Smith broke in, his mournful face lined with gloom: “The killer attacked Jarvey, and then discovered his flesh was alien—uneatable. Just like our big cat. Wouldn’t eat anything we set before him—” His words died out in sudden, queer silence. Then he said slowly:

“Say, what about that creature? He’s big enough and strong enough to have done this with his own little paws.”

Morton frowned. “It’s a thought. After all, he’s the only living thing we’ve seen. We can’t just execute him on suspicion, of course—”

“Besides,” said one of the men, “he was never out of my sight.”

Before Morton could speak, Siedel, the psychologist, snapped, “Positive about that?”

The man hesitated. “Maybe he was for a few minutes. He was wandering around so much, looking at everything.”

“Exactly,” said Siedel with satisfaction. He turned to Morton. “You see, commander, I, too, had the impression that he was always around; and yet, thinking back over it, I find gaps. There were moments—probably long minutes—when he was completely out of sight.”

Morton’s face was dark with thought, as Kent broke in fiercely:

“I say, take no chances. Kill the brute on suspicion before he does any more damage.”

Morton said slowly: “Korita, you’ve been wandering around with Cranessy and Van Home. Do you think pussy is a descendant of the ruling class of this planet?”

The tall Japanese archeologist stared at the sky as if collecting his mind. “Commander Morton,” he said finally, respectfully, “there is a mystery here. Take a look, all of you, at that majestic skyline. Notice the almost Gothic outline of the architecture. In spite of the megalopolis which they created, these people were close to the soil. The buildings are not simply ornamented. They are ornamental in themselves. Here is the equivalent of the Done column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic cathedral, growing out of the ground, earnest, big with destiny. If this lonely, desolate world can be regarded as a mother earth, then the land had a warm, a spiritual place in the hearts of the race.

“The effect is emphasized by the winding streets. Their machines prove they were mathematicians, but they were artists first; and so they did not create the geometrically designed cities of the ultra-sophisticated world metropolis. There is a genuine artistic abandon, a deep joyous emotion written in the curving and unmathematical arrangements of houses, buildings and avenues; a sense of intensity, of divine belief in an inner certainty. This is not a decadent, hoary-with-age civilization, but a young and vigorous culture, confident, strong with purpose.

“There it ended. Abruptly, as if at this point culture had its Battle of Tours, and began to collapse like the ancient Mohammedan civilization. Or as if in one leap it spanned the centuries and entered the period of contending states. In the Chinese civilization that period occupied 480-230 B. C., at the end of which the State of Tsin saw the beginning of the Chinese Empire. This phase Egypt experienced between 1780-1580 B. C., of which the last century was the ‘Hyksos’—unmentionable—time. The classical experienced it from Ch~aeronea—338—and, at the pitch of horror, from the Gracchi—133—to Actium—31 B. C. The West European Americans were devastated by it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and modern historians agree that, nominally, we entered the same phase fifty years ago; though, of course, we have solved the problem.

“You may ask, commander, what has all this to do with your question? My answer is: there is no record of a culture entering abruptly into the period of contending states. It is always a slow development; and the first step is a merciless questioning of all that was once held sacred. Inner certainties cease to exist, are dissolved before the ruthless probings of scientific and analytic minds. The skeptic becomes the highest type of being.

“I say that this culture ended abruptly in its most flourishing age. The sociological effects of such a catastrophe would be a sudden vanishing of morals, a reversion to almost bestial criminality, unleavened by any sense of ideal, a callous indifference to death. If this this pussy is a descendant of such a race, then he will be a cunning creature, a thief in the night, a cold-blooded murderer, who would cut his own brother’s throat for gain.”

 

“That’s enough!” It was Kent’s clipped voice. “Commander, I’m willing to act the role of executioner.”

Smith interrupted sharply: “Listen, Morton, you’re not going to kill that cat yet, even if he is guilty. He’s a biological treasure house.”

Kent and Smith were glaring angrily at each other. Morton frowned at them thoughtfully, then said: “Korita, I’m inclined to accept your theory as a working basis. But one question: Pussy comes from a period earlier than our own? That is, we are entering the highly civilized era of our culture, while he became suddenly historyless in the most vigorous period of his. But it is possible that his culture is a later one on this planet than ours is in the galactic-wide system we have civilized?”

“Exactly. His may be the middle of the tenth civilization of his world; while ours is the end of the eighth sprung from earth, each of the ten, of course, having been builded on the ruins of the one before it.”

“In that case, pussy would not know anything about the skepticism that made it possible for us to find him out so positively as a criminal and murderer?”

“No; it would be literally magic to him.”

Morton was smiling grimly. “Then I think you’ll get your wish, Smith. We’ll let pussy live; and if there are any fatalities, now that we know him, it will be due to rank carelessness. There’s just the chance, of course, that we’re wrong. Like Siedel, I also have the impression that he was always around. But now—we can’t leave poor Jarvey here like this. We’ll put him in a coffin and bury him.”

“No, we won’t!” Kent barked. He flushed. “I beg your pardon, commander. I didn’t mean it that way. I maintain pussy wanted something from that body. It looks to be all there, but something must be missing. I’m going to find out what, and pin this murder on him so that you’ll have to believe it beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

 

It was late night when Morton looked up from a book and saw Kent emerge through the door that led from the laboratories below.

Kent carried a large, flat bowl in his hands; his tired eyes flashed across at Morton, and he said in a weary, yet harsh, voice: “Now watch!”

He started toward Coeurl, who lay sprawled on the great rug, pretending to be asleep.

Morton stopped him. “Wait a minute, Kent. Any other time, I wouldn’t question your actions, but you look ill; you’re overwrought. What have you got there?”

Kent turned, and Morton saw that his first impression had been but a flashing glimpse of the truth. There were dark pouches under the little chemist’s gray eyes—eyes that gazed feverishly from sunken cheeks in an ascetic face.

“I’ve found the missing element,” Kent said. “It’s phosphorus. There wasn’t so much as a square millimeter of phosphorus left in Jarvey’s bones. Every bit of it had been drained out—by what super-chemistry I don’t know. There are ways of getting phosphorus out of the human body. For instance, a quick way was what happened to the workman who helped build this ship. Remember, he fell into fifteen tons of molten metalite—at least, so his relatives claimed—but the company wouldn’t pay compensation until the metalite, on analysis, was found to contain a high percentage of phosphorus—”

“What about the bowl of food?” somebody interrupted. Men were putting away magazines and books, looking up with interest.

“It’s got organic phosphorus in it. He’ll get the scent, or whatever it is that he uses instead of scent—”

“I think he gets the vibrations of things,” Gourlay interjected lazily. “Sometimes, when he wiggles those tendrils, I get a distinct static on the radio. And then, again, there’s no reaction, just as if he’s moved higher or lower on the wave scale. He seems to control the vibrations at will.”

Kent waited with obvious impatience until Gourlay’s last word, then abruptly went on: “All right, then, when he gets the vibration of the phosphorus and reacts to it like an animal, then—well, we can decide what we’ve proved by his reaction. May I go ahead, Morton?”

“There are three things wrong with your plan,” Morton said. “In the first place, you seem to assume that he is only animal; you seem to have forgotten he may not be hungry after Jarvey; you seem to think that he will not be suspicious. But set the bowl down. His reaction may tell us something.”

Coeurl stared with unblinking black eyes as the man set the bowl before him. His ear tendrils instantly caught the id-vibrations from the contents of the bowl—and he gave it not even a second glance.

He recognized this two-legged being as the one who had held the weapon that morning. Danger! With a snarl, he floated to his feet. He caught the bowl with the fingerlike appendages at the end of one looping tentacle, and emptied its contents into the face of Kent, who shrank back with a yell.

Explosively, Coeurl flung the bowl aside and snapped a hawser-thick tentacle around the cursing man’s waist. He didn’t bother with the gun that hung from Kent’s belt. It was only a vibration gun, he sensed—atomic powered, but not an atomic disintegrator. He tossed the kicking Kent onto the nearest couch—and realized with a hiss of dismay that he should have disarmed the man.

Not that the gun was dangerous—but, as the man furiously wiped the gruel from his face with one hand, he reached with the other for his weapon. Coeurl crouched back as the gun was raised slowly and a white beam of flame was discharged at his massive head.

His ear tendrils hummed as they canceled the efforts of the vibration gun. His round, black eyes narrowed as he caught the movement of men reaching for their metalite guns. Morton’s voice lashed across the silence.

“Stop!”

 

Kent clicked off his weapon; and Coeurl crouched down, quivering with fury at this man who had forced him to reveal something of his power.

“Kent,” said Morton coldly, “you’re not the type to lose your head. You deliberately tried to kill pussy, knowing that the majority of us are in favor of keeping him alive. You know what our rule is: If anyone objects to my decisions, he must say so at the time. If the majority object, my decisions are overruled. In this case, no one but you objected, and, therefore, your action in taking the law into your own hands is most reprehensible, and automatically debars you from voting for a year.”

Kent stared grimly at the circle of faces. “Korita was right when he said ours was a highly civilized age. It’s decadent.” Passion flamed harshly in his voice. “My God, isn’t there a man here who can see the horror of the situation? Jarvey dead only a few hours, and this creature, whom we all know to be guilty, lying there unchained, planning his next murder; and the victim is right here in this room. What kind of men are we—fools, cynics, ghouls or is it that our civilization is so steeped in reason that we can contemplate a murderer sympathetically?”

He fixed brooding eyes on Coeurl. “You were right, Morton, that’s no animal. That’s a devil from the deepest hell of this forgotten planet, whirling its solitary way around a dying sun.”

“Don’t go melodramatic on us,” Morton said. “Your analysis is all wrong, so far as I am concerned. We’re not ghouls or cynics; we’re simply scientists, and pussy here is going to be studied. Now that we suspect him, we doubt his ability to trap any of us. One against a hundred hasn’t a chance.” He glanced around. “Do I speak for all of us?”

“Not for me, commander!” It was Smith who spoke, and, as Morton stared in amazement, he continued: “In the excitement and momentary confusion, no one seems to have noticed that when Kent fired his vibration gun, the beam hit this creature squarely on his cat head—and didn’t hurt him.”

Morton’s amazed glance went from Smith to Coeurl, and back to Smith again. “Are you certain it hit him? As you say, it all happened so swiftly—when pussy wasn’t hurt I simply assumed that Kent had missed him.”

“He hit him in the face,” Smith said positively. “A vibration gun, of course, can’t even kill a man right away—but it can injure him. There’s no sign of injury on pussy, though, not even a singed hair.”

“Perhaps his skin is a good insulation against heat of any kind.”

“Perhaps. But in view of our uncertainty, I think we should lock him up in the cage.”

While Morton frowned darkly in thought, Kent spoke up. “Now you’re talking sense, Smith.”

Morton asked: “Then you would be satisfied, Kent, if we put him in the cage?”

Kent considered, finally: “Yes. If four inches of micro-steel can’t hold him, we’d better give him the ship.”

Coeurl followed the men as they went out into the corridor. He trotted docilely along as Morton unmistakably motioned him through a door he had not hitherto seen. He found himself in a square, solid metal room. The door clanged metallically behind him; he felt the flow of power as the electric lock clicked home.

His lips parted in a grimace of hate, as he realized the trap, but he gave no other outward reaction. It occurred to him that he had progressed a long way from the sunk-into-primitiveness creature who, a few hours before, had gone incoherent with fear in an elevator cage. Now, a thousand memories of his powers were reawakened in his brain; ten thousand cunnings were, after ages of disuse, once again part of his very being.

He sat quite still for a moment on the short, heavy haunches into which his body tapered, his ear tendrils examining his surroundings. Finally, he lay down, his eyes glowing with contemptuous fire. The fools! The poor fools!

It was about an hour later when he heard the man—Smith—fumbling overhead. Vibrations poured upon him, and for just an instant he was startled. He leaped to his feet in pure terror—and then realized that the vibrations were vibrations, not atomic explosions. Somebody was taking pictures of the inside of his body.

He crouched down again, but his ear tendrils vibrated, and he thought contemptuously: the silly fool would be surprised when he tried to develop those pictures.

After a while the man went away, and for a long time there were noises of men doing things far away. That, too, died away slowly.

Coeurl lay waiting, as he felt the silence creep over the ship. In the long ago, before the dawn of immortality, the coeurls, too, had slept at night; and the memory of it had been revived the day before when he saw some of the men dozing. At last, the vibration of two pairs of feet, pacing, pacing endlessly, was the only human-made frequency that throbbed on his ear tendrils.

Tensely, he listened to the two watchmen. The first one walked slowly past the cage door. Then about thirty feet behind him came the second. Coeurl sensed the alertness of these men; knew that he could never surprise either while they walked separately. It meant— he must be doubly careful!

Fifteen minutes, and they came again. The moment they were past, he switched his senses from their vibrations to a vastly higher range. The pulsating violence of the atomic engines stammered its soft story to his brain. The electric dynamos hummed their muffled song of pure power. He felt the whisper of that flow through the wires in the walls of his cage, and through the electric lock of his door. He forced his quivering body into straining immobility, his senses seeking, searching, to tune in on that sibilant tempest of energy. Suddenly, his ear tendrils vibrated in harmony—he caught the surging change into shrillness of that rippling force wave.

There was a sharp click of metal on metal. With a gentle touch of one tentacle, Coeurl pushed open the door, and glided out into the dully gleaming corridor. For just a moment he felt contempt, a glow of superiority, as he thought of the stupid creatures who dared to match their wit against a coeurl. And in that moment, he suddenly thought of other coeurls. A queer, exultant sense of race pounded through his being; the driving hate of centuries of ruthless competition yielded reluctantly before pride of kinship with the future rulers of all space.

 

Suddenly, he felt weighed down by his limitations, his need for other coeurls, his aloneness-one against a hundred, with the stake all eternity; the starry universe itself beckoned his rapacious, vaulting ambition. If he failed, there would never be a second chance—no time to revive long-rotted machinery, and attempt to solve the secret of space travel.

He padded along on tensed paws—through the salon—into the next corridor—and came to the first bedroom door. It stood half open. One swift flow of synchronized muscles, one swiftly lashing tentacle that caught the unresisting throat of the sleeping man, crushing it, and the lifeless head rolled crazily, the body twitched once.

Seven bedrooms; seven dead men. It was the seventh taste of murder that brought a sudden return of lust, a pure, unbounded desire to kill, return of a millennium-old habit of destroying everything containing the precious id.

As the twelfth man slipped convulsively into death, Coeurl emerged abruptly from the sensuous joy of the kill to the sound of footsteps.

They were not near—that was what brought wave after wave of fright swirling into the chaos that suddenly became his brain.

 

The watchmen were coming slowly along the corridor toward the door of the cage where he had been imprisoned. In a moment, the first man would see the open door—and sound the alarm.

Coeurl caught at the vanishing remnants of his reason. With frantic speed, careless now of accidental sounds, he raced—along the corridor with its bedroom doors—through the salon. He emerged into the next corridor, cringing in awful anticipation of the atomic flame he expected would stab into his face.

The two men were together, standing side by side. For one single instant, Coeurl could scarcely believe his tremendous good luck. Like a fool the second had come running when he saw the other stop before the open door. They looked up, paralyzed, before the nightmare of claws and tentacles, the ferocious cat head and hate-filled eyes.

The first man went for his gun, but the second, physically frozen before the doom he saw, uttered a shriek, a shrill cry of horror that floated along the corridors—and ended in a curious gurgle, as Coerl flung the two corpses with one irresistible motion the full length of the corridor. He didn’t want the dead bodies found near the cage. That was his one hope.

Shaking in every nerve and muscle, conscious of the terrible error he had made, unable to think coherently, he plunged into the cage. The door clicked softly shut behind him. Power flowed once more through the electric lock.

He crouched tensely, simulating sleep, as he heard the rush of many feet, caught the vibration of excited voices. He knew when somebody actuated the cage audioscope and looked in. A few moments now, and the other bodies would be discovered.

