Malcolm Jameson

MISCELLANY

Introduction: Meet The Author

Amazing Stories, August 1940

CONSIDERED as a science fiction writer, I am only a trifle over two years old.

Considered as a human being, I am somewhat more ancient, having been born in the wild and woolly Texas of the Gay Nineties.

The first thing I remember is being in an Insane Asylum. There, no doubt, was where the foundation of my present occupation was laid. To the people around me there, the fantastic was commonplace and the commonplace fantastic.

They let me out of the place at the tender age of six, and then exposed me to an education that comprised the most astonishing smattering of odds and ends ever crammed into an ordinary cranium. About all I can say is that it held a little of all the arts, all the sciences, and most of classic literature. But not much of any.

My activities since have reflected that hodge-podge of mental equipment superbly.

Here is a partial list of the jobs I’ve held in the past three decades (skip when you get tired, or simply can’t believe it):

Land surveyor in the ranch country.

Road foreman and superintendent of bridge construction.

Night clerk in a summer hotel.

Barker on a rubberneck bus.

Bull fiddle player in symphony orchestra.

Foreman of a frog-and-switch manufacturing shop.

Machinist in an R.R. roundhouse.

Landscape painter.

At odd moments between jobs I played tuba in bands, and once tried my hand at soldier-for-fortuning in Mexico during the Huerta-Carranzavilla misunderstandings.

Came the war and nine years of Naval service. Life in a British cruiser at Scapa and in the North Sea; on our own battleships in big guns and fire-control; as engineer officer of a submarine, exec and navigator of a cargo type vessel, and captain of a subchaser.

There were side jobs, such as being aide to an ambassador and supervising an election in Cuba, governor of an island (population 6), and the patrolling of Manilla’s rowdy cabarets. One time I had to manage a baseball team in China.

Afterward I peddled correspondence courses though the oil and gas fields of Texas and Oklahoma, operated a chain of service stations, and eventually wound up in New York City selling life insurance and air-conditioning. And last—this.

There was some excitement off and on—such as fires, battles, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes on shore; and collisions, strandings, and typhoons at sea. Some of it was in Europe, some of it was in Asia, some of it in Spanish America, and a lot of it right here at home—meaning the wide U.S.A.

I’ve known a lot of famous people, and a number that won’t ever be famous.

Once or twice I’ve been on top of the pile. Now and then the pile has been on top of me. Altogether, though I’ve had a hell of a good time.

If I can learn to sling words well enough to translate one-tenth of what I’ve been lucky enough to observe into yarns you’ll like, I’m in my last job. It ought to make me rich!

Malcolm Jameson.

Eviction By Isotherm

Astounding Science Fiction, August 1938

NEW YEAR’S EVE! Over the world people abandoned themselves to sheer joy at the release from the intolerable strain of the past two decades. For this was not the dying of a hateful year only, but of an unspeakably ghastly century—a century whose final years had been one awful crescendo of slaughter and destruction. Men and women crawled from their subterranean shelters and mingled gayly among the wreckage of their cities. In their hilarity they did not see, or pretended not to notice, the ineradicable lines of ingrained fear etched on every countenance. Fear generated and fed by the deluges of Feroxite bombs, of incinerating heat rays, of bromine clouds, and of the horrible neuronaemia germs.

For on this morning, the last day of the Twentieth Century, a lean, silvery cruiser of Panamericana, one of the few survivors of what had been an impressive fleet of many thousands, had dropped down on Teneriffe from the stratosphere to meet peacefully the squat, cup-shaped aerial flagship of the Eurasiatics, itself a remnant of a once fearsome horde. Even the grasping and ruthless rulers of Eurasiatica had recognized that unless this war was halted, there would be no human race to enjoy its victory. In spite of vastly greater numbers, they had been held to a costly draw by the Panamericans through the latter’s adroit use of the miracles of applied science. The war was a stalemate. For years now, it had been a suicidal deadlock—a stupidly continued mutual destruction of peoples already ruined and exhausted. The armistice, bringing a pause in the useless carnage, was signed at high noon. By nightfall the world knew and rejoiced.

But not all gave themselves over to unthinking celebration. In an inner chamber of the North Regional administration building in the Idaho Rockies, the supreme directors of Panamericana affixed their ratification to the ten-year armistice proposal in gloomy silence. The Secretary had hardly left the chamber to broadcast the news to a jubilant hemisphere, when the Chief Commissioner gravely voiced the thought that was in every mind present.

“Ten years!” he said, slowly and distinctly, gripping the table’s edge until his knuckles nearly burst their skins, “then the beginning of the end! Gentlemen, what we have negotiated is a breathing spell—the lull before the last act in the tragedy of our race. Do not deceive yourselves. There can be no peace with an organization dominated by the Neo-Aryans. In 1957 we signed a treaty guaranteeing to us the freedom of the Americas, for which we resigned all our other interests in the world. Yet four years later they attempted our conquest. Again, in ’75, we made still other agreements. You all know how worthless those assurances were, and how useless our subsequent concessions. Even today, as they offer us this armistice, I learn that they are developing newer and more hideous weapons and that production has already begun in their fortress-laboratory in the mountains of Scandinavia. Their readiness for a truce is explained; they want these ten years to perfect their machines for one irresistible push. We must, whatever our preference, be ready to meet it. I tell you now, that when this armistice expires, we will be faced with but one choice—exterminate or be exterminated!”

Dr. Barnes, bearded and spectacled, the Coordinator of Sciences, arose.

“Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “what the Chief Commissioner has just said is true. But it is true only so long as present conditions remain unaltered. It is within our power to alter them. I cannot agree that it is necessary to exterminate the Eurasiatics to secure a lasting peace. We need only destroy the breeding place of the pernicious ideas of conquest. Let us at one stroke, render Europe uninhabitable. Then we may hope to negotiate a real peace with the rest of mankind.”

THE MEMBERS of the council sat looking at Dr. Barnes, puzzled at the unexpected speech. He continued, his eyes blazing as he warmed to his theme:

“As man to man, none of us has any quarrel with the European. You—I—all of us—are but transplanted Europeans. The European outside of Europe is not a predatory creature, not even quarrelsome. In the building of the old United States we saw millions of them of every Old World creed and nationality live and work peaceably together. Our race today is a blend of them. Yet all the while their cousins across the water were butchering each other on account of age-old prejudices. Every one of the important old-time capitals of Europe is haunted by the memory of a day when it almost ruled the world, and the ruler who sits in one of those thrones sooner or later acquires the obsession that he, too, is destined to control a great empire. My contention is that evil heritage is local, not racial. We must deal with a ghost, not a people, a megalomania rising from the blood-soaked soil of a continent with too much tradition! I propose, gentlemen, that in the interest of all humanity, we make ready to force the abandonment of Europe!”

He sat down among the excited buzzing of the council. No more extraordinary view had ever been seriously stated before them. The Chief Commissioner was as astonished as any other member of the group. For many years he had been in more or less close association with the staid scientist and knew him to be indefatigable, resourceful, even brilliant, in his silent way. But tonight he had spoken with passion, and his arraignment of the inanimate continent of Europe was as unexpected as his proposal to depopulate it. Yet, in other years, Dr. Barnes had offered programs that at the time seemed too fantastic for a sane man’s consideration. Today, many of these were functioning as commonplace details of a highly technical civilization. The Chief thought best to approach this new idea with cautious open-mindedness. With a trace of irony in his voice, he spoke.

“Dr. Barnes, for the past many years your organization has been working day and night ostensibly to help us defend ourselves from these raiders from Europe. If you knew a way to render that continent uninhabitable at a single stroke, I deplore your reticence in keeping it a secret while we were wasting men and ships in futile and costly nibbling at it.”

“Because,” replied Dr. Barnes, with dignity, “time and equipment were not available. Such a stroke will require elaborate preparations. Furthermore, its consequences will be so grave that it should be invoked only by those mad-men themselves. Now, we may prepare it secretly, as a purely defensive measure. If they keep the peace, it will not come into operation. But should they violate the treaties with a sudden, vicious raid—as they have done on every other previous occasion—that very act will set their doom in motion. The calamities that will thereafter befall then will be virtually self-inflicted. Our national conscience will be free of guilt.”

These words gave promise of something more tangible. The Chief Commissioner cared little for any theory about the Europeans, but as a weary and experienced director of relentless warfare he saw here the promise of another weapon. If there could be such a one powerful enough to destroy a continent at a single operation, he wanted to know of it. That war was certain to be resumed, he had no doubt. This might be the deciding factor. He invited Dr. Barnes to reveal the details of his plan.

The hearings required Several days. Dr. Barnes successively introduced his two technical assistants in the plan, young Stanley, of the Meteorological Bureau, and Professor Stevens, the vulcanologist. It was Stanley’s painstaking report that formed the basis for the discussions. The bulky portfolio, bulging with maps, was marked “Plan M-4”, the only title by which it was afterward made known to the world. Eventually Henry Thatcher, Director of Construction, was called in for estimates and budget requirements. It was soon apparent that the figures involved were colossal and that ten years was hardly long enough for what was to be done.

The Chief Commissioner whistled when he examined the program. Besides all this, he must rebuild the sky fleets and rehabilitate the army. There were hundreds of ruined cities to be cleaned up and reconstructed. Combined, these activities would tax the mechanical and manufacturing resources of the hemisphere to the utmost. He felt that prudence required that the Eurasiatics be met with the tried and proven old weapons as well as the new.

Yet this new idea appealed to him. It was breathtaking in its boldness and in its simplicity. But—would it work? A week of heated day and night session of the council brought the decision. It had to work. Nothing else promised more than a long, drawn-out continuance of the old struggle. Experience had taught them that the most hopeful end of that would be another truce of exhaustion. The project was authorized.

HENRY THATCHER stood on the summit of a low peak some thirty miles to the westward of Mt. Iraza, in the Cordillera de Salamanca, watching the action of two of his giant “moles” on the beach below him. The Caribbean, once ninety miles distant at this point, now lapped the shore not five miles from where he was standing. The “moles” lay diagonally across the water’s edge, like two stranded whales, half in, half out of the water.

The metal monsters, plated like armadillos, crawled imperceptibly toward the foot of the mountain. They were a matter of three or four miles apart, eating their way into the land that had once been Costa Rica. Each of them was five hundred feet in length and correspondingly thick. From its seaward side a huge suction hose dipped into the sea, on the other a massive tube of metal, more than fifty feet in diameter, led away over the land to the north. Following the tubes with his high-power glasses, Thatcher lost them in the haze of the distant horizon.

The crunch of approaching footsteps caused Thatcher to lower his glasses. Dr. Barnes and Stanley came up to him and exchanged greetings. He was expecting them, as they had notified him only a few days before that they were making one of their frequent inspection trips.

“How are the ‘moles’ behaving,” asked Dr. Barnes, “since you started using the new solvent?”

“Great!” exclaimed Thatcher. “We’ve stepped them up from half a million cubic yards a day to almost two-thirds. The stuff is more fluid, too, than with plain seawater. We are pushing the muck north now at a rate of twelve miles an hour through the discharge pipes. Next week we can cut out numbers 18 and 45 booster stations and send the men home.”

The party turned their backs on the two grubbing dredges and a few steps took them to where they could see the Pacific Ocean. Here, the waves broke against the foot of the mountain. On this side the work was finished. Over to the southwest the watery horizon lay approximately where the shore line and some towns used to be. The formerly distant Gulf of Nicoya was a thing of the past.

Thatcher pointed downward and a little to the right to a glistening outcropping of vitreous rock slanting down the mountainside.

“Ray-gun scar,” he informed them, laconically. Dr. Barnes regarded the glassy run of congealed fused rock with a face set grimly. Here was another memento of some skirmish of the air. In this place, probably, a swooping Eurasiatic had overshot his prey and the dazzling lance had slashed against the inert peak below. Of all the areas, this isthmus, from Honduras to Colombia, had been the most incessantly ravaged by the invaders. Not one of the inhabitants of this region had survived the last war.

“What is your depth out there?” inquired Stanley, pointing at the Pacific.

“Fifteen hundred feet, minimum,” replied Thatcher, “right in to the cliff. This range stands up pretty well for the most part and we can cut close. In some places there have been slides, but no big ones.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Dr. Barnes briefly. Then, “I see you are a few months ahead of your schedule. That’s fine!”

“Yes,” agreed Thatcher, “I always feel better a little ahead than behind. We are on the safe side with the Feroxite tunnels, too. All the shafts are down to depth, and about thirty per cent of the traverses finished. In another year we can commence boring out the big storage chambers.”

DR. BARNES WAS well satisfied with the progress. In these seven years, Thatcher and the Panamerican construction crews had accomplished marvels. The clumsy “moles”, in spite of their uncouth appearance, were uncannily efficient in their task of dredging away the lower flanks of the isthmus. This voracious implement, an invention of Thatcher’s, softened bedrock by impregnating it with a solvent mixed in seawater, then ground it to a paste within its vibrating interior. When fine enough, more water was added, and the resultant mixture was ejected into the waste tube that carried it hundreds of miles north to the dumping ground.

In each of the successive wars, the Eurasiatics had first of all struck at the canals of Panama and Nicaragua. When Thatcher had come to the isthmus after the armistice, he found two mangled ditches that must be cleaned out, straightened and rebuilt. The task was a trifling one compared to the larger order of Plan M-4, which called for the narrowing of the isthmus to leave nothing but the crooked backbone of the central range of the Cordillera. Thatcher was faced with the problem of removing all the shoulders and the plains from the northern canal, eastward to the eighty-second meridian, leaving in their place deep water. It was for this tremendous job that he had devised the “moles”.

Twenty of them had been built and put to the relatively easy task of clearing away the Pacific side—easier, because there was less of it, and the removed earth could be spilled in the nearby deep water. There, the thousand-fathom curve was close to shore. But on the Caribbean side, Barnes and Stanley had ordered the earth conveyed far north to where the easternmost corner of Honduras made a cape. This forced the lengthening of the huge spill pipes and the interposition of a number of booster pumping stations. It was to have a look at the made land at the dump that led the inspecting party to leave its vantage point and go down the slope a few hundred yards to where their reconnaissance cruiser awaited them.

This machine was of the counter-gravity type, a thing of beauty in its delicate control, silent and smooth in opration, and ideally adapted for hovering. As they soared away into the north, keeping low so that they could observe the encroachment of the scattered “moles” strung out along the shore line, Barnes sat in the rear compartment with his chief constructor and silently examined the terrain flowing by beneath. A long string of buildings on the mountainside soon came into view. That was a part of the “blind”, supposed headquarters of the mythical tromium mines.

The government, itself a master at the art of espionage, had early, through planned indiscretions, permitted the misleading news to leak out that the soil of the isthmus was rich in tromium ore. Since then, the director of the spy-defense section had gained some amusement and not a little profit by seizing a number of Eurasiatic agents trying to burglarize laboratories to secure specimens of the metal. There actually was no such metal, but the imaginary properties ascribed it were so marvellous that it served nicely to explain the magnitude of the mining operations in Central America. The Fleet Command had cooperated nicely with some wishful thinking in “discovering” tromium. Its “properties” were a nice combination of all the things they wanted and didn’t have.

Dr. Barnes noticed, on a flat landing platform beyond the buildings, the spread wings of three old VSF-6 machines, glistening under a new coat of silveroid. He pointed at them in surprise, as the type had been obsolete for many years.

“Bait!” explained Thatcher, grinning.

Dr. Barnes bristled slightly at the other man’s frivolous attitude toward so grim a matter. Himself a lofty idealist, he scrupulously refrained from allowing his emotions to become involved, even if, as now, he was planning the banishment of an entire race from its homeland in the greater interest of all men. He remarked, a trifle coldly, “You seem to enjoy your work, Mr. Thatcher!”

“You bet I do!” replied his companion, but the smile had vanished. “My mother, wife, and the three youngest children were in the so-called ‘respected zone’. It was neuronaemia they dropped there, if you recall. That was the time we first heard of it. And my son Charles was in charge of your Thermodynamics laboratory the night—”

“I am sorry,” said Dr. Barnes, soberly. “I keep forgetting.”

LITTLE ELSE was said for the rest of the trip north. Above the Rio San Juan they passed over miles of warehouses where the Feroxite was being accumulated. The tens of thousands of tons to be required during the last year was too stupendous a shipment to cope with in a single year. These planners, with their customary forethought, had commenced the accumulation of it early. Now there were considerable stores of it at both ends of the cuts.

At the point where Cape Gracias a Dios had stood for centuries among the shoals and pinnacles of the western Caribbean, they now could see the landward end of a slender peninsula stretching away to the east-northeast. Eight of the big spill pipes ran along it, side by side. Through them rumbled the soupy mixture of ground-up isthmian bedrock. On past where Gorda Bank with its skeletons of ancient galleons had lain, even to Rosalind Bank, the fat tubes went, and then curved out of sight into the water.

“There are no more shoals; this will be all the dry land we can make,” said Thatcher, gesturing toward the tip of the peninsula where the pipes plunged into the sea. “The muck is now being spread over the bottom between here and Jamaica. We cannot avoid some loss, as the current is raking part of it into Bartlett Deep. But if my estimate of the amount we still have to move is correct, we should be able to shoal this passage to somewhat less than a hundred fathoms.”

Stanley was in the center compartment, feeding charts marked with odd-shaped punch holes through an integrating volumometer. Stepping to the auxiliator on the side, he cranked in gradient, friction and viscosity factors. He read off the answer from the annunciator dial.

“There is nearly enough now,” he called back, “but let it run. The bigger the factor of safety, the better.”

The next evening the party rested in the living room of Professor Stevens’ bungalow, high up above St. Pierre. They had spent the day looking over the control panel of the valve room of one of the radial injectors of Mt. Pelee. Dr. Barnes complimented Stevens on his ingenuity and tenacity in the highly hazardous and unprecedented assignment he had been given.

Never before in history had men deliberately sought to prime a volcano. Nor were they ready yet to do so, for first the delicate work of sinking a dozen shafts leading downward and inward to the hot explosive core had to be done. The problem was to drive them deep enough—but not too deep. These shafts were spaced more or less evenly on a rough circle about the base of the mountain. Water suction pipes of large diameter were brought up from the sea and connected to monstrous centrifugal pumps, radio-powered and wired for remote control.

Professor Stevens had supervised the work faithfully these anxious seven years and had now completed the underground work without serious mishap. There was yet much to do, as only one of the pump units had been installed. Pelee on Martinique and Soufriere on St. Vincent’s were the two volcanoes he had drilled. Like the isthmus, these islands had been depopulated by the Eurasiatics, their cities erased. Their further wreckage would entail little loss to the world.

Stanley’s Plan M-4 called for a major volcanic eruption, to be set off at the exact moment desired. Dr. Barnes, in approving the plan, thought it best to rig two volcanoes, in view of the uncertainty of control. If one refused to erupt, after being primed, there at least would be another one ready for the attempt. The volcanic explosion was not a vital part of the plan, but a highly desirable accessory, because of its accelerating effect.

They discussed a number of aspects of vulcanism that night, and it was quite late before they were ready to retire.

“You understand, Stevens,” cautioned Dr. Barnes, “that an ordinary eruption will be just a waste of time. We must have a really tremendous explosion—something on the order of Krakatoa, or of Asamayama in the eighteenth century. Violence to the utmost! Nothing less will do. Are you ready to say you can produce it?”

Professor Stevens shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“I am not prepared to guarantee anything. Maybe these mountains will blow up. Maybe not. I would like to push the injectors lower, but I don’t dare. One might backfire, which would wipe us out, a thing I do not care for. But worse than that, it would bring on a premature eruption that might ‘kill’ the mountain for years.

“However, from what I have learned about the rock structure under here, I am inclined to think these fellows will explode within a week after we start the water down. As to the quality of the explosion, no prediction about what a volcano will do or will not do is worth the breath it takes to make it.”

Dr. Barnes laughed and suggested they go to bed. After all, if Stevens didn’t know, nobody did.

THE FOLLOWING year, 2008, the ambassadors of both the major divisions of the human race set their signatures and the Great Seals on a treaty of perpetual peace, each promising faithfully never again to encroach upon the other’s hemisphere.

People of good-will hoped that the treaty would mean something, that the Eurasiatics would respect it. But, nevertheless, persistent and ominous rumors kept coming of gigantic offensive operations being perfected. Confidential reports from Panamerican agents in Europe brought confirmation. Travel of any sort was forbidden through certain areas, most especially the Scandinavian peninsula, and the great industrial tract formerly known as Poland. The unknown factor was the date, the day when the inevitable surprise attack would be sprung.

Two years later, Panamericana had finished its defensive program, as originally scheduled. Its stratosphere fleets had been rebuilt, the army in readiness. A reserve was at hand with which to hold back the Eurasiatics until the strange new weapon of Dr. Barnes was brought into play. There was neither desire nor intention of using these forces offensively: instead there was the solemn hope that they would never have to be used at all. But the Chief Commissioner was none too easy about the security of the nation. It could well be that the enemy had also invented some new, unguessable weapon. He could only wait, for to the cynical mind the last treaty was as meaningless as any that had gone before.

On the isthmus, all construction machines and crews had been removed. There were only skeleton forces residing at the two oceanic canals. Between them, the slender thread of the single range of the Cordillera was all that remained of the isthmus. These mountains were permeated by a system of interconnecting tunnels, with risers to appropriate places near the summits, and throughout were numerous large chambers. This network was packed with Feroxite in all its ramifications. Many of the explosion chambers were located far below sea-level.

At Trinidad, Professor Stevens was living in a bomb-proofed powerhouse, guarding his generators and the projectors of the radio power by which the great pumps of his encircling volcano injectors were to be operated. In the same tight building were the controls to actuate the valves of the injectors and to start the robot machines. He remained there quietly, making occasional tests. From time to time he would tour the two deserted islands and check the state of his equipment.

Quite by chance, in June of that year, Tomboro, a great mountain in Sumbawa, blew up with frightful abruptness in the greatest eruption in history. Within three days, the Earth was treated to the spectacle of gorgeous sunsets everywhere. The sun, when it could be seen, was always ringed by an. extensive reddish corona—the “Bishop’s Rings” of the meteorologists. Stratosphere pilots complained of the haze and low visibility at all altitudes. Volcanic dust filled the upper air, all over the earth.

Stanley, taking advantage of this purely natural disturbance, had warnings broadcast to all portions of Panamericana. Local administrators were advised to take steps to provide against an approaching winter of extraordinary bitterness.. The Chief Commissioner had certain exposed areas in Canada, Patagonia and southern Chile evacuated. Everywhere, fuel in extra quantities was made ready and stored.

The high council received warning in October that the Eurasiatic breach of the treaties might come at any moment. Heretofore, most aggressor nations had chosen the spring as the time to launch wars, but in this instance the effect desired was surprise. The crafty rulers of Europe hoped that summer being past, the Panamericans would be less alert.

In three great divisions they came across the Atlantic, one in the far south, one in the north, and the central one to occupy the Caribbean area to sever communications between the two Americas. Both in the south and the north, equally great fleets rose up to meet them. The old, old, meaningless round of slaughter and destruction, of merciless killing and burning—purposeless, because the two combatants were so exactly balanced in power that half a century of previous fighting had brought no result but universal exhaustion.

The central squadron, acting along its traditional line of attack, advanced straight to the Isthmus of Panama, bombing and sweeping wide heat rays as it went. At Panama, part of the aerial destroyers stayed to complete the destruction of the force there, while the rest went on toward the Nicaraguan ditch. In time, they saw beneath them the houses built by Thatcher, the buildings they believed to be the celebrated tromium mines. The attacking vultures swooped lower, dropping their bombs as their sights came to bear.

WITH A BLINDING blast that made every seismograph in the world dance spasmodically, the Cordillera de Salamanca flew instantly into fine dust, rising miles high in the geyser of seawater that went up with it. The bombing squadron above them, men and machines in fragments, went too. Even away to the east, above Panama, the other invading bombers were hurled sidelong through the air like chips in a typhoon, crashing into one another, exploding from the contacts of their own deadly loads, and scattered as crumpled wreckage far beyond into the agitated waters of the Gulf of Darien, or into northern Colombia.

There was no living thing for hundreds of miles around after the explosion of the gigantic mine of Feroxite. Where the Cordillera had been was now a gap in the isthmus two hundred miles long. Through it rushed the waters of the Caribbean, pouring to the west into the Pacific. Underwater, the ragged stumps on which the mountain range had stood were being gnawed at and smoothed away by the steadily increasing current. The great Atlantic Equatorial current had found a gate to the west! No longer was it pent within the blind alley of the Caribbean and forced to escape through the Yucatan Channel to the Gulf of Mexico, where in turn it had no outlet but to double back and flow into the North Atlantic. The reason for the existence of those currents was gone. Straight ahead lay the best route.

In Trinidad, Professor Stevens heard the tremendous explosion. He needed no other signal. He closed his switches. The injectors to the roots of the Antillan mountains obeyed their robot valves and began feeding tons of seawater into the hot sub-crater crevices. In a few hours one, then the other, of the terrible volcanoes went into action with roars that made the vast Feroxite blast inconspicuous. Soufriere and Pelee had belched another cubic mile of dust into the high isothermal zone of the stratosphere.

Dr. Barnes and meteorologist Stanley were waiting in Yucatan. Directing the same craft in which they had made their inspection tours, Barnes slid out of the prepared hideout and hastened to view their handiwork. As they flew over the watery wastes where ten years before Costa Rica had lain, they were satisfied. The cut was clean. Only one small island marred the completeness of the blast. Not until systematic surveys could be taken would they know the full measure of their success, but they saw enough to give them confidence that their plan had been proved.

“Let them fight a little while, over the cities,” said Dr. Barnes, with an air of finality, as he thoughtfully stroked his beard. “It is already November. Soon they will quit coming; they will be having too much trouble at home.”

IT WAS A terrible winter everywhere. The cold waves came early, stayed longer, and were more intense. The sun, veiled by the dusty stratosphere, gave little heat, except within the tropics. By December, sub-zero weather was being experienced throughout the country north of the Chesapeake.

The Eurasiatics, discouraged over the utter loss of the central contingent that had perished over the isthmus, and baffled by the unexpected stiffness of the resistance, were in growing difficulties. The stratosphere was too hazy for high altitude work and the winds steadily increased in violence. Their position in the hostile skies quickly became untenable. Reluctantly, they withdrew and returned to Europe.

But there they found conditions far worse. Blizzard had piled on top of blizzard. North of the Alps, every valley was already filled with snow drifts. The Baltic soon froze and took on the appearance of the Arctic Ocean. The great base they had established in the Kjolen Mountains, filled with war supplies and the devilish cultures and chemicals for the last world struggle, became inaccessible. Unprepared for cold so bitter and so prolonged, the inhabitants, already bled of their vital reserves in the assembly of materials for the big push, suffered intensely. Soon they began to die in increasing numbers as they struggled desperately through the drifts and the icy blasts seeking the warmer south.

In the Americas it was somewhat colder than usual, but thanks to the warnings and careful preparations of their government, there was little real suffering. The country dug in and made the best of a hard winter. A close watch was kept on the skies, but the invaders did not return.

There was good reason for it. When March had ended, the North Sea was as frozen as the Baltic, and the shivering refugees from Britain crossed the Channel on sleds. Weather stations—before they were abandoned—reported that the Iceland “low”, that beneficent guardian of Europe’s climate, had first moved away toward Labrador, and had then dissipated. Mean temperatures had already dropped twenty degrees. The isotherms, those sinuous lines of equal temperature, which had heretofore crossed southern Canada only to curve far to the north on crossing the Atlantic, were rigidly straightening out. Like creatures caught in the bight of a wire being drawn taut, the peoples of Europe were relentlessly being shoved out of their homelands.

Some stayed, tearing down the houses of frozen or fleeing neighbors for fuel. Spring would soon come and the hard winter would be gone. But spring did not come. Nor summer. The myriad tons—cubic miles—of volcanic dust in the high heavens intensified all woes by filtering out a large proportion of the incoming sunlight. The plains and mountains below, dazzling in the unbroken cover of snowy ice, reflected completely what little heat reached them. A new winter came, or rather, the year-old one became more dark and tempestuous. Other layers of ice and snow were laid above those already there. A new Ice Age had begun—a glaciation invited by the impetuous commander who had set off the blast that killed the Gulf Stream.

The Director of the Eurasiatics had shifted his capital successively to the south until now it was in Jerusalem. It was a strange Holy Land, a white waste of snow, but not so bitterly swept by the howling north winds as the continent left behind. It was here that he was to receive the full impact of the consequences of his ill-advised ambition to rule the Earth.

REPORTS from all sections of Europe were more and more disconcerting. Copenhagen, London, Berlin—all these had been wholly abandoned, cluttered with ice and snow to the second stories of the buildings. The circulation of the winds had drastically changed. The prevailing ones were now from the north, and as the flow of heat formerly conducted by the Gulf Stream from equatorial regions to the Arctic was checked, the temperature gradient between the two zones steepened. Wind velocities were at hurricane heights.

Krevinsky, the chief meteorologist, who heretofore had been offering weak explanations, mouthing such phrases as “sunspot cycles,” “solar constants,” and the like, now knew that the great ocean current had actually been diverted. England was to become another Labrador, Scandinavia an eastern counterpart of Greenland. But what puzzled Krevinsky was the suddenness of the glaciation. Such a profound change could hardly come so quickly.

While he was pondering this enigma, further dismay was created in Jerusalem by the receipt of a curt notice from Hang Chow, regional capital of the Oriental division, that the yellow race had asserted its independence of the Eurasiatic confederation. More and more in recent years they had come under the domination of the pacifistic Chinese. Asia now, as well as ice-bound Europe, was lost to the grasping dictator.

Zandorff, the director, recognizing his temporary inability to do anything but accept the secession, turned his attention once more to the situation in Europe. There had been other severe winters; this one would pass. He sent for Krevinsky, and demanded sternly for a long range forecast. He wanted to know when the government could move back to Vienna.

But by that time Krevinsky had learned of the two volcanic eruptions almost coincident with the great blast at the isthmus. Previously, his technicians had interpreted the recorded tremors as indicative of the delayed portions of the isthmian blast. Now he knew the worst.

“Excellency,” he said, “hereafter the winters of Europe will all be cold. The Gulf Stream has ceased, and with it the Iceland ‘low’. If that were all, the continent would be uncomfortable, but much of it habitable. But in addition to that, we will have no summers, and far more severe winters, until the dust of three tremendous volcanic eruptions settles. That condition prevails over the whole world.”

“Why should that make a difference?” snapped Zandorff, impatiently. “Why are we worse off?”

“Because it starts the vicious circle of glaciation. The dust, being fine, scatters and disperses sunlight—but does not interfere with the outgoing terrestrial radiation of long wave length. We will lose much more heat than we will get for the next several years.

“The ground is already frozen deep and there are many feet of ice. Once the continent is deeply covered by a white, reflecting surface which cannot all melt in a summer, the solar heat will be merely rejected by the snow, and not absorbed. Every successive winter thereafter will add to the thickness of the ice.

“Excellency, until a great natural upheaval re-routes the ocean currents—we must abandon Europe to the glaciers.”

Zandorff snarled in rage. He ordered his guards to drag Krevinsky away. “Execute the incompetent fool!” he screamed.

But the enormity of the folly of the last expedition had been realized at last by the long-suffering Europeans. Instead, they imprisoned Zandorff, pending his execution for high treason.

The council reconvened and sadly took up consideration of the project to emigrate into Africa and try to build a new nation among the colonies there.

Seaward

Astounding Science Fiction, November 1938

READ ’em and weep, Silvy!” Heine Woerlein gleefully tossed two neatly bound booklets onto the reading table, a triumphant grin stretching from ear to ear. Sylvester Upham, his roommate, jerked his head up from the microscope to which his eye had been glued, and began undraping his long legs from about the stool on which he was perched. The lanky “Silvy” faced his jubilant associate inquiringly. Then he recognized the booklets They were their theses—back already, graded.

The exuberant Heine was displaying his own, the big blue “A” with a “Superlative Work” scrawled across the title page standing out like a Neon sign. Sylvester’s eye sought his own. That was decorated by the letter “B”, and the comment was “Could have been better.” He took it in, half suspecting it was one of Heine’s jokes. Perhaps his work “Transient Mutations” could have been better, but even as it stood, he didn’t see how the dull subject “Neglected Potentialities of the Silicoids” could have rated an “A.”

“That proves something or other,” crowed Heine, dancing.

“It proves, you big fish, that when you submit a thesis to a prof that’s nuts about silicoids it pays to write about silicoids! Now if he—”

“Yeah, I know. If he could see any use playing around with a lot of deformed hormones and inverted enzymes, you’d have led the class. It’s applied chemistry we’re studying, pal, something somebody can use. You’d better come down out of the clouds and start thinking about how to stick to a pay roll somewhere. Don’t forget, next month we’ll be out in the cold, cold world. Out there, it is not how interesting it is, but will it pay!”

It was the old battle. The two had roomed together for five years, and the good-natured conflict between the practical-minded Woerlein and the dreamy Upham had raged unceasingly. At bottom, each had the greatest respect for the other’s mentality, but that circumstance only rendered the friendly rivalry the keener.

When they left school, Woerlein went straight into the laboratories of the great Middle Europe Chemical Cartel, while Upham accepted a professorship in a small Scottish college. The former, prodded by the unrelenting system of the armylike Cartel, immediately started producing, with the regularity of a metronome, miracle after miracle of development in the field of industrial chemistry.

