Moon Base computermen. By paring it to the bone on every weight item, by going on minimum rations, and by getting help from a moon re- lief ship at maximum orbit, we could just make it back— provided we left one person behind. “A mere hundred pounds?” I asked. Then I knew how stupid it was. Add in food, the weight of the hydroponics tanks for one person’s air, and all the other items you have to count, and it was a lot more— enough to mean a difference in total fuel used that was enormous. One man needs a lot of weight for more than nine months of living. I’d never thought of a jinx be- fore—strangely, none of us had— when Minnie turned our even dozen to thirteen. Now . . . And it had to be Minnie. There comes a time when the rules have to be followed, even when it meant this. She was the one per- son who had no right with us, and she’d have insisted no other man could be killed for her. Be- sides, every man here was needed for the return trip— every one of us had some skill that was abso- lutely essential, carefully devel- oped. It took twelve trained men to get back, from computer man to hydroponics expert. It had to be Minnie.

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126 VENTUBE SCIENCE FICTION And take-off was due in four days! I went out to get a couple of sleeping tablets for the Skipper, realizing he’d been talking too loud toward the end. And I could have sworn I heard someone mov- ing away, though the wind and my imagination could have been the answer. There was no one in the narrow hall, anyway. And I was thinking of Miimie, alone here for years until there might be another trip made. There’d be supplies enough, from the two expeditions. She might exist for years, with skill and luck. But even she couldn’t stick it out alone until a possible future rescue. She dropped her hand over mine as I was dragging the pills from the drawer. “I’ve known for a long time, Johnny,” she said. “So you were listening?” She shook her head. “I didn’t need to listen. I saw you and the Skipper come in. And I saw the tank and the Skipper’s face back on the main ship. I got my own computations. And now I’ve even got my hide-out ready. When the time comes. I’ll be listening on my radio, hoping for you all. Now let me take these in to the Skipper.” Then abruptly her head was against my chest and she was cry- ing softly, this time from fear. She was afraid, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. But I knew she’d go through with everytliing she promised. Finally she drew away, trying to smile. “I guess that makes us even, Johnny. And maybe 111 be in later.” She was, but all we could do was to lie miserably, bying to console each other. I could hear the Skipper, still awake and stir- ring on his bunk. And once steps went down the hall, probably toward the latrine. “Pete,” she said softly. “Poor Pete. He tries so hard. He’s even still tiying to make an honest woman of me, Johnny.” It wasn’t funny, though she must have meant it that way. And it showed her strain, since she never told tales about other men normally. She sighed softly. “Know what I wanted to do, Johnny?” “Be a rocket pilot when you were a kid,” I guessed. Most kids did, even girls at some stage in growing up. She shook her head against me. “No. Never that. I wanted to be just what I became, Johnny. A woman who could follow the men into space and not hold them back. But I was hoping, when this was over and we were back . . . Well, there’ll be Mars and Venus some day, as well as the moon. I wanted to have three daughters— one for each. But I guess this makes a better ending when you write it up in that notebook of yours back at Base.”