 

“Siedel gone!” Morton said numbly. “What are we going to do without Siedel? And Breckenridge! And Coulter and— Horrible!”

He covered his face with his hands, but only for an instant. He looked up grimly, his heavy chin outthrust as he stared into the stern faces that surrounded him. “If anybody’s got so much as a germ of an idea, bring it out.”

“Space madness!”

“I’ve thought of that. But there hasn’t been a case of a man going mad for fifty years. Dr. Eggert will test everybody, of course, and right now he’s looking at the bodies with that possibility in mind.”

As he finished, he saw the doctor coming through the door. Men crowded aside to make way for him.

“I heard you, commander,” Dr. Eggert said, “and I think I can say right now that the space-madness theory is out. The throats of these men have been squeezed to a jelly. No human being could have exerted such enormous strength without using a machine.”

Morton saw that the doctor’s eyes kept looking down the corridor, and he shook his head and groaned:

“It’s no use suspecting pussy, doctor. He’s in his cage, pacing up and down. Obviously heard the racket and— Man alive! You can’t suspect him. That cage was built to hold literally anything—four inches of micro-steel—and there’s not a scratch on the door. Kent, even you won’t say, ‘Kill him on suspicion,’ because there can’t be any suspicion, unless there’s a new science here, beyond anything we can imagine—”

“On the contrary,” said Smith flatly, “we have all the evidence we need. I used the telefluor on him—you know the arrangement we have on top of the cage—and tried to take some pictures. They just blurred. Pussy jumped when the telefluor was turned on, as if he felt the vibrations.

“You all know what Gourlay said before? This beast can apparently receive and send vibrations of any lengths. The way he dominated the power of Kent’s gun is final proof of his special ability to interfere with energy.”

“What in the name of all the hells have we got here?” One of the men groaned. “Why, if he can control that power, and sent it out in any vibrations, there’s nothing to stop him killing all of us.”

“Which proves,” snapped Morton, “that he isn’t invincible, or he would have done it long ago.”

Very deliberately, he walked over to the mechanism that controlled the prison cage.

“You’re not going to open the door!” Kent gasped, reaching for his gun.

“No, but if I pull this switch, electricity will flow through the floor, and electrocute whatever’s inside. We’ve never had to use this before, so you had probably forgotten about it.”

He jerked the switch hard over. Blue fire flashed from the metal, and a bank of fuses above his head exploded with a single bang.

Morton frowned. “That’s funny. Those fuses shouldn’t have blown! Well, we can’t even look in, now. That wrecked the audios, too.”

Smith said: “If he could interfere with the electric lock, enough to open the door, then he probably probed every possible danger and was ready to interfere when you threw that switch.”

“At least, it proves he’s vulnerable to our energies!” Morton smiled grimly. “Because he rendered them harmless. The important thing is, we’ve got him behind four inches of the toughest of metal. At the worst we can open the door and ray him to death. But first, I think we’ll try to use the telefluor power cable—”

A commotion from inside the cage interrupted his words. A heavy body crashed against a wall, followed by a dull thump.

“He knows what we were trying to do!” Smith grunted to Morton. “And I’ll bet it’s a very sick pussy in there. What a fool he was to go back into that cage and does he realize it!”

The tension was relaxing; men were smiling nervously, and there was even a ripple of humorless laughter at the picture Smith drew of the monster’s discomfiture.

“What I’d like to know,” said Pennons, the engineer, “is, why did the telefluor meter dial jump and waver at full power when pussy made that noise? It’s right under my nose here, and the dial jumped like a house afire!”

There was silence both without and within the cage, then Morton said: “It may mean he’s coming out. Back, everybody, and keep your guns ready. Pussy was a fool to think he could conquer a hundred men, but he’s by far the most formidable creature in the galactic system. He may come out of that door, rather than die like a rat in a trap. And he’s just tough enough to take some of us with him—if we’re not careful.”

The men backed slowly in a solid body; and somebody said: “That’s funny. I thought I heard the elevator.”

“Elevator!” Morton echoed. “Are you sure, man?”

“Just for a moment I was!” The man, a member of the crew, hesitated. “We were all shuffling our feet—”

“Take somebody with you, and go look. Bring whoever dared to run off back here-”

There was a jar, a horrible jerk, as the whole gigantic body of the ship careened under them. Morton was flung to the floor with a violence that stunned him. He fought back to consciousness, aware of the other men lying all around him. He shouted: “Who the devil started those engines!”

The agonizing acceleration continued; his feet dragged with awful exertion, as he fumbled with the nearest audioscope, and punched the engine-room number. The picture that flooded onto the screen brought a deep bellow to his lips:

“It’s pussy! He’s in the engine room—and we’re heading straight out into space.”

The screen went black even as he spoke, and he could see no more.

 

It was Morton who first staggered across the salon floor to the supply room where the spacesuits were kept. After fumbling almost blindly into his own suit, he cut the effects of the body-torturing acceleration, and brought suits to the semiconscious men on the floor. In a few moments, other men were assisting him; and then it was only a matter of minutes before everybody was clad in metalite, with anti-acceleration motors running at half power.

It was Morton then who, after first looking into the cage, opened the door and stood, silent as the others crowded about him, to stare at the gaping hole in the rear wall. The hole was a frightful thing of jagged edges and horribly bent metal, and it opened upon another corridor.

“I’ll swear,” whispered Pennons, “that it’s impossible. The ten-ton hammer in the machine shops couldn’t more than dent four inches of micro with one blow—and we only heard one. It would take at least a minute for an atomic disintegrator to do the job. Morton, this is a super-being.”

Morton saw that Smith was examining the break in the wall. The biologist looked up. “If only Breckinridge weren’t dead! We need a metallurgist to explain this. Look!”

He touched the broken edge of the metal. A piece crumbled in his finger and slithered away in a fine shower of dust to the floor. Morton noticed for the first time that there was a little pile of metallic debris and dust.

“You’ve hit it.” Morton nodded. “No miracle of strength here. The monster merely used his special powers to interfere with the electronic tensions holding the metal together. That would account, too, for the drain on the telefluor power cable that Pennons noticed. The thing used the power with his body as a transforming medium, smashed through the wall, ran down the corridor to the elevator’ shaft, and so down to the engine room.”

“In the meantime, commander,” Kent said quietly, “we are faced with a super-being in control of the ship, completely dominating the engine room and its almost unlimited power, and in possession of the best part of the machine shops.”

Morton felt the silence, while the men pondered the chemist’s words. Their anxiety was a tangible thing that lay heavily upon their faces; in every expression was the growing realization that here was the ultimate situation in their lives; their very existence was at stake and perhaps much more. Morton voiced the thought in everybody’s mind:

“Suppose he wins. He’s utterly ruthless, and he probably sees galactic power within his grasp.”

“Kent is wrong,” barked the chief navigator. “The thing doesn’t dominate the engine room. We’ve still got the control room, and that gives us first control of all the machines. You fellows may not know the mechanical set-up we have; but, though he can eventually disconnect us, we can cut off all the switches in the engine room now. Commander, why didn’t you just shut off the power instead of putting us into spacesuits? At the very least you could have adjusted the ship to the acceleration.”

“For two reasons,” Morton answered. “Individually, we’re safer within the force fields of our spacesuits. And we can’t afford to give up our advantages in panicky moves.”

“Advantages! What other advantages have we got?”

“We know things about him,” Morton replied. “And right now, we’re going to make a test. Pennons, detail five men to each of the four approaches to the engine room. Take atomic disintegrators to blast through the big doors. They’re all shut, I noticed. He’s locked himself in.

“Selenski, you go up to the control room and shut off everything except the drive engines. Gear them to the master switch, and shut them off all at once. One thing, though—leave the acceleration on full blast. No anti-acceleration must be applied to the ship. Understand?”

“Aye, sir!” The pilot saluted.

“And report to me through the communicators if any of the machines start to run again.” He faced the men. “I’m going to lead the main approach. Kent, you take No. 1; Smith, No. 3, and Pennons, No. 4. We’re going to find out right now if we’re dealing with unlimited science, or a creature limited like the rest of us. I’ll bet on the second possibility.”

 

Morton had an empty sense of walking endlessly, as he moved, a giant of a man in his transparent space armor, along the glistening metal tube that was the main corridor of the engine-room floor. Reason told him the creature had already shown feet of clay, yet the feeling that here was an invincible being persisted.

He spoke into the communicator: “It’s no use trying to sneak up on him. He can probably ‘hear a pin drop. So just wheel up your units. He hasn’t been in that engine room long enough to do anything.

“As I’ve said, this is largely a test attack. In the first place, we could never forgive ourselves if we didn’t try to conquer him now, before he’s had time to prepare against us. But, aside from the possibility that we can destroy him immediately, I have a theory.

“The idea goes something like this: Those doors are built to withstand accidental atomic explosions, and it will take fifteen minutes for the atomic disintegrators to smash them. During that period the monster will have no power. True, the drive will be on, but that’s straight atomic explosion. My theory is, he can’t touch stuff like that; and in a few minutes you’ll see what I mean—I hope.”

His voice was suddenly crisp: “Ready, Selenski?”

“Aye, ready.”

“Then cut the master switch.”

The corridor—the whole ship, Morton knew—was abruptly plunged into darkness. Morton clicked on the dazzling light of his spacesuit; the other men did the same, their faces pale and drawn.

“Blast!” Morton barked into his communicator.

The mobile units throbbed; and then pure atomic flame ravened out and poured upon the hard metal of the door. The first molten droplet rolled reluctantly, not down, but up the door. The second was more normal. It followed a shaky downward course. The third rolled sideways—for this was pure force, not subject to gravitation. Other drops followed until a dozen streams trickled sedately yet unevenly in every direction—streams of hellish, sparkling fire, bright as fairy gems, alive with the coruscating fury of atoms suddenly tortured, and running blindly, crazy with pain.

The minutes ate at time like a slow acid. At last Morton asked huskily:

“Selenski?”

“Nothing yet, commander.”

Morton half whispered: “But he must be doing something. He can’t be just waiting in there like a cornered rat. Selenski?”

“Nothing, commander.”

Seven minutes, eight minutes, then twelve.

“Commander!” It was Selenski’s voice, taut. “He’s got the electric dynamo running.”

Morton drew a deep breath, and heard one of his men say:

“That’s funny. We can’t get any deeper. Boss, take a look at this.”

Morton looked. The little scintillating streams had frozen rigid. The ferocity of the disintegrators vented in vain against metal grown suddenly invulnerable.

Morton sighed. “Our test is over. Leave two men guarding every corridor. The others come up to the control room.”

 

He seated himself a few minutes later before the massive control keyboard. “So far as I’m concerned the test was a success. We know that of all the machines in the engine room, the most important to the monster was the electric dynamo. He must have worked in a frenzy of terror while we were at the doors.”

“Of course, it’s easy to see what he did,” Penrions said. “Once he had the power he increased the electronic tensions of the door to their ultimate.”

“The main thing is this,” Smith chimed in. “He works with vibrations only so far as his special powers are concerned, and the energy must come from outside himself. Atomic energy in its pure form, not being vibration, he can’t handle any differently than we can.”

Kent said glumly: “The main point in my opinion is that he stopped us cold. What’s the good of knowing that his, control over vibrations did it? If we can’t break through those doors with our atomic disintegrators, we’re finished.”

Morton shook his head. “Not finished—but we’ll have to do some planning. First, though, I’ll start these engines. It’ll be harder for him to get control of them when they’re running.”

He pulled the master switch back into place with a jerk. There was a hum, as scores of machines leaped into violent life in the engine room a hundred feet below. The noises sank to a steady vibration of throbbing power.

Three hours later, Morton paced up and down before the men gathered in the salon. His dark hair was uncombed; the space pallor of his strong face emphasized rather than detracted from the out-thrust aggressiveness of his jaw. When he spoke, his deep voice was crisp to the point of sharpness:

“To make sure that our plans are fully co-ordinated, I’m going to ask each expert in turn to outline his part in the overpowering of this creature. Pennons first!”

Pennons stood up briskly. He was not a big man, Morton thought, yet he looked big, perhaps because of his air of authority. This man knew engines, and the history of engines. Morton had heard him trace a machine through its evolution from a simple toy to the highly complicated modern instrument. He had studied machine development on a hundred planets; and there was literally nothing fundamental that he didn’t know about mechanics. It was almost weird to hear Pennons, who could have spoken for a thousand hours and still only have touched upon his subject, say with absurd brevity:

“We’ve set up a relay in the control room to start and stop every engine rhythmically. The trip lever will work a hundred times a second, and the effect will be to create vibrations of every description.

There is just a possibility that one or more of the machines will burst, on the principle of soldiers crossing a bridge in step—you’ve heard that old story, no doubt—but in my opinion there is no real danger of a break of that tough metal. The main purpose is simply to interfere with the interference of the creature, and smash through the doors.”

“Gourlay next!” barked Morton.

Gourlay climbed lazily to his feet. He looked sleepy, as if he was somewhat bored by the whole proceedings, yet Morton knew he loved people to think him lazy, a good-for-nothing slouch, who spent his days in slumber and his nights catching forty winks. His title was chief communication engineer, but his knowledge extended to every vibration field; and he was probably, with the possible exception of Kent, the fastest thinker on the ship. His voice drawled out, and— Morton noted—the very deliberate assurance of it had a soothing effect on the men—anxious faces relaxed, bodies leaned back more restfully:

“Once inside,” Gourlay said, “we’ve rigged up vibration screens of pure force that should stop nearly everything he’s got on the ball. They work on the principle of reflection, so that everything he sends will be reflected back to him. In addition, we’ve got plenty of spare electric energy that we’ll just feed him from mobile copper cups. There must be a limit to his capacity for handling power with those insulated nerves of his.”

“Selenski!” called Morton.

The chief pilot was already standing, as if he had anticipated Morton’s call. And that, Morton reflected, was the man. His nerves had that rocklike steadiness which is the first requirement of the master controller of a great ship’s movements; yet that very steadiness seemed to rest on dynamite ready to explode at its owner’s volition. He was not a man of great learning, but he “reacted” to stimuli so fast that he always seemed to be anticipating.

“The impression I’ve received of the plan is that it must be cumulative. Just when the creature thinks that he can’t stand any more, another thing happens to add to his trouble and confusion. When the uproar’s at its height, I’m supposed to cut in the anti-accelerators. The commander thinks with Gunlie Lester that these creatures will know nothing about anti-acceleration. It’s a development, pure and simple, of the science of interstellar flight, and couldn’t have been developed in any other way. We think when the creature feels the first effects of the anti-acceleration—you all remember the caved-in feeling you had the first month—it won’t know what to think or do.”

 

“Korita next.”

“I can only offer you encouragement,” said the archeologist, “on the basis of my theory that the monster has all the characteristics of a criminal of the early ages of any civilization, complicated by an apparent reversion to primitiveness. The suggestion has been made by Smith that his knowledge of science is puzzling, and could only mean that we are dealing with an actual inhabitant, not a descendant of the inhabitants of the dead city we visited. This would ascribe a virtual immortality to our enemy, a possibility which is borne out by his ability to breathe both oxygen and chlorine-or neither—but even that makes no difference. He comes from a certain age in his civilization; and he has sunk so low that his ideas are mostly memories of that age.

“In spite of all the powers of his body, he lost his head in the elevator the first morning, until he remembered. He placed himself in such a position that he was forced to reveal his special powers against vibrations. He bungled the mass murders a few hours ago. In fact, his whole record is one of the low cunning of the primitive, egotistical mind which has little or no conception of the vast organization with which it is confronted.

“He is like the ancient German soldier who felt superior to the elderly Roman scholar, yet the latter was part of a mighty civilization of which the Germans of that day stood in awe.