Upham’s progress was not so swift or so consistent. But he had leisure and the freedom to experiment in his own bold fashion in a realm unthought of by the industrialists, with the result that every five years or so he was able to announce to a breathless world some unprecedented combination of molecules or living cells. Such a discovery would at one leap put him ahead of the plodding Woerlein in their race toward fame. They wrote each other frequently, and now and then met. It was always a merry occasion, full of boasting and friendly gibes.

It was when they were past forty that Upham’s extraordinary plant creation, the Omniflor, was given to the public, an event that placed him definitely in the forefront of Britain’s biochemists. This remarkable bit of synthetic magic produced not only a super-rubber from its stalk juices, a long-fibred natural silk from its seed-bolls and a palatable and nutritious fruit, but the substance purprephyll which gave the odd violet color to its leaves also generated a powerful essential oil which was found to be the perfect specific for cancer. Upham, now bald, bearded and chronically stooped from trying to adapt his six-feet-three of gaunt frame to the conventional limitations of furniture and architecture, had followed up his triumph by sending a taunting telegram to his old sidekick, Woerlein, mailing at the same time a smallish bale of press clippings. Back came the answer.

GOOD WORK. WHAT FERTILIZER DO YOU USE?

REGARDS HEINE.

And so it went. Upham grinned when he got it. He knew his thrust had been well parried—for his Omniflor would not seed without Protogen, that mysterious compound made by the Middle Europe Cartel. Protogen was the brain-child of Heine Woerlein, the wizard of the Continent.

IMMERSED in their research, the wasteful orgy of another great war was on them before they knew it. The Central Alliance, a combine of Continental autocracies, had determined to crush the last of the democracies. These, in turn, allied themselves together and fought back. It became crystal-clear in a very few months that this conflict was only soluble through the extermination of one or the other of the participants. It was a war of whole populations, one in which quarter was neither asked nor given. Two distinct ideologies, two technocracies, two civilizations were grappling, and the future of the world hung on the outcome.

It was inevitable that the two scientists should find their services commandeered by their respective governments. Woerlein, being more practical, was made a general on the staff of the High Command. Upham, shrinking from administrative duties, accepted a commission as colonel and fell into the role of advisor to the Chief of Chemical Warfare of the Allied Democracies, a General Amos Canby.

Under the circumstances, communication between the former roommates virtually ceased, although once in a while they did manage to exchange greetings through another classmate who lived in a neutral country. Mainly, they kept track of each other’s activities through recognition of new and ingenious methods of offense and defense. As was to be expected, the Central armies had sprung several surprises that clearly showed the chemical bias of Heine Woerlein—the inorganic field—whereas Upham’s counter measures reflected his own tendencies, the manipulation of living organisms.

Honors were about even, and the war still dragged wearily on without noteworthy advantage to either side until the Centralists very nearly conquered by their introduction of the “glassy death.” Upham first heard of this in his secluded laboratory hidden in the recesses of a Labrador fjord when he read the frenzied dispatch of his army superior General Canby. Without warning, tens of thousands of Democratic soldiers had stiffened, suddenly paralyzed, and the paralysis passed quickly into a rigor. Within a week, the stricken men’s tissues were gradually transformed into a substance much like glass.

The gloating code message which the exultant Heine could not resist sending his old antagonist of the classroom gave Upham the clue. Their neutral intermediary sent him a slip of paper written by Woerlein to be forwarded to Upham. It reached him in the same week as Canby’s urgent appeal.

The message read: “A/B equal C/D. That proves something or other!”

Like a flash, the memory of the day when they received their thesis marks glowed in the mind of Sylvester Upham. The plain English sentence was the key to the code. Translated, the mathematical equation signified: “Just as my grade of ‘A’ was superior to your grade of ‘B’, so the Centralists are superior to the Democrats.” In like manner!

Upham radioed the university for a verbatim copy of the Woerlein thesis. In that youthful work of over two decades ago was the suggestion of certain possible uses of the silicoids. Now it had come to fruition—in the “glassy death.”

In another week, Upham had forwarded to General Canby a full analysis of the “glassy death” with directions as to how to nullify that malignant, ray-induced disease. Once more the war fell back into its previous condition of wasteful stalemate. Prompted by the reference to the almost forgotten college theses, Upham started his return message to his old sidekick, Heine. It read: “Your arithmetic worse than ever. True formula is expressed by H/H; C equals O.”

With this cryptic message on its way, Upham dug out his own adolescent thesis and began its intensive study.

FROM THAT DAY on, a deep silence was all that could be had from the Democratic laboratory in the frozen north. General Canby felt that the counteraction of the “glassy death” was all well enough, but after all, it was a purely negative measure. Something more aggressive was urgently needed. He flooded the air with appeals to Upham to provide him with something more. The other arms of the service were slowly but remorselessly being driven back. It was up to science to devise the new weapon that would overwhelm the enemy and turn the menace of defeat into victory. That was Upham’s job.

Canby’s imperative messages to Labrador either evoked no response, or else a meager “Progress satisfactory”—a message maddening in its vagueness, conveying nothing.

Canby turned his routine duties of stimulating the production of poison gases and other ordinary chemical activities over to subordinates, and arranged for a cruiser to take him to Labrador. General Canby was a business man, primarily, and he had never fully trusted his distinguished colonel advisor. The suspicion was kindling in his mind that the eccentric scientist might have forgotten all about the war and had become immersed in some characteristic scheme of his own, such as altering the genes of seaweed so that it would produce honey.

As the Viper turned her bow in toward the entrance to the fjord that indented the barren, glacier-striped coast of Labrador, General Canby’s chubby, plump form was on the bridge, his eyes squinted beneath a worried brow, scanning the inhospitable shore for the first sight of the camouflaged buildings that housed his most important experimental station. On the forecastle, men were making ready the lines for docking.

Abruptly the curt order of the captain of the Viper cut the silence. “Full speed astern, both engines!” Dead ahead there was an acre of tiny ripples, the indication of a shoal or considerable rock just awash. Everyone on the bridge was studying the twinkling waters through glasses.

“A school of fish, sir!” reported the quartermaster.

“Rats!” exclaimed the captain, in the same instant.

And rats they were, hundreds of them. As the onrushing stern clove the water under the renewed push of the screws, the Viper forged ahead, split the approaching patch of roughened water, and went on through. General Canby and the captain rushed to the wing of the bridge and gazed down at the swarm of swimming animals slipping past in the quickwater. Rats, spotted brown rats, swimming vigorously, some clutching a moment at a seam or rivet of the cruiser’s side as it slid by them. In the wake astern, the two halves of the sundered school reunited, and as the ship drew away toward the dock, the watching men on the bridge lost to view the area of tiny wavelets. The school of swimming rodents had gone on out into the broad Atlantic.

“Must he fumigating up there,” observed the captain dryly, waving at the laboratory on the crest of the hill.

Canby made no answer, but he was thoughtful. What could Upham be doing with rats? The vagaries of that man’s mind were unpredictable. Canby pretended a patience he was far from feeling, while the ship was being placed alongside the dock.

He left his aides on board, and pushed on up the rocky path alone, panting a little from the arduous ascent. When he reached the crest and had passed the sentries at the gate, he noted with astonishment that the yard surrounding the main building contained many wire pens. Some of them were filled with the same brown rats the Viper had met, others were empty. It was just as Canby had feared. Upham had gone off on one of his tangents—and at such a time! Rats, indeed, when the fate of the world was at stake!

IT WAS IN the far gallery that General Canby found his man. The lean figure was bending over a huge ledger, the straggly, bifurcated beard hanging down ludicrously over the trim army uniform. Upham was making entries in the ledger from a sheaf of loose sheets. Canby could not fail to be struck by the contrast of this man’s impractical, scholarly countenance with his military garb. Here was another of the absurdities of war. This man they needed—and to pay him adequately, he must be given rank, for the War Office insisted such important work must be under army control. Control! Even a greater absurdity. A man like Upham was controllable by nothing except his own whimsical interest.

General Canby approached the writing man upon whom he depended so heavily, casting a critical eye about the littered work tables as he threaded his way among them. Everywhere lay rats, dead rats, in all stages of dissection. On one table was a large cage, like a parrot cage, containing a half-dozen live ones. They were brownish in color, almost yellow, and spotted with dark spots.

“Just in time!” called out Upham, gayly, hearing his approach and looking up. He was as matter-of-fact in manner as if the conversation had just been resumed after a few minutes’ interval. It had been more than three years since Canby had deposited him here and put the station at his disposal. General Canby was a trifle nettled by the informality of the greeting, and after seeing what he had seen on the way in, he was in no mood for pleasantries.

“If you are wasting your time on Bubonic Plague carriers”

“Dear me, no!” disclaimed Colonel Upham, in mild surprise. “That is too ineffective. Besides, I understand it is considered unethical to kill people by ordinary disease germs. I have the book you gave me, you know. The one on the Rules of War. It is all right to shoot, stab, bomb, strangle, burn—all those things—but germs are out. Not orthodox! But I haven’t found anything in the book about this. It couldn’t be, because I have just found out about it myself. I got the idea from Heine”

“Heine?” bristled the general.

“Yes, Heine—Heine Woerlein, my old roommate. You know. He is head of Chemical Warfare on the Central side. We did our theses together. That ‘glassy death’ stunt was his idea—he thought of it twenty years or more ago. So I’m working off one of mine on him.” Upham chuckled, happy as an undergraduate. “Only I don’t think he’s fast enough to unravel mine as quickly as I did his.”

General Canby was nonplussed. He was confronted with a situation he had not expected.

“Do you mean,” he said, aghast, “that while we are fighting for our very existence, you are frittering away your efforts prolonging a silly schoolboy feud? Personal enmity has no place in war!”

“Enmity?” echoed Upham, his mild blue eyes widening in astonishment. “Why, Heine and I are the best of friends. The only trouble with him is he’s blind to the possibilities of mutants in organisms. But he’ll know better—soon.”

“In the meantime our armies are pushed back every week,” said General Canby, bitterly, not knowing quite how to handle this queer technical expert. “When they open the big drive next spring, we’re done. And all the while you are playing with rats, to prove some point in a childish squabble!”

“Not rats, lemmings—lemmings from Norway!” Upham turned his absent-minded gaze toward the window. Then his expression became at once alert. He jumped to his feet, excitedly, and ran to the window, shouting.

“Stop him! Stop Okkuk! Head him off before he reaches the shore!”

GENERAL CANBY followed to the window. He could see an Eskimo plunging down the rocky slope, falling occasionally, but each time picking himself up and resuming his headlong flight toward the fjord. He saw him bang blindly into a post, stop and tear at it savagely until he had uprooted it and flung it to one side. Then the fleeing man dashed on to the brink of the fjord and dived into it. Canby could hear Upham’s voice behind him, telephoning to the soldiers on the dock. In a moment a boat was putting out, pursuing the fast-swimming Eskimo.

Upham joined General Canby at the window. He pointed down to a trough partly filled with grain. The trough was in one of the empty pens that had held the tawny rats.

“Okkuk is something of a petty thief,” Upham explained, “but we should forgive him. He has saved us the embarrassment of having to ask for volunteers. He has evidently stolen and eaten some of my experimental food. Come, I will show you.”

General Canby followed Upham through the halls of the laboratory building. He looked into a huge refrigerator piled waist-high with the dank bodies of the dead little animals. He was shown the pens of the living ones, and glanced through stacks of closely written notebooks. Upham was lecturing as they walked. He talked of hormones, a new and unthought-of variation that only developed in fluctuating and distorted magnetic fields.

He displayed microscopic slides, charts of curves correlating sunspots and auroras with selected terrestrial plagues and migrations. Canby saw the weird, fantastic arrangement of oddly constructed electromagnets suspended in all positions around jars of wheat, baskets of moss, and other substances. In an hour’s time, he had lost the feeling of annoyance he had brought with him into the building. It had been replaced by a consuming interest. The interest grew into enthusiasm; here was the road to victory, and General Canby found himself slapping the lank colonel on the back and crying.

“You’ve done it! This is what we have been hoping for!”

THE Viper carried a contented Chief of Chemical Warfare back to Europe. His task was to lay this plan before the General Staff and get their cooperation. Colonel Upham wound up his work in the laboratory and departed for Chicago.

The purchasing agents of the Democratic armies had already engaged many millions of bushels of wheat and had contracted for its milling. In that city of abundant power supply, manufacturing facilities, and vast grain storage capacity, it was a fairly simple matter for Upham to have his special electromagnets built, and the ponderous machines rigged at predetermined points about the grain elevators. Some were placed on cribs erected on the roofs, others on tall structures of heavy scaffolding located at carefully computed angles to the sides. When they were all in place, and the cam-driven battery of theostats connected, Upham gave the order to let the amperes flow.

The resulting wail of protest from householders whose radios were flooded with strange, oscillating static was dealt with by a friendly city government. Upham stayed in the city, keeping a watchful eye on his power charts, testing samples of flour from time to time as it was milled, and making further studies of its effects. The magnetically mutated hormones were present in every sample, in abundant concentration. His reactions were invariably what he expected. There was no more to be done in America. He let them barrel the flour, and later saw it descend into the hold of ships in New York harbor. Escorted by a squadron of destroyers, he crossed the Atlantic with his shipment and supervised its placing in the warehouses of Le Havre.

General Canby was having a harder row to hoe. First, the General Staff snarled at him, and the War Ministry laughed him out of the room. But he went at them again and again. His winning card—and he knew that they, too, knew it only too well—was that they had no alternative.

Spring was near, and with it would come the last Big Push. All winter they had barely managed to hold their lines, dug in behind barbed wire, fighting the miserable war of attrition in the mud. Elsewhere on the Continent, one after another of their allies had crumpled, been overrun, utterly crushed. Each such victory made more enemy troops available for the grand final thrust on the western front. As the roads became more passable, the enemy would be concentrating for the drive that would make the word “Democracy” a historical term.

As matters stood, there was left but the desperately held territory of the southwest half of France and a thin strip of the Channel coast protected by a hard-held line from Ostend to Rouen. Thence, the battered, soggy trenches straggled across France through Orleans toward Lyon. Paris had been lost the year before. The British clung doggedly to the torn and shattered sector of shore opposite their island. It was their last buffer against invasion.

It was when they thought of this bit of mangled territory that the die-hards among the brass-hats snorted indignantly. This Chemical General, Canby, had the effrontery to propose that they deliberately evacuate the lines from Amiens to Rouen and let the enemy through! Worse, he was urging them to stock the advance base at Gournay, behind the salient of that name, with thousands of tons of flour newly received at great risk and expense from America, and then abandon it to the enemy. Such tactics were shockingly novel! Outrageous recklessness!

In time, Canby made his point. He argued that they were certain to lose the sector in any case, and pointed out that by orderly withdrawal they would save the troops to strengthen their lines elsewhere. And he finally convinced the most stupid of them that the gift of the flour was like that of the Trojan horse. It was charged with the hormones of destructive madness!

Flour, of all things, was what the enemy needed most. Although they had swept the Continent from one shore almost to the other, their lack of sea power had meant they still suffered an external blockade. During all the war, there had been an acute shortage of foodstuffs, and the civilian population had long since become inured to the use of shoddy substitutes. Such stocks of genuine food as could be obtained—usually by capture—were immediately distributed to the army.

When the General Staff made its decision, they were gracious enough to call in General Canby and allow him to dictate the movement orders.

His preparations were swift and simple. While the flour Upham had brought from America was being trucked to the depots of Gournay, all the rest of the district of Seine Inferieure was cleared of every living thing—animals as well as the citizens and troops. Prepared flank lines were drawn on the off banks of the Seine and the Somme. When all the region between the front line trenches and the Channel had been evacuated, the thin ranks holding the line were withdrawn during one dark, rainy night.

The enemy continued to bomb and shell the area, but within a few hours a trench raiding party found an abandoned trench. In another day the vanguard of the army was moving in, warily feeling its way ahead with the probing arm of artillery fire. But planes and scouts soon confirmed the fact of general retreat; the district was deserted, empty of defenders.

The general commanding the first wave of the invaders found the unguarded depots of Gournay, and settled his headquarters there. There was much material there besides flour, and hundreds of trucks were soon rolling to the rear, dispersing the welcome booty. Field kitchens all over conquered France would shortly serve to the victorious soldiers food that they had been deprived of for many months.

Fighting went on as usual, for several days. General Canby trotted in and out of General Headquarters, enduring as patiently as he could the biting comments of the Commander-in-Chief. But his aide, Colonel Upham, was content. He knew his hormones and their interval of propagation. Consequently, he walked the streets of Rouen unmindful of the tittering of the French girls or the wisecracks of the fresh young officers who referred to him in the privacy of their messes as “that nutty old billy-goat.” His mind was full of anticipation of the humbling of his erstwhile co-worker, Heine Woerlein. In just a few more hours he could taste his triumph, watch his contemptible “deformed hormones” tumble the reputation of his friendly rival into the dust.

On the third day, the relinquished sector was filled with the foe. He had occupied it to the utmost edge.

Then something extraordinary began to happen. Troop movements began on a huge scale. Those within the sector, the ones who had been attacking the north and south lines hemming it in, ceased their operations and unexpectedly marched away toward the coast. Elsewhere in France, armies began to converge on that region that had so accommodatingly been vacated by the Democratic armies. In response to the only inquiry that Upham made, Canby found out for him, through the Intelligence Service, that the enemy High Command was still located at Paris—including, of course, the general commanding the chemical warfare elements, General H. Woerlein.

“TOO BAD we can’t see it all,” remarked General Canby to Colonel Upham, the next day. They were lying on the belfry platform of an ancient Rouen church steeple, their binoculars resting on the sill of a slender Gothic window that opened out to the wastes to the north.

Firing had ceased. It was unnecessary now to shoot away ammunition. The enemy was paying no attention to what lay on his flanks, only to what was ahead. And ahead was but the ruined and deserted villages of what had once been the pleasant country of Seine Inferieure. Beyond them lay only the English Channel.

Canby and Upham looked again across the fields to the north. As far as the eye could see, there were columns of gray-clad soldiers—many columns, marching abreast. Among them threaded yet other columns, motor-drawn, lines of trucks, tractors, field-guns, tanks. All—regiments, divisions, whole armies—were marching steadily to the west. Whatever lay in their path, whether shrub, stump, or the crumbling walls of a wrecked town, was seized upon, torn apart and scattered to the winds in blind ferocity. But always onward, seaward, flowed those endless lines of gray men

All day that procession passed. It was a stupendous, awe-inspiring review of the greatest army the world had ever seen assembled. No matter how many thousands had gone on before, there were yet more thousands to follow at their heels.

In the late afternoon, an aerial parade appeared to complete the spectacle. Overhead, the sky became black with planes, planes that veered neither to the right nor the left. They, too, were going west. And behind, from out the hazy distance of the eastern sky, still other squadrons were coming.

Night brought no cessation of the sounds of the hurrying hordes. The measured tramp of countless feet, the laboring motors of the trucks and tractors, and the unremitting drone of planes above filled the dark air with the echoes of urgent travel. The bewildered citizenry of Rouen was glad to hear them pass, but wondered dumbly where they were going. To the west lay England, to be sure, but where existed the fleets needful to transport such hosts?

In General Headquarters, General Canby pawed through the communications files. Telegrams from the eastern trenches reported the enemy had withdrawn from the attack, and was moving off to the west. Dispatches from Falmouth, England, stated that a multitude of aircraft were passing that point, flying high, headed straight into the west. Toward dawn, radio reports were received from the Admiralty. These contained the startling information that the head of the columns of planes had passed the south of Ireland, far at sea. Several destroyers there had observed many of them falling, apparently out of fuel, while many others, still in formation, had plunged into the sea in full-power dives. There had been a search for survivors, but none had been found.

When morning came, Canby and Upham went again to their observation post in the church tower. There were still the relentlessly moving columns to be seen, and they could not but feel appalled at the very magnitude of the forces they had set in operation. As they watched, breathless almost with awe, they noticed a new feature in this day’s stampede. Yesterday, the men driving seaward had stopped occasionally, as if for meals or routine rest, but today they did not stop. Seemingly tireless, or as if driven by some urge that brooked no delay and revoked the natural laws of fatigue, they even accelerated their pace.

THE LAST of the airplanes had gone on out over the Atlantic. The sky was clear. General Canby and his aide left their perch, went to the ground, where the general ordered a plane. At the airbase, the grotesque figure of the discoverer of the mystery hormones that had caused this astounding migration of their opponents followed his chubby chief into the waiting plane. They got off the ground and steered a course across the sky above the marching legions, heading toward Dieppe, on the Channel. The hurrying troops and motorcades below were too intent on their strange fixed purpose even to glance upward.

If the sight of the marching armies past Rouen had been uncanny, what was to be seen at the shore line staggered belief. The beach, wherever access could be had to it from the land, was black with men, crossing, striding into the surf. In one place where a road led straight down to the water, a long column of tanks had emerged onto the sand, wallowed across it, and plunged into the waves. The first of them had stalled as soon as their carburetors flooded, but the succeeding ones crawled clumsily up over them, toppling into the water beyond.

Canby and Upham circled above, watching in amazement. Soon, something very much like a breakwater had been built by the steady accretion of new tanks, flung together in a nondescript pile, some upside down, others at weird angles. Some infantry, following, advanced unhesitatingly into the water until stopped by the irregular wall of steel. They beat viciously at it with rifle butts, or tossed hand grenades. Finding they could neither demolish it nor move it, they wriggled between the crevices or climbed over. By whatever means they could, they forced their way to the other side. Then they struck out into the dirty waters of the Channel, swimming, a few of them, for a few yards, but the weight of their equipment dragged most of them down.

Similar scenes were everywhere along the coast. The seemingly inexhaustible manpower of the enemy was pouring steadily over the sand dunes, charging across the beaches, flinging itself into the ocean.

General Canby viewed the strewn ocean in solemn silence. As night approached and there was yet no end to the advancing regiments bent on watery self-destruction, he turned the plane and headed back toward Rouen. Colonel Upham had seen enough. His theory had borne fruit, abundantly. The war was won, and far more important to him, his thesis was upheld. Somewhere among those ocean-craving throngs was his friend and classmate, Heine Woerlein. His victory would be empty unless his lifelong rival should understand and acknowledge it. Until now, their years of competition had been indecisive. He asked Canby what news there was of the location of the opposing High Command.

It was the next forenoon that they found them. His Excellency, the Supreme Commander of the Central armies, was marching seaward, surrounded by his staff. Canby’s plane alighted gently in a field a little to the right and ahead of them. He and Upham awaited the oncoming general and his circle of high officers, goose-stepping their way forward, glazed eyes fixed on the western horizon. Like men in a trance, they went forward. Among them, Upham finally recognized his old roommate, Heine, belted, bemedalled, and well-nigh concealed by his steel helmet.

UPHAM DARTED amongst the unseeing staff, and grasped Woerlein by the shoulder and shook him violently, but to no avail. Then he slipped from his pocket a syringe he had prepared and deftly shot the injection into the arm of the somnambulistic Heine. After eight more paces, Heine shook himself and the light of recognition came into his eyes.

“My hormones have got you, Heine,” said Silvy urgently. “Snap out of it! You are on your way to drown yourself.”

The dazed Woerlein was led to the plane of his adversary, while Upham administered shots of his antidote to the Supreme Commander and his most important aides. A half hour later, they were cruising above the water’s edge, showing the astonished captive generals what was happening to their armies. Convinced, the vanquished commander-in-chief signed the armistice put before him. and Canby sent out messages ordering the remainder of the flour to be intercepted and destroyed. Later, the victorious troops of the Allied Democracies, armed with tanks of Upham’s antidote, were pursuing the ocean-bound cohorts of the Centralists, salvaging as many of them as they could overtake.

General Woerlein, as a distinguished prisoner of war, was paroled to the custody of Colonel Upham. In his quarters at Rouen, Upham told him what had happened to him.

“I sent you fair warning, Heine,” chuckled Upham, his unruly beard waggling up and down as he spoke. “H over H, the hormones conquer Heine! It should teach you to be more respectful to the possibilities of some organisms.

“If you remember my university thesis, you will recall that I was even then speculating as to the causes of the extraordinary migrations of the lemmings of Norway, those little rodents that periodically go in droves to the sea, devouring or destroying everything in their path. As you know—or should know—when they reach the sea they go right on in, by the thousands, all of them, and start swimming straight away from the shore. Of course, they always drown.

“In the course of time, I eliminated most of the possible causes of this phenomenon and came to suspect that there was something in their diet, some accidental variation of it, that produced the disturbance. It was evidently something that occurred periodically, although irregularly.

“Eventually, I narrowed the field of inquiry and proved to my satisfaction that the magnetic fluctuations set up by auroras was what caused these mutations. I took moss, and bark, and the other rubbish they ordinarily feed on, and manipulated them in various magnetic fields. Finally I got a batch that worked. The hormones of madness—those hydrophiliac organisms—appeared in living specimens. It was simple enough after that to induce the same variations in other foods, such as wheat.

“The wheat variants were even more powerful than those in the moss, and according to my computations, strong enough to actuate men. You saw how it did it. I think that proves something or other.”

“Yes,” admitted Heine Woerlein, sadly, “I think it does!”

Mill Of The Gods

Astounding Science Fiction, January 1939

“WELL, what have you been doing out there?”

The windows rattled at Jed Andrews’ bellow. The towering, red-faced old metal magnate glared belligerently from under bushy eyebrows at his quaking employee. They were both standing, for there were no chairs for visitors in Jed Andrews’ office. Interviews with him were too short for need of them. “Say something, damn it! What about Phoebe? You’ve been there long enough—and spent enough!”

Asa Nutworth was really a quite promising young mining engineer—on paper, but he lacked experience and the toughness of character to cope with the hard-boiled, self-made kind like old man Andrews. The master of Saturnine Metals Corporation did nothing to make it easier for him. Bluff and bluster made him rich, and he stayed faithful to a technique that had served him well.

“The core of Phoebe is solid C32, super-diamond, the hardest isotope of carbon. It is in the form of a single crystal, over five miles in diameter. To be exact, twenty-nine thousand, two hun—”

“Never mind the inches,” snorted Jed Andrews, bringing his fist down on the table. A stack of books, topped by the elephantine edition of “Ores of the Saturn System” leaped an inch into the air, then crashed to the floor. “How do you know it?”

Asa Nutworth gulped uneasily, and his eyes shifted unhappily, then went on with his speech, like a frightened schoolboy reciting. “The Engelsburg X-13 inferometer readings indicated its presence and size. We sank test borings in six places, along three different diameters at right angles to each other. In that way we checked the dimensions exactly. The cores we brought up were all pure super-diamond.”

“I’ll say they were super-diamond,” growled Andrews, caustically, snatching up a handful of monthly reports. “Chewed up seventy-four ordinary diamond cutting heads. Lord! Six holes, one hundred and eight miles deep, each—through solid meteoric iron—at twelve and a half sols a lineal foot! What a survey! And how do you propose to get my money back?”

“Well, sir, I was thinking—”

“Thinking be damned! What have you done?”

“Why … er … nothing, yet. You see—”

Jed Andrews’ eyes bulged; no apparatus was needed to read the blood pressure anybody looking could guess: two hundred ten, two hundred twenty, two hundred thirty—“Get out of here before I lose my temper!” managed the mining trillionaire, half choking, hanging onto his desk with both hands.

With the vague feeling that somehow he had offended, and sensing that he was no longer wanted, Asa Nutworth edged slowly, hesitantly, as he had come in, out of the office. Ever since he had been sent to Titan by the Dean of Terrestrial Tech in response to Jed Andrews’ requisition for the “smartest damn engigineer you got,” he had the feeling of fighting uphill against his employer’s prejudice against college men. Yet he had done a good job on Phoebe, and he knew it. Andrews had told him to survey it and learn its composition “from skin to gizzard, and damn the expense.” Today’s reception was all the more unreasonable because the old mining magnate had O.K.‘d all the bills so far without a whimper.

AN HOUR later, at the time when Andrews’ chief clerk was paying off the rattled and mystified young engineer (but sugar-coating the dismissal with a handsome bonus check), Dingbat Warren was parking his runabout gravicopter on the sun-deck of Saturnine’s main office building. Around, spread out for ten miles in every direction, lay the shops and yards of Andrews’ vast industry. Over against the ragged sierra of the Prometheus Range were the smelters and foundries. To the south, cut by the great scintillating arch of the Rings, were the hulls of scores of spaceships of every type taking shape. To the east and west were machine shops, drafting rooms, laboratories, and the other many accessories of a highly integrated industry.

His companion joined him on the ramp. Dainty, cute, utterly feminine, the first glance at her was apt to be deceptive. A second one would discover the square chin and challenging eyes of Jed Andrews, for Alicia Andrews was a fair copy of her dad. She was defiantly carrying a heavy two-foot bar of polished metal, one end of which was roughened and covered with chalk marks. He tried to relieve her of her burden, but, making a little face, she drew back.

“No, I want to grind it myself.” She smiled and added, with a childlike smile. “I like to watch the sparks fly.”

“Have it your way,” he shrugged, knowing she would anyway. As they passed the door of Andrews père’s office, they grinned at each other. A thunderous torrent of profanity was welling through the open transom into the hall.

“You trot along and do your fireworks,” said Dingbat. “I want to speak to the Old Man. He doesn’t seem any worse than normal.”

Her eyes flashed angrily, but she was smiling. “Go on in—and you’ll deserve all you get in there, only don’t come crawling to me afterward and ask me to patch it up.”

He threw back his head, laughing, as she stalked haughtily down the hall, lugging her bar of manganese steel to the machine shop. A moment later, he heard his name announced within, to Andrews, and the answering roar, “Hell, I’m busy. Find out what he wants and tell him no! Hold’ on! Did you say Dingbat Warren? Bring him in. I want a bucket of his blood!”

“Mornin’, pop. What’s hot?” remarked Dingbat, casually, when he was in the presence.

“Don’t ‘pop’ me! Save that until you rate it, which will be a long time, if I have anything to do with it.” Jed Andrews waggled a finger at Dingbat. “But I do want to talk business with you, young man. What kind of hop did you slip my traffic manager to wangle that terminal contract out of him? It’s the rankest piece of piracy anybody ever put over on me?”

“Hop?” echoed Dingbat, innocently, “Oh, I get it. If one of your employees does a sensible thing, he must be hopped up. Well, my little service is going to cut your turn-around on the Plutonian run by a trifling sixty per cent, that’s all.”

“Rats and rubbish! Never heard of such a thing.”

“How could you?” challenged Dingbat, audaciously, “It’s hard to get new ideas when all you’ll listen to is ‘yes, sir.’” He knew that the tough old industrialist whom he hoped soon to have for father-in-law had a worse bark than bite, and likewise that he secretly admired men that stood up to his bluster.

That is, if they were not on his own pay roll.

Jed Andrews glared, sputtering. He jabbed a button on his desk.

“Send Tolliver in!” he bellowed into a microphone.

In a couple of minutes, Tolliver, traffic manager for the far-flung lines of Saturnine Metals, stood in the sanctum.

“Why did you take on the tug contracts? Speak up. I want this impudent spud to hear it.”

“Why, sir, as you know, all our ore-carriers are low-powered ships, for economy, and slow. If we could lift one off the loading dock by a powerful tug, take it up to speed, then kick it ahead, it would coast the rest of the way as fast as a super-liner. At the destination, another tug would have to meet it, brake it down and dock it. This contract does that. It is the equivalent of trebling the motive power of all our ore-carriers. For the same operating costs, we can carry twice as much ore as heretofore.”

“Harrumph,” commented Jed Andrews, sourly. “Who thought that up?”

“Why, Mr. Warren, sir. He approached me about it. I thought it was a good idea, and accepted it.”

“Good work, Tolliver,” said Andrews, gruffly. “That’s all.”

For a moment after Tolliver had faded from the room, Andrews regarded Dingbat thoughtfully. At bottom, he respected this breezy young man who was courting his daughter. Himself a successful industrialist, he had watched with approbation the aggressive way in which Warren had built up his little fleet of planetary tugs and salvage vessels until it had already become a factor in the world of industry. At the same time, Jed Andrews had no intention of approving the love match with his daughter. He could only think in big terms. In his eyes, anything less than millions was mere chicken feed.

At that moment, however, Jed Andrews was not appraising the young man before him as a possible son-in-law, but as a resourceful business man who might be of use to him. Andrews was struggling with a problem, and had not been able so solve it—an unusual situation for him. For the first time in many years he was ready to accept advice.

“You win,” he said, more calmly. “Since you’re so all-fired smart, let me put something up to you, and see if you can think of an answer to it.”

Dingbat Warren listened attentively while Jed Andrews told him the story of Phoebe and his operations there.

SATURN’S outermost satellite, Phoebe, had been the subject of controversy for generations. Since it revolved around its primary in an opposite directions to all the other moons, many thought it came originally from outer space. Some thought it might contain rare and valuable minerals. The Saturn System Geologic Survey had explored it to some extent, but its bulk of pure iron had defied extensive probing. Three years before, they had reluctantly given Jed Andrews the concession of surveying and mining it. The terms of the charter provided that if he succeeded in bringing in to trade a reasonable quantity of valuable minerals within that period, he might buy the satellite at a nominal price. If no actual mining were done, it was to revert to the government.

The period was about to expire, and since no mining had been done, the option would lapse. The government had refused to renew it, and rumor had it that the Martian syndicate, having learned of the immensely valuable core, had already induced the members of the council to award the satellite to them. Bribery was suspected.

“So you see. I’m out on a limb. They gave me three years, and the whole dag-blasted term of it has been frittered away by that guy Nitwit I hired. All right, he did find one diamond, and what a diamond! But it’s all in one piece, five miles across, and a hundred miles down—under pure iron! I’ve done some fast digging in my time, but this option expires in three weeks. Three weeks! Think of that.”