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Lady of Space I wasn’t interested in such things. “When, Minnie? To- night?” She nodded, not trying to lie. I knew it had to be. Once it was even partly an open secret, we couldn’t face it while she was still there. At last she got up, and because I knew she wanted it, I lay there while she went down the hall toward the place where the suits and supplies were, and where the lock led to Mars. I lay there, wanting to scream, listen- ing. And then there was a scream, cut off after the first sound, but in her voice. I was out into the hallway, al- most bumping into the Skipper, though nobody else seemed to have heard. And a few seconds later we saw her, ripping off her helmet and pointing beyond the lock. Out there was Pete— without a helmet. And for the first time, his bloated, distorted face looked sure of itself. Benson shook his head like a man coming out of a drunken spree. Curiously, his eyes weren’t bloodshot. “The fool— the damned fool. Just because I shot off my mouth where he could hear. And now, with no computerman, we’re all stuck here.” I was remembering the soimds in the hall, too. Pete had listened, all right. But mostly I was won- dering just how many drinks the 127 Captain had really had, and when he’d first heard Pete. I was re- membering how Benson’s voice had grown louder and clearer as he told me the facts. I didn’t like my thoughts, either— maybe be- cause I wasn’t sure what I’d have done in Benson’s case. “No, Captain,” I told him. I saw his eyes narrow at the formal title for a split second; then his face froze into a neutral blank. “No,” I repeated. “Pete was a fool, but not that kind. He wouldn’t kill himself and leave Minnie to die because we couldn’t get back. He had to know some- thing I should have guessed my- self, as you should have, or did. There had to be another com- puter expert here— and I guess I should have known why Minnie always hung around the com- puter shack at Base.” Minnie nodded as we tirmed toward her. “He knew. I put my- self through college working high- level computers, and I’ve been helping Pete here when I could. Poor Pete, he never trusted him- self. All right, I can compute us home.” Her hand shook a little, but it steadied as she refastened her helmet. We all went out together to put a helmet on Pete and to smash it so it would look as if, he’d cracked it in a fall. It wasn’t a good job, but nobody would doubt it; and three of us were already too many to know the

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128 VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION truth, I guess. Or maybe it didn’t matter about some of them. What would I have done in Benson’s place? “Better get some sleep,” I told him. “We’ll have to work on take-off plans tomorrow. And well need clear heads for that.” He smiled faintly, with the muscles taut along his cheeks. Then he left us alone, I suppose it makes a poor end- ing, and a tragedy would have more punch. But we got back to Moon Base by the skin of our teeth, and even got Minnie off be- fore the interviews. And after a while, things went back to nor- mal, except that Moon Base was scheduled to handle all inter- planet trips and Benson went to another job on Earth. There are still about fifty men on the Base and only Minnie with them. She’s still the same Minnie, and none ever complain that she’s unfair. Maybe I’m jealous at times, and maybe that’s not a good ending. But it’s what she wants, and on the whole, I like it. And maybe I’ll hke it better from now on. She and I have named our daughter Pete. If the baby grows up to be like her moAer, I’ll hke everything fine. HELP WANTED - Because of the recent upheaval in newsstand distribution, many dealers are not being adequately supplied with copies of VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION. If your dealer does not have it, you will be doing a real service for us — for the dealer — and perhaps for yourself, if you will send us his name and address. We will make every effort to see that your dealer is properly supplied in the future. Write to; Newsdealer Service VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION 527 Madison Avenue, New York 22, N. Y.

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'ye/rtur/ngs C. M. Kombluth and Henry Kuttner died this year, and thereby science' fiction lost two of its most brilliant creators. Henry Kuttner never appeared in Venture— and that was Venture’s loss. C. M. Korn- bluth has been in these pages before, and his last completed work is this issue’s lead novelet. There is nothing this department can say tliat would be as fitting as what their fellow writers feel. So we are turning over the rest of this issue’s Venturings, first to Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth’s close friend and. longtime collaborator, and then to Theodore Sturgeon . . . C. M. Kombluth It was Cyril’s fate that in all of his life he was precocious. He couldn’t wait. At the age of eighteen he was already the author of a hundred published stories, the principal contributor to at least two science-fiction magazines, the owner of some twenty-three pennames. At twenty- two he was a discharged veteran of the Ardennes Forest, with a Bronze Star earned the hard way, operating a machinegun against German tanks. In the decade and a bit that followed, Cyril Kombluth wrote prolifically and as well as any writer the science-fiction field has ever known. There were the short stories and the novelets: “The Little Black Bag,” with its searing, off-hand peek at a moron-owned future; “The Marching Morons,” which developed that glimpse into a power- ful portrait. There was “The Mindworm,” probably the finest retelling of the vampire myth in science-fiction temis. There was “The Luckiest Man in Denv” and “The Silly Season” and “The Cosmic Charge Account” and “The Education of Tigress Macardle” and “Reap the Dark Tide" and “The Advent on Channel Twelve”— the first handful to come to mind, and what great ones have been left out? And then there were the books. At the age of thirty-five Cyril had published nearly twenty books— paperbound and clothbound, under pennames and under his own, in collaboration or alone, in this country and in a dozen countries abroad, most science fiction but many not. takeoff, the syndic, the explorers. NOT THIS AUGUST. And OITTPOST: MARS and THE SPACE MERCHANTS. And VALERIE, and . . . and, again, so many that are left out. It is a long, honorable list, but now it is tragically a list that has an end. On the 21st of March, 1958, Long Island was emerging from a storai.