“You may suggest that the sack of Rome by the Germans in later years defeats my argument; however, modern historians agree that the ‘sack’ was an historical accident, and not history in the true sense of the word. The movement of the ‘Sea-peoples’ which set in against the Egyptian civilization from 1400 B. C. succeeded only as regards the Cretan island-realm—their mighty expeditions against the Libyan and Phoenician coasts, with the accompaniment of viking fleets, failed as those of the Huns failed against the Chinese Empire. Rome would have been abandoned in any event. Ancient, glorious Samarra was desolate by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s great capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveler Hsinan-tang visited it about A. D. 635.

“We have, then, a primitive, and that primitive is now far out in space, completely outside of his natural habitat. I say, let’s go in and win.”

One of the men grumbled, as Korita finished: “You can talk about the sack of Rome being an accident, and about this fellow being a primitive, but the facts are facts. It looks to me as if Rome is about to fall again; and it won’t be no primitive that did it, either. This guy’s got plenty of what it takes.”

Morton smiled grimly at the man, a member of the crew. “We’ll see about that—right now!”

 

In the blazing brilliance of the gigantic machine shop, Coeurl slaved. The forty-foot, cigar-shaped spaceship was nearly finished. With a grunt of effort, he completed the laborious installation of the drive engines, and paused to survey his craft.

Its interior, visible through the one aperture in the outer wall, was pitifully small. There was literally room for nothing but the engines—and a narrow space for himself.

He plunged frantically back to work as he heard the approach of the men, and the sudden change in the tempest-like thunder of the engines—a rhythmical off-and-on hum, shriller in tone, sharper, more nerve-racking than the deep-throated, steady throb that had preceded it. Suddenly, there were the atomic disintegrators again at the massive outer doors.

He fought them off, but never wavered from his task. Every mighty muscle of his powerful body strained as he carried great loads of tools, machines and instruments, and dumped them into the bottom of his makeshift ship. There was no time to fit anything into place, no time for anything—no time—no time.

The thought pounded at his reason. He felt strangely weary for the first time in his long and vigorous existence. With a last, tortured heave, he jerked the gigantic sheet of metal into the gaping aperture of the ship—and stood there for a terrible minute, balancing it precariously.

He knew the doors were going down. Half a dozen disintegators concentrating on one point were irresistibly, though slowly, eating away the remaining inches. With a gasp, he released his mind from the doors and concentrated every ounce of his mind on the yard-thick outer wall, toward which the blunt nose of his ship was pointing.

His body cringed from the surging power that flowed from the electric dynamo through his ear tendrils into that resisting wall. The whole inside of him felt on fire, and he knew that he was dangerously close to carrying his ultimate load.

And still he stood there, shuddering with the awful pain, holding the unfastened metal plate with hard-clenched tentacles. His massive head pointed as in dread fascination at that bitterly hard wall.

He heard one of the engine-room doors crash inward. Men shouted; disintegrators rolled forward, their raging power unchecked. Coeurl heard the floor of the engine room hiss in protest, as those beams of atomic energy tore everything in their path to bits. The machines rolled closer; cautious footsteps sounded behind them. In a minute they would be at the flimsy doors separating the engine room from the machine shop.

Suddenly, Coeurl was satisfied. With a snarl of hate, a vindictive glow of feral eyes, he ducked into his little craft, and pulled the metal plate down into place as if it was a hatchway.

His ear tendrils hummed, as he softened the edges of the surrounding metal. In an instant, the plate was more than welded—it was part of his ship, a seamless, rivetless part of a whole that was solid opaque metal except for two transparent areas, one in the front, one in the rear.

His tentacle embraced the power drive with almost sensuous tenderness. There was a forward surge of his, fragile machine, straight at the great outer wall of the machine shops. The nose of the forty-foot craft touched—and the wall dissolved in a glittering shower of dust.

Coeurl felt the barest retarding movement; and then he kicked the nose of the machine out into the cold of space, twisted it about, and headed back in the direction from which the big ship had been coming all these hours.

Men in space armor stood in the jagged hole that yawned in the lower reaches of the gigantic globe. The men and the great ship grew smaller. Then the men were gone; and there was only the ship with its blaze of a thousand blurring portholes. The ball shrank incredibly, too small now for individual portholes to be visible.

Almost straight ahead, Coeurl saw a tiny, dim, reddish ball—his own sun, he realized. He headed toward it at full speed. There were caves where he could hide and with other coeurls build secretly a spaceship in which they could reach other planets safely—now that he knew how.

His body ached from the agony of acceleration, yet he dared not let up for a single instant. He glanced back, half in terror. The globe was still there, a tiny dot of light in the immense blackness of space. Suddenly it twinkled and was gone.

For a brief moment, he had the empty, frightened impression that just before it disappeared, it moved. But he could see nothing. He could not, escape the belief that they had shut off all their lights, and were sneaking up on him in the darkness. Worried and uncertain, he looked through the forward transparent plate.

 

A tremor of dismay shot through him. The dim red sun toward which he was heading was not growing larger. It was becoming smaller by the instant, and it grew visibly tinier during the next five minutes, became a pale-red dot in the sky—and vanished like the ship.

Fear came then, a blinding surge of it, that swept through his being and left him chilled with the sense of the unknown. For minutes, he stared frantically into the space ahead, searching for some landmark. But only the remote stars glimmered there, unwinking points against a velvet background of unfathomable distance.

Wait! One of the points was growing larger. With every muscle and nerve tensed, Coeurl watched the point becoming a dot, a round’ ball of light—red light. Bigger, bigger, it grew. Suddenly, the red light shimmered and turned white—and there, before him, was the great globe of the spaceship, lights glaring from every porthole, the very ship which a few minutes before he had watched vanish behind him.

Something happened to Coeurl in that moment. His brain was spinning like a flywheel, faster, faster, more incoherently. Suddenly, the wheel flew apart into a million aching fragments. His eyes almost started from their sockets as, like a maddened animal, he raged in his small quarters.

His tentacles clutched at precious instruments and flung them insensately; his paws smashed in fury at the very walls of his ship. Finally, in a brief flash of sanity, he knew that he couldn’t face the inevitable fire of atomic disintegrators.

It was a simple thing to create the violent disorganization that freed every drop of id from his vital organs.

They found him lying dead in a little pool of phosphorus.

“Poor pussy,” said Morton. “I wonder what he thought when he saw us appear ahead of him, after his own sun disappeared. Knowing nothing of anti-accelerators, he couldn’t know that we could stop short in space, whereas it would take him more than three hours to decelerate; and in the meantime he’d be drawing farther and farther away from where he wanted to go. He couldn’t know that by stopping, we flashed past him at millions of miles a second. Of course, he, didn’t have a chance once he left our ship. The whole world must have seemed topsy-turvy.”

“Never mind the sympathy,” he heard Kent say behind him. “We’ve got a job—to kill every cat in that miserable world.”

Korita murmured softly: “That should be simple. They are but primitives; and we have merely to sit down, and they will come to us, cunningly expecting to delude us.”

Smith snapped: “You fellows make me sick! Pussy was the toughest nut we ever had to crack. He had everything he needed to defeat us—”

Morton smiled as Korita interrupted blandly: “Exactly, my dear Smith, except that he reacted according to the biological impulses of his type. His defeat was already foreshadowed when we unerringly analyzed him as a criminal from a certain era of his civilization.

“It was history, honorable Mr. Smith, our knowledge of history that defeated him,” said the Japanese archeologist, reverting to the ancient politeness of his race.

 

GREATER THAN GODS

Astounding Science Fiction, July by C. L. Moore (1911— )

 

One of the pioneer women science fiction writers, Catherine (the C. L. is dramatic evidence of the then status of women in the field) Moore wrote in collaboration with Henry Kuttner after their marriage in 1940. Previously, she was best known for her female fantasy character ^"Jirel of Jory" who appeared in a series of stories in Weird Tales, and the "Northwest Smith" stories in the sf magazines of the thirties. Both series were outstanding, and very popular.

"Greater Than Gods" is a non-series story about an alternate future. It is also about choosing, one of the most dif^ficult of all human activities.

(Science fiction in the Self-conscious Seventies is as much a female activity, both in the reading and writing, as it is a male activity, but it wasn't always thus. Right through the Golden Age, it was almost entirely masculine. But even in the depth of the male-chauvinist Thirties there were women who dared, successfully, to compete. C. L. Moore was perhaps the best of these, but Leslie F. Stone and A. R. Long were two others. Notice the use of initials and epicene given names to hide the fatal feminism of the writers. IA)

 

The desk was glass-clear steel, the mirror above it a window that opened upon distance and sight and sound whenever the televisor buzzer rang. The two crystal cubes on the desk were three-dimensional photographs of a sort undreamed of before the Twenty-third Century dawned. But between them on the desk lay a letter whose message was older that the history of writing itself.

“My darling—” it began in a man’s strongly slanting handwriting. But there Bill Cory had laid down his pen and run despairing fingers through his hair, looking from one crystal-cubed photograph to the other and swearing a little under his breath. It was fine stuff, he told himself savagely, when a man couldn’t even make up his mind which of two girls he wanted to marry. Biology House of Science City, that trusted so faithfully the keenness and clarity of Dr. William Cory’s decisions, would have shuddered to see him now.

For the hundredth time that afternoon he looked from one girl’s face to the other, smiling at him from the crystal cubes, and chewed his lip unhappily. On his left, in the translucent block that had captured an immortal moment when dark Marta Mayhew smiled, the three-dimensional picture looked out at him with a flash of violet eyes. Dr. Marta Mayhew of Chemistry House, ivory whiteness and satin blackness. Not at all the sort of picture the mind conjures up of a leading chemist in Science City which houses the greatest scientists in the world.

Bill Cory wrinkled his forehead and looked at the other girl. Sallie Carlisle dimpled at him out of the crystal, as real as life itself to the last flying tendril of fair curls that seemed to float on a breeze frozen eternally into glass. Bill reached out to turn the cube a little, bringing the delicate line of her profile into view, and it was as if time stood still in the crystalline deeps and pretty Salle in the breathing flesh paused for an eternal moment with her profile turned away.

After a long moment Bill Cory sighed and picked up his pen. After the “darling” of the letter he wrote firmly, “Sallie.”

“Dr. Cory,” hesitated a voice at the door. Bill looked up, frowning. Miss Brown blinked at him nervously behind her glasses. “Dr. Ashley’s—”

“Don’t announce me, Brownie,” interrupted a languid voice behind her. “I want to catch him loafing. Ah, Bill, writing love letters? May I come in?”

“Could I stop you?” Bill’s grin erased the frown from his forehead. The tall and tousled young man in the doorway was Charles Ashley, head of Telepathy House, and though their acquaintance had long been on terms of good-natured insult, behind it lay Bill’s deep recognition of a quality of genius in Ashley that few men ever attain. No one could have risen to the leadership of Telepathy House whose mind did not encompass many more levels of infinite understanding than the ordinary mind even recognizes.

“I’ve worked myself into a stupor,” announced the head of Telepathy House, yawning. “Come on up to the Gardens for a swim, huh?”

“Can’t.” Bill laid down his pen. “I’ve got to see the pups—”

“Damn the pups! You think Science City quivers every time those little mutts yap! Let Miss Brown look after ‘em. She knows more than you do about genetics, anyhow. Some clay the Council’s going to find it out and you’ll go back to working for a living.”

“Shut up,” requested Bill with a grin. “How are the pups, Miss Brown?”

“Perfectly normal, doctor. I just gave them their three o’clock feeding and they’re asleep now.”

“Do they seem happy?” inquired Ashley solicitously.

“That’s right, scoff,” sighed Bill. “Those pups and I will go ringing down the corridors of time, you mark my words.”

 

Ashley nodded, half seriously. He knew it might well be true. The pups were the living proof of Bill’s success in prenatal sex determination—six litters of squirming maleness with no female among them. They represented the fruit of long, painstaking experiments in the X-ray bombardment of chromosomes to separate and identify the genes carrying the factors of sex determination, of countless failures and immeasurable patience. If the pups grew into normal dogs—well, it would be one long, sure stride nearer the day when, through Bill’s own handiwork, the world would be perfectly balanced between male and female in exact proportion to the changing need.

Miss Brown vanished with a shy, self-effacing smile. As the door closed behind her, Ashley, who had been regarding the two photograph cubes on Bill’s desk with a lifted eyebrow, arranged his long length on the couch against the wall and was heard to murmur:

“Eenie-meenie-minie-mo. Which is it going to be, Wil-yum?”

They were on terms too intimate for Bill to misunderstand, or pretend to.

“I don’t know,” he admitted miserably, glancing down in some hesitation at the letter beginning, “My darling Sallie—”

Ashley yawned again and fumbled for a cigarette. “You know,” he murmured comfortably, “it’s interesting to speculate on your possible futures. With Marta or Sallie, I mean. Maybe some day somebody will find a way to look ahead down the branching paths of the future and deliberately select the turning points that will carry him toward the goal he chooses. Now if you could know beforehand where life with Sallie would lead, or life with Marta, you might alter the whole course of human history. That is, if you’re half as important as you think you are.”

“Huh-uh,” grunted Bill. “If you predicate a fixed future, then it’s fixed already, isn’t it? And you’d have no real choice.”

Ashley scratched a match deliberately and set his cigarette aglow before he said: “I think of the future as an infinite reservoir of an infinite number of futures, each of them fixed, yet maleable as clay. Do you see what I mean? At every point along our way we confront crossroads at which we make choices among the many possible things we may do the next moment. Each crossroad leads to a different future, all of them possible, all of them fixed, waiting for our choice to give them reality. Perhaps there’s a—call it a Plane of Probability—where all these possible results of our possible choices exist simultaneously. Blueprints of things to come. When the physical time of matter catches up with, and fills in, any one particular plan, it becomes fixed in the present.

“But before time has caught up with it, while our choice at the crossroads is still unmade, an infinite number of possible futures must exist as it were in suspension, waiting for us in some unimaginable, dimensionless infinity. Can you imagine what it would be like to open a window upon that Probability Plane, look out into the infinities of the future, trace the consequences of future actions before we make them? We could mold the destiny of mankind! We could do what the gods must do, Bill! We’d be greater than gods! We could look into the Cosmic Mind—the very brain that planned us—and of our own will choose among those plans!”

“Wake up, Ash,” said Bill softly.

“You think I’m dreaming? It’s not a new idea, really. The old philosopher, Berkeley, had a glimpse of it when he taught his theories of subjective idealism, that we’re aware of the cosmos only through a greater awareness all around us, an infinite mind— “Listen, Bill. If you vision these. . . these blueprints of possible futures, you’ve got to picture countless generations, finite as ourselves, existing simultaneously and completely in all the circumstances of their entire lives—yet all of them still unborn, still even uncertain of birth if the course of the present is diverted from their particular path. To themselves, they must seem as real as we to each other.

“Somewhere on the Plane of Probability, Bill, there may be two diverging lines of your descendants, unborn generations whose very existence hinges on your choice here at the crossroads. Projections of yourself, really, their lives and deaths trembling in the balance. Think well before you choose!”

Bill grinned. “Suppose you go back to the Slum and dope out a way for me to look into the Cosmic Plan,” he suggested.

Ashley shook his head.

“Wish I could. Boy, would you eat that word ‘Slum’ then! Telepathy House wouldn’t be the orphan child around the City any longer if I could really open a window onto the Probability Plane. But I wouldn’t bother with you and your pint-sized problems. I’d look ahead into the future of the City. It’s the heart of the world, now. Some day it may rule the world. And we’re biased, you know. We can’t help being. With all the sciences housed here under one citywide roof, wielding powers that kings never dreamed of— No, it may go to our heads. We may overbalance into . . . into. . . well, I’d like to look ahead and prevent it. And if this be treason—” He shrugged and got up. “Sure you won’t join me?”

“Go on—get out. I’m a busy man.”

“So I see.” Ashley twitched an eyebrow at the two crystal cubes. “Maybe it’s good you can’t look ahead. The responsibility of choosing might be heavier than you could bear. After all, we aren’t gods and it must be dangerous to usurp a god’s prerogative. Well, see you later.”