“You must have known all that for at least a year,” observed Dingbat, shrewdly. “What have you been waiting for?”

Andrews winced inwardly. Dingbat had put his finger on the spot that was aching him, but he laughed a little. “I was hoping, I guess, that I would think of something, or the Nitwit would, or maybe get an extension of time. If the worst came to the worst, I meant to wire these test holes with Bragwym circuits and shoot the juice to her. Blasting is mining, under any law. Then, ten days ago, one of the Martian gang got an injunction against me. They claim if I blow Phoebe up, it will fill the space-ways with bad fragments—menace to navigation, and all that stuff. Well, that sunk me. What makes me sorest of all is that I can’t find the answer—me, that’s never been licked!”

“I could tow Phoebe in for you, as is, if you had a place to park her,” suggested Dingbat. “That would take care of your option. Stuff laid down at the smelter is mined, surely.”

“Oh, I thought of that,” objected Andrews. “It’s not practical. Did you ever try to drag a moon contrariwise through a mess of stuff like that runs around the planets? Even if you ducked actual collisions, you’d set up perturbaions that’d make the inner satellites wander to hell-and-gone all over the place. I’ve got mines on those, too, you know.”

“Why?” asked Dingbat, cheerfully. “I can drag that little lump of iron in here, and those others won’t so much as wiggle. The plane of her orbit leans way away from the others, and what’s more, she’s riding high right now. You’re way up north here, and so is she. All I have to do is break her out of her orbit and lead her in here in a nice, easy curve, and lay her down.”

Jed Andrews took only two seconds to make his decision. The plateau beyond the Prometheus Range he had bought years before, to take care of future expansion. It was of continental proportions and could hold Phoebe easily. If Dingbat could do it, having the diamond alongside his plant would solve everything, even if it was encrusted with two hundred miles of useless iron. It might cause some quakes here on Titan, but—

“Done, boy! But I tell you right now, if you knock any of my chimneys down when you come spiraling in here. I’m going to be hard to live with!”

The price was discussed and settled, and it was a good one. Success would not make Dingbat rich, but it meant he could buy a couple more tugs. A contract was quickly drawn and signed.

DINGBAT WARREN found Alicia in the machine shop. She had finished polishing the piece she had carried there—a part of her own gravicopter bumper that she had broken in a bad landing, and wanted to smooth off. She had played around the shops as a kid, and was half a machinist. When he found her, she was sitting on a pile of half-finished parts, watching a swarthy grinder polish a crankshaft. The squat Titanian tending the grinding machine stood squarely in the midst of a cascade of flame and sparks. Titanians made excellent grinders, for their skin was unbelievably tough, and their crystalline eye-plates impervious to fire. Jed Andrews always employed them. It kept his compensation costs down.

Seeing she was sitting, fascinated by the rain of sparkling light from the gritty cutting wheel, and pretended to ignore him. Dingbat did not speak, but stood patiently nearby. Idly he surveyed the busy shop, listening to the screams of the tools cutting the hard alloys used in spaceship construction. Like Alicia, he let his gaze drift to the cataract of fire, and fell to planning how he was to maneuver Phoebe.

Of a sudden, something clicked inside his brain. Abruptly he snapped out of his reverie and began watching the operations of the flame-bathed Uranian with avid interest. The germ of an idea that flitted into his mind flowered into a full-fledged plan. Flinging “I’ll be right back” to the preoccupied Alicia, he dashed out of the machine shop.

Back in Andrews’ office, he found the old man staring savagely out the window toward the Prometheus Range.

“That’s going to be a hell of a lot of iron to get rid of,” he shot at Dingbat, thinking of the two-hundred mile sphere of iron that would loom there, if Dingbat did not get tangled up with the inner satellites.

“Oh, the diamond core is all you want, is it?” asked Dingbat, mildly.

“Yes, you damn fool! Why should I want iron?” bristled Andrews. “But, boy, the diamond! It will be worth trillions. The army and space-force alone—”

“That’s what I thought,” interrupted Dingbat. “Please sign this additional clause I’ve had inserted.”

Jed Andrews glanced at him sharply, and seeing he meant it, puckered his brow and read, “and for delivery within the agreed time of the central core only of the said Phoebe, consisting of one super-diamond, the compensation shall be, in lieu of moneys stipulated elsewhere, one-third the value of the said diamond.”

“Why, you four-flushing young whippersnapper!” exploded Andrews. “So you’re getting high and want to show off? Well, if that’s a bluff, you’re called. Emily! Bring your notebook!”

A fluttering stenographer slid into the room.

“Change this to read,” he grunted. “‘in addition to where it says ‘in lieu of,’ and change ‘one-third’ to read ‘one-half.’ That’s pouring it on you, boy. Now put up, or shut up!”

“Thanks,” grinned Dingbat, picking up the signed paper. At the door, he turned and asked, “and if I do, can I call you ‘pop’?”

“You can call me anything. Get out of here!”

Bound back to the machine shop. Dingbat bumped full tilt into Nutworth, just emerging from the cashier’s office, still dazed at the manhandling he had received from the cantankerous Jed Andrews. Hastily apologizing, he was about to dash on, when he recognized the unhappy engineer who had made the survey of Phoebe.

“You’re just the man I’m looking for. Want a job?”

“Well, I haven’t one, but—”

“You have! Dingbat Warren’s Sky Wrestlers, Inc. That a sky-tug outfit.”

“But I don’t know anything about tugboats.”

“You’re going to.” Dingbat shoved a card into the surprised young man’s hand, and telling him to meet him there in an hour, rushed away. By now, he figured, Alicia had tired of watching the manganese sparks and was probably steaming up to spit some of her own.

ON BOARD the super-tug Thor. hurtling outward from Titan with all it’s stern jets spewing fire. Dingbat clung to the grips of the starboard observation port, intently studying the play of light from the iridescent Rings below. No matter how often he passed them, he always did that. There was more than the strange beauty of the multicolored whirling bands to appeal to him; there was the intellectual interest in the superb precision with which the myriads of tiny globes kept station in the endless procession around Saturn.

He did not care whether the Rings were the unused parts of a planet never built, or the debris of one that fell apart. But he did know that planet, if it ever existed, was all of quartz. The rainbow hues of the dizzily sweeping disks were due to the helter-skelter mixture of amethyst, clear, rose and smoky quartzes, jasper and agates, mingled and ceaselessly succeeding one another in their race to nowhere. They flowed along, some spheroids five or ten miles in diameter, most somewhat smaller, the interstices partially filled with clouds of smaller particles, ranging from boulders on down through sand and gravel to the merest dust. Due to its speed, the Ring looked solid, a polished sheet of opalescent glass, but Dingbat knew its real composition. He had spent a vacation prowling through its interior.

When the Ring had slid out of sight under the quarter, and Mimas hung glimmering below. Dingbat turned away and began considering the details of what he had to do.

The mining engineer, Nutworth, was disconsolately pacing the cabin. He regretted coming on this expedition, for there appeared nothing for him to do. No one had told him yet what he had been hired for. Violent and unaccountable people, these Titanian colonists, he was thinking. In a single afternoon he had been summarily dismissed by one whose orders he had carried out implicitly, and as promptly hired by another, who seemed to have nothing do. Nutworth was a conscientious fellow, and he felt he should be doing something to earn his pay.

“Tell me all about the big diamond inside Phoebe,” demanded Dingbat, noticing him for the first time.

Nutworth brightened. Eagerly he told all he knew. It did not take long. The diamond was a special form of carbon. It had no known melting point, was of tremendous hardness, was probably a crystal of many million faces, probably nearly spherical. The fact that it was combustible gave Dingbat a moment’s worry, until he remembered that oxygen is needed to let something burn.

“Thanks,” said Dingbat, and left Nutworth to his own devices. On the quarter, following the Thor, were two other powerful tugs, the Kzvasind and the Hercules. Dingbat called their captains to the televisor and outlined what they were to do. Jed Andrews had said that all men and equipment had been withdrawn from Phoebe and the moonlet was deserted. This was well, for there was little time to spare. They could hook right on.

A week later, Phoebe was rolling inward, well on her way to Titan. Her course led around Saturn in a great arc, and out, then, to Titan. Clinging to her, spaced equally about her on a great circle, were the three tugs, all pushing. By varying their jet velocities. Dingbat could manipulate his tow as he chose. He was utilizing all her own momentum, coming in on a spiral counter to the revolution of the other satellites.

Saturnward and down lay the bright plain of the Ring. From the Thor it appeared as a glittering continent stretching almost limitlessly to starboard. Its near edge was racing toward them. Dingbat knew, at tremendous speed. It looked as thin as cardboard at his distance, despite its forty miles of thickness. Now, if at all, he must launch his daring experiment.

He had no great misgivings. He had confidence in his theory—even if the idea was impromptu. But there was never any certainty in the outcome when colossal forces of nature are brought into play in a novel way. Unforeseen factors could easily make the difference between triumph and ruin. But it was do or die now. After what Andrews had said in the office Dingbat would not draw back. He reached for the televisor control.

At his curt order, the tugs turned the helpless Phoebe downward. Dingbat turned his attention to the Ring, which now appeared to be tilting slowly up toward him. When it had risen until it was edgewise to him, he gave another signal and the tug masters leveled off, heading their tow toward a point on the edge of the Ring far ahead. Self-reliant and cool as he usually was, Dingbat felt gooseflesh rise as his calculations showed him his zero hour was but a few minutes off. When once he had let go of Phoebe, the matter would be out of his hands. Nature would have charge. Time only could tell whether she would handle it as he had visualized it. “Standby” he ordered, grimly, squinting at the chronometer; then, “Give her the works!”

His other tugs cast off, flaring their bow tubes to deliver a parting kick to the doomed Phoebe. Dingbat himself clung to the satellite a couple of minutes longer, surging forward with all his power to start the moonlet spinning. Then he, too, administered a final kick and backed away. The released Phoebe shot forward like a gigantic bowling ball sent down the black alley of space by some vast giant. Dingbat sighted over the fast receding sphere. His calculations had been perfect; she was heading squarely for the edge of the Ring. His work, for the moment, was done. The urgent need was to find a safe place. The Thor shot upward, climbing frantically, followed by the other two.

AT THE INSTANT when he felt high enough to be secure. Dingbat leveled off again. Well above the plane of the Ring, he could look ahead and down to the speeding iron ball. Phoebe was very near to the periphery of the Ring now, approaching at a small angle. Shortly she must collide with it. Their directions of movement were opposite, and Dingbat involuntarily shuddered at the speed of impact—it would be at least sixty miles per second!

“Too bad,” commiserated Nutworth, who was also looking out the port. “Got away from you, didn’t she?”

“Put these on,” commanded Dingbat, shortly, handing out space goggles.

Phoebe struck. A dazzling green flame shot out, straight as an arrow, flaring back thousands of miles along her wake. The region from which the tugs had just escaped was sheer flame. About the buffeted sphere that had been Phoebe, a corona of incandescent iron vapor was pluming, streaked with beads of molten iron bursting into sparkling rosettes, while ricocheting quartz spheroids bombarded space above and below the Ring. Instinctively, Dingbat shut his ears with his hands to shut out the screech he expected to hear, forgetting that in the void there is no sound.

“What on Earth!” stammered the frightened Nutworth. The crew members looked at Dingbat in awe.

“Cosmic grindstone,” tersely explained Dingbat, “a little job of diamond polishing.”

Now that he saw the limits of the danger zone. Dingbat pushed his ships ahead. He wanted to get as close as the spurting flames and wildly leaping quartz particles would permit, for when Phoebe had spent her momentum, he still had the tricky job of diving in to salvage the diamond. He could plainly see by this time one hemisphere of Phoebe sticking up through the upper surface of the Ring, and it was white hot. The hurricane of sand and gravel impinging against the iron moonlet was abraiding it away, and the friction was heating the iron as it was torn from its base. Now and then, a blinding burst told of the collision with one of the larger quartz spheroids. Dingbat thrilled, thinking what the spectacle must be, viewed from Saturn.

His first reaction had been one of elation. His idea was working! His main fear had been that Phoebe would lose her velocity before the sandblast of the Ring could strip her clean, and he would have to lug home a misshapen thing. But when he looked again, his complacency left him. There was something wrong down there. He had used foresight, but not enough. In giving Phoebe his last push, he had set her spinning, so that when she was in the rushing Ring stream, she would roll over and over, allowing it to gnaw her evenly on all sides. With a gasp of dismay he realized that this was not happening. Instead, Phoebe was spinning madly about an axis vertical to the Ring! In striking the Ring, the impact of the edge had applied a torque that had started a violent rotation about the wrong axis.

Dingbat’s first impulse was to dive and risk another push. But as he approached he saw too clearly that the searing envelope of lurid iron vapor and the flying gobs of fused quartz made that certain death. Even if he could penetrate that barrage, it was questionable whether the glowing sphere was solid enough to receive the thrust. There was nothing to do but hover and watch. The blast of Ring material was slotting Phoebe through the middle. The moonlet was over two hundred miles in diameter, the disk but forty thick. The battered satellite was being severed like an apple being fed into a buzz saw. Its core was a priceless diamond, and would soon be reached, and swept away.

DINGBAT had hardly realized the inevitable effect, when the thing he dreaded happened under his direct gaze. With a final outpouring of flame, the white-hot nucleus of Phoebe was swept out from under its polar dome, and away in a swarm of struggling quartz globules. The white-hot domes, no longer held apart by the center, now collapsed into the Ring, and in their turn began to be eroded. Dingbat sprang into swift action, for he knew that to lose sight of the diamond meant to lose it. Once cool, and mingled with the tens of millions of similar quartz spheroids, it would circle perpetually with them about Saturn. There would be no finding it, short of a miracle. He must turn and pursue it now!

Desperately the tugs tried to kill their momentum in the direction Phoebe had originally started. Enveloped in flames from the flaring jets bucking space, observation from the Thor was impossible for a time. When she and her sisters had managed to turn and had begun to pick up speed in the direction of motion of the Ring, Dingbat’s anxious scanning of the curving plain ahead showed him nothing. The diamond, last seen well within the Ring, had disappeared. Now there was no sign. Savagely, he ordered every ounce of speed crowded on.

Ten minutes later, far ahead, there was a momentary burst of white light, followed by a fanlike eruption of greenish flame. That indicated the diamond still had a little velocity left in their direction, and had just had a collision with a quartz sphere. Dingbat snatched a little hope. As long as the diamond was fighting upstream, as it were, signs could be expected. Cursing helplessly because there was no more reserves of speed, Dingbat paced the cabin until the Thor had built up to Ring velocity. The sight of the glimmering ten-thousand-mile width of the Ring added to his dejection; systematic search of it was an impossibility.

When the moment came that the tug was traveling exactly at the speed of the Ring fragments, all hands peered below. As by magic, the Ring ceased to be a solid. Below, as if hanging motionless in space, were bodies, millions of them, of every size and color. The spaces between them were large, comparatively. A spaceship, handled with care, could safely be taken in.

As he gave the order, he noted for the first time that in the excitement of the day, he had forgotten the passage of time. In scanning the part of the Ring ahead, where he thought he had last seen the diamond, his heart sank when he observed that spot would shortly pass into the shadow of Saturn. His search would have to be made in the dark. What had seemed to be difficult enough was about to turn into an impossibility. Unless he sighted the diamond before dark, it was lost forever!

At that moment, in the very edge of the penumbra, a dazzling beam of purest blue, changing instantly to a gorgeous crimson, shot forth. It vanished as quickly as it came, as its source went into the shadow. The diamond! It could be nothing else. A groan went up from the crew. Everybody recognized now that with another hour of sunlight, there might be a chance of securing the gem. But now?

THE THREE ships groped through the packed recesses of the Ring, their lights creating an eerie scene. Nowhere in all space is there another such area. All about them were the ghostly spheres, each reflecting the light differently, depending on its color and crystal form. Hour after hour they tested one big quartz globule after another, hoping to get back the answering flash of the superb jewel. False hopes were raised—and dashed. Men grew tired and sleepy.

“Titan calling,” announced the televisor man.

“Don’t answer,” replied Dingbat, glumly.

“If it’s any help, sir,” ventured Nutworth, “I just remembered—diamonds phasphoresce under the impact of an electric discharge.”

“No good,” said Dingbat, gloomily, “these are tugs, not war cruisers.”

Nutworth relapsed for a moment into his ordinary state of worried abstraction, then brightened and added; “And under ultraviolet light, too.”

“Now you’re talking,” cried Dingbat, coming to life again. Orders rang out and the crew of the Thor swarmed all over the place, rigging transformers.

The scene outside, if bizarre before, was absolutely weird now. The flood of violet light made the strange particles in the neighborhood look like the embellishments of a fever dream, glimmering in the ghostly light. Many pieces were discovered that gave off a mild fluorescence. These were successively examined and rejected. The ships went on, casting their invisible light ahead. Presently, back from the black void ahead came the glorious brilliance of the answering flame of the diamond.

“Phoebe, come to papa!” half sobbed Dingbat, delirious with relief. The crew needed no orders. They did what was to do. Dingbat danced round and round. Grabbing the amazed Nutworth, he pumped his hand up and down. “Nutworth, old boy, I apologize!”

“For what?” asked the bewildered engineer.

“Never mind,” said Dingbat, sobering, “but you get a bonus, too.”

The Thor had hooked onto the diamond, and it was not yet dawn.

“Saturnine Works,” Dingbat ordered, crisply, “and mind the chimneys.” He went to the televisor and switched it on. In a couple of minutes he was looking into Jed Andrews’ office. Before he could say a word, the old man started roaring.

“What in Hell! Every astronomer in the Solar System has gone crazy!”

“Tell ’em everything’s under control,” and Dingbat switched off. The old man could wait. He was looking for Alicia and the glimpse of the office showed him she was not there. Now he called the Andrews mansion on Tethys Heights. Ah! There she was.

“Hy’a, hon! Listen—there’s an old Earth custom that when the boy friend brings in a big diamond, the girl sets the date. I’m on the on the way!”

Catalyst Poison

Astounding, April 1939

OH yes, I knew Eddie Twitterly and I knew Rags Rooney. Come to think of it, I introduced them. And I know all about their stunt from the very beginning. It’s my job to know people and what’s going on. How do you think I could hold my job on the Star if I didn’t?

My paper wouldn’t print the low-down on the Big Day because they thought it was too fishy. That a fellow with literately millions a day income should jump the traces and behave like Eddie did, was too much for them. It shows you how little some editors understand human nature. There was nothing fishy about it to me, because I knew Eddie so well: knew how temperamental he was.

Eddie was smart as hell. All those degrees he had and the jobs he’d held are proof of that; but he was unreliable. He couldn’t stand routine. That’s why they kicked him out of the university faculty. He didn’t fit in the factory atmosphere they had up there, the regular hours and same old grind, month in month out. Eddie was the kind that gets steamed up over something, goes at it hammer and tongs, day and night, and then all of a sudden drops it like a hot potato. Whenever he reached the fed-up stage, he’d go on a bat; and when I say bat I mean bat. He’d stay blotto for ten days and, likely as not, wind up in a psychopathic ward somewhere.

The psychiatrists said he had an inner conflict. He was part scientist, part artist, and it’s a bad combination. His hobby was modeling. Sometimes right in the middle of a scientific investigation, he’d get the yen to do some sculpting, and off he’d go. It muddied his work in both fields and kept him from being a big success in either. Then he’d get to thinking about that and the next you’d know, he’d be draped across the bar somewhere telling the mahogany polisher all his troubles.

I BUMPED into him one night, shortly after he lost that physics professorship. It was at the Spicy Club, and from the looks of things, Eddie was celebrating his liberation from academic life. I had Rags Rooney with me. Now Rags is an utterly different type. He’s a gambler and promoter; backs fighters and wrestlers, ordinarily, but he’ll take a part of a Broadway show, or stake a nut inventor, or lay his money anywhere he sees a sporting chance. Sometimes he cleans up, sometimes he loses his shirt, but generally speaking he picks winners.

That night Eddie’s hunch, as near, as I can remember it, was to build a machine based on those new-fangled notions of the atom. You know the idea; that there is no such thing as matter; that everything is simply a lot of electric charges zipping and zooming around and bouncing off each other. According to him, butter and steel are just different combinations of them, revolving at different speeds. All right, he’d say, if it’s electrical, you can alter it by electricity: change one to the other, or to anything else—a brick, or even a pint of red ink.

From that, he went on to tell us that feelings and thought are electricity too. Brain cells are little batteries, and when you think, currents run back and forth. I hadn’t heard that one before, but Eddie insisted that it was so; said that the current could even be metered. Well the payoff was he thought he could hook the two things together. If he had a machine to amplify his mental powerhouse and focus it on something—anything, even air, is always a flock of swirling electrons—he could make the electrons jump the way he wanted them to. Whatever picture was in his mind would form there.

“Just think.” he said. “with my Psycho-Substantiator I could model without clay or tools. When my thoughts solidify and I see any faults and want to change them, all I have to do is think the revision. And if it comes out all right, then I imagine the material I want—marble or bronze, or even gold—and there it is! No casts to make, no chiseling, no manual work at all—a finished piece.”

It must have been the crack about gold that made Rags sit up and take notice. Whatever it was, before I realized what was happening, they’d made a deal and were shaking on it. Rags was to put up the money, Eddie the brains, and split fifty-fifty on what came of it. I thought then—and I haven’t changed my mind—that it was a mistake. I couldn’t imagine the two of them getting together on what to do with the machine when they got it built. I spoke to Rags in the washroom about it, and warned him how flighty Eddie was.

“Hell.” he said. “I’ve been handling sporting talent all my life, and they don’t come any more temperamental. This guy’ll be a cinch.”

I didn’t see either of them for a long time—months. One night. I dropped into Rags’ apartment to chin a minute with him and his missus, and the minute I got inside, I knew I oughtn’t to have come. There was a first-class family row going on. I tried to duck, but she grabbed me and began laying into me too.

“You started all this.” she said scornfully, “you and your chiseling boyfriend! Thirty thousand smackers is what that no-good souse has taken this poor fish for—and look at what we get!”

Boy, she was sore.

She dragged me over to the where there was a little white statuette. It was a comical thing, not bad at all; a pot bellied little horse, made out of some white stone, but, of course, not good for much except a gimcrack.

Then she started raving again, and I learned more about Rags’ home life in the next fifteen minutes than I ever dreamed of before.

“And him sounding off all the time about how he makes his living outta suckers.” she snorted, “but if he hasn’t been taken for a ride this time, I never saw it done. He’s bought a half interest in what that dope thinks about! Imagine! Why, wine, woman and song is all that poor louse ever thinks about, and you know what a rotten voice he has.”

“What’s his voice got to do with it?” Rags growled.

She gave him a dirty look. “That’s why he concentrates on the other two.”

RAGS jammed on his hat and gave me the sign to come along. We went down to Mac’s place and Rags threw down a coupla slugs before he said a word.

“Oh, everything’s all right,” he said in a minute, “only I see where I gotta get tough with the guy. He’s not practical. The machine works like he said. What he thinks about comes out. But what the hell good is it if his mind runs to goofy doll horses? I ask you. And it could just as well been a ten-pound diamond. But that’s not all. To celebrate, he goes on a four-day binge. I just found him. Two of the boys are sitting with him now in the steam room down at the gym. Soon as they cook it out of him. I’m going down and work on him.”

I didn’t say a word. Eddie’s geared for two speeds, full ahead—his own way—and reverse. If Rags was going to put the pressure on him I figured all he’d get would be a backfire.

They must have compromised things after a fashion. Next I heard, Rags was going around trying town to peddle a statue, a gold one this time, for a price like a couple of hundred thousand. I wanted to keep track of things, because I saw a good story coming up when the secrecy was off, so I hunted him up.

Sure enough, the statue was Eddie’s second creation. It was gold, but Rag’s was ready to chew nails.

“The museums won’t touch it.” he complained: “say it’s ugly, terrible, a sloppy, bulging, fat, nude woman.”

“Rent it to a photographer for the ‘before’ picture for a reducing ad,” I suggested: then seeing he was in no joking mood, I asked him how it happened.

“Live and learn.” said Rags, sad-like. “Like a dumbbell. I let him have his way. He was dead set to do statuary, so I says. ‘O. K. but be sure to make it outta something I can hock in case the art part backfires.’ So he says, ‘I’ll do a Venus,’ and I says, ‘Shoot, only make her gold.’ Well, he’s got funny ideas about women. At the start, she was skinny enough to be an exhibit in a T. B. clinic. I kept saying, ‘Put some meat on her,’ thinking all the time about the weight of it when I went to sell it. He was sore at first, then he got to giggling and did what I said, and how!”

“What the hell,” I told Rags, “You’re sitting pretty. Go down to Wall Street and look up some of the millionaires that are moaning about the gold standard. The law says they can’t hoard, but they can own golden works of art.”

He took my advice and found a buyer all right, but getting that quarter of a million too easy was what ruined him. It made him greedy. Rags had made bits before, like I said, but never anything big like that. Now that he had a taste of big money, he was hungry for more and hiked the limit to the sky. He was all for quantity production, and since he had plenty of cash, he began to rig for it.

In planning gold by the ton, commonsense told him they couldn’t go on working in Eddie’s third-floor studio. That plump Venus damn near caved the joists in. Rags found a place near the foot of Forty-fourth Street, in the block west of Eleventh Avenue. It was an abandoned ice plant, a big barn of a place with a dirt floor. Eddie had to dismantle his machine and take it there, then work for two or three months making parts for the new and bigger machine with it.

The day they were ready to ride with the new equipment, Rags asked me to come down and watch it work. The place looked like a cross between an iron foundry and a movie studio. The floor was laid out in grids, four of them, each with molds for two hundred gold bricks. Pointing down at them was a circle of vacuum lubes mounted on high stands with reflectors back of them. At one side was a sort of throne where Eddie was to sit. Wires ran all over the place. Rags filled up the molds with water, and left a hose dribbling into the header so there’d be plenty of additional water to make up the difference in weight.

Eddie put up a last-minute battle about having to do something as tedious as thinking up hundreds on hundreds of little gold bars, all alike. But Rags couldn’t see anything but bullion. He had sweated blood trying to get rid of the fat Venus and he wanted no more of it. At five thousand dollars apiece, the gold bricks were in handy, manageable units, and the sum of them was a fortune. Two million a day in good pay, even if you don’t like the work, Rags argued. I have to admit that argument would have sold me. Eddie grumbled some more, but he focused his apparatus on the first bank of molds, put on his metal headpiece, and got on his throne.

As soon as the tubes lit up, the water began to turn pink, then a ruby red. “Colloidal gold,” Rags whispered. Eddie must have taught him that word. In about two hours, the first quarter of the job was done. All that time, Eddie had sat there, frowning, concentrating on the idea of twenty-four-carat gold lying in neat rows of bricks. He looked pretty tired and disgusted when he finished, but he only stopped to eat a sandwich, he growled at Rags some more, then tackled the next batch. I stuck around. You don’t get to see anything like that every day.

In the afternoon Eddie filled up Grid No. 3. He complained a lot about his head aching, but Rags wasn’t listening to him. He was pacing up and down, gloating over the gold, or else sitting in a corner, figuring on the backs of envelopes. Eddie was limp by the time he got to the last set of molds, but Rags kept egging him on, yelling at him like a regular Simon Legree to hurry up, think faster and harder, so it would all be done before night. I felt sorry for Eddie, but all he did was sigh and slip his helmet on and go back to work.

It was about an hour later, that things began to go sour. I heard Rags griping, and went over to where he was. He looked scared. The molds under his feet were full of some gosh-awful, fluffy, pink mess.

“That’s horrible!” he said, sniffing the air. Then he ran over and began shaking Eddie.

Eddie had been sitting with his eyes closed, mumbling something to himself, but when Rags pounded hm, he snapped our of it, shut off the juice, and came down to see what the excitement was about.

Eddie was puzzled too, for a minute; then he began laughing.

“Tripe,” he said, “that’s what it is—tripe!” and then went off into another fit of laughing.

Rags was glaring at him the whole time, wondering what was so funny. “Whadya mean tripe?” he wanted to know, sore as hell.

“Why,” says Eddie, as soon as he could get his breath, “I guess I must have gone nuts thinking about nothing but gold. Now I remember, I got thinking what a lot of tripe this whole thing is: kept saying it over and over. ‘This is a lot of tripe.’ Ha-ha-ha! And that’s what we got!”

WELL, they had it round and round. All Rags could see was a million dollars spoiled by sheer inattention, right when his mouth was watering for big money. but after they’d jawed awhile, Eddie agreed to clean up the tripe, make it into gold, but later on, after he’d had some rest. Then I asked Rags what he was going to do with so much gold when he had it.

“Sell it to the bank,” he said, cocky as you please.

When I finished telling him about the gold laws, he was worried.

That night he went down to Washington to find out where he stood. What they said to him, I never knew; but after that, gold was out. Rags came back damning the administration like a charter member of the grass-roots conference. But he was already full of new plans. He showed me the schedule—so many tons of platinum, then so much silver, and so on. I warned him he was hunting trouble, driving Eddie like that. I thought it was a miracle that Eddie hadn’t torn loose after the tripe episode. He usually did when he was fed up on anything.

“I’ve taken care of that.” said Rags, in an offhand way. “I’ve got to go abroad. I’m going to Amsterdam to find out how many diamonds the market can take without cracking. While I’m gone, to be sure nothing’ll slip, I’ve fixed it with the O’Hara Agency to keep a guard on the place, so nobody can get in or out. Eddie don’t know it yet, but he’ll be comfortable enough. I had a bedroom fixed up down there, and a kitchenette, and I hired a Filipino boy to stay and cook for him. He’ll have to keep busy, and he can’t get in trouble.”

“Oh, izzat so?” I told him. “Well, you don’t know Eddie. That boy could get in trouble in Alcatraz. When he gets a thirst, he can think up ways and means that’d surprise you.”

Rags wouldn’t listen to me, and now he’s sorry. It was bad enough to lay out all that monotonous work thinking up truckloads of platinum, but to lock up Eddie in that way, without even telling him about it, was just plain damn foolishness. I knew Eddie’d hit the ceiling as soon as he found out: and whenever he did, it was going to be just too bad

And when it happened, it was exactly that way.

I went down there one night, about a week later. It was drizzling, but I felt like a stroll, and I was worried a little about Eddie, locked up in that old plant practically alone. When I got almost to the door of it one of O’Hara’s strong-arm men stepped out from behind a signboard and flagged me down. I showed my card and told him I was a friend of Rags and knew all about the layout, but it didn’t get me by. Yet I did want to know how Eddie was taking it, so I slipped the fellow a fin, and he talked.

The second night after Rags had gone, Eddie came out of the plant and started uptown. The watchmen headed him off and turned him hack. Eddie didn’t understand at first, and cut up quite a bit. They handled him as gently as they could, and finally shoved him through the door without roughing him up too much. It was when he heard what Rags’ orders were that he went wild. He went back inside, but a couple of minutes later the door popped open and Eddie kicked the Filipino out and threw his baggage after him.

“Tell Rooney.” he yelled to the dicks, “there’s more ways of choking a dog than feeding it hot butter.” And with that be slammed the door and barred it.

That sounded bad to me, I wanted to know the rest, and the O’Hara man went on. The next night, they heard sounds of a wild party going on inside. That was strange, because they had kept a close watch on the place and knew nobody had gone in. But there it was—singing and laughing, plenty of whoopee. And it had been going on ever since!

I listened, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Then we could make out a faint groaning.

“Oh.” said the operative, “that’s all right. Too much party. You know. They were fighting last right. At least, we could hear the guy bawling the girls out, and they were crying.”

“Girls?” I asked. “What girls?”

“See that crack over the door?” he said. “We piled some boxes and barrels up and took a squint inside through there. It was something to see, I can tell you—a perfect harem, like in the movies, only more so, five or six dames, dolled up like nobody’s business, all eating off of gold platters and passing jugs of drinks around. The only guy in there is this Twitterley, rigged out like a sultan, with a pair of ’em on his lap, handing the stuff to him, what a life! And they pay me to stand here to keep him in! Where would he want to go? He’s got everything, come on; let’s hop down to the coffee pot and get on the outside of some hot chow, This joint don’t need watching.”

IT WAS raining in earnest by then, so I went to the Star office to file some copy. It must have been well past midnight when I came out. The rain seemed to be over, so I started for the subway on foot. In Forty-third Street, near Eighth Avenue, I saw a crowd standing near a window of a cafeteria, peeking in, and some of them were staring up at the swinging sign over the sidewalk. There was a ladder against the building and I could make out a cop near the top of it struggling with something perched on the sign. The cop was wriggling and cussing, and whatever was up there was pecking at him and hissing away at a great rate.

Just then the crowd let out yelps, “There’s another one!” Somebody said, and they all ran out to the edge of the curb, looking upward all the time. On the very end of the sign sat a fuzzy little thing, hardly bigger than you fist, but it had a tail about a yard long that hung down and curled up at the end. Its eyes shone like a cat’s. Oh, more than that, they flamed—bright violet, not green or orange, the way a cat’s do, “he’s already got four of ’em down,” a fellow told me, meaning the cop.

“They’re inside.”

I pushed into the cafeteria, and there were others, sure enough, sitting in a row along the counter, they seemed to be harmless enough, after you got over their looks, but what they were was something else again. They may have started out to be marmosets, but something sure went wrong with them. One was a bright-lemon color, another heliotrope, one emerald green, and the other a little of everything. They kept flicking out forked tongues, the way snakes do, and hissing. But those violet eyes were what got you. They gave you the creeps.