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There had been neither heat nor light for two days. Cyril awoke; arose; chopped fireplace wood for Mary, his wife, and their two small sons; shoveled snow; made his way to the railroad station; and collapsed. It was heart failure, and the first failure that that heart had ever known. In death as in life Cyril was ahead of his years. He died at the age of thirty-five. Still, there is this: the manner of his death was so precisely that which he had himself described as the most desirable of ways to pay the debt we all owe— in all but time— that sorrow hardly extends to this man who has died untimely young. It belongs to his wife and family; it belongs to his friends; and it belongs to the uncounted persons, in this country and in a dozen others, who knew and loved his work, who hoped for more, and who now by his death are left forever poorer, Fredeeik Pohl Henry Kuttner There was a tiring about his face that was different from other faces, and it took a while to realize what it was. It was nothing you could see at the time, but only afterwards, by wondering and remem- bering hard. And it was this: that always before he smiled, his eyes would shine. He had a soft voice and he was soft-footed. He seemed to move always a little faster than he had to, faster, at least, than you would. When you got to know him a little better you were sure of it, and you could understand that it wasn’t just part of the way he sprang up- stairs on his silent sneakered feet; there really was something inside him which could move a little faster than you might, or faster than you could. He was full of Story. He could shape a whole novel to its last two words, and make them what the whole thing was for. His was the soup-spoon which thickened at the edge when it approached a man’s mouth, puckered up and coldly kissed him. His was the hquor-organ of the forgetful Gallegher, whose hands would stray inspired over the console and produce wondrous solutions, some potable and others belonging to problems he couldn’t remember until that deft last para- graph. His were the chill, strange, kind visitors of “Vintage Season” and in “When the Bough Breaks,” whimsy-horror; and more, so much more. I never heard a bad tiring about Henry Kuttner. I never saw evil of any kind in him. I never knew I could miss so very much someone I had seen so seldom. He shouldn’t have died. Theodore Sturgeon

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Vivid v^riting and boundless imagination have earned F&SF its reputation as tops in the field. Every month fine tales of tomorrow^^s new worlds, and the exeiting people who discover them, by such outstanding authors as Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, C. M. Kornbluth, Mark Van Doren, Shirley Jackson and a host of others. 35^ a copy. $4.00 a year. A/lfRCORY A/Iystery AAA GA2 t N( Each issue features an original, full-length mystery novel brought to you months in advance of its hard-cover publication. Also shorter stories and articles by such authors as Erie Stanley Gardner, George Harmon Coxe, James M. Fox, William Campbell Gault and others. Fascinating reading for those who like exciting well- written mysteries. 35^ a copy. $4.00 for 12 issues. The brightest new star on the SF horizon, Venture brings you hard-hitting tales of action and adventure, plus the shocking realism of truly offbeat science fiction. Fine authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Poul Anderson, Leigh Brackett and many others are featured in this exciting new magazine. 35^ a copy. $4.00 for 12 issues. iBestsdCcr Jllystay MAGAZIN^E ' Reprints of best-selling, high-quality mystery novels, plus exciting stories of fictional and true-life crime — every issue of this new magazine features varied entertainment by top mystery writers such as Cornell Woolrich, James M. Fox, and many others. 354 ^ copy. $4.00 for 12 issues. Joseph W. Ferman, Publisher MERCURY PRESS, INC. • 527 Madison Ave. . New York 22, N.Y.