 

Bill leaned in the doorway watching the lounging figure down the hall toward the landing platform where crystal cars waited to go flashing along the great tubes which artery Science City. Beyond, at the platform’s edge, the great central plaza of the City dropped away in a breath-taking void a hundred stories deep. He stood looking out blind-eyed, wondering if Sallie or Marta would walk this hail in years to come.

Life would be more truly companionship with Marta, perhaps. But did a family need two scientists? A man wanted relaxation at home, and who could make life gayer than pretty Sallie with her genius for entertainment, her bubbling laughter? Yes, let it be Sallie. If there were indeed a Probability Plane where other possible futures hung suspended, halfway between waking and oblivion, let them wink out into nothingness.

He shut the door with a little slam to wake himself out of the dream, greeting the crystal-shrined girl on his desk with a smile. She was so real—the breeze blowing those curls was a breeze in motion. The lashes should flutter against the soft fullness of her lids— Bill squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head to clear it. There was something wrong—the crystal was clouding— A ringing in his ears grew louder in company with that curious blurring of vision. From infinitely far away, yet strangely in his own ears, a tiny voice came crying. A child’s voice calling, “Daddy. . . - daddy!”

A girl’s voice, coming nearer, “Father—” A woman’s voice saying over and over in a smooth, sweet monotone, “Dr. Cory. . . . Dr. William Cory—”

Upon the darkness behind his closed lids a streaked and shifting light moved blurrily. He thought he saw towers in the sun, forests, robed people walking leisurely—and it all seemed to rush away from his closed eyes so bewilderingly—he lifted his lids to stare at— To stare at the cube where Sallie smiled. Only this was not Sallie.

He gaped with the blankness of a man confronting impossibilities. It was not wholly Sallie now, but there was a look of Sallie upon the lovely, sun-touched features in the cube. All of her sweetness and softness, but with it—something more. Something familiar. What upon this living, lovely face, with its level brown eyes and courageous mouth, reminded Bill of—himself?

His hands began to shake a little. He thrust them into his pockets and sat down without once taking his eyes from the living stare in the cube. There was amazement in that other stare, too, and a halfincredulous delight that brightened as he gazed.

Then the sweet curved lips moved—lips with the softness of Sallie’s closing on the firm, strong line of Bill’s. They said distinctly, in a sound that might have come from the cube itself or from somewhere deep within his own brain: “Dr. Cory . . . Dr. Cory, do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he heard himself saying hoarsely, like a man talking in a dream. “But—”

The face that was Sallie’s and his blended blazed into joyful recognition, dimples denting the smooth cheeks with delicious mirth. “Oh, thank Heaven it is you! I’ve reached through at last. I’ve tried so hard, so long—”

“But who . . . what—” Bill choked a little on his own amazement and fell silent, marveling at the strange warm tenderness that was flooding up in him as he watched this familiar face he had never seen before. A tenderness more melting and protective and passionately selfless than he had ever imagined a man could feel. Dizzy with complete bewilderment, too confused to wonder if he dreamed, he tried again. “Who are you? What are you doing here? How did—”

“But I’m not there—not really.” The sweet face smiled again, and Bill’s heart swelled until his throat almost closed with a warmth of pride and tenderness he was too dizzy to analyze now. “I’m here— here at home in Eden, talking to you across the millennium! Look—”

 

Somehow, until then he had not seen beyond her. Sallie’s face had smiled out of a mist of tulle, beyond which the cube had been crystal-clear. But behind the face which was no longer wholly Sally’s, a green hillside filled the cube. And, very strangely, it had no look of smallness. Though the cube’s dimensions confined it, here was no miniature scene he gazed upon. He looked through the cube as through a window, out into a forest glade where upon a bank of green myrtle at the foot of a white garden wall a little group of tanned men and women reclined in a circle with closed eyes, lying almost like corpses on the dark, glossy leaves. But there was no relaxation in them. Tensity more of the spirit than the body knit the group into a whole, focused somehow upon the woman in the circle’s center—this fair-haired woman who leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, chin in hand, staring brown-eyed and tensely into space—into Bill Cory’s eyes. Dimly he realized that his perception had expanded as he stared. Awareness now of a whole countryside beyond her, just over the garden wall, made this cube that had housed Sallie’s careless smile a window indeed, opening upon distance in space and time far outside his imagining.

He knew he was dreaming. He was sure of it, though the memory of what Ashley had been saying hovered uneasily in the back of his mind, too elusive now to be brought consciously into view. But in this impossible dream he clenched his hands hard in his pockets, taking a firm hold upon reality.

“Just who are you, and what do you want? And how did you—”

She chose to answer the last question first, breaking into it as if she could read his thoughts as she knelt staring on the myrtle leaves.

“I speak to you along an unbroken cord between us—father. Thousands of times removed, but—father. A cord that runs back through the lives that have parted us, yet which unite us. With the help of these people around me, their full mental strength supplementing mine, we’ve established contact at last, after so many failures, so much groping in mysteries which even I understand only partly, though my family for generations has been trained in the secrets of heredity and telepathy.”

“But why—”

“Isn’t the fact of achievement an end in itself? Success in establishing a two-way contact with the past, in talking to one’s own ancestors—do I need more reason for attempting that than the pure joy of achieving it? You wonder why you were chosen. Is that it? Because you are the last man in a direct line of males to be born into my family before the blessed accident that saved the world from itself.

“Don’t look so bewildered!” Laughter bubbled from the cube-or was it a sound in his own brain? “You aren’t dreaming! Is it so incredible that along the unbroken cord of memories which links your mind to mine the current might run backward against the time flow?”

“But who are you? Your face—it’s like—”

“My face is the face of the daughter that Sallie Cory bore you, thousands of years ago. That resemblance is a miracle and a mystery beyond all understanding—the mystery of heredity which is a stranger thing than the fact of our communication. We have wondered among ourselves if immortality itself—but no, I’ll have mercy on you!”

This bewilderingly beloved face that had darkened with mystical brooding, flashed suddenly alive again with swift laughter, and hearing it, catching a lift of the brows that was his and a quirk of the soft lips that was Sallie’s own, Bill made no effort to stem the tide of warm affection rising higher and higher in him. It was himself looking out of this cube through Sallie’s brown eyes—himself exultant in achievement for the simple sake of achieving. She had called him father. Was this a father’s love, selfless, unfathomable, for a lovely and beloved daughter?

“Don’t wonder any more,” laughed the voice in his ears. “Look— here’s the past that lies between us. I want you to understand what parts your world from mine.”

Softly the myrtle glade and the lovely smiling face that blended Sallie and Bill melted into the depths of a cloud forming inside the three dimensions of the cube. For a moment—nothing. Then motion was lifting behind the mist, shouldering the veils aside. Three-dimensional space seemed to open up all around him— He saw a wedding procession coming down a church aisle toward him, Sallie smiling mistily through a cloud of silver tulle. And he knew at the sight of her that though it was only chance which had chosen her instead of dark Marta Mayhew, he could come to love Sallie Carlisle Cory with an intensity almost frightening.

He saw time go by with a swiftness like thought itself, events telescoping together with no sense of confusion, moving like memories through his mind, clear, yet condensed into split seconds. He was watching his own future, seeing a life that revolved around Sallie as the center of existence. He saw her flashing in and out of his laboratory as he worked, and whenever she entered, the whole room seemed to light up; whenever she left, he could scarcely work for the longing to follow.

He saw their first quarrel. Sallie, spinning in a shimmer of bright glass-silk as soft as gossamer, dimpled at the self which in this waking dream was more vividly Bill Cory than the Bill who watched. “See, darling, aren’t I heavenly?” And he heard himself answering, “Edible, darling! But isn’t that stuff expensive?”

Sallie’s laughter was light. “Only fifteen hundred credits. That’s dirt-cheap for a Skiparelle model.”

He gasped. “Why Sallie, that’s more than we’re allowed for living expenses! I can’t—”

“Oh, daddy’ll pay for it if you’re going to be stingy. I only wanted—”

“I’ll buy my wife’s clothes.” Bill was grim. “But I can’t afford Paris fashions, darling.”

Sallie’s pretty underlip pouted alarmingly. Tears sparkled in the soft brown eyes she lifted to his, and his heart melted almost painfully in one hopeless rush.

“Don’t cry, sweetheart! You can keep it, just this once. But we’ll have to make it up next month. Never again, Sallie, understand?”

Her nod was bright and oblivious as a child’s.

But they didn’t make it up. Sallie loved partying, and Bill loved Sallie, and nowadays there was much more hilarity than work going on behind the door in Biology House marked “Dr. William Vincent Cory.” The television’s panels were tuned to orchestras playing strong rhythm now, not to lectures and laboratory demonstrations as of old.

No man can do two jobs well. The work on sex determination began to strike snags in the path that had seemed almost clear to success, and Bill had so little time any more to smooth them out. Always Sallie was in the back of his mind, sweet, smiling, adorable.

Sallie wanted the baby to be born in her father’s home. It was a lovely place, white-walled on low green hills above the Pacific. Sallie loved it. Even when little Sue was big enough to travel she hated to think of leaving. And the climate was so wonderful for the baby there— Anyhow, by then the Council had begun to frown over Bill Cory’s work. After all, perhaps he wasn’t really cut out to be a scientist— Sallie’s happiness was more important than any man’s job, and Sallie could never be really happy in Science City.

The second baby was a girl, too. There were a lot of girls being born nowadays. The telenews broadcasters joked about it. A good sign, they said. When a preponderance of boys was born, it had always meant war. Girls should bring peace and plenty for the new generation.

Peace and plenty—that was what mattered most to Bill and Sallie Cory now. That and their two exquisite daughters and their home on the green Pacific hills. Young Susan was growing up into a girlhood so enchanting that Bill suffused with pride and tenderness every time he thought of her. She had Sallie’s beauty and blondeness, but there was a resolution in her that had been Bill’s once, long ago. He liked to think of her, in daydreams, carrying on the work that he would never finish now.

Time ran on, years telescoping pleasantly into uneventful years. Presently the Cory girls were growing up. . . were married. . . were mothers. The grandchildren were girls, too. When Grandfather Cory joined his wife in the little graveyard on the sea-turned hill beyond the house, the Cory name died with him, though there was in his daughter’s level eyes and in her daughter’s look of serene resolution something more intrinsically Bill Cory than his name. The name might die, but something of the man who had borne it lived on in his descendants.

 

Girls continued to outnumber boys in the birth records as the generations passed. It was happening all over the world, for no reason that anyone could understand. It didn’t matter much, really. Women in public offices were proving very efficient; certainly they governed more peacefully than men. The first woman president won her office on a platform that promised no war so long as a woman dwelt in the White House.

Of course, some things suffered under the matriarchy. Women as a sex are not scientists, not inventors, not mechanics or engineers or architects. There were men enough to keep these essentially masculine arts alive—that is, as much of them as the new world needed. There were many changes. Science City, for instance. Important, of course, but not to the extent of draining the country dry to maintain it. Life went on very nicely without too much machinery.

The tendency was away from centralized living in these new days. Cities spread out instead of up. Skyscrapers were hopelessly old-fashioned. Now parklands and gardens stretched between low-roofed houses where the children played all day. And war was a barbarous memory from those nightmare years when men still ruled the world.

Old Dr. Phillips, head of the dwindling and outmoded Science City, provoked President Wiliston into a really inspiring fury when he criticized the modem tendency toward a non-mechanized rural civilization. It happened on the telenews, so that half the world heard it.

“But Madam President,” he said, “don’t you realize where we’re heading? The world’s going backward! It’s no longer worthwhile for our best minds to attempt bettering living conditions. We’re throwing genius away! Do you realize that your cabinet yesterday flatly rejected the brilliant work of one of our most promising young men?”

“I do!” Alice Wiliston’s voice rang with sudden violence over half the world. “That ‘brilliant work,’ as you call it, was a device that might have led to war! Do you think we want that? Remember the promise that the first woman president made the world, Dr. Phillips! So long as we sit in the White House there will be no need for war!”

And Elizabeth of England nodded in London; Julianna VII smiled into her Amsterdam telenews screen. While women ruled, war was outlawed. Peace and ease, and plenty would dominate civilization, leisure for cultivation of the arts, humankind coming into its own at last, after so many ages of pain and blood and heartbreak.

Years telescoped into centuries of peace and plenty in a garden world. Science had turned its genius to the stabilization of the climate so that nowhere was shelter necessary from cold or storms; food was freely abundant for all. The Garden that Adam and Eve forfeited in the world’s beginning had returned again to their remotest descendants, and the whole earth was Eden.

And in this world that no longer demanded the slightest physical effort, mankind was turning to the cultivation of the mind. In these white, low-roofed houses set among garden parks, men and women increasingly adventured into the realms beyond the flesh, exploring the mysteries of the mind.

Bill Cory, leaning forward in his chair, had lost all identity with himself. He was simply a consciousness watching time unfold before him. The gravestone that bore his name on the California hillside had long since sunk into the sod, but if there is immortality at all, Bill Cory watched himself move forward through the centuries, down the long, expanding line of his descendants. Now and again, startlingly, his own face looked briefly at him from some faraway child of his remote grandchildren. His face, and Sallie’s.

He saw pretty Sue come and go like reflections in a mirror. Not always Sue unmistakably and completely—sometimes only her brown eyes lighted the face of a many-times-great-granddaughter; sometimes the lift of her smile or the tilt of her pretty nose alone was familiar to him in a strange face. But sometimes Sue herself, perfect to the last detail, moved through the remote future. And every time he saw those familiar features, his heart contracted with an ache of tenderness for the daughter he yet might never have.

It was for these beloved Susans that he was becoming uneasy as he watched time go by in this lazy paradise world. People were slowing mentally and physically. What need any more for haste or trouble? Why worry because certain unimportant knowledge was being lost as time went on? The weather machines, the food machines were eternal; what else really mattered? Let the birth rate decline, let the dwindling race of the inventive and the ambitious fade like the anachronism it was. The body had taken mankind as far as it could; the mind was the vehicle for the future. In the vast reaches of infinity were fields aplenty for the adventurous spirit. Or one could simply drowse the days away— Clouds thickened softly across the dreamy vistas of Eden. Bill Cory leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes with both hands. The hands were shaking, and he stared at them a little stupidly, still half lost in the wonder of what he had seen, in the strange welter of emotions that still warred in him—the memory of Sallie and his strong love for her, the memory of Sue’s sweetness, the memory of pride in them both. And in the queer feeling that it had been himself in those many daughters of his through the ages, striving so hard for world peace to the ultimate end that mankind might achieve—ruin.

For it was wrong—it was bad. The whole world. The race of man was too splendid, too capable of working miracles, to end on a myrtle bank dreaming about abstractions. He had just seen a decadent, indolent, civilization going down the last incline into oblivion as a result—yes, as a direct result—of his own action. He’d seen himself sinking into a fat, idle old age, without honor of achievement.

Suddenly and desperately he hoped that Ashley had been right— that this was not the inevitable and changeless future. If he tore up the letter lying on his desk now, if he never married Sallie, would not his work be finished successfully some day, and the catastrophe of unbalanced births avoided? Or could a man change his ordained future?

Almost fearfully he reached for the letter lying beside that clouded cube in which the years had mirrored themselves. Would he be able to take the letter up and rip it across—like this? The sound of tearing paper reassured him. So far, at least, he was still a free agent.

And knowing that, suddenly he was sorry. Not to marry Sallie, with her bubbling laugh. Never to see young Sue growing into beauty and courage and sweetness. Old age without achievement, had he said to himself a moment ago? Sue herself was achievement enough for any man. Sue and those other Susans down the long line of his descendants, incarnating again and again all that was finest in him, eternal as life itself through millenniums.

He did not want to meet again the brown eyes of this latest Susan who had come to him in the depths of the cube. While he looked, his reason was lost in his love for her, and not even against reason could he believe the world which had produced her to be anything but perfect, simply because this beloved daughter moved and breathed in it.