The cop outside came in, carrying the latest one he’d caught, a sky-blue one, with purple stripes. Two curbstone naturalists were poking at the little animal and arguing what it could be. In the midst of that, we heard sirens outside and a police patrol car dashed up. A cop got out of the car and came into the restaurant towing a sleepy, bald-headed man, who looked like he hadn’t quite finished dressing.

“Do you see what I see?” the cop with the blue monkey asked him, soon as he was inside, throwing me a wink.

“Did you get me out of bed for a gag?” snapped the bald-headed man, huffy as could be. “It’s a publicity stunt!” And with that he stalked out.

“Fat lot of help that zoo expert turned out to be.” The cop that brought him said. “Stay with it Clancy: the S. P. C. A, wagon’ll be here soon.”

I’d seen all I’d wanted to see, so I blew. Down the street about a hundred feet I began to feel something dragging my shins at every step. It was dark there and I couldn’t see very well, at first, but it felt like I was up to my waist in hairy, palpitating stuff! I could see a lot of little knobs swaying up and down, about the size of baseballs, and each knob had a pair of pearly lights on it. They were dim, dim as glowworms, but there was something scary about it.

I must have yelled, because people came running up behind me, but they stopped some little distance away. As they did, the bobbing balls and the grassy stuff spread out over the street like smoke. The way they heaved up and down and slide sideways at the same time made me sick at the stomach. Then I had a better look. They were spiders! Not the hard-boiled, tough kind of spider, with hair on its chest, but the old-fashioned wiry granddaddy longlegs—except that these must have been all of thirty inches high! I must have been pretty jittery, because the next thing I tried to do was climb a brick wall

I found that was impractical, so I pulled myself together and began to wonder where they came from and what to do about it. They were scattering all over the street then, going away from me, and the other people were backing away from them, yelling.

Presently the emergency track came and the boys tumbled off and started to work on the spiders. They shot a few, but soon quit that. It would have been an all-night business, there were thousands of them. Some of the cops began whanging them with nightsticks, but all a longlegs would do when it was swatted was sag a little, then come up for more. Finally, one of the cops began gathering ’em up by the legs, tying ’em in bundles with wire. The first thing I knew, the whole crowd had joined in and were having a lot of fun out of it. In a little while they had most of them tied up in shocks, like wheat. I never thought I’d live to see the day when they stacked bales of live spiders on the sidewalks of New York, but that’s what they did that night.

A couple of dozen of them got away and went jiggling out into Times Square, with a lot of newsies chasing them. The cops let them corner what were left, because another call had come in. Several, in fact. Strange varmints had popped up in two, or three nearby places. I didn’t know what was happening, any more than anybody else. Some thought a big pet shop had been burglarized and the door left open, and some others thought this and that, but none of it made sense.

I went with the emergency track next to Forty-forth Street, the other side of Eighth Avenue, where a big serpent was reported to be terrorizing the neighborhood. The moment we got there, we saw the serpent, all right. We couldn’t miss it. It was big, and it was luminous! I should say the thing was a hundred or more feet long and a yard thick. It was made of some transparent jelly-like substance, a deep ruby red, but inside we could see its skeleton very plainly and a couple of dogs it had eaten.

The cops tried to shoot it at first, but that was a waste of time. The bullets would go through—you could see the holes for about a minute afterward. Then the holes would close up. Three or four dozen slugs didn’t faze the thing. They tried to lasso it, but that didn’t work either. In the first place, it was slick and shiny, and could wiggle right on through. Besides, the slime seemed to be corrosive. When a rope did stick for a few seconds, it dropped apart, charred shreds.

Next they chopped at it with axes. They picked a place about midway of the snake, or eel, or whatever you want to call it, and went to it, two men on a side. It was like chopping rubber, but they did get it in two. Then the fun began. The after piece sprouted a head, then sheered out and took the other side of the street. Both the original serpent and the detached copy stretched out to full length, and in a few minutes the cops had two snakes to worry about, instead of one.

“Forget the axes,” said the lieutenant “we gotta think of a better one than that.”

It was all very exciting to me, but the main effect it had on the cops was to make ’em sore. They had nearly everything in the world on that wagon in the way of equipment, and none of it any good in a case like that. Finally somebody brought an acetylene torch into action, and that was the beginning of the end. That is, the end of that particular pair of monsters. When the flame hit ’em, the parts just hissed, shriveled up, and disappeared. In a little while there was nothing left of them except the skeletons of the two dogs and some charred meat that hadn’t been digested.

A police inspector drove up in time to see the finish. “I’m glad you boys found the answer.” he said, “because there’s plenty more. Everything the other side of Tenth Avenue is blocked with ’em. Let’s get going.”

“Blocked” wasn’t the word; he ought’ve said “buried.” When we got orer there, we found the fire department and about a thousand other cops already there. The avenue had been cleared, but the first four or five streets above Forty-second were packed in squirming, bellowing, hissing monsters. In some places they filled the street almost to the second story window. Everything that crawls, and a lot more, was all mixed up there. After one look, I knew that gelatin eel was hardly worth remembering. In this jam ahead of me were centipedes a half block long, lizards, snakes, animals that didn’t look real, storybook animals, dragons, griffins, and the like. The firemen had snared a thing built along the general lines of a crocodile, but it was covered with mirror scales instead of the usual kind. It sparkled beautifully whenever it’d thresh around.

The people in the tenements were awake, and taking it hard. The women and children were on the roofs, or upper levels of the fire escapes. The men stayed lower down, some of them poking at the monsters with curtain poles, bed slats, or anything they had. On the avenue side, firemen had ladders up and were taking the people out as fast as they could. Cars and trucks kept rolling up with more men and equipment. I understood they had sent out a general alarm for all the welding-torch equipment in the city. Soon they had lines of flames working into the cross streets.

I watched them burn and slaughter the creatures for a while, but anything gets tiresome. Daylight came and I was getting hungry. I did think of Eddie several times, and wondered how he was making out, cooped up in that old plant. He was entirely cut off from me, probably surrounded by these monsters, but it never occurred to me to worry about him. I knew he had thick brick walls around him, and only one door, and that barred. I broke away and went back to midtown for some breakfast.

While I ate, I looked over the papers. The extras were not out yet, and there was nothing in them except rather facetious, wisecracking accounts of the marmoset and spider episodes. Then I heard somebody say the militia had been called out, and that the police commissioner had set up temporary headquarters in a shack in Bryant Park. I decided that was the place to go to find out what else’d happened besides what I’d seen myself.

They had already built a stockade or corral there, and in it were a number of the monsters that had been taken alive somehow or other. There was a crowd of scientists hanging around, too, and a funny-looking lot they were. I walked through them, admiring the variety of the layout of their whiskers and listening to their shop talk. Some were taking notes and making sketches and were very serious about the whole business. Others were scoffing openly and saying it couldn’t be, there were no such animals. The rest simply stood and looked. I guess they were what you’d call the open-minded ones. One bird had brought his typewriter and was sitting on a camp stool, pecking away to beat the band. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was writing a book. The title was “Phenomenal Metropolitan Fauna.” Pretty good, huh? That’s what I call being a live wire.

I flashed my card on the guard at the headquarters shack, and went in. A clerk was handing the commissioner a phone.

“What now?” I heard the old boy say in a weary tone. Then he threw the phone down and tore his hair. “Pink elephants.” he said, to nobody in particular, and I thought he was going to break down and cry. “Three of them, coming up Forty-second Street.”

“That’s going too far.” said the A. P. man, tearing up his notes. “I’m through. Some Barnum’s putting over the biggest hoax yet. I won’t be a party to it.”

I started to leave. I wanted to see how they handled the elephants. but something new was coming in over the phone, so I waited. That time it was the report about the sea serpent. Uptill then I hadn’t given a thought to the marine aspects of the plague, but I hung on, listening to the details.

A sea serpent had slid into the river a little above the Forty-second Street ferry and turned down the river. The battleship Texas happened to be coming up the stream at the time and sighted it. They did some fast work and got a couple of motor sailers over and began chasing it. I will have to check back the files to find out what became of that sea serpent. My recollection of it is that it got away: dived and disappeared somewhere in the upper bay. But the Texas’ boats stayed with it to the end, and I heard they had a grand time, bouncing one-pounder shot off the thing’s head. It had awful hard scales and they couldn’t dent it. But it must have been timid, because it kept going as hard as it could, and never once tried any rough stuff on the launches. One whack of that tail, and it would have been all over for them.

YOU understand by now, I guess, that those monsters were not really ferocious: they just looked bad. They didn’t bite, most of them, but they’d jerk you into a psychosis if you were the least weak-minded.

I suppose I seem awful dumb, now that we know what it was all about, not to have guessed earlier what was making the plague of monsters. But there was so much happening, and so fast, my brain didn’t work like it ought. I might never have tumbled, if Rags Rooney hadn’t come rushing in, wild-eyed. He had landed an hour before from a transatlantic airplane and had been trying to get to the plant.

“Where’s Eddie?” he fairly panted, grabbing my arm.

“At the plant,” I told turn, “by your arrangement.”

“Can’t you see?” moaned Rags, agonized. “He’s done it again! The plant is the center of this mess, and Eddie’s turning these things out with the Sicco … Psy … never mind, you know. He’s got the horrors, the D. T.’s. like the doctors said he would, if he didn’t lay off. We gotta stop him!”

I dragged Rags over to the commissioner and we finally made him understand. He was not what you’d call a quick thinker, but that day he’d try anything. In a minute we had the Edison substation on the line and were telling them to cut the juice off the plant.

“It’s already off,” a voice said. “The circuit breakers just kicked out, and won’t stay in. They must have had an overload down there, or a short.”

That was the worst possible news.

“Gosh.” I thought. “Eddies already put out a coupla thousand cubic yards of assorted animals since midnight, including three elephants at one crack, without blowing any fuses. What can be coming now?”

The commissioner saw something was up, so he went with us, taking us in his car. We tore down Forty-second, blasting the air with our siren. About a block west we met the elephants coming along, docile enough, some national guardsmen leading ’em. I’d heard of pink elephants all my life, but you’re got to see one to really know. I think it’s the peculiar shade.

We had to park at Eleventh Avenue. There were still plenty of reptiles and minor pests packed around the plant, but flame throwers were slowly cutting their way into them.

The eaves of the plant were still oozing a few small snakes and bats, but the big door was down. The elephants had done that, I suppose. Overhead there were several army and navy planes swooping, machine-gunning the vampires, pterodactyls, and what have you that took to the air. To the side of us, a little way off, were a couple of three-inch field guns that they’d sent down in case something really big and unmanageable should come out.

We heard a big noise down at the plant, and when we looked at it again, we saw the roof begin to rise and the walls to bulge, bricks popping in every direction. Everything fell to pieces, and as soon as the dust cleared away, we were looking at the most gigantic, frightful-appearing thing there ever was, not even barring dinosaurs. It was fat and loathsome and hairy. There was no head, nothing but a gaping red mouth, full of bayonet like teeth, with a ring of octopus tentacles around it. It began groping around with the tentacles and started picking up the small-fry monsters that were within reach. I saw it tuck away a plaid camel with one feeler, while it took a couple turns around a unicorn with another. Then the artillery let loose.

The curator-fellow that was writing the book by the corral had worried his way through the police lines and had been standing close behind us for some time. He pulled me by the sleeve.

“Beg pardon.” he chirped, “but did I understand your friend to say that Twitterly was in there operating a machine by which he could telepathically control chemical changes?”

“Something like that,” I admitted, not wanting to say too much.

“He was a good physicist and chemist too. I am surprised he permitted ethyl alcohol to enter the reaction. It’s a very unreliable catalyst. Tricky, quite.”

Prospectors of Space

Thrilling Wonder Stories, September 1940

NEIL ALLEN called his father. In their cumbersome space suits the two stood in the twilight that passes for day on distant Triton. Their face plates were turned toward the jagged Dolphin Range, where the cabin lights of at least three space ships flickered. A stabbing searchlight streamed down from the leader, probing the frozen wastes below.

Old man Allen’s hand gripped the button of his phone transmitter,.

“Solar Exploitation has come to take over, son. They’re looking for us.”

Neil’s father had foretold this. It meant the end of his career. With the preemption of Triton would come the end of space prospecting. The Metal Trust had already absorbed everything in space. But the Allens had hoped they would be unmolested on faraway Triton.

Working by the light of torches, the twelve members of their crew were slicing away slabs of rhodium. In three days more they would have had a full cargo, a profit at last on the expensive round trip from Neptune to the nearest Solar Exploitation refinery on Callisto.

The first ship of the Exploitation flotilla sighted the little wildcat mining expedition. It settled to the floor of the crater, the two subordinate ships following. Floodlights switched on, the space lock opened, and three men in space suits stepped out.

Old man Allen had been through this little ceremony before. He knew just how helpless he was. In the old days, he and his crews had fought the claim-jumpers on the spot. But the Mining Law stopped that. It pretended to permit prospecting on any “uninhabited planetary body” while it gave monopolist rights to any organization that would colonize and exploit it systematically. He had fought that in the courts, and lost. The Law promoted orderly production, the politicians said, and curbed speculation.

The three strangers arrogantly advanced to the senior Allen and handed him a metal tube. In it was the duly certified eviction notice.

Horvick, General Superintendent of Space Mines, spoke harshly.

“You have your notice, Allen. Call your men and get out. I’m giving you a break with the stuff you already have on board. Legally it’s ours.”

“Yours!” retorted old man Allen bitterly. He knew that one of the men confronting him was a captain of the Space Patrol, sent to enforce the Law in the void. He choked back hot words, wheeled abruptly, ordered his men into the Klondike.

DURING the first week of the long drag back to Earth, the old man maintained a moody silence. There was no point now in unloading at Callisto. They might as well go all the way and get the best price.

The Klondike was a staunch ship, built according to Allen’s own plans thirty years before. Neil Allen had lived aboard her since he was a little tot. He knew the paths among the planets as well as old harbor pilots knew their rivers.

They passed within twenty million miles of Saturn. The old man sat at the starboard lookout port, gloomily eying the beauty of the ringed planet and its spectacular family of satellites. He knew he would never see them again.

Neil fiddled with the instruments. His steady eyes filled with concern for he realized how heavy this last blow had been.

“Neil,” said his father at last. “For my own life, I have no regrets. This Triton business doesn’t matter—I should have retired five years ago. But I did wrong in apprenticing you to a dying trade. All you can do is hire out to Exploitation.”

“Not a chance, after what they’ve done to you.”

“Let’s face facts, Neil! Space prospecting is a thing of the past. As a freelance, I was able to follow my hunches and not have to wrangle with a bunch of Earth-bound directors. You won’t be able to freelance. You’ve learned an obsolete occupation. In my day, there was the whole Solar System to work in. Buck Bowen and I were the first to mine the craters of the Moon. We moved on to Mars, then to the moons of Jupiter.

“That was when they passed the Mining Law. Exploitation came after us. They let us eliminate the poor spots, find out the dangers. But when we started bringing in loads of high-grade stuff regularly, we knew that Horvick and his gang would be along soon. Bowen and I split up after they grabbed Callisto. He thought there was more chance in the planetoid belt. I thought surely they would let me alone around Uranus. Remember our camp on Oberon? They hounded Bowen the same way. One asteroid after another they took from him. The richer ones they towed in bodily, smelted them down entirely. Two years ago Bowen was doing fine with indium ore in the Anterior Trojans. Well, he’s dead now—ruined by Exploitation. You might look up his son, Sam, when you get back. He’s in the same fix you are—educated to be a prospector, with no place to prospect.” The old man bravely tried to tell some anecdote of the old days. He couldn’t finish it. Haggard and worn, he went to his bunk.

Then Neil turned the Klondike’s nose downward to pass beneath the asteroids, the old man handed him an envelope.

“Neil, this is my will. You’ll have the Klondike and this cargo. There’s a little money, too, in the Stellar Trust Company. I don’t know what you’ll do when that’s gone. It ain’t much.”

“Cut it out, Dad. The System still has some unknown corners.”

Allen shook his head. In the last few days he had weakened rapidly. The driving force in his life had been hard work. Neil groped for a suggestion that would renew the old man’s urge to live.

“Dad, you were going up out of the ecliptic some time and look around. When we dump this load, let’s do that.”

“Not me,” Allen answered wearily. “That’s for you and Sam Bowen. Even with new methods it’ll be a gamble. Play safe, Neil. You’re as good at astrogation as you are mining. Get yourself a safe job.”

“That’s out!” declared Neil. “I’m following your lead as long as the old Klondike holds together!”

“Well, if that’s the way you feel, go bring me that diamond-studded meteorite from the drawer of my desk.”

Neil brought him the jagged piece of rock.

“This is what gave me my start in life. Bowen and I found tons of them that had fallen into the craters of the Moon. One summer we saw them, picked them up still hot. Draconids, they call them, and they have never been found anywhere else. That thing is nearly half-pure iridium.” He fondled the aerolite reminiscently. “Maybe this is the answer for you, and for Buck’s boy, too. Only, watch your step. It would break my heart if I thought you made the biggest find of all, and then had that skunk Horvick cash in on it.”

Allen closed his eyes. Neil waited, but the old man had dropped off to sleep. He never woke up.

AFTER his father’s funeral on Earth, Neil Allen wasted no time in the personnel offices of the big companies. There was only one that he knew much about. But the thought of that one filled his heart with bitter rage, a hatred he focused on Horvick, its managing director and principal stockholder. His love of independence, inherited from his father, made him scorn employees as mere robots manipulated by schemers.

Instead, he planned. If tons of Draconids had been picked up on the Moon, there must be billions of them in space somewhere. After he sent a letter to the last known address of Sam Bowen he haunted the Planetarium and the Geological Museum. He made himself familiar with the workings of the Assay Office, the one place in the Solar System where reasonably pure metals could be sold without having to deal with the Metal Trust.

He concentrated on the meteor swarm known as the Draconids, and their related group, the December meteors, out of Scorpio. He learned all that was known on Earth, about their orbits, their frequency, and their composition.

In three weeks his plan was clear. The old Klondike was cradled in the great central bay of the United Sky-yards machine shop; Neil was all over the place, from drafting room to armature shop, checking the details and construction of his two pairs of electromagnets. Then came the work of installing them in the roomy cargo blisters that bulged from the Klondike’s sides. His only helpers were Jim Hathaway, long-time Mate of the Klondike and five other members of the crew who had elected to stick by the ship. For years they had worked on the share basis.

It was in the Klondike that Sam Bowen found Neil the day before the job was finished, Sam’s father’s death had occurred about a year sooner, and he had already spent most of his modest inheritance looking for work. All he had left was the twin sister of the Klondike, Buck Bowen’s old Golconda.

“It’s tough,” Sam declared venomously. “We won’t sell ourselves to the Exploitation outfit, and Transgalactic Spaceways pays practically nothing. They can get all the pilots they want from kids that fall for the ‘See the Universe’ line. So what’s left? Assay Office. That’s loaded to the gunwales with political slickers. We’re licked.”

“Like hell we are,” flared Neil “There’s still a frontier. We’ll do what Columbus did; what the old Forty-niners did, what your father and mine did. We’ll make jobs for ourselves!”

“Yeah?” retorted Sam. “Out around Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti. If they have planets, all we have to do is find a pair of females dizzy enough to marry us, and start out there on our honeymoon. Our kids could do the mining when they got there, and their kids could bring the stuff back!”

“Back down, Sam,” interrupted Neil. “Listen to me. Did you ever happen to think that every explorer and prospector in history has stuck to the plane of the ecliptic? Of course the smart ones duck under the planetoid belt to skip a hammering. Your old man may even have chased a fat asteroid up ten degrees or so. But who really knows anything about what’s above us or under us?”

“We have telescopes, haven’t we?” countered Sam. But he was willing to listen. “Nobody wastes rocket fuel zipping around up there because nothing’s there but a lot of scattered gravel and dust. You couldn’t locate a ton of pay dirt in a million cubic miles. And if you did, it’s hell working in a hail of iron nuggets. Why, out on Ceres—”

“I know, you had double repulsor screens. But do you think you could stand an iridium hail if you had a bucket to catch it in?”

Neil sketched his plan. His father had learned that the meteor streams were really the debris of a defunct comet—Jenkins 368. It had long since disintegrated and scattered over its orbit, which intersected Earth’s at an angle of about eighty degrees. The June and December meteors marked the nodes.

“All we have to do is plow along the orbit and gather ’em in,” concluded Neil. “Not forgetting they are only half iron. The rest is iridium, rhodium, and stuff like that.”

“But my Golconda isn’t fitted with magnets. Where do I come in?”

“As a packhorse. I figure to act as a sort of base ship. If I had to work it alone, I’d trail along until I caught a full load, then break away and come in with it sticking to me. But with you in the game, we can get several loads. You can peel me off every so often, bring a load in and sell it, and then come back for more. That way, we won’t risk losing the swarm.”

“If you ever find it, and there’s anything there.” Sam was still dubious. “Comets are thinner than smoke, even when they’re all together.”

Neil shrugged. “If prospecting was a sure thing, there wouldn’t be any money in it. I know old Jenkins three-sixty-eight is spread out thin, but you can’t laugh off those iridium meteors. If you want to come in, I’ll swap a half interest in my ship for a half in yours. How about a partnership, Sam?”

“Well, it’ll be a lot better than staying grounded.” But a sudden doubt swept Sam’s mind. “If we do clean up, what’s to prevent Horvick from butting in with a fleet of Exploitation ships and sweeping the orbit clean?”

“Time, for one thing,” replied Neil. “He’s still out at Triton. They have no magnet-equipped ships—haven’t even thought of it. If we work fast there won’t be anything left for them.”

The next day the Klondike was ready. But the Golconda was still laid up. Sam would gather his crew and take on fuel and provisions. Neil furnished him with a copy of the coordinates of his proposed trajectory, which he could follow in a week.

Jim Hathaway raised the question of what should be done with the mining gear the senior Allen had used. Neil ordered it all stowed in the cargo blisters. Since the ship’s function was to act primarily as a magnet, the more massive she was, the better she would attract and hold the cosmic litter.

It was already June when Neil took off for the Moon. The Draconids were due to appear in a few days. He preferred to wait on the Moon. With no atmosphere, the visibility was better, and the take-off into the midst of the meteor swarm would be easier against the lesser gravitational pull.

He set the Klondike down in a roomy crater. Employees of the Exploitation company were already there, waiting for the semi-annual shower, to pick up the sky-nuggets as soon as they fell. The lunar manager of the company visited the parked Klondike and growled at them for trespassing on company property.

Neil glibly quoted the law permitting transcient vessels a three-day stay. Since his crew was not mining, the lunar manager could do nothing but walk away, muttering. However, he set a guard over the ship to see that no minerals were picked up.

AS soon as the shower started, Neil closed his hatches and fired his rockets. Along the old comet path he went, picking up speed. He turned on his repulsor screens, keeping a close watch on the needle as it registered the hits of meteors.

Gathering acceleration, he maneuvered corkscrew style, feeling for the center of the stream. When he was receiving the maximum of hits from the rear, he knew he was on the axis of the meteor stream. He straightened out, altering his course slightly from time to time to conform to the ellipse of the orbit.

It was several hours before the pelting from the rear ceased. He cut his rockets and drifted. He had a trifle too much momentum, for now the pelting came from ahead. He was overtaking the sky-gravel.

Cautiously he shot a few measured jets from his bow tubes. He jockeyed the Klondike until she was moving along among the perihelion-bound particles at little more than their own speed.

He swept the space about him with a spotlight. He had expected to sight bits of matter of all sizes floating near him. Instead, all the light revealed was an almost milky haze. Occasionally he caught the glint of reflected light from some tiny object, but the myriad of glistening nuggets he had hoped to see were missing. For space, though, the area about him must be unusually full. Never before, outside the atmosphere of a planet, had he been able to see the beam of his searchlight.

He cut his repulsor screens and started the huge generator. The instant it roared up to full speed, he threw a switch and set up his synthetic gravity field.

It was fully an hour before he noticed any result. He had expected to hear a rain of pellets against the hull, was even afraid that some larger aerolite might come crashing through. He alternated between the lookout ports, staring into space. In the pale beam of the searchlight, all he could see was swirling wisps of milky haze. At intervals a light thud told of a sizeable particle slamming against the skin.

Before long he noticed that the outer rims of the ports seemed to be encrusted with frost. Frost in the void? Impossible! But there it was, silvery, clinging to the port frames and hull. Several inches of ice covered the metal parts, growing swiftly until the glassite panes became opaque.

He raced below and checked his generator panel. Undoubtedly there was a powerful magnetic field all about the ship. He donned a space suit and mounted to the upper lock. When he slid back the outer door, he was almost smothered by the fall of incredibly fine metallic dust. But he shook it off and climbed out on the roof of the ship.

Nothing in his short young life had prepared him for the spectacle that greeted him. Beneath his feet the Klondike appeared like a huge frost-covered watermelon. All about him, illuminated by the beam of the searchlight, was a wan fog through which fell a silvery rain of almost invisible fineness.

He stooped and tried to pick up a handful of the stardust at his feet. But as he lifted his hand, the powder slithered out like smoke caught in a gale. It flew back to the magnetized hull. He noticed that the surface was pock-marked with tiny craters. Even as he looked, a fragment the size of a ping-pong ball whizzed past his head and embedded itself in the silvery dust.

Before Neil went below, he gathered up a bucketful of powder from the floor of the space lock. He and Jim Hathaway analyzed it in their assay booth. It was the same substance that formed the larger Draconids.

Inside the ship there was no way of knowing how thick the adhering matter had become. Usually they would feel the light pattering as they cruised through some thicker portion of the meteor swarm. But that was punctuated at intervals by the heavy jar of some greater chunk hurtling through the void.

At the end of the third day Neil led his men to the space lock. Before they had slid the outer door open two feet, they were half buried by the avalanche from above. Working with scoops and buckets, they had to clear the lock and get the surplus comet debris into the cargo blisters.

The crust on the ship was a couple of yards deep. Neil realized that by the time the Golconda reached them, he and his crew would be hopelessly imprisoned in the nucleus of a fast growing body, adding shell upon shell to itself, like the layers of an onion. He was reluctant to cut off the generator, but this was getting to be too much of a good thing.

Outside the ship, he tried to cut back around the space lock. He had to send some men to clear away the openings of the rocket jets. But the dust was so powerfully gripped by the magnetic field that it acted as if it had been saturated with heavy glue. Even when they succeeded in loosening a shovel-full, it flew back the moment an effort was made to move it.

Neil left the men struggling with the outer crust and went below to the cargo blisters. He clambered over the old mining equipment that filled them. Thoughtfully he stared at the sectional tubing of the old Saturn extension trunk. Then he called Jim Hathaway.

He had found the dismantled shaft his father had used to penetrate the soupy top-soil of Saturn to get at the silurium deposits. The sections were each six feet long and about three in diameter, the ends flanged inward so the segments could be bolted together. Inside were cross pieces that made a ladder when assembled.

It was a troublesome job to adapt the first of the segments to the frame of the space lock door, but they managed it. Adding segments above was simple. By the time they knocked off for the day, eighteen feet of trunk led up through the accumulation of dust and gravel.

“Looks like the funnel on an ancient steamship,” Neil grinned at Hathaway. They stood on the topmost rung of the ladder and hung over the top, looking down at the shining hull. “But it gives us a way to get in and out. There’s enough on here for the night, so let it rain.”

The next day, Neil found the level of the cosmic dust almost to the top of the extension trunk. He made it routine to add another segment every eight hours.

Trying to compute the total amount of his haul, if weighed on Earthly scales, he whistled in astonishment. If they could lay it down at the Assay Office, it would be the most tremendous fortune in the System!

By the time television contact had been made with the approaching Golconda, the Klondike was buried ninety feet deep within a shell of iridium dust.

“Where are you?” Sam Bowen asked, from the television screen in the Klondike’s cabin. “My graviscope says you’re within a few miles, but I can’t see you. I found a swell little asteroid, though. Looks like silver.”

“Okay,” acknowledged Neil with a chuckle, as he realized what the Klondike looked like from a great distance.

“Land on it. I’ll meet you there.”

When they heard the final braking blast of the Golconda, Neil and his men climbed topside to greet the other crew. Sam Bowen stared at the men clambering out of a hole in the ground.

“What happened?” he yelled. “Where’s your ship?”

Neil pointed down. “You’re aboard it. We’ve been gathering ore while we were waiting for you.”

He led Sam to the head of the Saturn trunk and showed him the lights of the cabin glimmering nearly a hundred feet below. Sam’s eyes went round with astonishment.

“Hey!” Sam gulped. “If we land this on Earth, we’re rich! Exploitation will be ruined!”

“Just about,” agreed Neil grimly. “Their mines on the outer planets won’t be worth a dime a dozen. Not with their low grade ore and that long haul!”

THE Golconda’s blister hatches were open, the magnets cut off. Madly the two crews began shoveling the rich dirt into the holds.

Just before the Golconda was ready to shove off on her Earth-bound trip, Neil called Sam aside.

“Here’s a ball of money, all right. But getting it in is going to be a bigger job than I figured on. I’m out of control already. I don’t dare blast a jet. It’d backfire and wipe us all out. The Klondike is practically a celestial body. We’re set on this orbit. For the next four months everything will be swell—until we pass the other node. After that, it’s outer space.

“When you get in, charter some freighters to help you cart the stuff. There are only a couple of hundred feet more of this Saturn trunk. When that’s used up—Well, you can see for yourself that we can’t afford to grow too big.”

“You won’t grow so fast now,” observed Sam. “Think how much more volume it takes to add a yard at this diameter.”

“And think how much more mass I’m getting all the time! It adds to the pull. By the way, when you cash in on this load, drop by the Systemic Stock Exchange. Sell short every share of Exploitation Common you can margin.”

Sam Bowen gasped. “You certainly believe in shooting the works, don’t you?”

“Why not? This is beginning to look like a one-shot proposition. I expect to get more fun out of chopping down that skunk Horvick than out of the money.”

“Maybe so,” admitted Sam. “But Horvick won’t take it lying down. Our dads were pretty foxy, and he cleaned ’em every time. I’m with you a hundred per cent, but he’s got me plenty worried.”

“Trot along and dump this load. I’ll do the worrying while I’m waiting for you to come back. If Horvick tries some funny stuff, I should be ready with the answer.”

During the eight days that the Golconda was absent, the newly formed “Klondikoid,” as the men called it, grew another hundred and fifty feet in radius. It was fast becoming an imposing member of the Solar System. Though it was intolerably hot below, since the hull radiation had been shut off, Neil kept his generator running. The men could take turns on the topside, but the gathering of the iridium must go on.

When the Golconda did return, she returned alone.

“Eight million sols!” Sam shouted ecstatically, waving a sheaf of papers.

He told of his descent to the sky-docks of the Assay Office, how he slid his cargo into the appraising vats, and the assay report. The metal was pure and easily separable by the swift D’Orgmenay process. The worthless iron was washed away, leaving the fifty-three per cent remainder, which proved to be all metal of the platinum group. There was also about half a bushel of small diamonds to each ton of dust.

“Fair enough,” grunted Neil. “What luck did you have chartering ships?”

Sam’s face fell. ‘“Horvick was at the Assay Office when I landed. He nearly had fits when he saw what I’d brought—wanted to know where we were poaching. He had a catalogue of every known body in the System, said they owned all of ’em that had any valuable minerals.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I just said his catalogue needed revision. But when I got out to Sidereal Sky-docks, I found he had taken options on everything that could get off the ground. He must have had a hunch. Anyway, none of the ship-owners could do business with me.”

“You poor fish!” Neil said.“I’ll bet you tipped your hand by selling his stock first,”

“What was wrong with that?”

“Never mind. The eight million wasn’t so bad. Shake a leg now. Get in with another like it.”

Neil smothered his disappointment. A dozen ship loads, more or less, would not more than dent this spheroid. Getting this aggregation of metal to market was going to be a major operation, like towing in an asteroid. But there was plenty of time to consider that. They were still more than a month from perihelion.

After the Golconda had disappeared Earthward, Neil and Jim Hathaway took stock of their situation. There were seven sections of the Saturn trunk still unused—enough to last at the present rate of growth until the Golconda returned. The second day, however, they ran into a cluster of heavier meteorites and had to add two segments within eight hours.

“This is getting out of hand,” said Neil.

He ordered the generator cut off. It made no difference in the rate of accretion. The hull of the Klondike and the surrounding shell of forty-seven per cent cosmic steel had become permanently magnetized by long soaking in the strong field of the electromagnets. The dust and gravel continued to land.

Neil went daily to the topside, to check his position and watch the falling stardust. As he stepped out onto the pock-marked surface of his synthetic planetoid the day the Golconda was due, he gave his usual glance at the Sun.

Around the flaming globe was a magnificent halo of pale light and several parhelia of greenish tinge. Haloes and parhelia in space? There must be an atmosphere of sorts here. He looked at the sky back of him. Another pale, shapeless area of light marked by a solid black spot, glowed diametrically opposite the Sun.

He looked from it to the Sun and back again. The dark hole was obviously a shadow thrown by the “Klondikoid.” But a shadow set-off from a luminous sky was an absurdity in the void. The amazing sight held him, despite the constant hazard, of the missiles flicking about his feet… The sky away from the Sun was taking on a brighter tone. He saw that the brilliant part was roughly annular, covering nearly half the field of his vision. It was not until then that he noticed its source.