But the letter was torn. He would never marry Sallie if he could help himself. The cost was too high, even for such a reward as Sue. And an almost tremulous awe broke over him in a sudden tide as he realized what he was doing. This was what Ashley had dreamed of— opening a window into the Plane of Probability and learning enough to force the Cosmic Mind out of its course. Changing the shape of his own future and that of all mankind. Greater than gods—but he was no god. And Ashley had warned him that it might be dangerous to usurp a god’s prerogative. Suddenly he was afraid.

He looked away from that cube which held his future, and across from it on his desk the violet eyes of Marta Mayhew caught his, fixed in their changeless smile. She was a girl, he thought, he remembered from half a lifetime ago, so much had happened since he glanced last into her face. Dark and lovely she was, her eyes meeting his almost as if there were vision behind their deep, long stare. Almost as if—

Light flared out in one white, blinding sheet that blotted out the cube and the violet-eyed face and the room around him. Involuntarily Bill clapped his hands to his eyes, seeing behind the darkness of his lids a dazzle of blurring colors. It had happened too quickly for wonder—he was not even thinking as he opened his eyes and looked into the cube where Marta’s gaze had met him a moment before.

And then a great tide of awe and wonder came washing up into his consciousness, and he knew that Ashley had been right. There was an alternative future. There comes a point beyond which bewilderment and shock no longer affect the human brain, and Bill was outside wondering now, or groping for logical explanations. He only knew that he stood here staring into the cube from which Marta’s eyes had smiled at him so short an instant ago— They were still Marta’s eyes, deep-colored in a boy face almost Bill’s own, feature for feature, under a cap of blue steel. Somehow that other future had come to him, too. He was aware of a sudden urgent wonder why they had come so nearly together, though neither could be conscious of the other— But things were moving in the depths of the cube.

Behind the boy’s face, three-dimensional perspective had started vividly back from the crystal surfaces, as if the cube were a wide window flung suddenly open upon a new world. In that world, a place of glass and shining chromium, faces crowded as if indeed at an open window, peering into his room. Steel-helmed faces with staring eyes. And foremost among them, leaning almost through the opened window into his own past, the steel-capped boy whose features were Bill’s looked eagerly out, the sound of quickened breath through his lips a soft, clear sound in the room. They were Bill’s lips, Bill’s features— but Marta’s gentle courage had somehow grown masculine in the lines of the boy’s face, and her eyes met Bill’s in his.

In the instant before those parted lips spoke, Bill knew him, and his throat closed on an unuttered cry of recognition—recognition of this face he had never seen before, yet could not mistake. The deep welling of love and pride in his heart would have told him the boy’s identity, he thought, had he not known at sight who he was—would be—might one day be— He heard his own voice saying doubtfully, “Son—?”

But if the boy heard he must not have understood. He was handicapped by no such emotion as stirred Bill. His clipped, metallic voice spoke as clearly as if indeed through an opened window:

“Greetings from the United World, William Vincent Cory! Greetings from the Fifteenth Leader in the Fifth New Century, A. C.”

Behind the disciplined, stern-featured young face others crowded, men with steel-hard features under steel caps. As the boy’s voice paused, a dozen right arms slanted high, a dozen open palms turned forward in a salute that was old when Caesar took it in ancient Rome. A dozen voices rolled out in clipped accents, “Greetings, William Vincent Cory!”

Bill’s bewildered stammer was incoherent, and the boy’s face relaxed a little into a smile. He said: “We must explain, of course. For generations our scientists have been groping in the past, Dr. Cory. This is our first successful two-way contact, and for its demonstration to our Council, connection with you was selected as the most appropriate and fitting contact possible. Because your name is holy among Us; we know all there is to know of your life and work, but we have wished to look upon your face and speak to you of our gratitude for molding mankind into the patterns of the United World.

“As a matter of record, I have been instructed to ask first at what point we have intersected the past. What date is it in your calendar?”

“Why, it’s July 7, 2240,” Bill heard his own voice stammer a little as he answered, and he was conscious of a broad and rather foolish grin overspreading his face. He couldn’t help it. This was his boy—the child who wouldn’t be born for years yet, who might, really, never be born. Yet he knew him, and he couldn’t help smiling with pride, and warm, delighted amusement. So stern-faced, so conscious of his own responsibility! Marta’s son and his—only of course it couldn’t be, exactly. This scene he looked into must be far ahead in time— “Twenty-two forty!” exclaimed the boy who was not his son.

“Why, the Great Work isn’t even finished yet then! We’re earlier than we knew!”

“Who are you, son?” Bill couldn’t keep the question back any longer.

“I’m John Williams Cory IV, sir,” said the boy proudly. “Your direct descendant through the Williams line, and—First in the Candidates Class.” He said it proudly, a look of almost worshiping awe lighting his resolute young face. “That means, of course, that I shall be the Sixteenth Leader when the great Dunn retires, and the sixth Cory—the sixth, sir!—to be called to that highest of all human stations, the Leadership!” The violet eyes so incongruous in that disciplined young face blazed with almost fanatic exaltation.

Behind him, a heavy-faced man moved forward, lifting the Roman salute, smiling wintrily beneath his steel helmet.

“I am Dunn, sir,” he said in a voice as heavy as his features. “We’ve let Candidate Cory contact you because of the relationship, but it’s my turn now to extend greetings from the System you made possible. I want to show it to you, but first let me thank you for founding the greatest family the United World has ever known. No other name has appeared more than twice on the great role of Leaders, but we have had five Corys—and the finest of them all is yet to come!”

Bill saw a wave of clear red mount his boy’s proud, exalted face, and his own heart quickened with love and pride. For this was his son, by whatever name he went here. The memory of his lovely daughter had been drowned out momentarily in the deep uprushing of pride in this tall, blue-eyed boy with his disciplined face and his look of leashed eagerness. There was drive and strength and power of will in that young face now.

He scarcely heard Dunn’s heavy voice from the room beyond the cube, so eagerly was he scanning the face of this son he yet might never have, learning almost hungrily the already familiar features, at once hard and eager and exultant. That mouth was his, tight and straight, and the cheeks that creased with deep hollows when he smiled, but the violet eyes were his mother’s eyes, and the gentle inflexibility of Marta’s courage at once strengthened and softened the features that were Bill’s own. The best of them both was here, shining now with something more than either had ever known—an almost fanatic devotion to some stem purpose as exalting as worship, as inflexible as duty— “Your own future, sir,” Dunn was saying. “But our past, of course.

Would you like to see it, Dr. Cory, so that you may understand just how directly we owe to you all that our world is today?”

“Yes—v-very much.” Bill grinned at his own stammer, suddenly light-hearted and incredulous. All this was a dream. He knew that, of course. Why, the very coincidences in it proved that. Or—were they coincidences? Desperately he tried to clarify the thought taking form in his own mind, a terrifyingly vast thought, terrifyingly without explanation. And yet it must be a dream— If it were real, then there was more than chance here. It could be no accident that these two children of his, groping blindly in the dark for contact with him, had succeeded at so nearly the same moment. There would be reason behind it, reason too vast for comprehension. He parted his lips to speak, but Dunn was already speaking.

“Look then, William Vincent Cory! Watch your own greatness unfolding in the years that lie ahead.”

Hazily the scene in the cube blurred. The beloved, blue-eyed face of the boy he might never have, faded as a dream fades—a dream fading in a dream, he thought dimly—

This time it was Marta coming down the church aisle toward him, looking like a violet-eyed madonna coifed and veiled in white lace. He knew that he did not love her, now. His heart was still sore with the memory of Sallie. But love would come; with a woman like this it could not but come. There was tenderness and humor and passion on that raptly lifted face, and a strength that would call out the strength in him, not a weakness such as dimpled in Sallie’s face to evoke an underlying weakness in himself. For weakness was in him. He knew it. It would depend upon the woman who shared his life which quality overcame the other.

Life would be good with Marta. He saw it unfolding before him in a long succession of days, work and play and companionship that brought out the best in both. And the memory of the strange vision in which he thought he loved Sallie faded. This was the woman he loved. Her courage and humor, her violet eyes bright with pride of him— Life went by—clear, condensed, swift. He saw his own work moving steadily toward success, Marta’s eager encouragement tiding him over the low ebbs when difficulties threatened. She was so full of pride in her brilliant young husband that her enthusiasm almost ran away with her. It was she who insisted upon making the discovery public.

“I want to flaunt you before the world!” she urged. “Let’s report to the Council now, darling. Aw, please, Bill!”

“We’re not ready yet,” he protested feebly. “Let’s wait—”

“What for? Look.” She shook a record sheet under his nose. “A hundred per cent success in the last dozen experiments! What more do you want? It’s time to make an official report—announce what you’re doing to the world! You’ve been all the way from fruit flies to monkeys. You’ll have to make a report to the Council anyhow before you can take the next step. And remember, darling, when you come to that, I’m first in line as a candidate.”

He seized her shoulders in a heavy grip, frowning down into the eagerness of her lifted face. “There’ll be no guinea pigs in this family! When Junior Cory comes into the world he—or she—will do it without benefit of X-rays. Understand?”

“But darling, I thought the whole idea was to give parents their choice of boys or girls in the family.”

“The thing’s not perfected yet to the point where I’d want to risk my own wife. And anyhow . . . anyhow, I’ve got a funny notion I’d rather just take what comes. Don’t know why, exactly, but—”

“Bill, I do believe you’re superstitious! Well, we’ll fight that out later. But right now, you’re going to make a full report of your success to the Council, and I’m going to be the proudest wife in the City. And that’s final!”

So the report was made public. It created a tremendous furor; the world clamored for the magical stuff that would put the molding of the future into their hands. Bill Cory blushed and grinned for a delighted public in the telenews screens, promising the great gift soon, and Marta glowed with vicarious pride.

By the time he had made his first experiment with a human subject, the puppies which were the result of his first successful mammalian experiment were beginning to worry him a little. Miss Brown was the first to notice it. She came in from the kennels one day with a frown behind her steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Dr. Cory, has someone been training those dogs?”

“Training them?” Bill looked up, puzzled. “Of course not. Why?”

“Well, they’ve got the makings of the finest trained dogs on Earth. Either the whole lot of them is exceptionally intelligent or . . . or something. They just fall over each other obeying every command you can make clear to them.”

Bill straightened from his microscope. “Um-m-m - . . funny. Usually one or two dogs in a litter are more intelligent and obedient than the rest. But to have every one in six litters a canine genius is something pretty queer. What do you make of it?”

“I wouldn’t call it genius, exactly. As I say, I’m not sure if it’s unusual intelligence or. . . well, maybe a strong strain of obedience, or lack of initiative, or. . . it’s too soon to say. But they’re not normal dogs, Dr. Cory.”

 

It was too soon to say. Tests simply showed the pups to be extraordinarily amenable to training, but what quality in them made this so was difficult to determine. Bill was not sure just what it implied, but an ‘uneasiness in him woke and would not be quieted.

The first “X-ray” babies began to be born. Without exception they were fine, strong, healthy infants, and without exception of the predetermined sex. The Council was delighted; the parents were delighted; everyone was delighted except Bill. The memory of those oddly obedient pups haunted him— Within three years the Cory System was available to the public.

The experimental babies had made such an excellent showing that, in the end, Bill gave in to the insistent world, though something in the recesses of his mind urged delay. Yet he couldn’t explain it. The babies were all healthy, normal, intelligent children. Unusually amenable to authority, yes, but that was an asset, not a liability.

Presently all over the world the first crops of Cory System babies began to appear, and gradually Bill’s misgivings faded. By then Bill Junior had arrived to take his mind off other people’s children but even now he was obscurely glad that little Bill was a boy on his own initiative, not because his parents had forced masculinity upon him. There was no rhyme or reason to Bill’s queer obsession that his own child should not be a product of the X-ray system, but he had been firm about it.

And in later years he had reason to be glad. Bill Jr. grew up fast. He had Marta’s violet eyes and his father’s darkly blond hair, and a laughing resolution all his own. He was going to be an architect, and neither his mother’s shocked protest at this treason to the family profession, nor Bill’s not wholly concealed disappointment could swerve him. But he was a good lad. Between school terms he and his father had entirely marvelous vacations together, and for Bill the world revolved about this beloved, talented, headstrong youngster whose presence upon Earth seemed reason enough for Bill’s whole existence.

He was glad, even, that the boy was stubborn. For there could be no question now about a weakness in the children of the Cory System births. In all ways but one they were quite normal, it was true, but initiative seemed to have been left out of them. It was as if the act of predetermining their sex had robbed them of all ability to make any decisions of their own. Excellent followers they were—but no leaders sprang up among them.

And it was dangerous to fill with unquestioning followers of the strongest man a world in which General George Hamilton controlled the United States. He was in his fourth term as president as the first great group of Cory System children came to maturity. Fiercely and sincerely he believed in the subjugation of the many to the State, and this new generation found in him an almost divinely inspired leader.

General George dreamed of a United World in which all races lived in blind obedience and willing sacrifice for the common good. And he was a man to make his dreams come true. Of course, he admitted, there would be opposition at first. There might be bloody wars, but in his magnificent dreams he believed sincerely that no price could be too high, that the end justified any means necessary to achieve it. And it seemed like the cooperation of Heaven itself to find almost an entire generation coming into adulthood ready to accept his leadership implicitly.

He understood why. It was no secret now what effect the Cory System had upon the children it produced. They would follow the strongest leader with blind faith. But upon this one generation of followers General George knew he could build a future that would live after him in the magnificent fulfillment of his most magnificent dreams. For a war lord needs a nation of soldiers, a great crop of boy babies to grow into armies, and surprisingly few saw the real motive behind General George’s constant cry for boys, boys, boys—huge families of them. Fathers of many sons were feted and rewarded. Everybody knew there was the certainty of war behind this constant appeal for families of sons, but comparatively few realized that since the best way to be sure of boys was the use of the Cory System, the whole new generation would be blind followers of the strongest leader, just as their fathers were. Perhaps the Cory System might have died of its own great weakness, its one flaw, had not General George so purposefully demanded sons of his followers.

 

General George died before the first great war was over. His last words, gasped in the bursting tumult of a bomb raid over Washington were, “Carry on—unite the world!” And his vice-president and second in command, Phillip Spaulcling, was ready to snatch up the falling torch and light the world to union.

Half the United States lay in smoking ruins before the Great War ended. But General George had builded well upon that most enduring of all foundations—the faith of men. “Be fruitful and multiply,” was a command his followers had obeyed implicitly, and Spaulding had mighty resources of human brawn and human obedience to draw upon.

The great general had died gladly for his dream, and he had not died in vain. Half the world was united under his starry banners within a decade after his death; the United World of his vision came into being less than fifty years later.

With peace and blind faith and prosperity, Science City indeed came into its own. And because a taste of power had made the Leaders hungry, the eyes of the City turned upward toward starry space. During the command of the Fourth Leader after the immortal General George, the first successful space voyage was achieved. The first living man stood knee-deep in the dead pumice dust of the moon and a mighty forward stride for mankind was recorded.

It was only a step. Mars came next, three generations later. After a brief and bloody war, its decadent inhabitants surrendered and the Seventh Leader began to have giddily intoxicating dreams of a United Solar System— Time telescoped by. Generation melted into generation in changing tides over a world population that seemed unaltering in its by now age-old uniforms of George Blue. And in a sense they were unaltering. Mankind was fixed in a mold—a good enough mold for the military life of the U. W.—the United World. The Cory System had long ago become compulsory, and men and women were produced exactly in the ratio that the Leaders decreed. But it was significant that the Leader class came into the world in the old haphazard fashion of the days before the legendary Dr. Cory’s discovery.

The name of Cory was a proud one. It had long been a tradition in that famous family that the founder’s great System should not be used among themselves. They were high among the Leader class. Several of the Leaders had borne the surname of Cory, though the office of course was not hereditary, but passed after rigid training and strict examination to the most eligible of the Candidates Class when an old Leader passed his prime.

And among the mighty Corys, family resemblance was strong. Generations saw the inevitable dilution of the original strain, but stubbornly through the years the Cory features came and went. Sometimes only the darkly blond hair of the first great Bill, sometimes the violet eyes which his pretty Marta had bequeathed her son, sometimes the very face of young Bill Jr. himself, that had roused an ache of pride and love in his father’s heart whenever he saw those beloved features.

The Cory eyes looked now upon two worlds, triumphantly regimented to the last tiny detail. Mankind was proving his supremacy over himself—over his weaknesses and his sentimental, selfish desires for personal happiness as opposed to the great common good. Few succumbed to such shameful yearnings, but when they did, every man was a spy against his neighbor, as stern as the Leader himself in crushing these threats to the U. W.’s strength. It should be the individual’s holiest and most mystically passionate dream to sacrifice his happiness for the Leader and the U. W., and the Leader and the United World lived for the sole purpose of seeing that he did.

Marvelous was the progress of mankind. The elements had long since been conquered; the atom had yielded up its incalculable power in the harness of the machines, space itself was a highway for the vehicles of the U. W.

Under the blue-black skies of Mars, mankind’s checkerboard cities patterned the hot red soil; under the soft gray clouds of Venus, those roofed and checkered cities spread from a common center through jungles steaming in more than tropic heat. Many-mooned Jupiter was drawing the covetous eyes of the Leaders in their sky-high cities of glass and steel.

And moving through these patterned cities upon three worlds, the followers of the Leader went about their ways, resolute, unfaltering, their faces set in one pattern of determination.

It was not a happy pattern. There was little laughter here; the only emotion upon the serious faces, aside from the shadow of that same exaltation that blazed in the Leader’s eyes, was a subtle furtiveness, a sidelong quality that by intuition seemed to distrust its neighbors. Bill recognized it. Every man’s duty was to sacrifice for the Cause not only his personal desires and happiness, but his personal honor as well; he must keep relentlessly alert for traitorous weakness in his friends, his associates, his own family.

Mistily the panorama of the centuries began to melt into itself, to fade, while behind it a blue-eyed face, helmed in blue steel, took form to smile straight into Bill’s eyes. A tense, expectant smile, supremely confident.

 

Bill sat back and breathed deeply, avoiding for a moment the proudly smiling face of his son. “I’m—there!” he was thinking. “That was me being born again and again, working with all my heart to crush out human happiness— But there was Sue, too, generations of her—yes, and of me—working just as sincerely toward an opposite goal, a world without war. Either way they’ve got me. If I don’t finish my work, the world unbalances toward matriarchy; if I do, mankind turns into a machine. It’s bad. Either way it’s bad—”

“The doctor is almost overwhelmed at the realization of his own greatness,” Dunn’s voice murmured from the window into the future. Bill recognized it for a sort of apology, and sat up with an effort to meet the pride-bright eyes of the boy who one day might be his son. There was nothing but happy expectancy of praise on the boy’s face, but Dunn must have read a little doubt in Bill’s, for he said heavily, as if to overwhelm that doubt:

“We build toward one common end, all of us—we have no thought for any smaller purpose than the conquest of the Solar System for the mighty race of man! And this great purpose is yours no less than ours, Dr. Cory.”

“Manpower is what counts, you know, sir.” Young Billy’s voice took up the tale as Dunn’s died. “We’ve got tremendous reserves, and we’re piling up still more. Lots of room yet on Mars to fill up, and Venus is almost untouched yet. And after that, we’ll breed men and women adapted to Jupiter’s gravity, perhaps . . . oh, there’ll be no end to our power, sir! We’ll go on and on— Who knows? There may come a day when we’re a United Universe!”

For an instant, hearing the young voice shake with eagerness, Bill doubted his own doubtfulness. The mighty race of man! And he was part of it, living in this far-off future no less than he lived now in the flesh, in the burning ardor of this iron-faced boy. For a moment he forgot to be amazed and incredulous that he stood in the Twenty-third Century and looked as if through a window into the Thirtieth, talking with the unborn descendant of his yet unconceived son. For this moment it was all accomplished reality, a very magnificent and blood-stirring present achieved directly through his own efforts.

“Father. . . father!” The voice was sweet and high in the core of his brain. And memory came back in an overwhelming rush that for an instant drowned out everything but a father’s awareness of special love for a favorite daughter.

“Yes, Susan . . . yes, dear.” He murmured it aloud, swinging around toward the cube that housed his other future. Sue leaned forward upon her knees among the myrtle leaves, her brown eyes wide and a little frightened upon his. There was a crease between her winged brows that dented Bill’s own forehead as he faced her. For a moment it was almost as if each of them looked into a mirror which reflected the features of the other, identical in nearly every detail. Then Sallie’s smile dimpled the cheeks of her far-descended daughter, and Sue laughed a small, uneasy laugh.

“What is it, father? Is something wrong?”

He opened his lips to speak—but what could he say? What could he possibly say to her, who did not even dream that her own time was anything but inevitable? How could he explain to a living, warmly breathing woman that she did not exist, might never exist?

He stared at her unhappily, groping for words he could not find. But before he spoke— “Dr. Cory, sir— Is anything wrong?” He turned back to Billy with a harried crease between his brows and then stared wildly from one face to the other. How could they help hearing one another? But obviously Billy, from his window into the present, saw simply the cube that held Sallie’s immortal smile, while Sue, from hers, looked upon Marta’s changeless face. It seemed to Bill that the boy and the girl had spoken in voices almost identical, using words nearly the same, though neither was aware of the other. How could they be? They could not even exist simultaneously in the same world. He might have one of these beloved children or the other; not both. Equally beloved children, between whom he must choose—and how could he choose?

“Father—” said Sue on a rising inflection of alarm. “There is something wrong. I. . . feel it in your mind— Oh, what is it, father?”

Bill sat speechless, staring from one face to the other of these mutually exclusive children. Here they stood, with their worlds behind them, looking anxiously at him with the same little crease between the brows of each. And he could not even speak to either without convincing the other he was a madman talking to empty air. He wanted insanely to laugh. It was a deadlock beyond all solution. Yet he must answer them—he must make his choice— As he sat there groping in vain for words, a curious awareness began to take shape in his mind. How strange it was that these two should have been the ones to reach him, out of all the generations behind each that had been searching the past. And why had they established contact at so nearly the same time, when they had all his life span to grope through, hunting him for such different reasons, in such different ways? There was more than accident here, if all this were not a dream— Billy and Sue—so similar despite the wide divergence of their words, a wider divergence than the mind can well grasp, for how can one measure the distance between mutually incompatible things? Billy who was all of Bill Cory that was strong and resolute and proud; Sue, who incarnated his gentler qualities, the tenderness, the deep desire for peace. They were such poles apart—why, they were the poles! The positive and negative qualities that, together, made up all that was best in Bill Cory. Even their worlds were like two halves of a whole; one all that was strong and ruthless, the other the epitome of gentle, abstract idealism. And both were bad, as all extremes must be.

And if he could understand the purpose behind the fact that these two poles of human destiny had reached back in their own pasts to find him at the same moment—if he could understand why the two halves of his soul, split into positive and negative entities, stood here clothed almost in his own flesh to torture him with indecision, perhaps— He could not choose between them, for there was no choice, but there was a deeper question here than the simple question of conduct. He groped for it blindly, wondering if the answer to everything might not lie in the answer to that question. For there was purpose here vaster than anything man has words for—something loomed behind it to shadowy heights that made his mind reel a little as he tried to understand.

He said inadequately to both his staring children: “But why . . . how did you. . . at this very moment out of all time—”

To Billy it was mere gibberish, but Sue must have understood the question in his mind, for after a moment, in a puzzled murmur, she said:

“I—don’t know, exactly. There is something here beyond the simple fact of success. I. . . I feel it— I can sense something behind my own actions that. . .that frightens me. Something guiding and controlling my own mind— Oh, father, father, I’m afraid!”

Every protective instinct in him leaped ahead of reason in Bill’s ‘instant, “Don’t be frightened, honey! I won’t let anything happen to you!”

“Dr. Cory!” Young Billy’s voice cracked a little in horror at what must have sounded to him like raving madness. Behind him, staring faces went tense with bewilderment. Above their rising murmurs Sue wailed, “Father!” in a frightened echo to Billy’s, “Dr. Cory, are you ill, sir?”

“Oh, wait a minute, both of you!” said Bill wildly. And then in a stammer, to stop Billy’s almost hysterical questions, “Your. . . your sister— Oh, Sue, honey, I hear you! I’ll take care of you! Wait a minute!”

In the depths of the cube the boy’s face seemed to freeze, the eyes that were Marta’s going blank beneath the steel cap, Bill’s very mouth moving stiffly with the stiffness of his lips.

“But you never had a daughter—”

“No, but I might have, if—I mean, if I’d married Sallie of course you’d never even— Oh, God!” Bill gave it up and pressed both hands over his eyes to shut out the sight of the boy’s amazed incredulity, knowing he’d said too much, yet too numbed and confused now for diplomacy. The only clear idea in his head was that he must somehow be fair to both of them, the boy and the girl. Each must understand why he— “Is the doctor ill, Candidate Cory?” Dunn’s voice was heavy from the cube.

Bill heard the boy’s voice stammering: “No—that is, I don’t—” And then, faltering, more softly: “Leader, was the great doctor ever— mad?”

“Good God, boy!”

“But—speak to him, Leader!”

Bill looked up haggardly as Dunn’s voice rolled out with the sternness of a general addressing armies. “Pull yourself together, sir! You never had a daughter! Don’t you remember?”

Bill laughed wildly. “Remember? I’ve never had a son yet! I’m not married—not even engaged! How can I remember what hasn’t happened?”

“But you will marry Marta Mayhew! You did marry her! You founded the great line of Corys and gave the world your—”

“Father . . . father! What’s wrong?” Sue’s sweet wail was in his ears. He glanced toward her window momentarily, seeing the terror in the soft brown eyes that stared at him, but he could only murmur:

“Hush, darling—wait, please!” before he faced the Leader and said with a strong effort at calmness, “None of all that has happened— yet.”

“But it will—it must—it did!”

“Even if I never married Marta, never had a son?”

Dunn’s dark face convulsed with a grimace of exasperated anger.

“But good Lord, man, look here!” He seized Billy’s blue-uniformed shoulders with both hands, thrusting him forward. “You did have a son! This is his descendant, the living likeness of young Cory Junior! This world . . . I myself . . . all of us . . . we’re the result of that marriage of yours! And you never had a daughter! Are you trying to tell us we don’t exist? Is this a. . . a dream I’m showing you?” And he shook the boy’s broad young shoulders between his hands. “You’re looking at us, hearing us, talking to us! Can’t you see that you must have married Marta Mayhew?”

“Father, I want you! Come back!” Sue’s wail was insistent.

Bill groaned. “Wait a minute, Dunn.” And then, turning, “Yes, honey, what is it?”

 

On her knees among the myrtle leaves Sue leaned forward among the sun-flecked shadows of her cool green glade, crying: “Father, you won’t. . . you can’t believe them? I heard . . . through your ears I heard them, and I can understand a little through your mind linked with mine. I can understand what you’re thinking. . . but it can’t be true! You’re telling yourself that we’re still on the Probability Plane . . . but that’s just a theory! That’s nothing but a speculation about the future! How could I be anything but real? Why, it’s silly! Look at me! Listen to me! Here I am! Oh, don’t let me go on thinking that maybe. . . maybe you’re right, after all. But it was Sallie Carlisle you married, wasn’t it, father? Please say it was!”

Bill gulped. “Wait, honey. Let me explain to them first.” He knew he shouldn’t have started the whole incredible argument. You can’t convince a living human that he doesn’t exist. They’d only think him mad. Well— Sue might understand. Her training in metaphysics and telepathy might make it possible. But Billy— He turned with a deep breath and a mental squaring of shoulders, determined to try, anyhow. For he must be fair. He began: “Dunn, did you ever hear of the Plane of Probability?”

At the man’s incredulous stare he knew a dizzy moment of wonder whether he, too, lived in an illusion as vivid as theirs, and in that instant the foundations of time itself rocked beneath his feet. But he had no time now for speculation. Young Billy must understand, no matter how mad Dunn believed him, and Sue must know why he did what he must do—though he didn’t understand himself, yet, what that would be. His head was ringing with bewilderment.

“The . . . the Plane of Probability?” In Dunn’s eyes upon his he saw a momentary conviction flare that, reality or not, and history be damned, this man was mad. And then, doubtfully, the Leader went on, “Hm-m-m . . . yes, somewhere I have heard— Oh, I remember. Some clap-trap jargon the old Telepathy House fakers used to use before we cleared them out of Science City. But what’s that nonsense got to—”

“It’s not nonsense.” Bill closed his eyes in a sudden, almost intolerable longing for peace, for time to think what he must do. But no, the thing must be settled now, without time for thinking. And perhaps that was the best way, after all. A man’s brain would crack if he paused to think out this madness. Only he must say something to young Billy— And what could he say? How could he face either of these beloved children and, to their uncomprehending, pleading faces, refuse them life? If he could only break the connection that riveted them all into a sort of triple time balance— But he couldn’t. He must make it clear to Billy— “It’s not nonsense,” he heard his own voice repeating wildly. “The future—you and your world—is a probability only. I’m a free agent. If I never marry Marta, never perfect the sex-determination idea, the probable future shifts to . . . to another pattern. And that as bad as yours, or worse!” he finished to himself.

“Is he mad?” Billy’s voice was a whisper in the screen.

The Leader said as if to himself, in an awed and stumbling voice, “I don’t . . . I can’t . . . the thing’s preposterous! And yet he is unmarried, the Great Work’s still unfinished. Suppose he never— But we’re real! We’re flesh and blood, aren’t we? He stamped a booted foot on the floor as if to test the foundations of his world. “We’re descended in an unbroken line from this . . . this madman. Lord in heaven, are we all mad?”

“Father! Come back!” Sue’s voice shrilled in Bill’s ears. He turned desperately, glad of an excuse to escape the haunted stares from that other window even though he must face hers. She had risen to her feet among the myrtle leaves. The glade was cool and still about her in this lazy, sunlit world of her own future. She was crying desperately, “Don’t listen, father! I can feel the confusion in your mind. I know what they’re saying! But they aren’t real, father—they can’t be! You never had a son, don’t you remember? All this you’re saying is just. . . just talk, isn’t it? That silly stuff about the Probability Plane—it’s nothing but speculation! Oh, say it is, father! We’ve got such a lovely world, we love living so. . . I want to live, father! I am real! We’ve fought so hard, for so many centuries, for peace and happiness and our beautiful garden world. Don’t let it snuff out into nothingness! But”—she laughed uncertainly—”how could you, when it’s all around us, and has been for thousands of years? I. . . oh, father!” Her voice broke on a little quivering gulp that made Bill’s heart quiver with it, and he ached intolerably with the rising of her tears. She was his to protect and cherish, forever. How could he— “Dr. Cory—do you hear me? Oh, please listen!” Young Billy’s familiar voice reached out to him from that other future. He glanced toward him once, and then put his hands to his ears and whirled from them both, the two voices mingling in an insane chaos of pleading.

 

Sue on her myrtle bank in a future immeasurably far ahead, child of a decadent world slipping easily down the slope of oblivion.

Billy’s world might be as glorious as he believed, but the price was too high to pay for it. Bill remembered the set, unsmiling faces he had seen in the streets of that world. These were men his own work had robbed of the initiative that was their birthright. Happiness was their birthright, too, and the power to make the decisions that determined their own futures.

No, not even for such achievements as theirs must mankind be robbed of the inalienable right to choose for himself. If it lay in Bill Cory’s power to outlaw a system which destroyed men’s freedom and honor and joy, even for such an end as mankind’s immortal progress, he had no choice to make. The price was too high. Confusedly he remembered something out of the dim past: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul. . . .