Like snow whipped by a gale from the crest of a drift, powdery metal of almost molecular fineness was flowing along the tangential rays of the Sun that swept the shadow edge of his planetoid. Rather, they were flung away in vigorous straight lines, as moonbeams fall. The light pressure was tearing at the finer particles and sending them flying into space! That vague light must be visible for untold miles!

Neil’s heart thumped at the full realization of his position. His Klondike, buried beneath him, had reassembled the ingredients of the scattered Jenkins 368. That ancient comet had been reborn. The incredibly fine dust hurtled along by the light waves of the Sun was its new-grown tail! Then the halo and parhelia Sunward must be the illuminated other edge of the debris stream.

He made sure of his observations, then scuttled down the trunk and ran to the televisor to call the Golconda. Seconds seemed hours before he succeeded in raising the anxious face of Sam Bowen.

“How far away are you?” he demanded.

“Pretty close—about half a million miles,” responded Sam. “But what about the comet? Is it anywhere near you?”

“Near me?” yelled Neil. “Hell, I’m it! What do we look like?”

Bowen shook his head.

“I can’t make you out yet. But there’s a fine bright head, about ten degrees toward the Sun from where I think you are. The fanciest thing you ever saw in tails is running straight the other way for millions of miles.”

“That’s all I want to know. Get down here. I’ll let you have a ringside seat—smack on top the nucleus!”

Ten hours later the Golconda was resting on the “Klondike.”

“Too bad you can’t see yourself,” Sam said. “From a distance it looks like you were melting, being blown straight down to the nadir of everything.”

“One way to get comet experience,” grinned Neil, “is to build one. Or rebuild one. But how did you make out with your last load?”

“Same price. I caught ’em with a posted price, and they had to pay it. But they took the sign down while I was there. Said the next lot would have to be cheaper. Same with the diamonds. Down at the Stock Exchange, I ran into Horvick again. He’s sore as hell, shouted that we’re riding for a fall. His stock flopped twenty points as soon as I was reported landing at the Assay Office. But I sold some more. We’re over a million shares short now.”

“Good work. Next time you go in, make a deal with Ecliptic Salvage Company for space tugs to pull me in. That’s the only way we can do it.”

“Phew!” whistled Sam. “That runs into money. Pop and I dragged a little asteroid down to Mars one time. The tugmasters collected a million sols a day.”

“So what?” demanded Neil. “You’ve already collected sixteen millions for a few parings off this ball. Even at a tenth the selling price, we can’t lose.”

THE day after the Golconda left, they ran into a fresh cluster of meteorites. Neil and his crew coupled on the last segment of the Saturn trunk—and two others they improvised out of sheet metal. The second day there was no choice but to move onto the topside and set up a space camp. They brought up provisions, air flasks, batteries, and material for a screen against the falling meteors. They made ready for a siege against the rigors of the void. Neil was not particularly surprised, a day later, to see the oncoming lights of a group of space ships. The leader probed downward with his searchlight, landed, and the space lock opened. Helmeted figures approached, the foremost one carrying a metal tube. Exploitation had come to take over. Jim Hathaway drew his space gun suggestively, looking at Neil.

“Take it easy,” said Neil. “This bandit robs with the Law behind him. That’s the weapon we’ll use this time. His own racket—in reverse!”

“Which of you is Neil Allen?” It was Horvick’s grating voice.

“I am,” answered Neil. “And I order you to leave my ship at once.”

“Your ship?” snarled the other. “We passed it yesterday. That will be the last load you get away with. Here is the proclamation. Now take your men and get out!”

Horvick flung curt orders to his flagship captain.

Neil turned to the commander of the Space Patrol who had landed with Horvick.

“I appeal to you in the name of the Law. This man has no right to put me off my ship into the void.”

“Another space-bug,” sneered Horvick, tapping his helmet. “You’d better take him in, Captain. Turn him over to the psychopathic division.”

The captain led Neil, protesting his rights, into the police cruiser. Jim Hathaway was cursing vigorously, but Neil silenced him with a nudge. He had just overheard Horvick issue orders to have a fleet of space tugs sent out.

“This comet is pure stuff. We’ll tow it in just as it stands. What a haul!” Horvick was pleased with himself.

ON the day the group of tugs hauling the Jenkins comet was reported, the field west of the Assay Office was crowded. The whole population had turned out to witness the unprecedented landing of a comet nucleus on Earth for smelting. On a balcony of the Government Building, Neil Allen also stood watching the handling of the silver spheroid by the Metal Trust tugs. With him, besides Sam Bowen and Hathaway, were an astronomer, an astrogation engineer; the judge of the Court of Interplanetary Equity, and the High Commander of the Space Patrol.

The glittering ball was eased down until it was a scant three thousand feet above the bins beyond the Sky-docks.

Eight tugs hovered about it, gripping it with their magnetic rays. The time had almost, come for the nethermost pair of tugs to let go and get out from under. Neil was talking to the man beside him.

“It’s nothing but dust, finer than the finest flour. All that holds it together is the residual magnetism in my ship. In a moment you will see what I mean. The attraction was sufficient to hold it together in space. It’s comparatively nothing here in the face of Earth’s gravity.”

The two lower tugs began moving out. In another moment they would cast off and dart away. The comet was a thousand feet up, lowering gently.

“Piracy is a grave charge,” observed the judge. “If your contention is correct, Horvick must pay you five times the value of ship and cargo. He may be liable to a prison term besides. I trust your complaint is not a frivolous one. It will cost you dearly if it is.”

A tremendous gasp, like a rising breeze, broke from the crowd. The two tugs were free, sliding away to the sides. From the bottom of the silvery sphere, tons of shimmering powder cascaded to the ground. No longer held back by the magnetic grip of the tugs, Earth’s gravity now had hold of it, ripping it away. For a moment, nothing could be seen but the cloud of metallic dust, surging upward in recoil as the scintillating rain struck the ground.

The crowd pressed frantically back to escape the torrent of iridium dust.

But even in their anxiety, men kept their faces turned skyward. The rumor had spread that Neil Allen had accused Horvick of robbing him of his ship and cargo in the void. Horvick had sent Neil back to Earth under guard, charged with lunacy, The Metal Trust had few friends in that throng.

“There she is!” cried Neil triumphantly.

On the field the crowd was cheering wildly. In mid-air, where a moment before the “comet” had been, hovered the rusty old Klondike, a few hummocks of stardust still clinging to her sides. Thirty thousand witnesses had seen the veteran ship drop her cargo into the bins of the Assay Office. Now she was in plain sight of all, firmly held by the grapnels of the Corporation’s tugs.

Exploitation—had been exposed at last. Here was piracy, and no man could deny it.

“This’ll break Horvick and his company,” observed the astrogation engineer.

“That’s what I figured,” said Neil happily. He patted the book he had almost worn out on his trip down the comet orbit—the “Revised Statutes of the Spaceways.” Then he spoke soberly to Sam Bowen, “I guess this squares things for our dads. Too bad they’re not here to see it.”

“Maybe they are,” said Sam, with a gulp.

In His Own Image

Unknown Worlds, Janury 1941

FOR ALL THEIR bold and swaggering walk, there was something indefinitely furtive about the two men. Perhaps it was because one of them kept looking over his shoulder, or it may have been because the other kept sidling up to him as if better to conceal the suspicious bulge under his sailor’s jacket.

They stopped at Market, with Howard Street and its flophouses and hiring halls behind them, and here they waited for the traffic lights to change with that sort of mingled bewilderment and contempt that marks the seaman afoot in the heart of a great city. Traffic stopped and they struck on. In a few minutes they were climbing the low hill that leads to San Francisco’s tawdry and synthetic Chinatown.

“’Tis behind Low Hing’s joint,” said the less stocky of the two—the crooked-nosed fellow wearing the cap of a mate. “So said that remittance man I talked with at Noumea.”

“Aye,” grunted the captain.

They turned into a side street and presently stopped at an alley mouth. The captain glanced about, then led the way into the rough-cobbled canyon. Its dingy brick walls were plastered with tattered posters of red covered with black Chinese characters. From above and to the left came the squeal and clatter of Chinese music, and the occasional boom of a temple gong. In the inner court they found there were doors giving access to rickety staircases.

At the top of the first dusty flight the captain kicked a China boy out of his way with a heavy curse, then turned to find the second stairs. On the third floor there was no sign of life, only a trash-littered narrow hall more appropriate to a long-abandoned house. But at one end of it there was a door, and across its flimsy panels was the crudely scrawled sign in peeling paint:

IDOLS, AMULETS and CHARMS

Bought, Sold and Exchanged.

The captain did not hesitate, but thrust the door open. A high-pitched bell tinkled within, and the two men found themselves confronting an ancient counter backed by bare shelves. Farther behind, half concealed by a dirty cotton curtain, half drawn, a bald-headed, bearded old man sat on a stool. In his lap was a grotesque wooden image, and he appeared to be lost in the study of certain strange scribblings incised in its base. All about him stood other monstrous and distorted figures—of wood, of bronze, of stone. They were of all sizes and shapes. There were multiple-armed and many-eyed ones, with faces that scowled or grinned abominably. Some were animal-headed, but all were loathsome and abounded in obscene detail.

If the proprietor of the queer shop heard the bell or the heavy-footed entry of the two seafaring men, he gave no sign of it. He continued to pore over the inscriptions on the lewd figure he was holding.

“Well?” snarled the captain, drawing forth his paper-wrapped bundle and setting it down on the counter with a bang. The old man took a full minute before he turned his head and shot a cold and indifferent glance toward his callers. Then he laid aside the idol he had been studying and came slowly to the counter. He fixed a pair of glittering eyes on the hard, scarred face of the captain, then waited.

“You make gods?” inquired the seaman, and mentioned as reference the name of a malodorous character known from Paumoto to the Gulf of Huon. The leathery skin of the captain was almost black from a lifetime’s exposure to the tropic sun.

The ancient shopkeeper threw back his head and laughed, cynically and with pointed scorn. The master of the auxiliary schooner Lapuu scowled.

“Men make their own gods,” cackled the old man after a pause. “It is faith that does it.” He resumed his probing of the hard, salt-bitten faces before him. Then he let his eyes drop and touch for a moment the package on the counter. “But,” he added, “sometimes, if the pay is right—and I choose—I cut a statue.”

THE captain of the Lapuu tore the wrappings from the parcel he had brought. What he revealed was unspeakably hideous, the creation of some drug-maddened savage—a stone monstrosity with a double head that bore but a single eye. Its many pairs of arms gestured variously, beseechingly, threateningly, and otherwise in ways, that had best not be told. There was a vital cruelty about the thing that was shocking.

“We want one like that, only bigger and better,” said the captain.

The dealer in idols studied the frightful creation and noted the shape and depth of the offering bowl that the fiendish figure held in its all but nethermost pair of hands.

“This is a very evil thing,” muttered the old man, picking up the small statue and turning it over and over in his hands. His manner of handling the vile object was familiar yet cautious, as those wise in the ways of serpents handle venomous snakes. “It has been stolen, too.”

“Aye, no doubt,” said the captain hastily, “but not by me.”

As he spoke, the memory leaped into his brain of the little sloop falling away astern of the Lapuu, and of the white man in it, lying face up to the staring sun of the South Sea, and of the fresh red gash under his chin and cheeks, and more of the same red splashing on the grating beneath him, A stranger, that man had been. He had come alongside pleading huskily for water and holding out a handful of pearls as the price he was willing to pay for it. And the captain remembered also the quarrel he had with his mate—the former one, not this dumb pick-up at his side—over the division of the spoils. The mate claimed that having done the dirty work, he was entitled to a full share of the profit. That mate had died that same night in a way not accurately stated in the log.

“I came by it by inheritance, so to speak,” explained the captain, without the alteration of a single line of his granite face, and all the time gazing hard with his steely eyes into the piercing stare of the other. “But I know, from my knowledge of such things, where it came from, and I mean to return it. Those who once owned it are many and unforgiving. They will demand tenfold if I am to have their friendship. That is why I must take back a really first-class god—one with a brilliant eye, not a bit of glass, and with silver and jade ornaments, and of ebony, not cheap red stone like this.”

“I tell you, I make no gods,” snarled the surly old man. “People do that for themselves.” He pushed the small idol away from him, but his eyes continued to bore into the ruthless face across the counter from him. The captain smiled faintly. Then he pulled a chamois bag from a pocket and loosened the string at its throat.

“Let that be as it may be,” he said softly. “Let us call it a statue, then, but it must be four feet high and of such materials as I have mentioned.”

“You have asked it,” stated the old idol maker, dropping his eyes as if satisfied with his scrutiny. He shot one swift glance at the crooked-nosed mate, then held out his hand toward the captain, palm up.

The captain silently began counting out pearls into the outstretched hand of the dealer in outlandish gods. A score the old man took, of the finest, before he closed his fingers and signified it was sufficient.

“My work,” muttered the craftsman, “will be done one week from Friday. The rest you must do yourselves.”

“Bah!” snorted the captain, and turned on his heel, beckoning the mate to follow. They thundered down the stairs and out into the filthy court.

Above them, in the workshop of the idol vender, the old craftsman was pottering among his tools and chuckling as he poked about. There was a gleam of strange satisfaction in those eyes that could see more than was meant for them. He selected a choice chunk of ebony and laid it to one side.

“Ah, a masterful man, that captain! Gods or statues, it is all one to him.” He picked up a mallet and a small chisel and went to work. “But the gods, in their own way,” he mused, “are just.”

THE Lapuu, as befitted her business, was small. The cargo she sought was compact and of great value, and often lay behind thunderous reefs of wave-swept shoals. There were but four in her crew, Kanakas all, and each voyage saw new faces. There were whispers in the islands concerning the high mortality on the tiny trader, but in certain waters men do not speak too openly about things. It is unwise to make charges without proof, and things are hard to prove without witnesses. Though many Kanakas—and mates—had shipped, first and last, on the little Lapuu, no man knew of his own knowledge of a single one who had been paid off. In none of the archipelagos could a man be found who had sailed in the Lapuu.

When San Francisco lay twenty-eight days astern, the captain had a certain crate brought from the hold. The installation of the newest embodiment of the Great Spirit of Tana Lipa on a sort of throne in the cabin shared by the two whites was the captain’s own idea. Whether the cowing of the crew was part of the idea is something that only the captain could have told. At any rate, as the packing and dunnage fell away, the Kanakas fled howling to the fo’c’s’le and huddled there, whimpering, despite the angry orders and kicks showered on them by the mate. One set up a singsong monologue of propitiation.

“You’ll have to finish the job yourself, mister,” remarked the captain dryly from the low poop. “They’re scared of the brute.”

If the idol’s prototype had seemed malevolent, its enlargement exuded fiendishness unspeakable. If those who hold that art is the statement of the quintessence of things are right, then the maker of that ugly figure must be reckoned as among the great masters. For unmistakable greed, lust, and sadism fairly glowed in the sensual lines and masses of the ebony torso and in the postures of the multipaired arms and legs. Some of the hands held weapons, some were clinched as if in anger, others beckoned, while some struck out with clawed talons. Yet the trunk and its unholy appendages were but accessories to the whole, topped as it was by that bifurcated head bearing its single ominous, commanding eye. Smoldering, implacable hatred and insatiable desire, if human terms may be employed in the description of an expression so inhuman, was what that leering, glassy eye conveyed. Even the mate shuddered as he beheld it when he drew back from having driven home the last screw that secured it to its new pedestal. He carefully shut the door before ascending to the poop.

The mate soon had reason enough to hate that repulsive idol even as it appeared to hate him. Fat Tom, the cabin boy and cook, steadfastly refused to enter the cabin after he had looked once upon the monstrous figure and fled, gibbering, out into the waist. Neither curses nor flogging nor threats of punishment more dire could induce him to set foot again inside. The upshot of it was the mate had to make the bunks and serve the meals himself. And as if that were not enough, the hitherto even tenor of their leisurely voyage began to be interrupted. Little things happened, none of them of great moment, but each adding to his growing irritation.

The steady, even breeze that had wafted them along so smoothly died. In its place came days of dead calm, punctuated by sudden squalls that seemed to come from nowhere and go as quick whence they had come. The crew worked sullenly and apathetically, as if they already knew the ship was foredoomed and that nothing that anyone did could be of use. Blocks jammed unaccountably, and running gear, even the newest and best stuff, parted without cause or warning. The compass card wandered at random in the binnacle until the captain himself cursed it heartily and thereafter had to depend upon the stars when he could see them.

But it was the mate who, as these accidents persisted, more and more often cast worried, surreptitious glances at the horrid creation squatting on its fantastic pedestal against the bulkhead. One night as he and the captain ate in dogged silence, the mate felt he could endure it no more. In a half-strangled voice he blurted out, “That thing gives me the creeps! It wants something!” and the captain laughed harshly and cursed him for being a superstitious fool. The mate, thus reproved and secretly ashamed of his momentary fear, kept his mouth shut thereafter. Like his captain, it had been his boast that he feared neither devil nor man. But though he could control his tongue, he could not altogether quell the uneasness within him. It was all very well, he would say to himself, that these accidents are coincidences, but—

“Pah!” sneered the captain, as if aware of his thoughts. “A thing, a doll—no more—made by a doddering numskull in a dive in ’Frisco! ’Tis a toy with which to swindle stupid savages. Think  of the pearls we’ll get, man. Will not that pay for all your silly tooth chattering and the extra work you gripe about?”

But after that, the captain, too—when no one was looking—would stare thoughtfully at the ugly statue. A thorough scoundrel, he had never been permitted to live long in any one country. Consequently he had sojourned in many places and he had seen and scoffed at many such puppets, whatever their form. In this country they worshiped such and such a symbol, in that, another, but to his mind it all came to the same thing. Mankind, he thought—and his lip curled in scorn—were the gulls of priests.

Yet even as he sneered in the fullness of his contempt, a vague apprehension shook him. Unreasoning fools though he thought those others were, a wave of doubt suddenly rippled through him and his spine tingled just a little bit as he gazed into that single baleful eye. Could it be that after all there was something in this priest business? So many millions—

THERE came a night when the wind howled and the schooner plunged frantically about in a raging sea. But it was not so bad a night that the mate could not carry on alone, so he clung to the wheel on the wind-swept poop and held the Lapuu on her course as best he could, trusting that the scrap of a staysail would stay on her. Below, in his bunk, the captain lay and idly watched the play of light in the cabin as the fitful lightning crackled outside. He was tired, for the day had been a hard one, and he dozed from time to time, but the jerky motion of the tiny ship and the violence of the thunder made sound sleep impossible.

It was on his second or third awakening that he first noted the horrid glintings in the eye of the image, and his heart froze within him. With his eyes fairly starting from their sockets, he sat bolt upright in his bunk and stared. He would have sworn that he knew the trick of that cleverly designed eye—a ball of rose quartz cunningly hollowed at the back to admit the insertion of small emerald and diamond chips. But no! Now it was a thing of living fire, pulsating, opalescent fire; the eye of a fiend, fixed upon him with a malignant intentness that chilled him to the bone.

And then the cruel arms began to weave about in a devilish rhythm that set his pulses pounding. He tried to tell himself it was the shadows dancing, but as the last flash of lightning died he saw there were no shadows. The frightful creature gleamed with an unholy radiance all its own. And as he looked, the hideous idol seemed to grow until it loomed gigantic and menacing and filled half the tiny room. That, and what followed, drove the captain shrieking, clambering, clawing out into the storm.

The mate, his drawn face thrust into the whipping rain, clung to the rail above and stared wild-eyed into the storm-racked sea. In the lulls in the fanfare of thunder he had heard the whimperings in the cabin below, but it was that ultimate soul-chilling scream of his captain that bereft him of the shred of sanity left him. Now they were mocking, taunting voices in the winds; the scudding clouds were monsters—appalling, gesturing shapes barely glimpsed in the flickering light. The howling tempest was itself an evil entity, implacable and furious, bellowing harsh threats. The mate strained, listening, and did not know his hair was whitening.

Once, in a dazzling burst of electric fire, he caught sight of his captain, crawling forward on hands and knees, and heard him whining like a whipped dog. Again a lightning flash revealed him farther forward, crouching beside the little shack improvised of battens, fumbling with the door that kept their few remaining animals penned in. The mate averted his eyes and stared stonily at the wild ocean. In his own agony, it was nothing to him if the Malign One chose to make a beast of his skipper. Let him go and live with the goat and the chickens if that was the Great Spirit of Tana Lipa’s will. In dealing with that black, one-eyed devil, each must make what bargain he could.

THE dawn came at last, gray and blustery, but there followed shortly a marked abatement of the gale. To the astonishment of the mate the captain suddenly appeared at the top of the ladder, hard and swaggering as was his customary carriage.

“Get forward, mister, and set more sail,” he ordered curtly. Then he turned, as if he had forgotten all about the Lapuu, and began gazing ahead as if lost in a rosy dream. The mate, frozen faced and unspeaking, stumbled forward to rout out the cowering crew.

Later, when his work was done, some weird fascination drew him irresistibly toward the cabin. The captain, lost in reverie, did not appear to be aware of his coming aft, or of his going down into the cabin under him.

The mate entered the chamber of horrors with fear and trembling, but the mysterious force that drew him was so compelling that he could do no other. It was some time before he could bring himself to lift his eyes to the hideous image that sat enthroned there, but when he did he began to understand why the deck of the cabin was strewn with blood-tipped feathers. With a thrill of horror, he looked upon the litter of bloody fragments that almost filled the bowl clutched by that all but nethermost pair of vile hands. He saw the torn entrails heaped there and the small heart that adorned the apex of the nauseous heap of offal, and the first full blast of terror seized him. Despairing, he raised his eyes until he met the steady, insatiable gaze of that awful glittering eye. It was then that it was his turn to cry out and prostrate himself before the lewd demon in the manner he thought would be the most pleasing to it.

“I will, O Great One, I will!” he whimpered. “Time—give me a little time. I did not know.” And he fell to sobbing.

But outside, in the bracing sunshine and the mild breeze that had succeeded the gale, the shuddering mate regained some control of himself. He glanced uneasily aft to where the captain still stood, looking ahead as if in a trance. The mate hesitated. It was all so unreal—he must have dreamed—he must not—

“Who knows?” he suddenly whispered to himself as he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. “There is no harm in playing safe.” And he went on forward, thinking of how to get the goat into the cabin without being noticed by the captain.

Hours later he climbed anew to the poop. He was calmer then—not serene, but at least at something like peace with himself and his diabolical master below. He slid noiselessly to his place by the taffrail and thoughtfully regarded the red caked under the ends of his broken fingernails, then he looked up at the back of his captain’s head.

“After all, it was only a chicken’s heart he gave,” he muttered hoarsely, and he looked upon the master of the Lapuu with an emotion that was not far from pity.

The day wore on without incident. Though the gate to the animal pen yawned open for all to see, and no animal appeared on deck, neither of the two white men noticed it. Or if they noticed, they did not see fit to speak of it. After the first exchange of words in the morning, neither spoke to the other, nor appeared to see.

But night came, and it was the captain’s turn to stand the first watch. The mate, fearing to profane the temple the cabin had now become, slept elsewhere—well forward, on deck, abreast the foremast. To his astonishment, the fresh dawn found him where he had laid his mattress the night before. The captain had not called him for the midwatch!

He sat upright and called for Fat Tom and coffee. But there was no answering cry or patter of feet. He looked forward to where the crew hung out, but there were only three men there—the deckhands. Fat Tom must be aft. The mate got up and walked toward the poop, calling again for the unseen cook.

As he approached he saw the captain standing with his feet widespread and glaring at him with his old-time arrogance.

“Get your own breakfast,” snarled the captain.

“I want Fat Tom,” persisted the mate. Why should this mad captain be permitted to bully him so? Hadn’t he, the mate, sacrificed a goat instead of a chicken? By rights, he should be captain of the ship, if favor counted.

“Go get him, then,” he said, waving an arm back toward the foamy wake. “He’s back there.”

On the instant the mate’s appetite for food was gone. Sullenly and almost blindly he mounted to the poop and took the wheel. He watched with vicious envy as the captain blustered forward, storming and cursing the natives who scurried ahead of him, trying to elude his blows. The mate knew he had been beaten, outwitted. He had snatched one peaceful night—the first in many—and now he must go back to the other way, the way of anxiety and dread and nameless fears. He had been outbid. First chicken, then goat, now man! That was the utmost. The captain was the favorite.

For half an hour the captain raved and swore up forward, and every minute of that half-hour saw the mate’s despair grow blacker. In the end it became absolute. Nothing—not anything—could be worse. Life was unbearable. The mate slipped a quick lashing on the wheel, and like a ghost vanished down the ladder.

It was indeed an angry god he looked upon. The bowl was heaped high and overflowed with dreadful things, but the idol still sat with unsated stare. It had a satisfactory offering, it was true, but only from one man. There lived others under his spell. The single flashing, bloodshot eye seemed to drill the mate through and through. He fell to the deck and groveled, mumbling and begging to be told what he should do. After a long time his moans ceased, and he rose stiffly, like an automaton.

“White it shall be,” he said between his teeth.

The captain’s resolute, overbearing stride could be heard outside, each step louder than the one before. He was coming aft. The mate stood just inside the door, his weapon ready in his hand. On the fo’c’s’le three dark-skinned men set up a mournful chant, swelling louder and louder as they sang.

4½B Eros

Planet Stories, Spring 1941

“MAKEE chop chop. Kwei! Kwei!”

The two Venusian coolies squatted down between the shafts and with one quick motion elevated the sedan chair to shoulder height. Then they started off in a lazy run through the torrential downpour, splashing mud right and left as their sturdy yellow legs struck into the watery line of muck that passes for a road in Venusberg. Captain Hank Karns, the Lone Trader, sank back in his seat and watched idly with mild blue eyes as first one grass hut and then another appeared momentarily through rifts of rain. There would be time enough to worry about Cappy Wilkerson’s plight when he reached the administration building and found out more about the charges against him. No doubt it was just another shakedown, the effort of some minor official to pry loose a little more than the customary cumshaw.

Captain Karns had berthed his own old trading tub not an hour earlier and as he registered the arrival of his Swapper he noted that under the date of three days before there was the entry: “Wanderer, Captain Wilkerson, en route Mercury to Luna.” After it was the notation in red: “Detained by order Collector of the Port; captain in custody.”

Hank Karns thoughtfully pawed his long white beard. Cappy Wilkerson was a careful and upright man and a lifelong friend; what manner of charge could they have trumped up against him? That they were trumped up he took for granted, for the local government of autonomous Venus was notoriously corrupt and always had been. The Venusians themselves were the descendants of coolies brought centuries before from tropical Asia. They took little or no interest in government. Politics had, therefore, fallen into the hands of white adventurers, most of whom lived on Venus for the very good reason they were not wanted elsewhere. The Central Council of the loose Interplanetary Federation seldom interfered with them unless for acts so flagrant as to affect the Federation as a whole.

The old space merchant left his chair at the courtroom and squeezed through the crowd at the back just in time to hear the whack, whack, whack of the gavel marking the end of the trial. Standing defiantly in the prisoner’s box was Cappy Wilkerson, his eyes flashing and his iron-gray mane thrown back. He looked like an indignant old lion brought to bay by a pack of jackals. The judge, a young man with a monocle and a stiff black pompadour, was dressed in a smart military uniform which made him appear anything but judicial. He was biting out his words as if what he was saying was inspired by personal venom.

“I have heard all you have had to say, including your filthy imputations as to the integrity of this court. Your guilt is so apparent that we need not trouble even to preserve the record of your silly and malicious allegations. …”

Here the judge contemptuously tossed a sheaf of papers into a wastebasket.

“Therefore, bearing in mind not only your guilt but your contumacious conduct before me, I sentence you to five years at hard labor in such a one of our prison camps as the Director of Welfare and Beneficence may select.

“It is further directed that your ship, together with its illicit contents, be confiscated and sold at public auction in order to defray the cost of these proceedings. Marshal! Take him away,”

Hank Karns was on his feet at once, elbowing and pushing his way forward through the departing throng of curiosity-seekers. His voice was shrill with indignation.

“Hey, you can’t do that!” he yelled. Officials closed in on him at once, and the judge’s face grew red with anger. “This is a court of law,” he said, “and the decisions of the presiding judge are final. Now get out before I hale you up for contempt.”

“Tarnation damn!” muttered Hank Karns as he turned and left the building. This was no ordinary shakedown. This called for action, and quick action, for it was unthinkable that his buddy should be carted off to the insect-infested, fever-ridden, infamous Great Swamp of Venus. White men lived but a few months there; a year, let alone five years, was as good as life.

A bulletin caught his eye, and as he read it he gasped. The paste that fastened it to the board was still wet, but the paper bore characteristics of printed type. It must have been prepared at least a day ago. It read:

COLLECTOR’S SALE

One confiscated tube ship, the Wanderer, complete with fittings. The cargo of the same consisting of miscellaneous trade goods. Saturday. Inquire at Collector’s Office for details.

“Phew!” gasped Hank Karns. “That was quick work. And planned.” He turned and made his way to the Collector’s Office.

The man at the front desk gaped at him woefully.

“‘S’already sold,” he said indifferently, the third time Karns put his question.

‘“But it says Saturday …”

“Okay—it says Saturday. So what?”

“B-but this is only Tuesday. …”

“We have a Saturday every week, dodo. Now trot along and annoy somebody else for a change. I have work to do.”

Hank Karns blinked. Why, Saturday was the day the Wanderer docked. These Venusians were getting raw. They must have sold her that very day I

“Who is that old man? Throw him out!”

Karns turned slowly and viewed the new speaker. He was a big man, with piercing black eyes and a hawk nose, and heavily bearded—a strange sight for super-tropical Venus where men kept clean shaven for coolness. But the man turned abruptly away and entered an inner office, slamming the door behind him. Hank Karns’ eyes followed him all the way—they were fixed on the back of the fellow’s neck. There, oddly enough, just above the shoulder line, peeped a line of color demarcation. Above the line, which was made visible by the fact that its wearer had pulled open his collar for comfort, the skin was the normal pallor usually seen on Venus; below, it was a mottled chocolate color.

“Didja hear what the collector said?” snarled the clerk. “Scram!”

Without a word. Hank Karns turned and left the office. He passed through the thronged corridors almost in a daze. There was Cappy Wilkerson, gone to the Swamp, virtually condemned to death. There was his ship sold, even before the trial which was to condemn it. And everywhere there was high-handed insolence, seemingly inspired by this overbearing man with the duplex complexion. What did it mean? And the fact that he could not yet place those sharp eyes and that predatory nose, though somewhere, sometime, he had encountered them before, puzzled Hank Karns still more. Something stank in Venus.

AN hour later he sat morosely in a tiny tavern he had long known, hidden up the blind alley known as Artemis Lane. For half a century it had been familiar to him as the hangout for his kind.

“So you see how it is,” the bartender was concluding. “At this rate there won’t be any more. With all the old-timers dead or in the Swamp, how in hell can I keep running. No sir, this joint is for sale—for what it’ll bring. Drink up and have another.”

Captain Karns took the proffered drink from the grizzled tavern-keeper, but despite its cheering nature—for it was purest “comet-dew”—he took it glumly. Never in all his long and active life had he heard so much evil news at one sitting. Another of his old pals had come to grief, and all because he had touched at Mercury. Mercury, it appeared, was poison to all his tribe. The record was too consistent to be accounted for by coincidence. Coincidences do not occur in strings.

“And what makes it stink ain’t the worse,” persisted the indignant bartender, bitterly, “not a damn finger is lifted to stop the flow of trilibaine. The town is lousy with it. Half these natives stay hopped up all the time.”

“I thought the Federals had cleaned that up ten years ago,” commented Hank Karns.

“It’s back,” was the laconic retort.

Hank Karns said nothing. The fact that three of his buddies were languishing in the malarial swamps of Venus, continually subject to the indignities of brutal guards was uppermost in his mind. And besides that, two others—Bill Ellison and Jed Carter—had died on Mercury when their ships mysteriously blew up on take-off. That too had an especial significance, for those two were the only members of the trader tribe who had any sort of reputation as fire-eaters. In their youth, of course, all of them had been bolder and more truculent, but as they gained in experience they learned that there is more to be gained by soft words than bluster. If Hank was to secure the release of his friends it must be by guile, the use of a cunning superior to that employed by their common enemies.

If he was to secure! There was no if about it. He must. For it was Bob Merrill and Ben Wilkerson who had once rescued him, Hank Karns, from an even more deadly situation. More than twenty years ago that had been, on far-off lo, and Hank Karns winced at the memory of it. On that occasion he had, through the machinations of the notorious Von Kleber gang, been convicted and sentenced as a pirate. Ten hateful and horror-filled days and nights he had spent in the mines of Sans Esperance, the Federal Penitentiary, digging radioactive ores. Two of his friendly competitors heard of it and plead for a new trial wherein it was shown that he had been sent up through perjured testimony to screen the trial of the real culprits, The wave of public opinion they started then did not subside until Von Kleber and his outlaws were put finally behind bars.

No, there was no choice, Cappy Wilkereson and Cappy Merrill must be released and Ellison and Carter avenged. How? That remained to be seen.

“Wa-al,” drawled Hank Karns, elaborately, now that his mind was made up, “I’ll be seein’ you. I’m taking a little trip into Mercury and back.”

The bartender shook his head ominously.

“No fool like an old fool,” he said, and he didn’t laugh.

In the rain-lock, or the vestibule outside the bar, Karms stopped. He felt inside the lining of his vest and after much fumbling produced a dog-eared memorandum book. He ran through the yellowed pages until he found one covered with cryptic entries. They appeared as if made long ago, but several interlineations in various colored inks showed that amendments had been made from time to time since the original writing of them.