But—the alternative. Bill groaned. Happiness, peace, freedom, honor—yes, Sue’s world had all that Billy’s lacked. And to what end? Indolence and decadence and extinction for the great race that Billy’s civilization would spread gloriously among the stars.

“But I’m thinking of choice,” groaned Bill to himself. “And, I haven’t got any choice! If I marry Sallie and don’t finish my work— one future follows. If I marry Marta and do finish it, the other comes. And both are bad—but what can I do? Man or mankind; which has the stronger claim? Happiness and extinction—or unhappiness and splendid immortality; which is better?”

“Cory—Dr. Cory!” It was Dunn’s voice, heavy enough to break through the daze of bewilderment that shrouded Bill’s brain, he turned. The Leader’s iron-hard face under the steel helmet was settling into lines of fixed resolution. Bill saw that he had reached some decision, and knew a sudden, dazed admiration for the man. After all, he had not been chosen Leader for nothing.

“You’re a fool to tell us all this, Cory. Mad, or a fool, or both. Don’t you know what it means? Don’t think we established this connection unprepared for trouble! The same force that carries the sight and sound of us from our age to yours can carry destruction, too! Nowhere in our past is there a record that William Cory was killed by a blast of atom-gun fire as he sat at his desk—but, by God, sir, if you can change that past, so can we!”

“It would mean wiping yourself out, you know,” Bill reminded him as steadily as he could, searching the angry eyes of this man who must never have faced resolute opposition before, and wondering if the man had yet accepted a truth that must seem insanely impossible to him. He wanted overwhelmingly to laugh, and yet somewhere inside him a chilly conviction was growing that it might be possible for the children of his unborn son, in a future that would never exist, to blast him out of being. He said: “You and your whole world would vanish if I died.”

“But not unavenged!” The Leader said it savagely, and then hesitated. “But what am I saying? You’ve driven me almost as mad as you! Look, man, try to be sensible! Can you imagine yourself dissolving into nothingness that never existed? Neither can I!”

“But if you could kill me, then how could your world ever have been born?”

“To hell with all that!” exploded Dunn. “I’m no metaphysician! I’m a fighting man! I’ll take the chance!”

“Please, Dr. Cory—” Billy pressed forward against the very surface of the cube, as if he could thrust himself back into his own past and lay urgent hands upon this man so like him, staring white-faced and stubborn into the future. Perhaps it was more than the desire for peace that spoke in his shaken voice. If Bill Cory, looking into that young face so like his own, had felt affection and recognition for it, then must not the boy know a feeling akin to it as he saw himself in Cory’s features? Perhaps it was that subtle, strange identification between the two that made the boy’s voice tremble a little as if with the first weakening of belief. When he spoke he seemed to be acknowledging the possibility of doubt, almost without realizing it. He said in that shaken, ardent voice:

“Please, try to understand! It’s not death we’re afraid of. All of us would die now, willingly, if our deaths could further the common good. What we can’t endure to face is the death of our civilization, this marvelous thing that makes mankind immortal. Think of that, Sir! This is the only right thing possible for you to do! Would we feel so strongly if we weren’t sure? Can you condemn your own race to eternity on one small planet, when you could give them the universe to expand in and every good thing science can offer?”

“Father. . . father!” It was Sue again, frantic and far away.

 

 

But before Bill could turn to her, Dunn’s voice broke in heavily over both the others. “Wait—I’ve made up my mind!” Billy fell back a little, turning to his Leader with a blaze of sudden hope. Bill stared. “As I see it,” went on Dunn, “the whole preposterous question hinges on the marriage you make. Naturally I can’t concede even to myself that you could possibly marry anyone but the woman you did marry— but if you honestly feel that there’s any question in your own mind about it, I’ll settle it for you.”

He turned to nod toward a corner of the room in which he stood that was outside Bill’s range, and in a moment the blue-uniformed, staring crowd about him parted and a low, rakish barrel of blue-gleaming steel glided noiselessly forward toward that surface of the cube which was a window into the past-future that parted Bill and themselves. Bill had never seen anything like it before, but he recognized its lethal quality. It crouched streamlined down upon its base as if for a lunge, and its mouth facing him was a dark doorway for death itself. Dunn bent behind it and laid his hand upon a half-visible lever in its base.

“Now,” he said heavily. “William Cory, there seems to be a question in your mind as to whether we could reach you with our weapons. Let me assure you that the force-beam which connects us can carry more than sight and sound into your world! I hope I shan’t have to demonstrate that. I hope you’ll be sensible enough to turn to that televisor screen in the wall behind you and call Marta Mayhew.”

“M—Marta?” Bill heard the quiver in his voice. “Why—”

“You will call her, and in our sight and hearing you are going to ask her to marry you. That much choice is yours, marriage or death. Do you hear me?”

Bill wanted insanely to laugh. Shotgun wedding from a mythical future—”You can’t threaten me with that popgun forever,” he said with a quaver of mirth he could not control. “How do you know I’ll marry her once you’re away?”

“You’ll keep your word,” said Dunn serenely. “Don’t forget, Cory, we know you much better than you know yourself. We know your future far more completely than you saw it. We know how your character will develop with age. Yes, you’re an honorable man. Once you’ve asked her to marry you, and heard her say yes—and she will—you won’t try to back out. No, the promise given and received between you constitutes a marriage as surely as if we’d seen the ceremony performed. You see, we trust your honor, William Cory.”

“But—” Bill got no further than that, for explosively in his brain a sweet, high voice was sobbing:

“Father, father, what are you doing? What’s happened? Why don’t you speak to me?”

In the tension Bill had nearly forgotten Sue, but the sound of that familiar voice tore at him with sudden, almost intolerable poignancy. Sue—the promise to protect her had risen to his lips involuntarily at the very mention of danger. It was answer to an urgency rooted race-deep, the instinct to protect the helpless and the loved. For a moment he forgot the gun trained on him from the other window; he forgot Billy and the world behind him. He was conscious only of his daughter crying in terror for help—for help from him and for protection against him at once, in a dizzy confusion that made his head swim.

“Sue—” he began uncertainly.

“Cory, we’re waiting!” Dunn’s voice had an ominous undernote.

 

But there was a solution. He never knew just when he first became aware of it. A long while ago, perhaps, subconsciously, the promise of it had begun to take shape in his mind. He did not know when he first realized that—but he thought he knew whence it came. There was a sureness and a vastness about it that did not originate in himself. It was the Cosmic Mind indeed in which his own small soul was floundering, and out of that unthinkably limitless Plan, along with the problem came at last the solution. (There must be balance. . . the force that swings the worlds in their orbits can permit of no question without an answer—)

There was no confusion here; there had never been. This was not chance. Purpose was behind it, and sudden confidence came flooding into him from outside. He turned with resolution so calm upon his face that Billy sighed and smiled, and Dunn’s tense face relaxed.

“Thank God, sir,” breathed Billy, “I knew you’d come to your senses. Believe me, sir, you won’t be sorry.”

“Wait,” said Bill to them both, and laid his hand on the button beneath his desk that rang a bell in his laboratory. “Wait and see.”

In three worlds and times, three people very nearly identical in more than the flesh alone—perhaps three facets of the same personality, who can say?—stood silent and tense and waiting. It seemed like a very long time before the door opened and Miss Brown came into the room, hesitating on the threshold with her calm, pleasant face questioning.

“You want me, Dr. Cory?”

Bill did not answer for a moment. He was pouring his whole soul into this last long stare that said good-by to the young son he would never know. For understanding from some vast and nameless source was flooding his mind now, and he knew what was coming and why it would be so. He looked across the desk and gazed his last upon Sue’s familiar face so like his own, the fruit of a love he would never share with pretty Sallie. And then, drawing a deep breath, he gulped and said distinctly:

“Miss Brown, will you marry me?”

Dunn had given him the key—a promise given and received between this woman and himself would be irrevocable, would swing the path of the future into a channel that led to no world that either Billy or Sue could know.

Bill got his first glimmer of hope for that future from the way the quiet woman in the doorway accepted his question. She did not stare or giggle or stammer. After one long, deep look into his eyes—he saw for the first time that hers were gray and cool behind the lenses—she answered calmly.

“Thank you, Dr. Cory. I shall be very happy to marry you.”

 

And then—it came. In the very core of his brain, heartbreak and despair exploded in a long, wailing scream of faith betrayed as pretty

Sue, his beloved, his darling, winked out into the oblivion from which she would never now emerge. The lazy green Eden was gone forever; the sweet fair girl on her knees among the myrtle leaves had never been—would never be.

Upon that other window surface, in one last flash of unbearable clearness, young Billy’s incredulous features stared at him. Behind that beloved, betrayed face he saw the face of the Leader twisting with fury. In the last flashing instant while the vanishing, never-to-exist future still lingered in the cube, Bill saw an explosion of white-hot violence glare blindingly from the gun mouth, a heat and violence that seared the very brain. Would it have reached him—could it have harmed him? He never knew, for it lasted scarcely a heartbeat before eternity closed over the vanishing world in a soundless, fathomless, all-swallowing tide.

‘Where that world had stretched so vividly a moment ago, now Marta’s violet gaze looked out into the room through crystal. Across the desk Sallie’s lovely, careless smile glowed changelessly. They had been gateways to the future—but the gates were closed. There would never be such futures now; there never had been. In the Cosmic Mind, the great Plan of Things, two half-formed ideas went out like blown candle flames.

And Bill turned to the gray-eyed woman in the doorway with a long, deep, shaken sigh. In his own mind as he faced her, thoughts too vast for formulation moved cloudily.

“I know now something no man was ever sure of before—our oneness with the Plan. There are many, many futures. I couldn’t face the knowledge of another, but I think—yes, I believe, ours will be the best. She won’t let me neglect the work we’re doing, but neither will she force me to give it to the world unperfected. Maybe, between us, we can work out that kink that robs the embryo of determination, and then—who knows?

“Who knows why all this had to happen? There was Purpose behind it—all of it—but I’ll never understand just why. I only know that the futures are infinite—and that I haven’t lost Billy or Sue. I couldn’t have done what I did without being sure of that. I couldn’t lose them, because they’re me—the best of me, going on forever. Perhaps I’ll never die, really—not the real me—until these incarnations of the best that’s in me, whatever form and face and name they wear, work out mankind’s ultimate destiny in some future I’ll never see. There was reason behind all this. Maybe, after all, I’ll understand—some day.”

He said nothing aloud, but he held out his hand to the woman in the door and smiled down confidently into her cool, gray eyes.

 

TRENDS

Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939 by Isaac Asimov (1920

 

"Trends" was not my first published story, but my third. The first two, however, did not appear in Astounding and so I rarely count them. This was the very first story I sold to John Campbell, and I became the youngest member of the "stable" of writers he had already gathered around himself.

Though others still younger came his way later, I don't think that ever in his career did he have an acolyte less worldly and more naive than I was. I believe that amused him and that it pleased him to have so excellent an opportunity to do a bit of molding. At any rate, I have always thought that of all his writers I was his favorite and that he spent more time and effort on me than on anyone else. I believe it still shows.

I have always been proud that my first Astounding story appeared in the first issue of the Golden Age, but I know very well that there was no connection. In fact, in the blaze of Van Vogt's lead story Black Destroyer, I doubt that anyone noticed the twinkle of my own presence. IA

 

John Harman was sitting at his desk, brooding, when I entered the office that day. It had become a common sight, by then, to see him staring out at the Hudson, head in hand, a scowl contorting his face—all too common. It seemed unfair for the little bantam to be eating his heart out like that day after day, when by rights he should have been receiving the praise and adulation of the world.

I flopped down into a chair. "Did you see the editorial in today's Clarion, boss?^"

He turned weary, bloodshot eyes toward me. "No, I haven't. What do they say? Are they calling the vengeance of God down upon me again?" His voice dripping with bitter sarcasm.

"They're 'going a little farther now, boss," I answered. "Listen to this:

 

" ‘Tomorrow is the day of John Harman's attempt at profaning the heavens. Tomorrow, in defiance of world opinion and world conscience, this man will defy God.

" `It is not given to man to go wheresoever ambition and desire lead him. There are things forever denied him, and aspiring to the stars is one of these. Like Eve, John Harman wishes to eat of the forbidden fruit, and like Eve he will suffer due punishment therefor.

" `But it is not enough, this mere talk. If we allow him thus to brook the vengeance of God, the trespass is mankind's and not Harman's alone. In allowing him to carry out his evil designs, we make ourselves accessory to the crime, and Divine vengeance will fall on all alike.

"'It is, therefore, essential that immediate steps be taken to prevent Harman from taking off in his so-called rocket-ship tomorrow. The government in refusing to take such steps may force violent action. If it will make no move to confiscate the rocketship, or to imprison Harman, our enraged citizenry may have to take matters into their own hands—' "

 

Harman sprang from his seat in a rage and, snatching the paper from my hands, threw it into the corner furiously. "It's an open call to a lynching," he raved. "Look at this!"

He cast five or six envelopes in my direction. One glance sufficed to tell what they were.

"More death threats?" I asked.

"Yes, exactly that. I've had to arrange for another increase in the police patrol outside the building and for a motorcycle police escort when I cross the river to the testing ground tomorrow."

He marched up and down the room with agitated stride. "I don't know what to do, Clifford. I've worked on the Prometheus almost ten years. I've slaved, spent a fortune of money, given up all that makes life worth while—and for what? So that a bunch of fool revivalists can whip up public sentiment against me until my very life isn't safe."

"You're in advance of the times, boss," I shrugged my shoulders in a resigned gesture which made him whirl upon me in a fury.

"What do you mean ^`in advance of the times'? This is 1973. The world has been ready for space travel for half a century now. Fifty years ago, people were talking, dreaming of the day when man could free himself of Earth and plumb the depths of space. For fifty years, science has inched toward this goal, and now . . . now I finally have it, and behold! you say the world is not ready for me."

"The '20s and '30s were years of anarchy, decadence, and misrule, if you remember your history," I reminded him gently. "You cannot accept them as criteria."

"I know, I know. You're going to tell me of the First War of 1914, and the Second of 1940. It's an old story to me; my father fought in the Second and my grandfather in the First. Nevertheless, those were the days when science flourished. Men were not afraid then; somehow they dreamed and dared. There was no such thing as conversation when it came to matters mechanical and scientific. No theory was too radical to advance, no discovery too revolutionary to publish. Today, dry rot has seized the world when a great vision, such as space travel, is hailed as `defiance of God.' "

His head sank slowly down, and he turned away to hide his trembling lips and the tears in his eyes. Then he suddenly straightened again, eyes blazing: "But I'll show them. I'm going through with it, in spite of Hell, Heaven and Earth. I've put too much into it to quit now."

"Take it easy, boss," I advised. "This isn't going to do you any good tomorrow, when you get into that ship. Your chances of coming out alive aren't too good now, so what will they be if you start out worn to pieces with excitement and worry?"

"You're right. Let's not think of it any more. Where's Shelton?"

"Over at the Institute arranging for the special photographic plates to be sent us."

"He's been gone a long time, hasn't he?"

"Not especially; but listen, boss, there's something wrong with him. I don't like him."

"Poppycock! He's been with me two years, and I have no complaints."

"All right." I spread my hands in resignation. "If you won't listen to me, you won't. Just the same I caught him reading one of those infernal pamphlets Otis Eldredge puts out. You know the kind: `Beware, O mankind, for judgment draws near. Punishment for your sins is at hand. Repent and be saved.' And all the rest of the time-honored junk."

Harman snorted in disgust. "Cheap tub-thumping rivivalist! I suppose the world will never outgrow his type—not while sufficient morons exist. Still you can't condemn Shelton just because he reads it. I've read them myself on occasion."

"He says he picked it up on the sidewalk and read it in `idle curiosity,' but I'm pretty sure I saw him take it out of his wallet. Besides, he goes to church every Sunday."

"Is that a crime? Everyone does, nowadays!"