Halfway down was the group P2, and what followed had been twice changed. The line that stood in lieu of them read: “Veg—wickerware—4½B, Eros.” Hank Karns read the line through two or three times, then snapped the book shut and replaced it in its hiding place. He carefully buckled up his slicker and jammed his sou’wester tight upon his head. Then he stepped forth into the steamy drizzle of Artemis Lane.

He sloshed his way through mud and water until he came to the main drag. He turned to the right and splashed along until he came to the corner where Erosville Road turned off. He took the turn and plugged along for four blocks of its twisting, boggy length. A dozen steps farther on he lifted his eyes and peered from beneath dripping brows at the signs about. Across the street was what he sought—a sagging awning crudely painted with the legend: “An Shirgar—Dealer in Native Basketry.” On the bedewed window below was another, “Hir Spak Anglass.”

Hank Karns stopped under the awning long enough to squish some of the water out of his shoes, then he entered. A swarthy, turbanned Venusian met him, rubbing his hands together obsequiously and bowing jerkily at every step.

“Yiss, milord. Valcom to mizrable shop. Vat vishes milord?”

“Wickerware,” said Hank Karns, tartly, for him. “For export.”

“Ah,” breathed the representative of An Shirgar. “Zhipluds, eh? You pay?” Captain Karns shook his head, and pointed to the private door at the back.

“Ah, vickvare. No pay. Maybe boss you see, eh?”

“Yep, trot him out,” said Hank Karns, and began fingering the clever basketware of the Venutian hillmen. He knew it would be quite a while before the Earthman came, if this was operated like the Callistan branch had been, twenty years before. After a time, without quite knowing how he knew, he was aware that someone else was in the showroom, studying him from a distance.

“Howdy,” he said, turning around. “I kinda wanted to finance a deal that’s too big for me to swing—is this the place?”

“Might be,” said the man non-commitally. He was a typical Terrestrian business man, not much over thirty, baldish, and plainly not given to foolishness. “I don’t touch anything as a rule unless I see a profit in it. And no chance of loss. What is your collateral?”

Hank Karns mentioned his ship. The man snorted, and started to turn away. “You’re wasting time.”

“I got a ring, too. It’s a—well—sorta heirloom.”

The man came back. He was still not interested, but he took the ring Karns offered him and weighed it in his hand. Then he applied a loup to his eye and examined it closely.

“You’ve hocked this before?”

“Yes,” chuckled Hank Karns. “And got it back, too.”

“Hmmm,” said the man. “It looks genuine. What do you want?”

“I—uh—am dropping into Mercury to do a little trading. When I get back I might want to buy a chair or so—mebbe houseful of stuff—and just wanted to be sure my credit was good.”

“You speak in riddles, my friend,” said the man with a curious, tight little smile. He was tossing the ring thoughtfully all the while.

“I’m only a lone trader,” said Hank Karns, wistfully, “and don’t know no better. Supposing you keep the ring while I’m gone—to appraise it, so to speak. All I want to know is who to call for when I get back. If I get back.”

The man pocketed the ring.

“Where will the call come from?’

“I dunno. Space, mebbe. Jail, mebbe.”

“My radio call is care assistant dockmaster, Venusberg sky yard. Mention berth twenty-three somehow. As to the jail angle, I do not as a general thing do business with people in jail. In that event, I might send you a lawyer, in consideration of this ring. Tell Rashab, the night turn-key—you’ll know him by the double scar on his chin—that you want to see Mr. Brown. I can’t guarantee he’ll go, but if he docs, bear in mind he’s a very cagy fellow and that Venusberg jail is studded with dictaphones and scanners. If what you have in mind smacks at all of illegality, it’s likely he’ll walk out on you.”

“Yep,” snapped Hank Karns, beginning to shut the clasps on his slicker, “I’ll remember. Only I don’t think it’ll be a lawyer I’ll need. If the joint is lousy with spy-machines, what I’ll want is an old friend—a man of my type.”

The man, whatever his name was, for he had still not given it, laughed outright for the first time. He slapped the Lone Trader on the back.

“Men of your type, you old humbug, are extinct as the horse.”

Hank Karns looked up to laugh back at him, but he was gone. In his place stood the turbanned Venutian, still doing washing motions with his hands.

“Milord no like vickvare? Milord go now?”

“My Lord, yes. I go now.”

Karns jammed on his sou’wester, took a deep breath, and pushed open the door. A half hour later he was making ready for the take-off for Mercury. It was a shot in the dark, but it was a chance I had to take.

“To hell with that,” thought Hank Karns. Then briskly to the boy he had brought with him this trip as a general utility man, “Hey, Billy, look alive! Bear a hand with getting them there rakes stowed!”

“SO that’s Mercury,” exclaimed Billy O Hatch, four days later, as he stared goggle-eyed into the visiplate. This was his first interplanetary trip.

“Yep,” said Karns. “That’s her, the doggonedest planet barrin’ none in the whole dad-frazzled system. After you’ve been here you can tell ’em you’ve seen wind blow, and I mean blow. That’s what them rakes is for. To get around you lie down on your belly and pull yourself along by them. It’s a helluva place. The sun on your back’d fry you, ’cepting there’s always a ice-cold hurricane cooling you off.”

“How can that be, cap’n?”

“Convection’s the ten-sol word for it. It’s cause she’s sizzling hot on one side and colder’n the underside of a iceberg on t’other. The wind goes straight up over the desert and comes straight down over the back side glaciers. Then it scoots for the desert again—and how! Nobody could live an hour in any part of the place if it warn’t for the temperate strip, and that’s cockeyed enough. You gotta steady, hundred-two-hundred-mile wind going straight into the sun, for that’s right down to the horizon. In the lee of a house you burn up in the shade of it you’d freeze solid in five minutes. And the houses have to be stone and streamlined.”

Hank Karns kept a watchful eye on the terrain coming up to meet them. Mooring a ship in that wind required the utmost art.

“As I told you, its a helluva place. Nothing grows there but a sort of grass and some moss. The only animals is varmints, like the cangrela and the trocklebeck. It’s cangrela claws and trocklebeck hides we trade for.”

Billy Hatch listened, wide-eyed. This was romance.

“The trocklebeck is a critter something on the order of a armadillo, only it’s got horns and big claws to hang onto the ground. It grazes, with its head alius into the wind. The cangrela is built along the lines of a crab and has claws, too. It crawls up behind the trocklebeck and kills ’em while they’re feeding. Trocklebeck scales and cangrela claws are both hard-er’n hell. They use ’em in machinery.”

“Oh,” said Billy Hatch.

“But you better git forrard there and tend to them grapples, ’cause a-gitting hold of the ground here is ticklish business. If we miss it’s just too bad. We’ll roll over and over for miles and miles, like as not.”

Hank Karns said no more for a time. As a matter of fact, he was far from ready to land. He had deliberately come up on the wrong side of the planet for making the landing at Sam Atkins’ little trading store. He wanted to give it a general bird’s-eye view. It was in a valley scooped out by the wind that he saw the first sign of a major alteration. Behind a huge artificial wind-break lay a group of new buildings, and one of them was dome-topped with a squat chimney. A matter of ten miles farther away was another new house and a small warehouse behind it. Just over the next low ridge lay Atkins’ place.

“Standby,” warned Hank Karns, as he brought the ship’s nose into the hurricane and began losing altitude. “Don’t let go ’til I tell you—and that’ll be when we’re practically down.”

Just as the keel kissed the ground, Karns gave the signal and the anchors fell. At the same instant he cut his rockets and the ship began falling away to leeward, dragging her anchors behind. In a moment they grabbed, pulled loose and grabbed again. That time they held. Karns released a long pent-up sigh. It was a perfect landing. Sam Atkins’ house lay but a bare hundred yards on the quarter.

There was still the business of shooting a wire over the trading post and making it fast at both ends, Atkins coming out to do his share. Then Captain Karns slid down the wire to the shack and allowed himself to be hauled in by the trading post keeper.

“I’m glad to see you, Cap’n, and sorry at the same time,” was his greeting from Sim Atkins. Atkins was a grumpy sort and a self-made hermit. He seemed to enjoy the solitude of windswept Mercury and the tedious, strenuous work of snaring cangrelas.

“How come sorry, Sam?” asked Hank Karns, as innocently as if he had never visited Venus.

Atkins looked mournfully at him and jerked a thumb eastward.

“I’ve got neighbors—bad ones. Whatever you do, don’t go over there. They’ll trick you somehow. They don’t want outsiders coming here, they’ve got a ship of their own that makes a trip every week or so.”

Hank Karns raised his eyebrows.

“Trocklebecks must be breeding faster’n they used to,” he observed. Mercury never produced enough to justify more than two trips a year, if that.

“Trockelebecks,” stated Atkins, “are practically extinct. And the cangrels are starving. I doubt if I could scare up four cases of prime claws to save my soul. It’s pagras that’s doing it. The place is crawling with them. They bite the trockelbecks and they curl up and die.”

“Mmm,” commented Hank Karns. He remembered those serpents well. They were originally a Venusian beast—a variety of dragon, and extremely venomous. They were really legged snakes, having thirty-six pairs of taloned legs and crab-like claws near the head, but the body was slender, rarely exceeding a yard in girth, for all their thirty-foot lengths.

“I’m closing up shop here,” said the gloomy Atkins next. “You can take the pick of what I own if you’ll set me down at the next stop you make.”

“Now you just keep your shirt on, Sam Atkins,” replied Hank Karns, “I’m not a-doing anything of the damn kind. I’m going over and have a talk with those gents in the next valley. …”

Sam Atkins glared at him.

“No fool like an old fool,” he remarked, hopelessly.

Hank Karns chuckled.

“Seems folks are agreed pretty well about me. But let’s eat, so I can get along my way.”

Unmooring and getting in the anchors was a troublesome job with only a green boy for a helper, but Hank Karns managed it. At that it was a much easier maneuver to move the ship that mile over the ridge than to try to crawl it in the teeth of a permanent typhoon. Moreover, if there was cargo to take aboard—and Hank Karn felt sure there would be—the ship would have to be moved anyhow. So he took off, circumnavigated the planet, and came up again, this time to the little office building and warehouse next to Atkins’ shack. He took good care not to go near the other group of buildings.

As he descended, casting about for a good spot to fling out his grapnels he kept a sharp eye out for signs of life about the buildings. All he saw was a couple of bronzed men, both bald as billiard balls, working over some object in the lee of the warehouse. Upon sighting the descending spaceship one went inside the warehouse and the other caught hold of the guide-wire and let himself be blown down to what appeared to be the office building. The man had on a heavily quilted suit of gray material—quilted so that if he lost his hold and was blown away, he would not bruise himself to death along the ground.

On the fourth try, Hank Karns managed to ground his ship not far from the office door. This time he landed to leeward and had to make his way up-wind by crawling, assisted by a Mercurian “staff,” or one of the rakes among his trade goods. As he crawled, he observed he was being watched from a loophole beside the door. But as he drew himself erect, the door opened and a man came out to greet him,

“Hello, Captain,” said the man, cordially, “we’re very glad to see you. Come in and rest yourself.” The man, Karns observed, was dressed in a heavily quilted suit and was breathing heavily. But he had a full head of hair and a luxuriant mustache.

“Howdy, yourself,” returned the Lone Trader. “Phew! It’s shore dusty hereabouts—I’ve heard of the place but I never seen it. The far Trojans is my bailiwick and the asteroids in that corner. …”

“Really?” said the man, helping his visitor through the door. The office was a single room, and no one else was in it. There was a bottle of voilet-hued liquor on the table and two glasses. “Have a drink? This is home brew—our Mercurian version of comet-dew—made from flowers that grow under the glacier lips.”

“Don’t care if I do,” remarked Karns, and sat down in the seat indicated. “As I was saying, I thought I’d look in on this place, seeing as how I had to make the perihelion hop home. Have to git home to see my oldest grandchild married.”

“Wouldn’t be interested in a bit of cargo, would you?” asked the man. “Our own ship is overdue, and I have some freight for Venus.”

“I’m alius interested in a bit of cargo,” said Karns, “but this trip I can’t stop by Venus—time’s too short.”

“Oh, well,” said his host, indifferently, “it doesn’t matter about that. I was thinking of shipping some boxes of claws and hides to our agent at Venusberg for sale there. We are a new company and have no outlets on Terra yet, unless you wanted to speculate on your own account and buy them outright.”

“Speculation’s my business,” said Hank Karns, serene and bland. And added, with just a touch of foxiness, “if the buying price is right.”

“Oh, we won’t quarrel about that,” laughed the man. “The hides are a by-product with us—this is a pharmaceutical outfit. We make a preparation from the hormones of these beasts. You can have the horns at almost any price.”

They spent the better part of an hour in good natured haggling, the childlike old man raising first one trivial objection after another to win small advantages—chiefly in the matter of valuation of the various items of trade goods he had to offer. None of the lone traders ever dealt in cash. The Swapper was most appropriately named.

At last they shook on the bargain—and a bargain it most obviously was from the trader’s point of view. Mr. Raoul Dement, or so the company man styled himself, presented the visiting captain two flasks of the violet liquor after the old custom of the trade.

“Nice stuff,” observed Hank Karns, licking his lip. “The best I ever—.”

“There’s twelve cases of it in the warehouse,” said Dement, with a wink. “Now, if you were the smuggling sort, there would be a nice profit for you. But, of course… .”

“Hell,” exploded Hank Karns, “running comet-dew’s no sin. Wisht I had a decimo for every gallon I’ve hauled. Once in a coon’s age I get stuck with a little fine, but shucks—the customer’ll alius pay that for you.”

There followed more dickering, but the upshot of it was that Hank Karns signed up for everything that had been offered him.

“Bon voyage,” said Mr. Dement. “If you ever pass this way again, drop in and visit.”

“Sure will,” said Hank Karns, looking his man in the eye. He was interested in his host’s forehead. About an inch from the right temple there was a slight depression—the ineradicable scar of an old skull injury.

MERCURY was still a big disk behind when the Swapper straightened out on her earthward trajectory.

“Step alive there, Billy, we got lots to do.”

All the blandness, all the gullibility and childlike faith were gone from Hank Karns’ face now. He looked much more like a work-ridden gnome than an emaciated Santa Claus. For they had unpacked every case and strewn its contents on the deck, looking for contraband of a more serious nature than the harmless comet-dew. But no case contained anything except what the invoice declared. Hank left the job of repacking to the boy and went about a minute search of the ship itself.

In that he was not a moment too soon. Behind the control board—hidden under the vine-like mass of electric leads—were two thermobombs. Their detonating coils were already hot. The control board was divided into three panels, each controlling an opposite pair of the six tubes which were arranged hexagonally about the stern. Two of the panels were about to be ruined by fire.

Hank Karns’ first impulse was to snatch the bombs loose and let them burn out harmlessly on the deck, but suddenly he checked it. Instead he withdrew his hand and stuck his blistered fingers in his mouth. Then he shouted a warning to Billy Hatch.

“Hey! Stand by for a blast. Bring an extinguisher, quick!”

The boy ran up, but nothing happened for several minutes. Then the two boards flashed fire. They put the fire out, but the damage was done. The Swapper was not nearly up to acceleration. She could never get to Earth at that velocity. She would have to limp into Venus on her two remaining tubes and have yard electricians renew her wiring.

“Pretty neat,” said Hank Kans, admiringly, contemplating his mined controls.

“I did the best I could, Cap’n,” said Billy, modestly, thinking the compliment was meant for him.

“You did all right, son,” said the skipper. “Supposing you turn in now. I’ll do what’s left.”

Hank Karns did not at once change course for Venus. He was still unsatisfied that he knew all he should know about his ship and its seemingly innocuous cargo. It was too obvious to miss that Dement had ordered the bombs planted to ensure the Swapper’s going into Venus. It was an easy guess that the suggestion to take liquor on board was a device to ensure the ship’s arrest and the confiscation that was sure to follow, Venusian courts being what they were. But to Hank Karns’ suspicious mind there was much more to it than that. In the first place, he could have obviated both. He could have snatched the bombs before they exploded, and he could yet jettison the liquor. Moreover, if the mere elimination of all visitors to Mercury was what they were after, those bombs could just as well have been of feroxite and designed to destroy the ship entirely, as was done in the case of the openly hostile Merrill and Carter. No, the master plot required the Swapper to go into Venus and be done away with there. Why? He thought that over.

Suddenly he arose and unlocked his little safe. From its lead container he withdrew a small pellet of radium and set up his fluoroscope. Then he dragged out one of the trockelebeck hides. He searched it systematically from horn to stubby tail, from the scaly back to the claws of the feet. Then he put his fluoroscope away. Grinning into his beard, he went aft and got a pair of pliers, a hammer and a cold chisel.

One of the horns came away as he screwed it off. He knew already from its fluorescence that it was hollowed out and filled with some substance, but he wanted to make sure. He shook the pale green powder inside out into his palm and sniffed it. Yes, that was it. There was the unmistable odor of crushed cherries and the sickish sweetness of the hashish of the sides—trilibaine! Ah, now he was getting somewhere. And as he split a few back scales at random he found that each had a few grams of the insidious drug within it. One such hide would supply a retail peddler for many months, each scale a separate delivery.

He delayed no longer. He shifted his course toward Venus and at the same time sat down to his radio key. He sent:

“URGENT: Venusberg Sky Yard. Attention assistant dockmaster. Four tubes disabled account switchboard fire. Please reserve for me berth twenty-three. Litigation in prospect. Can you recommend lawyer? (signed) Hank Karns, captain, TS Swapper.”

“Well,” he said to himself as he carefully swept up the telltale green dust from the deck and added it to the bundle of broken scales and neatly bored and threaded horns preparatory to firing it all through the garbage tube into his wake, “I’ve shot my wad. Now let’s see how smart Mr. Brown turns out to be.”

HE learned very soon that the thermobombs were but an added precaution. He had not been waiting more than a couple hours when his loudspeaker began to buzz. He glanced at it in surprise, as he was still a long way from Venus. The message began coming through, harsh and peremptory, “Lay to Swapper, to receive a boarding party. Lay to, or take the consequences. Sky-guard calling. Lay to!”

Hank Karns cut his rockets and went to the airlock to await the arrival of the cruiser. It was not long in coming.

Two smartly uniformed young officers sprang in.

“Let’s see your manifest,” ordered one curtly, while the other headed for the hold. In a moment the second came back with two flasks of the pale violet comet-dew.

“The old boy is lousy with the stuff,” he reported to the other. “Cases and cases of it.”

“Yes,” said the first, “and not a damn word about it in the manifest. This makes the second one of these old coots we’ve hauled up this month—what do you say, shall we call this one conspiracy?”

“Why not?” countered the other.

Karns said nothing beyond the usual blustering protests that would be expected of him. Then he lapsed into silence as the two took over after ordering their own vessel to proceed.

They did not go to the commercial sky yard, but to the official one. Other officers met them, and Hank Karns was led straight away to jail. He protested every step of the way, demanding to be taken before the Terrestrial resident commissioner, or to be booked in the usual way. Both those demands were refused, whereupon he asked for a lawyer.

“Don’t kid yourself, old man,” said one of his guards. “You’re in Venus now. Here you are.”

There he was. There was no question about that. The barred door slammed behind his departing escort with an air of utter finality.

“Hi-ya, pop!” screamed some hoodlum down the corridor. “Whatcha in for?”

After that nothing happened. Hank Karns looked about him at his cramped cell and settled down to make the best of it. It would be tiresome, locked up alone this way, but in a day or so perhaps the mysterious Mr. Brown would put in his appearance.

The next day came, but no Mr. Brown. However, early in the morning another visitor came in his place. Karns heard footsteps approaching and the jangle of keys. His door was flung open and a tall stranger stepped in. The man was quite old and clad in the blue uniform, faded and patched, of a space skipper. He was obviously a lone trader, but if he was, he was the only one in the universe that Hank Karns did not know. For this man, with his beetling gray eyebrows and hard steely eyes beneath, he had never laid eyes on before.

“Two minutes, no more,” warned the guard, and stood back In the corridor where he could both see and hear.

“Howdy Hank,” said the newcomer. “Danged if it ain’t gitting so that Tom Eagley spends half his time bailing you out or paying fines. Why, I’d hardly landed here but what I heard you’d been slung into the calaboose again, and I says to myself, says I…”

“Yeah, Tom, I know,” said Hank Karns, penitently, trying not to look at the eavesdropping guard. Inwardly he was seething with doubt and curiosity. Could it be that this was some minion of the collector trying to trick him, or was he acting for Mr. Brown? He remembered telling the fellow in the wickerware place that what he really needed was a man of his own type. Maybe they had found one. At any rate, he chose to pretend he knew him.

“Anyhow,” went on the stranger, “I looked up a feller named Brown that I know here and asked him what to do. He said things looked pretty black and his advice was to plead guilty and say nothing. Might get off with a fine or something. And that he had a little money of yours. He got me this pass, but said he couldn’t work it twice. Now tell me. Hank, what do you want me to do? I gotta get out of here for Mercury in a day or so.”

Hank Karns looked at the man steadily for a moment. He was on the spot. The man was evidently from Brown, but he knew neither of them personally. But worse, the guard was listening to every word, and there were doubtless dictaphones as well. But the two minutes were running out and there would not be a second visit.

“I’ll tell you, Tom, there isn’t but one thing you can do. I’ll have to take my medicine, I guess, but I hate like everything to lose them trocklebeck hides and horns. The critters is dying off—poisoned by pagras. Them danged snakes are all over Mercury. You might not have money enough to buy ’em in, but sorta keep track of ’em, won’t you? They’re not worth much now, but they’ll be mighty valuable some day. There’s a man here from lo that’ll pay a good price for ’em, if you can find him.”

“Time’s up,” snapped the guard, coming forward.

“All right, you old scalawag,” said the phony trader captain, jovially, “I’ll do my best. But watch your step with that judge. He’s tough.”

“I know,” said Hank Karns, despondently, and settled his face in his hands.

The door slammed and the footsteps withdrew, ringing emptily down the metal passage.

Dreary day followed dreary day. Time after time Karns heard footsteps ringing in the corridor, and as often he heard the rattle of keys as some door was opened and another unfortunate was ordered out to meet his doom—the sentence that was to change his state from slow dry rot to the swift wet rot of the Swamp. But it was never Karns’ door.

Then at last came the day when guards took him to the identical court where Wilkerson had been tried. The evidence was brief and to the point. He was apprehended trying to sneak into Venus when his clearance papers called for Terra as his destination. He had on board eight cases of illicit liquor. He had no acceptable explanation. Guilty. Two years in the Swamp and the loss of his ship was the sentence. Then they took him back to his cell to await the next caravan to the penal camps.

The second stretch of waiting was harder to take than the first, for he had placed the enigmatic collector now in his memory. The man was Von Kleber, thought to have died many years ago in the uranium mines of Sans Esperance. Karns knew him to be a convict from the fact that he had grafted new skin on his face and head so that the burns and baldness caused by radioactivity would not show. But that he was the notorious Von Kleber himself had not occurred to him. And with that recognition came the other. Raoul Dement was the man known as Frenchy the Hop, vice-president of the Von Kleber ring. It was he who had operated the narcotic racket while the big boss turned his attention to such other lines as piracy, white-slaving and smuggling in general. If such men could flourish unchecked in the well-policed Jovian satellites for more than a decade, it was hopeless to expect to dislodge them from their place on corrupt and autonomous Venus.

And so time dragged on and Hank Karns sat, awaiting the day when he would be taken away to the Swamp. He wondered apathetically whether he would be sent to the same camp where Wilkerson and Hildreth were. But at last there came a day when footsteps rang again in the corridors and he heard doors being opened and men taken away. Finally men stopped before his own cell and called him forth. Between two soldiers they marched him away.

To his surprise they took him first to the street, where three sedan chairs were waiting. The guards very politely indicated that Karns was to get in the middle one and they took the others. Hank clambered in and they set off. Shortly they drew up before the courthouse.

He was met inside by a tall, slender man of nearly his own age who wore the uniform of Chief Inspector of the Interplanetary F.B.I.

“How are you, Captain?” he said cheerily. “Sorry you had such a long stay in but we’ll try to make that up to you. Come in here and let me show you something?”

Hank Karns looked at the inspector in amazement. He was Frank Haynes, the man who had broken the Von Kleber case years before. There had been a time when they worked closely together on the information that Karns furnished when he was released from Sans Esperance. He said nothing in reply, though, as Haynes was leading the way into the courtroom. In the dock were two baldheaded prisoners—Von Kleber, erstwhile Collector of the Port, and Mr. Dement, manager of the Mercurian drug works. The judge was a new one—a judge who looked like a judge should look.

“There they are, thanks to you,” said Haynes, pointing. “Two as clever criminals as ever plagued the system. We’ve been a long time catching them. But their career is over now.

“Our local operative, known as Brown to you, has been trying for months to locate the source of the trilibaine flood but without avail. The Venusian authorities blocked him at every turn but there was nothing we could do about that unless we could hang a Federal offense on them. It was you who did that for us. I am very glad I gave you that identification ring after our cleanup on Callisto and the list of the secret addresses of our agents. I felt then that you were a man of discretion and would not abuse its privileges and today I most certainly am more than justified. When I interviewed you in your cell.”

“You!”

Inspector Haynes grinned at Hank’s surprise.

“Pretty effective disguise, eh? Well, as I was about to say—you gave me all the tips that were needed. First of all, your mention of the scourge of pagras told me it was trilobaine you had aboard, for that is a distillation of pagra venom. That gave us jurisdiction. I attended the secret auction and tried to bid. Everything in the ship went for a song to Von Kleber’s pals, but when I went to bid on the trocklebeck hides I ran into stiff opposition. They were not to be had at any price. So I stopped bidding.

“Our operatives trailed those hides through five sets of owners before we came to the Collector himself. Early this morning we made our raid and took in all their supplies of drugs and twenty-five of their peddlers. Previously we had raided Mercury and those men came in about an hour ago. They had quite a thriving little business, and why we didn’t think of their method of smuggling in the trilobaine before this I’ll never know. We knew, of course, that it must be coming in the ships that they confiscated. That much we were sure of. But we couldn’t prove a damn thing until we knew how. Thanks to you, the ring is busted now, and we can do something for those poor devils who were innocently duped into being carriers of the drug. Runners have already been sent to the Swamp to bring back your friends. And there you are. You’ll find your old Swapper in the Yard, completely overhauled and stocked to the gunwales with grade A trade goods.”

Hank Karns, trader, tugged at his grizzled beard and looked rather sheepishly at the floor.

“Dag it all,” he said “that’s fine enough. But gosh, I sure hated to make a damn fool of myself in front of everybody that away.”

Inspector Haynes broke into laughter and crossed over and slapped him on the back.

“You old liar. You loved it!”

The Man Who Loved Planks

Weird Tales, March 1941

THE Lord of Mad Mansion was dead!

“Yes,” reaffirmed the wizened little doctor from Milburn, “dead as a doornail. I found him lying in the great hall of his house on a pile of old lumber, his arms full of oak boards. What a house! We should have committed him long ago, for surely if there was ever a madman—”

Words failed the village practitioner.

He took off his glasses and wiped them, shaking his head dismally all the time. Then he peeped at his watch. I knew he would be with me for some time yet, as he had just then sent for the coroner. And I knew, moreover, that all I had to do was listen, for the estimable doctor had not been awarded the title of village gossip for nothing.

“Madman?” I queried, stepping back from the easel and eyeing the work I had in hand. I was trying to complete a painting of the giant elm that stood just west of the gatekeeper’s lodge I was using as a studio. “An eccentric, I should say, but hardly mad.”

The doctor snorted. I laid on another brushful of color, for now I knew I must bring my work to a swift completion. Within a few hours the hitherto sequestered estate would be overrun with curious morbid crowds. There would be police and lawyers— and, of course, Ada Warren, the acid-faced spinster sister and heir presumptive of Mad Mansion. Ada could e counted upon to evict me at once, if only on account of her hatred for Kendall—Enoch Warren’s sole friend and adviser. For it was from him and not from the recluse of the Mansion that I had received the privilege of tenancy.

“Eccentric, eh!” said the doctor presently, with a nasty, bark-like little laugh. “You should see the inside of that house! Not a stick of furniture in it. No, sir! Not a bed, nor a chair or even a stool. The old man slept, apparently, on a pair of blankets thrown down on the tiled floor of the great hall. He was a maniac, I tell you. Imagine a man of his wealth living in such a fashion. No furniture!”

“That is odd,” I commented, “two van-fulls of it went through the gates only last week. I peeked into one and saw many beautiful pieces—”

“That’s just it,” exclaimed the doctor, “that is why I say he was mad. He bought that furniture for the pleasure of breaking it up! Antiques, they were—all of them. Some even came from great museums. Do you wonder that his sister Ada tried to stop him from squandering his millions in that way?”

“It has always been my opinion,” I said, as dryly as I could, “that what use a man made of the money he had made himself was his own business. I never talked with Enoch Warren but once, but I have often watched him rambling through the trees here. He struck me as extraordinarily mild and gentle, very fond of trees and nature. It is true that he forbade me to approach within five hundred yards of the mansion itself, but that again was his privilege. A man has a right to privacy, and if he chooses to make a hermit of himself—well, what of it?”

“Bah!” cried out the doctor. “You are talking nonsense! No one has unlimited right to destroy property, and no sane man would shut himself off from all society. And what of the consequences to others? The destruction of his mills threw thousands of men out of employment!”

The doctor glared at me, as if daring me to answer that. I shrugged and went on painting. There were too many aspects of the Warren case that baffled me as well. The difference was that the doctor was indignant and steamed up over it, while I was not. I shared old Enoch Warren’s love of trees. That is why I paint them exclusively. It was that common love, indeed, that made it possible for me to break into that otherwise inhospitable estate. And it was for that reason that I chose to regard him as an eccentric rather than a lunatic.

“You recall that, of course?” snapped the doctor, looking at me sharply. “That was the beginning—eight years ago. Just a year after Mrs. Warren’s death, when old Enoch came back here to live.”

Yes, I remembered the story vaguely. I knew that Enoch Warren had built his ornate, castle-like mansion back in the nineties and had installed his empty-headed, baby doll wife in it. And I had heard that later they became estranged and he made it a point to be away on business most of the time. After her death he came home once—ostensibly to check the inventory of the great house’s contents before putting them on the auction block.

I recalled that the flighty Mrs. Warren had gone in heavily for priceless antiques in her desire to climb into the Four Hundred, and that it was these items that had brought Warren back East. A million dollars was not a sum to leave to hirelings to collect. The matter of the inventory was something the shrewd captain of industry wanted to look into himself.

“He spent one night here, they tell me,” I remarked, to show my interest, “stating he would return West the following day. Only he didn’t—he has stayed here ever since.”

“Exactly,” replied the doctor. “And that was the night he lost his mind. Until then he was a normal, highly successful business man. Every queer thing he has done has been since.”

“Yes, go on,” I said, squeezing another tube of white onto my palette.

“It was two weeks after that the museum scandal occurred. Of course, a man of his wealth and prominence could get a thing like that hushed up—”

“He must have,” I said, “since I have never heard of it.”

“Perhaps not. But there were ugly rumors at the time. In fact, there are still plenty of people anxious to dig up these grounds to find the remainder of that young woman he was supposed to have killed and dismembered.”

“Now you do surprise me,” I admitted. “I would not think Enoch Warren capable of killing anything.”

“He was found,” said the doctor, very impressively, “in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum with the freshly severed arm and hand of a young woman hidden under his coat. A guard swore he had seen him inside the ropes of one of the exhibits stroking a dining table with that arm! They detained him there for awhile, in the curator’s office, but in the end they let him go. It is worth noting there, I think, that a little later the museum sold him the particular table involved at a very, very fancy price.”

“Meaning he bribed them?”

The doctor laughed deprecatingly. “What else is there to think?”

I kept on painting.

“It was the last time he ever left these grounds,” the doctor went on, “except for the day he astonished the executives of his vast chain of lumber mills and yards by descending upon them in the New York offices. That was the day he extinguished his company.”

“I do remember that,” I said.

The whole world does. On that day Enoch Warren ordered every sawmill he owned demolished and all his existing stocks of lumber burned. Likewise he deeded to the government thousands of acres of standing timber to be reserved forever as national parks.

“Then,” cried the doctor, triumphantly, as if he had abundantly proved his point, “after settling a paltry quarter of a million on his sister Ada, he hires this creature Kendall to spend the other millions he owned in the buying of antiques! What more do you want to prove the man is mad?”

I could see in that outburst how the man’s small town mind was tainted with the venom of unsatisfied curiosity. Milburn folk loved to know in detail what their neighbor was doing. For a number of years not one of them had been allowed within the grounds of Mad Mansion, let alone into the house. The first of those privileges had been extended to me (and, I should say, sundry truck drivers who each month brought more loads of furniture). But entry into the great house itself was forbidden to all save Kendall, the world renowned expert on wood grains and textures.

“I am afraid,” I said quietly, “that you have not proved your case. Enoch Warren worked hard for many years to keep a vain, frivolous, society-struck woman furnished with the funds she needed to further her ambitions. She died and the necessity for his work was at an end. He chose to retire and devote himself to a hobby. I see nothing insane about it.”

“What!” fairly yelled the little doctor. “Don’t forget that when other men retire they sell their property, they don’t destroy it. Then there is the matter of the woman’s arm—”

“Pah! That is in the class with werewolf yarns,” I exclaimed, not troubling to conceal my disgust. The town doctor’s chatter was beginning to pall on me, built as it was on one part fact, three parts rumor, and the rest sheer surmise.