"Yes, but hot to the Twentieth Century Evangelical Society. That's Eldredge's."

That jolted Harman. Evidently, it was the first he had heard of it. "Say, that is something, isn't it? We'll have to keep an eye on him, then."

But after that, things started to happen, and we forgot all about Shelton—until it was too late.

 

There was nothing much left to do that last day before the test, and I wandered into the next room, where I went over Harman's final report to the Institute. It was my job to correct any errors or mistakes that crept in, but I'm afraid I wasn't very thorough. To tell the truth, I couldn't concentrate. Every few minutes, I'd fall into a brown study.

It seemed queer, all this fuss over space travel. When Harman had first announced the approaching perfection of the Prometheus, some six months before, scientific circles had been jubilant. Of course, they were cautious in their statements and qualified everything they said, but there was real enthusiasm.

However, the masses didn't take it that way. It seems strange, perhaps, to you of the twenty-first century, but perhaps we should have expected it in those days of '73. People weren't very progressive then. For years there had been a swing toward religion, and when the churches came out unanimously against Harman's rocket—well, there you were.

At first, the opposition confined itself to the churches and we thought it might play itself out. But it didn't. The papers got hold of it, and literally spread the gospel. Poor Harman became an anathema to the world in a remarkably short time, and then his troubles began.

He received death threats, and warnings of divine vengeance every day. He couldn't walk the streets in safety. Dozens of sects, to none of which he belonged—he was one of the very rare free-thinkers of the day, which was another count against him—excommunicated him and placed him under special interdict. And, worst of all. Otis Eldredge and his Evangelical Society began stirring up the populace.

Eldridge was a queer character--one of those geniuses, in their way, that arise every so often Gifted with a golden tongue and a sulphurous vocabulary, he could fairly hypnotize a crowd. Twenty thousand people were so much putty in his hands, could he only bring them within earshot. And for four months, he thundered against Harman; for four months, a pouring stream of denunciation rolled forth in oratorical frenzy. And for four months, the temper of the world rose.

But Harman was not to be daunted. In his tiny, five-foot-two body, he had enough spirit for five six-footers. The more the wolves howled, the firmer he held his ground. With almost divine—his enemies said diabolical—obstinacy, he refused to yield an inch. Yet his outward firmness was to me, who knew him, but an imperfect concealment of the great sorrow and bitter disappointment within.

The ring of the doorbell interrupted my thoughts at that point and brought me to my feet in surprise. Visitors were very few those days.

I looked out the window and saw a tall, portly figure talking with Police Sergeant Cassidy. I recognized him at once as Howard Winstead, head of the Institute. Harman was hurrying out to greet him, and after a short exchange of phrases, the two entered the office. I followed them in, being rather curious as to what could have brought Winstead, who was more politician than scientist, here.

Winstead didn't seem very comfortable, at first; not his usual suave self. He avoided Harman's eyes in an embarrassed manner and mumbled a few conventionalities concerning the weather. Then he came to the point with direct, undiplomatic bluntness.

"John," he said, "how about postponing the trial for a time?"

"You really mean abandoning it altogether, don't you? Well, I won't, and that's final."

Winstead lifted his hand. "Wait now, John, don't get excited. Let me state my case. I know the Institute agreed to give you a free hand, and I know that you paid at least half the expenses out of your own pocket, but—you can't go through with it."

"Oh, can't I, though?" Harman snorted derisively.

"Now listen, John, you know your science, but you don't know your human nature and I do. This is not the world of the `Mad Decades,' whether you realize it or not. There have been profound changes since 1940." He swung into what was evidently_, a carefully prepared speech.

"After the First World War, you know, the world as a whole swung away from religion and toward freedom from convention. People were disgusted and disillusioned, cynical and sophisticated. Eldredge calls them `wicked and sinful.' In spite of that, science flourished—some say it always fares best in such an unconventional period. From its standpoint it was a `Golden Age.'

"However, you know the political and economic history of the period. It was a time of political chaos and international anarchy; a suicidal, brainless, insane period—and it culminated in the Second World War. And just as the First War led to a period of sophistication, so the Second initiated a return to religion.

"People were disgusted with the `Mad Decades.' They had had enough of it, and feared, beyond all else, a return to it. To remove that possibility, they put the ways of those decades behind them. Their motives, you see, were understandable and laudable. All the freedom, all the sophistication, all the lack of convention were gone—swept away clean. We are living now in a second Victorian age; and naturally so, because human history goes by swings of the pendulum and this is the swing toward religion and convention.

"One thing only is left over since those days of half a century ago. That one thing is respect of humanity for science. We have prohibition; smoking for women is outlawed; cosmetics are forbidden; low dresses and short skirts are unheard of; divorce is frowned upon. But science has not been confined—as yet.

"It behooves science, then, to be circumspect, to refrain from arousing the people. It will be very easy to make them believe—and Otis Eldredge has come perilously close to doing it in some of his speeches—that it was science that brought about the horrors of the Second World War. Science outstripped culture, they will say, technology outstripped sociology, and it was that unbalance that came so near to destroying the world. Somehow, I am inclined to believe they are not so far wrong, at that.

"But do you know what would happen, if it ever did come to that? Scientific research may be forbidden or, if they don't go that far, it will certainly be so strictly regulated as to stifle in its own decay. It will be a calamity from which humanity would not recover for a millennium.

"And it is your trial flight that may precipitate all this. You are arousing the public to a stage where it will be difficult to calm them. I warn you, John. The consequences will be on your head."

 

There was absolute silence for a moment and then Harman forced a smile. "Come, Howard, you're letting yourself be frightened by shadows on the wall. Are you trying to tell me that it is your serious belief that the world as a whole is ready to plunge into a second Dark Ages? After all, the intelligent men are on the side of science, aren't they?"

"If they are, there aren't many of them left from what I see." Winstead drew a pipe from his pocket and filled it slowly with tobacco as he continued: "Eldridge formed a League of the Righteous two months ago—they call it the L. R.—and it has grown unbelievably. Twenty million is its membership in the United States alone. Eldredge boasts that after the next election Congress will be his; and there seems to be more truth than bluff in that. Already there has been strenuous lobbying in favor of a bill outlawing rocket experiments, and laws of that type have been enacted in Poland, Portugal, and Rumania. Yes, John, we are perilously close to open persecution of science." He was smoking now in rapid, nervous puffs.

"But if I succeed, Howard, if I succeed! What then?"

^"Bah! You know the chances for that. Your own estimate gives you only one chance in ten of coming out alive."

^"What does that signify? The next experimenter will learn by my mistakes, and the odds will improve. That's the scientific method."

"The mob doesn't know anything about the scientific method; and they don't want to know. Well, what do you say? Will you call it off?"

Harman sprang to his feet, his chair tumbling over with a crash. "Do you know what you ask? Do you want me to give up my life's work, my dream, just like that? Do you think I'm going to sit back and wait for your dear public to become benevolent? Do you think they'll change in my lifetime?

"Here's my answer: I have an inalienable right to pursue knowledge. Science has an inalienable right to progress and develop without interference. The world, in interfering with me, is wrong; I am right. And it shall go hard, but I will not abandon my rights."

Winstead shook his head sorrowfully. "You're wrong, John, when you speak of `inalienable' rights. What you call a `right' is merely a privilege, generally agreed upon. What society accepts, is right; what it does not, is wrong."

"Would your friend, Eldredge, agree to such a definition of his `righteousness'?" questioned Harmon bitterly.

"No, he would not, but that's irrelevant. Take the case of those African tribes who used to be cannibals. They were brought up as cannibals, have the long tradition of cannibalism, and their society accepts the practice. To them, cannibalism is right, and why shouldn't it be? So you see how relative the whole notion is, and how inane your conception of `inalienable' rights to perform experiments is."

"You know, Howard, you missed your calling when you didn't become a lawyer." Harman was really growing angry. "You've been bringing out every moth-eaten argument you can think of. For God's sake, man, are you trying to pretend that it is a crime to refuse to run with the crowd? Do you stand for absolute uniformity, ordinariness, orthodoxy, commonplaceness? Science would die far sooner under the program you outline than under governmental prohibition."

Harman stood up and pointed an accusing finger at the other. "You're betraying science and the tradition of those glorious rebels: Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and their kind. My rocket leaves tomorrow on schedule in spite of you and every other stuffed shirt in the United States. That's that, and I refuse to listen to you any longer. So you can just get out."

The head of the Institute, red in the face, turned to me. "You're my witness, young man, that I warned this obstinate nitwit, this . . . this hare-brained fanatic." He spluttered a bit, and then strode out, the picture of fiery indignation.

Harman turned to me when he had gone: "Well, what do you think? I suppose you agree with him."

There was only one possible answer and I made it: "You're not paying me to do anything else but follow orders, boss. I'm sticking with you."

Just then Shelton came in and Harman packed us both off to go over the calculations of the orbit of flight for the umpteenth time, while he himself went off to bed.

The next day, July 15th, dawned in matchless splendor, and Harman, Shelton, and myself were in an almost gay mood as we crossed the Hudson to where the Prometheus—surrounded by an adequate police guard—lay in gleaming grandeur.

Around it, roped off at an apparently safe distance, rolled a crowd of gigantic proportions. Most of them were hostile, raucously so. In fact, for one fleeting moment, as our motorcycle police escort parted the crowds for us, the shouts and imprecations that reached our ears almost convinced me that we should have listened to Winstead.

But Harman paid no attention to them at all, after one supercilious sneer at a shout of: "There goes John Harman, son of Belial." Calmly, he directed us about our task of inspection. I tested the foot-thick outer walls and the air locks for leaks, then made sure the air purifier worked. Shelton checked up on the repellent screen and the fuel tanks. Finally, Harman tried on the clumsy spacesuit, found it suitable, and announced himself ready.

The crowd stirred. Upon a hastily erected platform of wooden planks piled in confusion by some in the mob, there rose up a striking figure. Tall and lean; with thin, ascetic countenance; deep-set, burning eyes, peering and half closed; a thick, white mane crowning all—it was Otis Eldredge. The crowd recognized him at once and many cheered. Enthusiasm waxed and soon the entire turbulent mass of people shouted themselves hoarse over him.

He raised a hand for silence, turned to Harman, who regarded him with surprise and distaste, and pointed a long, bony finger at him:

"John Harman, son of the devil, spawn of Satan, you are here for an evil purpose. You are about to set out upon a blasphemous attempt to pierce the veil beyond which man is forbidden to go. You are tasting of the forbidden fruit of Eden and beware that you taste not of the fruits of sin."

The crowd cheered him to the echo and he continued: "The finger of God is upon you, John Harman. He shall not allow His works to be defiled. You die today, John Harman."

His voice rose in intensity and his last words were uttered in truly prophetlike fervor.

Harman turned away in disdain. In a loud, clear voice, he addressed the police sergeant: "Is _,there any way, officer, of removing these spectators? The trial flight may be attended by some destruction because of the rocket blasts, and they're crowding too close."

The policeman answered in a crisp, unfriendly tone: "If you're afraid of being mobbed, say so, Mr. Harman. You don't have to worry, though, we'll hold them back. And as for danger—from that contraption—" He sniffed loudly in the direction of the Prometheus, evoking a torrent of jeers and yells.

Harman said nothing further, but climbed into the ship in silence. And when he did so, a queer sort of stillness fell over the mob; a palpable tension. There was no attempt at rushing the ship, an attempt I had thought inevitable. On the contrary, Otis Eldredge himself shouted to everyone to move back.

"Leave the sinner to his sins," he shouted. "'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord."

As the moment approached, Shelton nudged me. "Let's get out of here," he whispered in a strained voice. "Those rocket blasts are poison." Saying this, he broke into a run, beckoning anxiously for me to follow.

We had not yet reached the fringes of the crowd when there was a terrific roar behind me. A wave of heated air swept over me. There was the frightening hiss of some speeding object past my ear, and I was thrown violently to the ground. For a few minutes I lay dazed, my ears ringing and my head reeling.

 

When I staggered drunkenly to my feet again, it was to view a dreadful sight. Evidently, the entire fuel supply of the Prometheus had exploded at once, and where it had lain a moment ago there was now only a yawning hole. The ground was strewn with wreckage. The cries of the hurt were heart-rending and the mangled bodies—but I won't try to describe those.

A weak groan at my feet attracted my attention. One look, and I gasped in horror, for it was Shelton, the back of his head a bloody mass.

"I did it." His voice was hoarse and triumphant but withal so low that I could scarcely hear it. "I did it. I broke open the liquid-oxygen compartments and when the spark went through the acetyline mixture the whole cursed thing exploded." He gasped a bit and tried to move but failed. "A piece of wreckage must have hit me, but I don't care. I'll die knowing that—"

His voice was nothing more than a rasping rattle, and on his face was the ecstatic look of a martyr. He died then, and I could not find it in my heart to condemn him.

It was then I first thought of Harman. Ambulances from Manhattan and from Jersey City were on the scene, and one had sped to a wooden patch some five hundred yards distant where, caught in the treetops, lay a splintered fragment of the Prometheus' forward compartment. I limped there as fast as I could, but they had dragged out Harman and clanged away long before I could reach them.

After that, I didn't stay. The disorganized crowd had no thought but for the dead and wounded now, but when they recovered, and bent their thoughts to revenge, my life would not be worth a straw. I followed the dictates of the better part of valor and quietly disappeared.

The next week was a hectic one for me. During that time, I lay in hiding at the home of a friend, for it would have been more than my life was worth to allow myself to be seen and recognized. Harman, himself, lay in a Jersey City hospital, with nothing more than superficial cuts and bruises^—thanks to the backward force of the explosion and the saving clump of trees which cushioned the fall of the Prometheus. It was on him that the brunt of the world's wrath fell.

New York, and the rest of the world also, just about went crazy. Every last paper in the city came out with gigantic headlines, "28 Killed, 73 Wounded—the Price of Sin," printed in blood-red letters. The editorials howled for Harman's life, demanding he be arrested and tried for first-degree murder.

The dreaded cry of "Lynch him!" was raised throughout the five boroughs, and milling thousands crossed the river and converged on Jersey City. At their head was Otis Eldredge, both legs in splints, addressing the crowd from an open automobile as they marched. It was a veritable army.

Mayor Carson of Jersey City called out every available policeman and phoned frantically to Trenton for the State militia. New York clamped down on every bridge and tunnel leaving the city—but not till after many thousands had left.

There were pitched battles on the Jersey coast that sixteenth of July. The vastly outnumbered police clubbed indiscriminately but were gradually pushed back and back. Mounties rode down upon the mob relentlessly but were swallowed up and pulled down by sheer force of numbers. Not until tear gas was used, did the crowd halt—and even then they did not retreat.

The next day, martial law was declared, and the State militia entered Jersey City. That was the end for the lynchers. Eldredge was called to confer with the mayor, and after the conference ordered his followers to disperse.

In a statement to the newspapers, Mayor Carson said: "John Harman must needs suffer for his crime, but it is essential that he do so legally. Justice must take its course, and the State of New Jersey will take all necessary measures."

 

By the end of the week, normality of a sort had returned and Harman slipped out of the public spotlight. Two more weeks and there was scarcely a word about hint in the newspapers, excepting such casual references to him in the discussion of the new Zittman antirocketry bill that had just passed both houses of Congress by unanimous votes.

Yet he remained in the hospital still. No legal action had been taken against him, but it began to appear that a sort of indefinite imprisonment "for his own protection" might be his eventual fate. Therefore, I bestirred myself to action.

Temple Hospital is situated in a lonely and outlying district of Jersey City, and on a dark, moonless night I experienced no difficulty at all in invading the grounds unobserved. With a facility that surprised me, I sneaked in through a basement window, slugged a sleepy interne into insensibility and proceeded to Room 15E, which was listed in the books as Harman's.

"Who's there?" Harman's surprised shout was music in my ears.

"Sh! Quiet! It's I, Cliff McKenny."

"You! What are you doing here?"