He jumped to his feet, fairly quivering with anger.

“Oh, so you think this fellow Kendall’s on the level, then? You think that all that money went for real antiques? Well, just wait until you have seen the house. That’s all. Just see the house!”

He bustled about the room in a great state of agitation, muttering. It was a case of outraged virtue or something, for in a moment he added a bit to his other information that I had not even guessed before and had no inkling of what it meant.

“I happen to know,” he sneered, “what is in Enoch Warren’s will. Ada is cut off, and so is Lionel, his nephew. Arthur Kendall is to get everything—this estate, the house, what money is left, and the antiques! Hah! Where are the antiques? Do you suppose that a man as shrewd as Kendall would have sent real antiques up here for that old man to chop up with an axe even if he had really bought them as the newspapers report? Not a chance! And the money! ‘To carry on my work, which only the said Arthur Kendall understands’ is the way the will reads. His work, the doddering old fool!”

The little doctor stopped, bristling with emotion. I do not know what else he might have said, for just then there was a chorus of honking horns outside. I opened the door and peered out. It was a car containing the coroner and some others, also a flanking squadron of State Police on motorcycles. I could not miss seeing the long caravan of miscellaneous other cars banked in the road behind them. Those were packed with villagers, intent on satisfying the curiosity that had been balked so long. Reluctantly I took down the heavy ring of keys and went to open the gate.

Enoch Warren, the Lord of Mad Mansion, was dead! My own anomalous position as half guest, half employee would shortly be ended. No longer could I expect to roam the wonderful groves of the quiet estate, secure in the knowledge that I would encounter no one unless it was Warren himself, striding through the woods with his handsome gray mane flying to the breeze, patting and talking to his fine trees as if they were human. Nor could I shut the world out by simply pointing to the sign above the gate that read:

“NO ADMITTANCE ON ANY PRETEXT.”

From now on the law would be in charge, whatever that was.

And I knew, without being told, that Ada Warren would sue to break the will. And that she would win.

I drew the gate open and silently motioned the caravan waiting so noisily outside to come on in. Then I went back into my lodge and locked the door behind me. At the moment I had no thought or desire to follow the prurient crowd into Mad Mansion itself. I thought only of the morbid, sensation-seekers I saw pass in behind the officials. Picks and spades stuck out of their car windows. By now they were doubtless digging in the shrubbery between the glorious trees. They would be looking ghoulishly for the buried fragments of a young woman—one lacking a left arm. Such is the power of wild rumor!

IT WAS another twenty-four hours before I opened my door again. In that time I had seen many cars pass in and out of the open gates. One had held the sour, frozen-faced Ada Warren with fat, indolent Lionel lounging beside her. With them were crisp, legal looking men, carrying brief-cases. Those, no doubt, were her attorneys.

I saw Arthur Kendall come in, alone and bearing the expression of a man in intense agony. He stayed a long while, but when he drove out he did not stop to speak with me as I hoped he might. Later, after the undertaker had come and gone, there were more police to arrive, and to my immense relief they cleared the grounds of the souvenir hunters and set their own watch on the gate. Their captain knocked at my door and wanted to know if they might make coffee on my stove and I said yes. After that I was left to myself.

Interested only in my art and caring nothing for idle gossip, I had never concerned myself in the least with the various legends concerning the Lord of Mad Mansion, as the neighboring country folk had come to call Enoch Warren. Evidently he had seen some of my work somewhere, for he sent Kendall to arrange for my coming to the estate to paint several of his best trees.

The arrangement was that I was to have the use of the gate lodge and the run of the groves, but must not go near the house.

ONE day Enoch Warren came up behind me as I was sketching and stood looking over my shoulder. Eventually he said: “You have some understanding of them, don’t you?”

“I hope so,” I replied.

“Do they ever talk to you?” he wanted to know.

“I am not quite that poetic,” I laughed. But I realized at once I had said the wrong thing, for he stalked off as if offended. Later, however, he sent Kendall to me with carefully drawn sketches of two magnificent trees and commissioned me to make full color paintings of them. They were not trees that I knew, though I think I know all the finer ones in the dozen nearest states.

Later Kendall returned to criticize the canvases, insisting on a number of small changes. He directed me to entitle one “Chryseis,” the other “Arethne.” Afterward they paid me for the work and hauled the pictures away for framing. I had not seen them since.

On the day following my interview with Milburn’s little doctor, I was astonished to hear a fresh commotion at the gate. I looked out to see two large farm trucks piled high with slabs of oak bark. A gang of grinning workmen sat on top their curious cargo. The leading driver bore a pass signed by Kendall, requesting me to allow them to enter, and stating that he himself would be along shortly to direct them where to put the bark.

Hardly had the trucks passed through the gate until I was favored by another visit from the garrulous man of medicine. He was as perky and irrepressible as a sparrow, and I could see that he was bubbling over with some new and exceptionally spicy bit of gossip.

“So you think Enoch Warren was sane?” he began, cheerfully, apparently having pardoned me for my coldness of the day before. “Well, we found something besides his will. He left directions for his funeral. …”

“Don’t sane men ever do that?” I countered. I do not like that doctor.

“Not funerals like the one he wants. He won’t have a preacher, nor any kind of Christian service. No, sir! He wants to be buried with a tree’s ashes, to the tune of a crazy rigamarole he has all written out. And believe it or not, the tree’s name is Arethne! He! He! He!”

“What’s so funny about that?” I demanded.

He choked his laughter off with a sputter. “You oughta see the tree! A mess of boards glued together, the nut! And get this—this is a scream—he directs that the funeral shall not be held until Mr. Kendall has had time to suitably clothe Chryseis. Imagine that—‘suitably clothe’—that’s what the directions say. Now, I ask you—was the man sane?”

“I am a painter, not a psychologist,” I replied stiffly. “I wouldn’t know.”

The doctor looked a bit crestfallen. Then he murmured something about having a string of calls to make down the road and left me. Shortly after that Kendall came.

HE STOPPED his car before my door and called to me. Always the serious, almost melancholy type, he was habitually a man of few words. He only said, “You may come up to the mansion any time you like—everyone else has poked his nose in, why not you?”

Then he perceived that what he had said was ungracious, and he hastened to add, “I didn’t mean that last the way it sounded. I mean I would like at least one person around who has some glimmering of what I have to deal with.”

“I’ll be up shortly,” I promised. And I cannot deny that despite my summary handling of the gossipy doctor, I was consumed with curiosity myself.

The sight of the mansion was a greater shock than I had anticipated. The building in its prime must have been a monstrosity, built as it was in a style of architecture that combined the worst features of Rhenish castles, neo-Norman-Gothic, and U. S. Grant jigsaw. But now the stone building stood hideously naked, its windows closed by rusty, warehouse type iron shutters.

I suddenly remembered that during the wood-burning phase of Enoch Warren’s “insanity,” he had stripped the building of its ornate porches and blinds and had burned them in one huge bonfire before the door. Some said that he had even gone so far as to rip the floors from throughout the house, so that above the stone and tile of the ground floor there was nothing to be seen but naked joists.

The two bark-laden trucks still stood before the door, but much of their load had already been carried inside. I stepped across the litter-strewn ground to the front door, avoiding as far as possible stepping on the chunks of bark the men had dropped behind them. The door was open and there was the hum of voices deeper within the house, but I did not go farther in than a few steps at first. The sight that greeted me was enough to stop any ordinary man in his tracks.

The light was dim, but in the first immense room in which I found myself I was astonished to see nondescript bundles of boards, planks, sticks and bits of wood of every conceivable length and shape stacked until they almost touched the stark floor joists overhead. In amazement I picked up one of the smaller ones of these bundles and examined it. It was bound with wire and bore a tag. The astounding label read “Phryne, parts of left hip and thigh, fragments of a hand.”

I gazed again at the strange assortment of boards that made up the bundle. They were all of oak, hand-polished, evidently fragments of what had been once a piece of fine furniture. Some were flat boards, such as form drawer fronts, others were turned spindles, others were mere splinters. Somehow I felt a queer sense of disgust at the very holding of the scraps of this lowboy or whatever piece it had been, and was aware at a growing sense of resentment at the evidences of wholesale vandalism about me.

For every one of those bundles was similar. Whether composed of oak, walnut, cherry or mahogany, each appeared to be the tied-up fragments of what had been a beautiful product of the cabinetmakers’ art. They varied enormously. Some bundles were of rungs and rails of chairs, banister spindles or wide planks such as must have come from desk tops or the side rails of beds. Some were firmly bound with wire or rope, others were no more than segregated piles of loose lumber. But all had been robbed of what incidental hardware they had once possessed, and all showed the common sign of being of selected hard-woods.

Though saddened by the wreckage, a series of dull, heavy thumps such as are made when heavy weights are dropped, reminded me that I still had to find Kendall and see more of the house. The trail of broken bark led me to a door that gave admittance into what must have been a ballroom or banquet hall.

If I had been astonished at the collection of boards in the outer parlor, that was a tame emotion to what I experienced here. In the room were three roughly cylindrical colossi of wood—three amazing aggregations, each from twelve to eighteen feet in length and perhaps six feet in diameter, of odds and ends of boards and planks fastened together. They lay athwart heavy blocks, and the men I had seen on the bark trucks were working on them under the direction of Kendall. They seemed to be rounding out the monstrous things with plastic wood applied from tubs. And as that was done, others were covering the rounded forms with slabs of the imported bark, fastening it on either by glue or by concealed wires.

Kendall wheeled as he heard me enter. Immediately he flashed what was obviously meant to be a friendly smile, but in the brief instant before he recognized me it seemed to me that as he turned, unaware, I had a glimpse into the soul of a man burdened with a responsibility so terrific he knew he could never discharge it. He started to say something to me, but at that instant we heard the sound of a heavy truck crunching to a stop outside. A roughly dressed man appeared in the doorway and calling out, “Three crated pieces for Mr. Warren. Where do you want ’em?”

Kendall’s face lit up like that of a condemned man on hearing of his reprieve.

“There”—he pointed to a space within the door, then called back to his bark workers to knock off what they were doing and wait.

I watched with considerable interest as he knocked the crating away and tore the burlap from about the newest acquisitions. Two of them were of oak—a highboy and a wardrobe. The other was an exquisite piece of mahogany, Chippendale, I thought, a sideboard. I glimpsed a fallen tag. It read—Value $53,000. Kendall was running his finger along the grain of the wood, appraisingly, and his troubled frown was gone.

“Just in time,” he said to me, across the top of the highboy. “The old man would be happy if he knew. This is mostly Arethne. There is a little more in the wardrobe, too, though that is mostly Chryseis and Melne.”

Naturally, his words meant nothing to me. I supposed the terms he employed was common trade jargon of connoisseurs.

He rummaged around in a corner and produced some tools. Without further words, and with reckless disregard of possible injury to the beautiful parts, he attacked the museum piece before him, ripping it apart. As each bit came away, he would scrutinize it carefully, then lay it on one of the several piles about him, or toss it into a corner with other rubbish. In a short time, before my amazed and somewhat indignant eyes, he reduced both the oak pieces to the wooden elements of which they were built.

SETTING two of the workmen to the task of similarly demolishing the mahogany sideboard, he picked up one of his little piles of boards and carried it across the room to where the huge bulk they were encasing in bark lay.

He examined the boards in his hands very carefully, then began a methodical search of the queer aggregation of wood that lay on the blocks. Presently he found what he was looking for and immediately, using glue and a few thin nails, he affixed another board to it. As he wasn’t about adding other boards to other spots, I suddenly comprehended what he was doing. The realization of it detracted nothing from the sheer madness of his undertaking, but it did serve to explain the present internal condition of Mad Mansion and the destruction of the antiques. Those huge blocks of assembled wood particles were in reality gigantic, three dimensional super-jigsaw puzzles! Enoch Warren, aided and abetted by Kendall, had been attempting to reconstruct ancient tree boles by piecing together the planks and bits that had originally been hewn from them!

It was staggering. I looked again, and I was right. Not only was the wood the same, but the grain of each component piece fitted exactly with that of its neighbors. What a colossal undertaking! And at the same time, how futile, for of what possible use could it be? But it was clear enough that the celebrated antique collection was hopelessly lost—destroyed in the furtherance of a wasteful and expensive hobby, and it was also evident why Warren had hired Kendall, the expert on wood identification, for his buyer. But why? Why indulge in such a fantastic game? There was hardly any choice. Enoch Warren was more than eccentric; he was insane. Now, even I was convinced of that!

Kendall stood back from his work, the last piece firmly embedded to round out the irregular cylinder that had once been a tree trunk. He signaled his men to go back to their work and complete the barking of the bole. Then, he took the remaining boards and added them in like manner to the other two monstrosities in the room. I could see that the third one was far from complete—it would require many highboys and whatnot to make a tree of it.

Meanwhile, the men had torn the sideboard apart and asked him what to do with its pieces.

“In the far corner,” he said, “the bundle marked Xaquiqui.” He added, to me, as if explaining, “Mayan—Enoch Warren was delighted to find her. It was his first knowledge that there were such things in the New World. That’s why he gave up lumbering. But I can’t bother with joining those today, although I do think we’ll get a leg out of it.”

That cryptic explanation was far more confusing than enlightening. The sideboard very obviously had not one, but four legs, each of them marvels of beauty in line and detail. But again we were interrupted, this time by the arrival of a crew of house movers. Those he set to work tearing out the wide French windows that pierced the outer wall. From the massive dollies they brought along, I deduced they intended removing the finished tree bole from the room.

THE funeral was held the next day, at dawn. There were not many present. Lionel and Ada Warren were there, glum and angry looking, and several of Warren’s old mill employees. The coffin had already been placed in the grave when I got there, but that apparently was a mere preliminary. Supported by heavy iron beams laid athwart the unusually wide grave, the enormous oak log lay, the bole of what in its day must have been the queen of trees. I hardly recognized it as the medley of scrap wood I had seen the day before within the house. Kendall’s job of reconstruction had been superbly done. “Suitably clothed” was the injunction in the will.

The two younger Warrens’ scowls deepened as an elderly man, one of Warren’s former superintendents, began reading in a fine, resonant voice. That was no ordinary funeral, but a pagan rite conceived by Warren himself. The words I heard were of the poetry and beauty of nature, and there was no reference to death—not until the closing words when I was almost startled to hear the familiar phrase “ashes to ashes.”

Upon uttering the last sentence, the master of ceremonies mounted the butt of the log and lit a match to it. It must have been saturated with oil, for in a moment it was blazing vigorously from end to end. With a gesture of dismissal to the few present, the man who had conducted the odd ritual walked away. In a few minutes they all had gone but Kendall, who continued to stand there staring moodily at the blazing pyre. I started to leave too, but he called to me to stay.

Neither of us spoke for more than an hour. We simply stood there, fascinated by the surging flames and the smoke that billowed up to drift lazily off to the south-east. Chunks of burning bark broke loose now and then and fell hissing onto the coffin underneath. Later, the rain of ashes and living embers became incessant, and the crackling popping of the burning oak filled the ears.

Kendall plucked my sleeve. His face was grim, as if he had seen some horror and was striving to hold himself together.

“Suttee!” he exclaimed huskily, “do you realize that? Suttee, no less. But she insisted on it. For months he refused, and they quarreled often. Then he promised. And made me promise.”

“I am trying to understand all this, Mr. Kendall,” I said, “but what you say is a riddle. All I see is the ghastly whim of an eccentric rich enough to indulge himself. The cost of that bonfire to the world, though, is incalculable—think of the art treasures—”

“But think too of the agony—” he burst out, and there was unutterable sorrow and pain in his face. But he stopped and after a moment said very quietly, but with a trace of bitterness, “I’m sorry. I thought you knew, I was hoping you could see. Of all people you are the most likely one— you have studied trees, love them, know their moods—”

He paused, and I noted uncomfortably that his eyes were wet.

“If you could see, I would not have to tell you. Since you do not, there is no use my trying. You would laugh and call me insane, like those fools did Enoch Warren. You saw Ada Warren glaring at me today, and you may know that she is bringing suit to prevent my getting the money. Undue influence, they claim! Yes, there was influence all right, strong influence. The strongest of all—great love. Arethne it was, though, not I, and there she goes—with him.”

After that outburst, he lapsed into bitter silence. We sat, finally on the turf, spell-bound by the pyre. At last, with a sharp crackling and a groan, the huge log broke in the middle and its sagging ends slid into the grave itself. A great shower of sparks scurried upward, wheeling and twinkling in the pall of smoke overhead. The grave, deep and wide though it was, was full to the brim with smoking ashes, symbolic of something I had not yet guessed. Seeing Kendall still submerged in his own dark thoughts, I quietly slipped away and left him alone with his grief.

THE acrid contest over the will was drawing to a close. Avid sensation seekers greedily read every word as Enoch Warren’s eccentricities were exposed in the press. Souvenir hunters infested the estate, despite the police guard. At Kendall’s request, I kept an eye on the shuttered mansion, for the court proceedings kept him in town much of the time. He seemed to fear that people might break in to carry away the precious rubbish left behind by Enoch Warren, and intrusted me with the key so I could look in from time to time to see that the remaining two synthetic logs were unmolested.

One evening late, I had gone to the top of the hill to watch the full moon rise, and thinking I heard sounds within the house, I let myself in. It was quite dark in there, except in the banquet hall. Through its east windows a flood of moonlight made everything clearly visible. The two oak logs were still where I saw them last, but in the place of the one called Arethne there was something else. It was only a beginning, as many loose boards lay scattered about the glued-up core, evidently handy to be fitted and cemented to the rest.

That, I observed, judging by the darkness of the wood, was to be a mahogany log. In an inner corner stood the iron bedstead Warren had used. Kendall must have moved it there to sleep on the nights he stayed in the house.

I sat down on it, and being drowsy and the bed a comfortable one, I was soon stretched out, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Warren’s bizarre hobby and the colossal impudence of it. What astonished me most was Kendall’s obvious intention of carrying it on. One would have thought that the death of Enoch Warren would have released him and that he would then abandon the silly business and go back to his former occupation.

I may have slept, but presently, for no readily apparent reason, I suddenly became aware that my heart was pounding and my breath coming in heavy pants; goose-flesh tingled on my arms and legs. I sat up, startled, then knew that someone was in the room with me. There was a vague but exotically delicious perfume, and I sensed rather than heard a low breathing. Abruptly, as if materialized on the instant out of the air itself, a beautiful girl stood beside my bed, not a foot away. She was gazing at me as if in earnest entreaty. Then, suddenly, she sat down on the edge of the bed beside me and began caressing my forehead with her tiny hands.

I did not move nor speak, nor did she utter a sound at first. But in a little while she began talking soothingly in a strangely whispering language. It was suggestive of the sound of high branches lightly tossed by a June breeze. Compelled to guess at her meaning from her tone, I assumed she was reassuring me as to her reality, despite her inexplicable apparition. But I did not need that. Tender and fairy-like though her fluttering touch was, it was real; she was no phantom.

Yet despite the calmness with which I submitted to her ministrations, a vague horror—not of her, but of something that affected her—grew on me. I looked at her more closely, straining my eyes in the pale, soft moonlight, and then I knew. She was covered with scars, she must have been hideously slashed at some time. Thin lines they were, almost hair lines, most of them, that covered her otherwise white and shapely body. One, heavier than the others, ran diagonally across her torso, from armpit to hip, as if she had been sawn in half and rudely sewn back together again. Then I observed that an ear was missing—that the outer curve of the thigh was gone, as if sliced away—and there were many minor scars lining her arms, face and hands. All those details I could see quite clearly, once I looked, for of clothing she had not a shred.

My emotions by then were tender ones, but mingled with them was an upsurging of hot indignation, growing into anger as I contemplated her cruel wounds. It was then that I recalled with some difficulty a little of what Kendall had said to me. His hitherto esoteric utterances had been so far away from sense that I had actually forgotten.

“Chryseis?” I hazarded, speaking softly. Like a delighted child she clapped her hands and laughed, then sprang away from me and went into a graceful dance. Ah, so Chryseis was her name. But he mentioned another, or two—Melne, Arethne?

“Arethne?” I tried, but she ceased dancing and knelt beside me, face pillowed in her arms, and wept bitterly. In a moment she rose and gestured hopelessly toward the area where the funeral log had lain. But when I spoke the name Melne, she brightened again and called out in her queer, delightful language to an unseen person.

On the instant another like her appeared, and for a brief time joined her in her dance. It was a grotesque dance then, for I could not fail to see that the second nymph was not only scarred as was Chryseis, but that she lacked an arm, that part of one leg between mid-thigh and ankle, and a portion of the back of her head. But marred though she was, her mutilations detracted nothing from the wild grace of her pagan beauty, nor did they seem to impair her ability to dance.

As if the self-revelation of these two was a signal, other apparitions—or so I thought them, though they were real as my own self when I touched them—showed themselves in every direction. My first reaction was a gasp of horror at seeing the banquet hall take on the aspect of a charnel house, for wherever I looked there were fragments of dismembered-like creatures. Fingers, slices of arms, legs and torsos, slivers of head, sprouting ears or tresses of wavy hair, lay all about me, suggesting the atrocities of the infamous Nana Sahib at Cawnpore. Yet, on the other hand, they seemed firm and alive, twitching and moving of their own accord.

Strangely, I felt no fear. Somehow I knew that whatever catastrophe had caused the gruesome relics, it was one that had occurred long, long ago. Chryseis and Melne had gone over to where the nucleus of the mahogany log-to-be was, beckoning me to come and look. Beside it were the fragments of a dark-skinned beauty, and while the two nymphs busied themselves picking up the scattered boards about the floor and arranging them in strange juxtapositions, I noticed that the disjointed parts of the dusky one were reorienting themselves. In a moment I could see that there was the greater part of another nymph there, or an Indian Princess, judging by the nobility of the face which gazed at me unblinkingly from lustrous black eyes.

Chryseis returned to me and with vehement gestures toward the helpless one on the floor, addressed me passionately in her pathetic, rustling speech. It was plainly an appeal for my assistance, but of all she said the only word I recognized was “Xaquiqui,” evidently the appellation of the one at our feet, or of the mahogany log with which she was associated.

While amazement and sheer incredulity were struggling for the mastery of my emotions, my intellect was vainly trying to function—to postulate some rational explanation of what I beheld. But my mind and soul was unexpectedly relieved of the burden of decision, for there was the sound outside of an automobile grinding to a stop before the door. The creatures before me scurried to their logs, and at the click of the latch vanished as abruptly as they had appeared. I was sitting alone in the vastness of the empty banquet hall staring into the steep shafts of silvery moonlight that struck downward through the windows. Between me and the light were only the fantastic silhouettes of the jigsaw logs.

ARTHUR KENDALL was surprised to find me within the house, no doubt, but his agitation over some other matter was so great that he wasted no time expressing it. All he said was a gruff, “Oh, you here? Please wait outside in the car. There is a private matter I must attend to here.”

His voice was so charged with emotion, and his face so haggard and drawn, that I actually felt a sense of indelicacy at looking at him. There was a torment of soul there that an outsider shrank from seeing.

He kept me a long time—more than an hour, it must have been, for the Moon climbed until it reached its zenith. Once I thought I heard a wail from the depths of the mansion—not the wail of anguish of the physically stricken, but the high cry of poignant sorrow such as one might expect from a suddenly bereaved bride, or a fond mother at the foot of her son’s gallows.

When Kendall did come, it was with a rush, as a man possessed. He sprang into his seat, stepped viciously on the starter, and whipped the car down the curving drive at a reckless speed. He slowed, though, for the gate, and once we were out on the road he drove more sanely.

“So you saw them, at last?” The form of it was a question, but it was a statement. He sighed heavily and slowed the car to a crawl.

“I’m glad they let you see. Whatever happens hereafter, there will be some strength and consolation in feeling that there is at least one human who understands what Enoch and I were compelled to do. Compelled, yes! How could we know of the long, hopeless sufferings of those dear creatures and not try to help them? Some we could save, or hoped to. For the others—there is always fire.”

He stopped the car and looked back toward the mansion, but behind us was only the dark masses of the midnight woods. Presently he started slowly forward again, talking as he drove.

“Enoch Warren saw them first, the night he slept there after his wife’s death. He woke with a start, in the middle of the night, feeling something lying on his chest, plucking at the hem of his blanket. Then that something crawled up across his throat and he felt fingers lightly brushing his jaw and cheek. Just as you would have done, he grabbed at the hand and caught it. It was surprisingly small and light, a woman’s hand, and it seemed to come away in his grasp, as if he had pulled it clear off the body that owned it. When he reached up further, with his other hand, to seize the arm that should have been there, there was nothing. Still holding his capture tight, he got up and made a light, and found he was holding the living hand of a severed arm.

“I say living, because the fingers wriggled in his, squeezing his hand. It was perplexing, and you can imagine how he searched the house. Our time is too short to tell you in detail of all those painful and slow first steps he had to take to solve the puzzle of the lonely, living hand. It could beckon as well as squeeze, and it would tap out messages with its fingertips. Patiently he followed its every hint.

“In time he learned that it was identified with the oak desk that stood in his bedroom, one of Mrs. Warren’s antique purchases. Then, driven or led by the hand, he found that downstairs there were more parts—some of the upper arm that belonged to his hand, a bit of leg, and some other unidentifiable fragments. These, in turn, appeared to be associated with a piece of furniture, an oak buffet. Experimentally, he wrecked the two pieces of furniture, and sorting out the boards that seemed to match, he joined them together and found that by doing it some of his fleshy fragments correspondingly welded themselves together. But there were some of the body slivers that did not fit at all, and of course there was much missing.

“His wife’s records showed that both the oak pieces were Ravenshaws, and he found an offer of a third, which she must have refused to buy on account of the price asked. He at once ordered it, tore it apart, and was rewarded by discovering he had the head to his body—to his delighted eyes she was a lovely blond goddess, no less. He devoted many months to conversing with the head, learning its language. In time he understood enough to hear her story.

“That was Arethne. She was a very ancient tree nymph, hamadryad of a wonderful oak that grew in a grove near Stonehenge, and there had been a time when she was the object of worship of multitudes. In the year 1572, Hugh Ravenshaw cut her tree down and made it into furniture—”

“Hold on,” I objected. “Hamadryads cannot survive their tree. They die with it.”

“That,” he said, “is a gross error, a mistranslation of the old legends. Tree nymphs survive until the bole has been totally destroyed, whether by rot or fire. You may divide the bole, and the hamadryad with it, but neither ceases to exist, as you yourself have seen.

“But back to Arethne. She was very anxious to be reassembled. She said the agony of being hewn into planks was not so great as you might imagine, but the perpetual distress of being dispersed—a hand in one city, a foot in another, and perhaps the head on another continent—was painful beyond description. It made re-embodiment, or materialization, impracticable, for whenever she attempted it, she only succeeded in frightening the human she tried to appear before. Such efforts on the part of herself, or cousins, are the foundations upon which so many ghost legends are built. After a few decades of such experiences, she quit trying and resigned herself to her miserable doom. The fact that the cabinet work made from her tree was so beautiful and masterfully done made her situation all the worse, for they were carefully preserved. She had abandoned hope even of relief in death.”

“But why,” I asked, “should a hamadryad want to reembody herself?”

“Because, although they are the souls of trees, they have the bodies of women. Now that there are no more satyrs, necessarily they must choose their lovers from among us. It is a hard fate for a lovely pagan creature to be dismembered and dispersed so finely, part in a museum there, another in a private collection in another place—in the midst of warm life, not dead, yet not able to partake of it.

“Her early efforts to reveal herself to potential lovers repelled, rather than attracted them. It was not until she met Enoch Warren that she found a human with the sympathetic nature and capacity of mind she yearned for. It was in search of the rest of her that he went to the museum that day, taking her arm with him to help him pick the pieces he must have. You see, by then he was well known in nymphian circles, and other dispersed hamadryads would show their pitiful fragments to him in the hope that he would aid them too. It was very confusing. It is a hard matter to match bits of the same body, especially when they are not adjacent, and it complicates things immeasurably to have to pick them from a jumble of alien parts.

“That is how he came to hire me. I could recognize them in their wooden form and need not expose myself to the embarrassment of being caught as he was, with a human fragment in my possession.

“I hunted Ravenshaws all over this country and Europe, and in the end we recovered most of Arethne’s tree, and we fitted it together as you have seen. Once she was complete, she remained embodied most of the time, only withdrawing into the tree when strangers, such as the truck-men, would arrive at the mansion. She took a great interest in the living trees on the estate, and would go out at night and mingle with their nymphs, although she thought them all distinctly of a lower class than the Old World hamadryads. It was largely due to her urging that Enoch burned his sawmills, that and the appearance of Xaquiqui. He did not believe at first that they are everywhere that there are trees.

“You see, in acquiring all that furniture, we had many pieces left over, as craftsmen mix their lumber indiscriminately. In the Ravenshaws we found much lumber from other trees of her own grove—two of them her own cousins, or sisters, hamadryad relationships are too involved for me to wholly understand. Those were Chryseis and Melne. Driven by his own impulse of compassion and by Arethne’s pleading, he continued his buying, searching for the remainder of those trees. Soon we had enough to start their reassembly.”

“But,” I objected again, “wouldn’t certain parts be irretrievably lost? The chips and sawdust and so on. And in all these centuries surely some whole boards must have been burned.”

“Exactly,” he admitted, “and therein lies the tragedy of it. Melne, whom you saw, is as complete as we can make her. It is true that there is a pair of stools in the Vatican made from her trees, but they refuse to sell them. Even if they would, they are unimportant—a pair of fingers, I think. I have searched everywhere—there is no more.”

Some time before we had reached the top of the hill that leads down to Milburn, and he had stopped the car and parked at the side of the road, looking from time to time over his shoulder. I was aware of a redness flickering on the windshield, and I turned to look too. Behind there was a ruddy glow lighting the sky, and in another minute a high yellow flame lifted itself above the treetops, licking the smoky clouds. From the direction of Milburn came the sound of pistol shots. Then the clangor of bells, and finally the scream of a siren.

Arthur Kendall put his car in motion. Then, without a word of explanation, drove it crosswise off the road and killed his engine. Doggedly he sat there as the lumbering fire truck chugged up the hill from the village, and when the outraged firemen stopped at his barricade and swore at him he merely fumbled with the switches on the dashboard and pretended to be trying to start a car that would not start. The impatient firemen gathered around and a dozen pairs of arms pushed us literally off the road. Then, with siren screaming, they drove on past to the conflagration behind us. Mad Mansion was in flames.

“It was the only way,” said Kendall, with a sob. He was driving furiously now. “We have burned others where there was no hope. So it must be with Chryseis.”

“But why? Chryseis is whole—”

“Yesterday,” he said grimly, almost biting the words off, “the court set aside the will. Ada and Lionel Warren inherit. Everything.”

I still could not see.

“An hour later Ada signed a contract with Seymour and Wrigley. It is that I cannot bear. Seymour and Wrigley are restorers of antiques. They have photographs of every bit of the original furniture, and they know most of the original component boards are there. All those we have collected there will be scattered again, sold on the open market, to appease Ada’s insatiable greed. I did the kind thing—they agreed with me, awhile ago, begged me to set the match.”

“You loved Chryseis?”

He nodded. “For two years she has been my wife.”

He let me out at Milburn, and drove off blindly into the night.

Article: Does a Tree Ever Die?

Weird Tales, March 1941

The author of the ‘The Man Who Loved Planks’ has a few words to say about trees and their fascinating souls—the wood nymphs

THE wholesale destruction of fine trees in New England several years ago set me thinking about wood nymphs. The belief that each grove has its dryad and each tree its hamadryad is an old one. For thousands of years people have thought that the hamadryad died with her tree. But when does a tree die? Strictly speaking, a living tree is already mostly dead—if we consider the sapwood as the only part enjoying the pulse of life. In my account of the unhappy fate of Chryseis, Melne and the others, I have chosen rather to consider that no part of a tree really dies until it has entirely rotted away or been consumed by fire. Its spirit, therefore, would continue to reside in it.

Whether or not that spirit would be dispersed into fragments, should the tree be dismembered, is one of those things that lie in the realm of the unknowable; so is the exact place of the ghost’s residence in the human body—if there are ghosts. But in the dream world of fantasy it’s not necessary to know things. We need only believe them, or half believe them. In that delightful land we require only a degree of plausibility. From the myths of antiquity to the Weird Tales of today, the formula is the same. If such and such creatures exist, and if such and such laws are in operation, things will be so and so.

So I considered the problem of the wood nymph, whose tree was of such beautiful wood that men would not allow it to perish, but cut it up into bits and attempted to preserve it forever in the form of fine furniture. It seemed to me that such a nymph would be most unhappy and yearn to be once more reunited with herself. That such a reassembly of a tree is possible was suggested by some of the expert testimony at the famous Hauptmann trial. By piecing these thoughts together I conceived the story in this issue as the most humane solution of her problem.

Dead End

Thrilling Wonder Stories, March 1941

“COME across with fifty grand, kid, or it’s going to to be just too bad.” Dippy Moran held out the heavily stamped check. Outstanding among the cancelled endorsements were the fatal initials “N. S. F.”

“Nuts,” said Hugo Trellick, staring at it, “I thought …”

“Never mind what you thought. It’s the coin we want—or else!”

“Or else what?”

“You know Joe. He don’t stand for no welching. The last guy that tried it on him went for a ride. He got back, all right, but he won’t ever look the same.”

“I’ll get the money,” muttered Trellick, reaching for the check.

“Oh, no you don’t,” snorted Dippy. “I’m hanging on to this. What’s more, I’m sticking with you until you pay off. Get it?”

Trellick sighed. There was an end to all good things, and this was one of them. The three one thousand dollar notes in his wallet and the rakish foreign built roadster outside the door were all that was left of the five million his father had left him a few years before. That fifty thousand dollar rubber check stood for his last effort to come back—it stood for part of his losses at Joe Hickleman’s stud joint the night before. And the Hickleman gang had a hard reputation as bad debt collectors.

Dippy Moran’s threatening gaze had never left his face.

“Come on, then,” said Trellick wearily.

“Where to?”

“I just remembered. My dad, before he croaked, staked a nut inventor. I’ve got a half interest in it—a time travel gadget. The old man thought there would be money in it.”

“Yeah? Well, let’s go see.”

TRELLICK brought the car to a stop on the soft shoulder of the road in front of the secluded farm house.

“Wait here. This bozo’s funny about visitors. I’ll do better by myself.”

He slid out of the driver’s seat and pushed the gate in the hedge open. After the third battery of knocks the front door was grudgingly unlocked, and Dr. Otis peered out into the dark to see who his unwanted visitor was. He was a head taller than the dapper young spendthrift who stood on his threshold.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, after a moment’s scrutiny. Then, as if to shut the door, “I have nothing for you yet. The book on the Constitutional Convention is not selling very well and I haven’t finished my studies of Lincoln—”

“It’s not chicken feed I want to talk about,” said Trellick roughly, pushing in. “Real dough is what I’m after, and I want it now! I’m broke, and I gotta have a hundred grand before the week is out.”

“Research, my young friend, does not produce results so fast.”

Dr. Otis closed and relocked the door and led the way to his laboratory. He did not like the son and heir of the man who had backed him, but he felt that at least he had to be civil to him. “Moreover, the machine is not perfected yet. It works very badly at long ranges. Two centuries is positively the upper limit at the present.”

“At that,” growled Trellick, “you don’t have to keep on mooning around with the junk you’ve been wasting time with. It took you six months to find out you couldn’t hear what Isabella said to Columbus and another six to learn you couldn’t look in on Shakespeare writing his plays to find out whether he really wrote ’em or not. As if anybody but a lot of old mossbacks gave a hoot! What about Sir Francis Drake and the pirate Morgan I wrote you about? Those guys swiped important money and buried it somewhere. What’s wrong with looking that up?”

“Too far back, the images are fuzzy,” said Dr. Otis quietly. “And it doesn’t interest me,” he added, with dignity.

“Oh, it doesn’t interest you!” sneered Trellick, wheeling on him. “Well, it interests me, and like it or not, that’s where we’re going. How do you get into this thing?”

He referred to the cabinet that sat against the wall, hooked to a wall outlet by a simple electric cord. It had a pair of lenses, similar to those on a penny-in-the-slot peep show, for the eyes. Dangling beside them was a set of headphones. Beneath, the front of the machine was studded with vari-colored knobs and verniers. Dr. Otis shook his head.

“I have told you repeatedly that this is no time travel machine. Such a thing is a logical impossibility, treated seriously only by half-cracked writers of fantasy. Such a machine would lead one at once into a hopeless paradox—”

“Never mind that bunk!” Trellick interrupted rudely. “What is it then? How does it work?”

“A Chronoscope, I call it,” said Dr. Otis. “It consists of a set of scanners for both sight and sound that can be focused on any spot in space and at any point in time. Such an instrument can probe time in much the same manner as a telescope probes space, but since the object of its scrutiny is unaware of it, nothing is affected, as would be the case if a living man actually went back into the past. It is argued—”

Trellick was impatient. “Don’t argue, get busy! Trot out that Drake and Morgan stuff I sent you.”

“I don’t like your tone, young man. The contract I signed with your father makes me the sole judge of what sections of the past should be studied. I’ve already told you—”

Bam!

Without warning Trellick swung on the bigger man, smashing a heavy right to the jaw. He followed instantly with a quick left jab, then jumped back.

“That for your contract,” he said in a low, deadly voice. “Will you talk reason now, or do you want more of the same?”

But Dr. Otis, for all his being a scientist, was not so tractable as Trellick had hoped. Instead, he charged like a bull, his college-trained fists plunging like pistons. Trellick exchanged another pair of blows with him, then went over backward as he crashed into a chair. Otis squared away, panting with indignation, and waited for him to get up.

But Trellick could not forget that sitting out in the road was Dippy Moran, waiting not too patiently for his fifty thousand dollars. He struggled to his feet and warily approached Dr. Otis again. Again they tangled, and with a jarred skull and a fast closing right eye, Trellick was smashed to the floor again. When he was up that time he was even more cautious, for he knew that Otis was more than his match.

Casting about for a weapon, his eye caught the heavy ebony bookends on Dr. Otis’s desk. He snatched one of them up and hurled it straight for the older man’s head. It struck, corner first, squarely on the left temple. There was a dull moan, and the scientist crumpled. He lay where he fell, without a further sound or quiver of motion. Trellick slowly lowered the arm that was about to cast the other one of the bookends. His jaw dropped as an awesome fear crept over him. Then, hesitantly, he knelt and passed hasty hands over the crumpled body on the floor.

Dr. Otis was dead!

Appalled, Trellick shrank back. He had been a ne’er-do-well and a wastrel, but beyond petty vices he had not resorted to crime. And this was murder! They could hang you for that! Tremblingly, he rose to his feet, recalled that Dippy Moran, the inexorable collector of gambling losses, was waiting grimly for him outside.

Hastily Trellick hefted the Chronoscope. It was lighter than he thought, hardly forty pounds. It was self-contained. He jerked the wire from the base-plug and shortened it into a coil. He snatched up a set of papers from the doctor’s desk and stuffed them into his pocket. Then he managed to get the Chronoscope onto his shoulders, and staggered with it to the door.

“Phew!” he gasped, as he set the instrument down onto the soft ground beside the car. “It’s heavy, but here it is. Now let’s get outa here!”

“I’ll say you’d better, pal. I seen what you did through the window.”

Trellick froze.

“You going to turn me in?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Dippy nonchalantly. “There ain’t no reward been offered yet. When there is, it’ll be up to you. The Boss’ll find a hideout for you—if you can pay the rent.” Dippy put a world of meaning into the way he squeezed that last word out from between his teeth. Blackmail, that indicated.

“It was self-defense,” objected Trellick, doggedly. “Anyhow, nobody knows I was there tonight outside of you.”

“No?” Dippy’s laugh was hollow mockery. “Not counting the million prints you probably left, how about these tire tracks? You gotta tread on this buggy that’s different from anything I ever seen, and it’s lying there in front of the house as plain as day. They’ll have your number, kid, within an hour after the cops hit the place. All I gotta say is that this here radio gadget you swiped better be worth what you say it is, ’cause the Boss don’t stick his neck out for charity!”

Trellick groaned. He was in for it now. This gang would suck him dry, no matter what vast treasures of the past he uncovered. Yet there was no choice. The other road led to the Death House and the noose. He shuddered.

“Let me drive,” said Dippy, scornfully, as the fleeting car reacted to Trellick’s jittery nerves.

JOE HICKLEMAN proved skeptical.

“A fat help, that!” he sneered, looking down on Trellick who was sweating with the Chronoscope. The Boss turned disgustedly to his henchmen.

“Get Tony up here and have this cockeyed television gadget busted up—he ought to be able to get something for the parts. Then take this guy down to Bug’s place, give him a good shellacking, and lock him up until the circulars are out. We may get something out of him yet, if it’s only a deal with the D.A.”

“No!” screamed Trellick, cringing at the thought of what was coming to him. “Give me time, that’s all.”

“You said you’d find Captain Kidd’s treasure, but all I can see is fog and static.”

“It’s too far back—1698 or thereabout. The Earth was billions of miles from here then, and there are too many cosmic rays between.”

“Whadda I care what the alibi is?” demanded the Boss. “You promised dough, and you ain’t produced in a week. Come on Patsy, grab him—”

“Wait!” wailed Trellick, grabbing at straws in desperation. “I’ll prove to you the machine is a real time searcher. Is there anything that happened lately that you’d like to get the lowdown on?”

“Yeah,” said Joe, after a moment’s thought. “I’d like to know what rat tipped the cops off about that Rawlinson job. We knew who one of ’em was, and bumped him off, but I can’t figure who else.”

Trellick tuned in the coordinates of Police Headquarters on the night of March 18th. He shifted the height control, and the laterals, as he searched room by room. Presently he came to a room with five cops in it and a sweating man seated under a bright light.

“Does this guy mean anything to you?” asked Trellick, stepping back and motioning Joe Hickleman to step to the eyepieces.

“I’ll say he does,” growled the Boss, grabbing for the headphones. “It’s Slippery Ellis—shhhh!”

For three hours Hickleman sat, listening intently, hearing question and answer, word for word. But it only took him the first ten minutes to make up his mind.

He turned abruptly from the machine and beckoned Patsy.

“Get Slippery—he’s the one. Give him Number Six, the old brickyard technique. Scram!” Then he turned calmly back to the drama being enacted in Headquarters.

“Yeah,” he said complacently, as the scene terminated. “You got something there. I can see a lotta ways to use a machine like that. But I ain’t forgetting you owe me fifty grand, and besides that I’m compounding a felony. So go back to your gold-digging. You got a month. Then—”

The Boss raised his brows and bulged his eyes ominously. It was his final ultimatum.

“Yessir,” stammered Trellick, and heaved the first breath that could be called easy since he had become these gangsters’ prisoner. Hickleman and his cohorts left the room.

After they had gone, Trellick tuned the Chronoscope to the farmhouse where the Chronoscope had been built, and watched the image of Dr. Otis as he had worked at its assembly. He could read over his shoulder as he hooked up one dial after the other, and in that way learned the purpose of several he had not been using.

There were sets for latitude and longitude and height above sea-level, with verniers for delicate adjustment. There were dials for year, month, day and hour, together with correction tables for Julian and other calendars. Not controlled by dials, but automatic, were five nests of cams that shot the invisible scanners back over the serpentine path followed by the Earth and Solar System as they hurtled through space at the rate of tens of millions of miles per year. And there were focusing screws on the eyepieces, and volume control on the phones.

Trellick discovered another item among the papers he had snatched from Dr. Otis’ desk. In the scientist’s bold handwriting were these words:

“The filament in the main tube is triborium carbide, and so far as I know constitutes the total amount of this substance so far isolated. I estimate its service life at about twelve hundred hours. Economy in the use of the Chronoscope is therefore indicated.”

Trellick shot a hasty glance at the meter on the machine. It read six hundred fifty four! The machine was already more than half used up! And of that amount, he himself had used up most of it in his vain searching for Captain Kidd and his buried treasure. Henceforth he must work at closer range and with as accurate preliminary data as he could secure.

When Dippy brought him his supper, Trellick gave him a list of the books he wanted bought. He could not bother with the hordes gone down on ships, the time and cost of salvage was too great, even if the position of the sunken hulk was exactly known. What he was after was shallowly buried treasure of gold or gems, preferably in some secluded spot. The books he ordered were the lives and careers of the buccaneers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Surely all those rich caches had not been uncovered!

It was Lafitte he chose. He started in the year 1818, and sought that famous privateer’s marauding craft, the Jupiter. He wasted twenty precious hours of the filament’s life before he found her, lazing along under full sail on an almost glassy sea. He gasped as he brought her more clearly into focus, for even at that range of a century and a quarter, she came in with startling clarity. It was as if he was perched in her mizzen rigging, looking down upon the quarterdeck of an actual ship.

A swaggering tough strode the poop, a long glass under his arm. Alternately his eyes roved aloft to check the set of the canvas or swept the empty, cloud-studded horizon. A hawk-nosed cut-throat clung to the wheel, while other picturesquely-garbed scoundrels lolled about the decks. All wore dirty sashes that once were gay in color, from which peeped the butts of pistols or the shiny brass hilts of cutlasses.

Trellick clung to the eyepieces, watching, but the minutes wore on and nothing happened except the occasional flapping of a sail. Impatiently he jumped the setting of the Chronoscope an hour ahead and found himself about three miles astern of the pirate ship. He realized then that he must use still another dial to keep pace with the moving object of his scrutiny.

All day he sat there, continually shifting the time ahead, for he was beginning to realize that the piracy business was not always brisk. It might be days before the Jupiter fell in with some luckless merchantman. Yet Trellick did not dare waste his precious filament by continual tracking. At the same time he could not risk too long a jump, as he might lose the Jupiter altogether.

Twice a day one of Hickleman’s men would bring him coffee and sandwiches, and at intervals he would sleep a little, but in the main he kept desperately at his job.

It was ten days (by Jupiter time) before he sighted the first victim, a three masted schooner with very dirty sails. There was a good breeze that day and the corsair lost little time in closing with its prey. Trellick’s breath came in excited pants as he watched the engagement from the first discharge of the 32-pounders to the time when the burning schooner drifted astern, gutted of her cargo, and her scuppers running blood.

He saw many terrible scenes in the vigils that followed that first capture. Sometimes he, Trellick, in 1941, would be the first to see the sail lift above the horizon. Usually he was informed of it by the hoarse bellows of the buccaneer on watch. Sometimes he tuned in on the very midst of the furious fight.

He witnessed men shot down or hacked to pieces. He saw struggling, weeping women carried exultantly on board, and the ribald pleasantries with which they were greeted. He saw gigantic Negroes, chained in strings of four or six, driven aboard with whips and thrust down into the holds. Those, he knew, would be later sold in the slave markets of New Orleans or Pensacola for somewhere about a dollar a pound. On other days he would witness the cruel, hard discipline of the seafaring men—the floggings, dippings from yardarm, even a keelhauling.

To offset those sights, he saw what he was looking for—treasure! Only there were no great hauls except in the single case of a Spanish grandee captured along with his heavily bejewelled wife. Generally the loot was in the form of cargo or slaves. Yet nearly every vessel outward bound from Mexico carried at least one gold bar and ten or twelve silver ingots. Trellick shifted his scanners to the cabin below where he saw the treasure chests slowly filling.

Later, when Trellick saw them unload the stuff at Little Campeachy, the pirate’s lair on Galveston Island, he learned that was the place to watch, for the ships only acted as gatherers, as the worker bees do for the hive. To save filament he learned to take jumps in time of months. Always, after such a jump, he would find more gold and jewels, as the silver, slaves and merchandise were shipped farther east and sold, and the money brought back.

AT last came the day when Lafitte was warned that warships were coming to raid him. That was when the most precious part of the hoard was loaded into brass-bound chests and sturdy casks and prepared for burial. Trellick finally had the satisfaction of seeing four chests of gold, one small casket of gems, and two casks of silver taken on board the Jupiter, and with them went Lafitte himself. That voyage Trellick followed closely, never letting the ship out of sight. In a few hours more he would know—know where those millions in gold and rubies and pearls were hidden, never since recovered. For it is well known that Lafitte died poor and none of his suspected wealth has ever come to light.

“How you doin’, kid?” Joe Hickleman’s gruff voice demanded. The words were friendly, but the tone was not. It sounded ominously like a threat. “Today’s the last day. If you don’t come through—”

“Everything’s swell!” exclaimed Trellick excitedly. “Look!”

He glanced at his notes and found the day and hour when Lafitte had packed his treasure chests before taking them out to the Jupiter. Hastily he cut back the machine to show that happening. He called the Boss to the eyepiece.

“Cripes!” muttered Hickleman, as he sized up the stacked ingots and the pile of bracelets, rings and unmounted jewels. “Them sparklers is worth a cool million, even to a fence.”

“I told you so,” cried Trellick, triumphantly. “It was all just a matter of time—”

“Yeah,” agreed the Boss, “and you just got in under the wire. If you hadn’t located the stuff, I was going to sell you out. A thousand bucks the police are offering for you, but that ain’t nothin’. A jerkwater college called Bairdsley Hall is offering a hundred grand for this machine in working condition. Say they bought out Otis before you croaked him, and it’s worth that much to ’em to get it back, along with his notes. Whadda you think of that?”

It was hard for Trellick to think anything, for the cold shudders were chasing each other up and down his spine. After all, he had not actually found the place of burial of the treasure yet, and there was scarcely more than a hundred hours left in the life of the filament. If in the end he failed, he knew his gangster captor would not hesitate to betray him for whatever he could get.

“D-don’t worry, Boss,” Trellick managed. “In another hour I’ll have the dope. Of course, after that, I’ll have to go and dig the stuff up—”

“I’ll take care of that angle,” said Joe Hickleman grimly. “I’m sitting in on this show from now on.”

The rest of the afternoon the two men alternated at the eyepieces. What they saw could have come out of any melodrama about the freebooters of the sea.

Lafitte himself, accompanied by two husky slaves, carried the chests ashore. Four picked desperadoes rowed the boat, but waited at the shore while the pirate and his black porters disappeared into the sand dunes of Mustang Island. The two watchers of the twentieth century trailed them to a lone live oak that stood on a knoll, and saw Lafitte step off twenty paces to the southwest. Next, the slaves dug a deep hole and eased the heavy boxes into it, and returning to their spades, started refilling the hole. At that point the pistols of the pirate spoke, and the two unlucky wretches tumbled into the excavation on top of the treasure trove.

Silently Lafitte finished the burial, and afterward chopped a peculiar blaze on the offside of the lone oak. Then, his work finished, he stalked back through the dunes to where his boat awaited him. Of all living men, only Lafitte knew the exact spot where the chests lay.

“Let’s go!” shouted Joe Hickleman. “What are we waiting for?”

Hickleman took two of his henchmen and Trellick with him on the trip to Texas. They hired a summer shack near Port Aransas and told people they were vacationers from the North, come down for a shot at tarpon fishing.

“There just ain’t no oak tree!” exclaimed the Boss in deep disgust after they had combed the dunes for four days. “And the place don’t look the same. Sure you know where you are? Because I ain’t going to stand for any funny business much longer—”

But just then Trellick gave a little yelp. His foot had caught on a gnarled root protruding from the shifting sands. As he turned to clamber up, he saw the grain of the grey, weathered wood. It was unmistakably oak. At once he began to dig, feverishly, with both hands.

By dark they had uncovered the huge, fallen bole. Faint but still legible, despite the fact the bark was long since gone, they found traces of Lafitte’s ax marks on the lower trunk. It was the witness tree!

Dawn found all four—even the puffing Boss—hard at work with pick and shovel. By the time the sun was half-way to the zenith they had turned up a skull, long, narrow and with a prognathous jaw. It could have belonged to no other than a native African. Just above the left eye socket there was a hole—the mark of Lafitte’s silencing bullet.

Dippy’s pick struck wood. A moment later he had fished out of the damp sand a pair of barrel staves. At his cry, the others came up closer and for another half hour they dug frenziedly, but their only reward was more staves and the rotting planks of a broken chest. A pair of brass hinges, green with age, was all the metal they found.

“You-all lookin’ for pirate treasure?” drawled a voice behind. There was amusement in the tone. “’Cause if you are, I can save you work. This place’s been dug clear down to water more times than I can think of. Back when I was a kid, they was some silver bars found here, but that was years ago. Since then, they’ve dug up acres and acres but they never found no more.”

Hickleman mopped his brow and stared at the tall, gaunt man. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, and on his loose-hanging vest a silver star reposed. The pearl-handled forty-fives that hung from his belt confirmed the man’s position. He was the local deputy sheriff.

“Nope,” said Hickleman, kicking the skull into full view. “Just saw this lying here and thought we’d find the rest of it.”

The law officer viewed it indifferently.

“Yeah,” he said, “those turn up every so often.” With that he chuckled and walked away.

The Boss glowered at the unhappy Trellick.

“Better think up a better one before we get back to the city,” he said, tossing away his shovel scornfully.

“There isn’t but one thing to do,” said Trellick, doggedly. “Go back to the machine and find out who took it, and when. Maybe it’s buried somewhere else.”

Trellick tried to make his words sound confident, though at the bottom of his heart he felt a gnawing fear. The filament of the master tube was almost burned out. If the Boss knew that, he might give up the search and at once claim the college’s reward. Trellick’s reason also told him that if the treasure had been uncovered long ago, it was probably dispersed by now, and its original finders dead. Yet, since the Chronoscope was so near the end of its usefulness, he dared not ransack history for another batch of buried pirate loot. He could only go along the trail he had broken.

“Okay,” said the Boss, “but make it snappy.”

BACK in his city hideout, Trellick swiftly skipped down through the century. Lightly he touched for a moment in each year. The giant oak still stood in 1860, and ’70, and ’80, and there was no sign that the ground about it had been disturbed, although under the influence of wind and rain it frequently changed its surface configurations.

But a day came in the early nineties when Trellick tuned in on a scene that was different. The magnificent tree lay on its side, uprooted, and two dozen paces away there were hummocks of sand that looked more man-made than natural.

Trellick hastily cut backward, groping here and there in the months just preceding, narrowing the time until he came to the exact day of the tree’s destruction. It was on a day in September, and when the machine brought the picture into sharp focus he could see that it was raining in torrents and that heavy black clouds were scurrying past, driven by a fearful Gulf hurricane.

In a moment he could make out four stumbling forms, men that were slogging through the wet sands, hunting shelter. They were rough-looking men and wore patched clothing, and none looked as if he had ever shaved. Trellick took them for tramps who had gone South to escape the northern winter. As he looked on, the men sighted the tree and ran toward it. When they reached it, they huddled in the lee of its massive bole, shivering.

Trellick skipped ahead an hour, then another. Still the men huddled as the wind rose, howling ever higher. Salt spray from mountainous waves was whipping in now, mingled with the driving rain. Then came thunderous lightning, and night. Impatiently Trellick cut ahead to dawn, the break of a day full of wild fury. The great tree was down! And under it, hopelessly crushed, was one of the tramps, while the other three clung like drowned rats to its fallen branches. Off to the left, the corner of a brass-bound chest stuck out of the glistening sand. It was an act of nature, not man’s cleverness that had revealed the hiding place of Lafitte’s treasure;

Impatiently Trellick jumped ahead another day, and found it calm. The three men were digging furiously. Already they had uncovered half the treasure. Then he saw them hesitate, break open a cask of silver ingots, take one of them out and rebury the rest. And with that one bar of silver in their hands, they went away!

Three days later they were back, with a string of packmules. That time they took out all the gold and jewels and stowed them on the sturdy animals’ backs. The silver they discarded as being too heavy and of little value to men so rich as they. Trellick’s heart sank as he looked at the meter on the Chronoscope. There were not many hours left. Suppose these men split later and went three ways? He could hardly hope to follow more than one. Which one?

The question soon answered itself.

THE youngest of the trio, a well built fellow with a luxuriant red beard, sank a butcher knife into the back of one of his mates while the latter was tightening the last of the donkeys’ girths. Then, before the third one knew what was happening, he sprang at him. The two men tussled for several seconds, but the red-bearded one had the advantage of surprise. In a moment he was all alone, standing among the burros on the blood-soaked sand.

Trellick looked on in something akin to horror. Somehow he had the feeling he knew that man. There was something familiar about the eyes—and voice. Yet he could not place him.

However, brutal and cowardly as the murders were, it simplified Trellick’s problem. He not only had but one man to follow, but he had the means of making him disgorge when he caught up with him in the present day. For Trellick had learned a trick or two from his association with the Boss and Dippy. He told them his plan, and they provided him the cameras and plates.

“That’s right,” grinned the Boss, happily, “they ain’t no statute of limitation on moider. He’ll have to come across when he sees these.”

Trellick said nothing, but he was vaguely disturbed. What was there about this man he was photographing that seemed so familiar? He adjusted the Chronoscope once more, increased the light to maximum, and flicked the camera shutters again, so they could take still pictures of the cold-blooded murders. Well, at least they had the goods on him, whoever he was.

Small wonder the discovery of the Lafitte hoard had never been reported!

Trellick soon found a short-cut in following the small cavalcade across the prairies of Texas. Each morning he noted its direction and, knowing that it could not make more than twenty miles during the day, five minutes scouting the next morning would find it, or the embers of the camp fire left behind. Steadily the trend was to the northwest—toward the Panhandle and ultimately Colorado.

The mesquite bordering the trail turned to sagebrush, and steadily the elevation rose. In time, Trellick found himself following the laboring donkeys up a rugged canyon of the Rockies. Then, at last, his query settled down and made a permanent camp. First of all, to Trellick’s unbounded satisfaction, the man—he watched buried the bulk of his treasure.

“Ah,” breathed Trellick, “maybe all we’ll have to do is dig there.”

But his hopes were soon blasted. The man he pursued had kept out a pair of the gold bars and was reducing them to powder with a horse-shoer’s rasp. Later, accompanied by a single donkey, he hit the trail to the nearest settlement. Trellick saw him hitch his donkeys to a post and saunter into the nearest saloon. He heard the tale of finding a placer deposit and of washing gold, and saw the powder exchanged for credit at the store, for whiskey, and for gold coin.

LATER expeditions followed, and with somewhat mingled feelings Trellick followed his trips to Denver and to the mint, where the man boldly sold gold bars by the dozen—a burro-load each trip. The money obtained from those sales went into Denver banks. As the self-styled miner grew in affluence and reputation for wealth, he became bolder. One day he came to town with two large diamonds which he said he had bought earlier for a lady friend, afterward changing his mind. How much would the jeweler give for them?

Trellick saw all these things and wondered. At that rate, the buried pirate loot in the canyon of the Rockies would soon be turned into bank balances and would cease to exist in the form that Lafitte left it. Yet, when he thought of that, he thought contentedly of the damning photographs of the cowardly murders on Mustang Island. Yes, let the fellow do the dirty work of converting the pirate’s cash into modern credit. The Boss could pry it loose in one interview. Already the balances totaled more than two million!

Joe Hickleman’s voice broke in harshly.

“Hey, you! What about all that dough? The G-men are snooping around and want plenty for an income tax rap. I can’t fool around no longer. What’s the dope?”

“Coming along fine,” assured Trellick, disconcerted at the urgency in the chief mobster’s voice. “I’m up to 1904 and the guy has cashed in half the treasure—it’s two million in the bank, and more to come.”

“Well, step on it, kid. I’m in a corner. Hop ahead and get the answer, and be damn quick about it.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Trellick, humbly.

A SMALL gong rang somewhere within the machine. Trellick was startled. He shut off the power and began examining all the dials and meters on the face of it. All were normal but the time meter. That stood just a hair off zero. The machine was about to burn out, and he was still thirty-five years behind his goal. Who was this man who had lifted the Lafitte millions and where did he live today?

He snapped the current back on and picked up his quarry in the famous old Brown Palace Hotel of Denver, just going into the barber shop. He snapped the switch off with a gesture of annoyance, then snapped it on again, a half-hour ahead. The man whose career he was so interested in, and whose fortune was so closely bound up in his, was just getting out of the barber chair.

His beard had been shorn away and instead he was wearing a handle-bar mustache, curled neatly at the ends as the vogue of that day prescribed. With a yawn, the plutocrat put his collar on, and leisurely tied his flowing cravat.

Then he tore open a package he had brought with him and took from it an elegant Prince Albert coat of finest broadcloth. An obsequious porter brought in another box and produced a splendid specimen of the old-fashioned beaver hat.

“Very fine gentleman, sah!” said the porter, giving the final, useless whisk of his long brush. “I’ll bet the ladies think you’re sompin’!”

Trellick gazed long and tremblingly at the figure on the visiscreen. He could hardly believe his eyes at first, but slowly conviction got the better of his doubts. He had seen that picture before—the top-hatted, swaggering young buck with his curled mustache and imposing frock coat. It was a picture that had always stood on the mantel in his mother’s house! It was a picture of his father—taken long before he was born!

Those millions! He had already had them! He had already squandered them! They were no more! All these weary weeks of search he had been following a circular trail. He was back to the beginning. Dead end? It was worse than a dead end. It was the old roundy-cum-roundy!

The hammering on the door was more insistent. Trellick stood speechless, not knowing what to say. The Chronoscope sat before him, dark and silent. That last vision had finished the overworked master tube.

“In the name of the Law!” bawled an overbearing voice. Then the door was burst in.

“You’re Trellick? This the machine? We had a tip we’d find you here.”

Somebody clicked a bracelet around his wrist. In a daze he was led from the room. Somehow he felt that every; thing had gone wrong. Of all the pirates under the sun, why had he picked Lafitte?

Article: Space-War Strategy

Super Science Novels Magazine, March 1941

SINCE the day of the trireme, warships have tended to specialize into types. Today we have such widely different classes as the heavy battleship, capable of keeping the sea in all weathers and dealing out and receiving terrible punishment; the submarine, which operates by stealth; the fast cruiser whose main function is to obtain information; aircraft carriers, transports, and so on. Whether seagoing tug or destroyer leader, each is designed for a definite purpose, and for its job is well nigh indispensible.

The fleets of tomorrow will be quite as specialized, and it may be interesting to speculate on how the conditions of space warfare will react on ship design and employment. If we imagine that the planets have all been colonized and some have set up independent governments, and that men occasionally still fight wars, how would such a war be conducted? What form would the attack take, and what defense could be made?

To simplify, let us assume that relations are at the breaking point between the Earth and Mars, that Mars is aggressive and is sure to attack, that both planets have considerable, and well-balanced fleets. Where and when would the attack fall and how could it be parried?

Since Mars is on the offensive, it can be assumed that she is sending an expeditionary force. She is bent on more than a mere raid, she intends to conquer the Earth if she can. She will therefore have transports full of troops, supply and ammunition ships, and hospital ships. These will be well guarded by warships and there will be special fighting units to beat down any opposition. The Earth cannot afford to wait for this invading armada to appear in her own skies—that would leave too many places to defend. She must intercept the fleet en route and destroy it there, or cripple it so it will have to turn back. Or, failing that, she must know when and where it will arrive so as to concentrate her defense.

SPACE is vast, and there are many possible routes by which the Martians can come. Which are they using, and how far along are they? These questions must be answered by the scouts. The function of scouts is to obtain information and nothing more. They possess high maneuverability, being of small mass and tremendous accelerative power. They need have little or no armament, but their crews must be handpicked physical specimens capable of enduring much greater accelerations than the run of men. Their chief equipment is thermoscopes, or delicate thermocouples, for locating ships by their intrinsic heat, and radio-sounding devices for measuring distances. And powerful radios, of course, for reporting what they have learned.

Now, although there are a number of possible routes for the Martians to follow, they all fall within a well defined area, just as there are a number of choices of routes between New York and Southampton, but lying in a fairly narrow band. Just as great fleets could not afford to go too far from those to throw an enemy off—as they would run out of fuel—neither could spaceships get too far from their most economical course. Students of rocket-ship trajectories know that the best course is a “C” shaped compound spiral connecting the two planets, and that it lies in or close to the plane of the ecliptic.

Within limits, it should be possible to follow nearly parallel courses to one side or the other or above or below that “optimum” course. The locus, or rather the envelope of all such possible courses, would be a crescent shaped solid of circular or elliptical cross-section—something like a curved banana, or a pair of cow’s horns set base to base. Its middle section might be as thick as sixty or eighty millions of miles across, but its ends would converge to the diameters of the planets involved.

The scouts know that the enemy is somewhere within this figure, but not how much to the right or left, or how far they have come. Once they can establish several successive points along the invader’s trajectory, they can compute the rest. Therefore, the Earth sends out many fast scouts in successive waves.

These scouts spread out so as to cover the entire solid described above, but the space left between any adjacent pair must not be so great that an enemy ship could slip through without detection. If the range of the thermoscopes is five million miles, then the scouts should never be more than ten million miles apart. One or the other could then pick up the enemy vessel. They dart forward, piling up acceleration to the limit of their crews’ endurance. By the time they make contact with the enemy, they are hurtling forward at such terrific velocity that their contact is much too brief for fighting. They may over-leap the enemy by millions of miles before they can check their momentum, but it will not matter—they have detected him and reported it.

A SECOND wave of scouts repeats the process a few hours later, and a second point along the enemy’s trajectory is known. With a third as a check, computers on the flagship back near Earth can then schedule the enemy’s future movements, knowing that he cannot alter his course or speed much without ruinous expenditures of time and fuel. It does not matter greatly whether the Martian cruiser screen destroys some of these scouts or not. A reported scrimmage is a contact, nevertheless, and that is the scout’s job.

Without the reports of the scouts, the Earth forces would be blind, not knowing within days when the enemy would strike, or from what quarter. With a knowledge of the most probable course, they can now make preparations to fight. The Earth main body, consisting of mine-layers, fast torpedo boats and various battleships, takes off. They get clear of the Earth’s gravity and kill their momentum along the Earth’s orbit. Then they lie in space, to the sides of the enemy’s line of approach, allowing the Earth to recede from them. They are motionless.

More detailed reports from the scouts inform them that the enemy is proceeding in a cruising formation somewhat like a fat, double-ended spear. The shank of it is a cylinder with the transports and other supply ships in line along its axis. The spearheads, front and rear, are cone-shaped formations of heavy fighting ships. Out ahead and on the quarters are clouds of cruiser screens to keep the scouts as far away as possible.

The Earth commander wishes to attack the Martian formation by surprise, if possible, and that is why he lies outside the horn-shaped locus of possible enemy trajectories. After the enemy has passed, the Earth forces will converge upon him from the rear by swiftly building up acceleration. In order to first throw the enemy into confusion and upset his formation (which is designed for quick deployment in any direction and at the same time to protect the non-combatant ships of the train) our admiral sends a squadron of mine-layers across his path to strew great numbers of small iron mines. Having laid their mines, the mining ships hurry ahead and get clear, proceeding on to Earth.

As the vanguard of the invading fleet bumps into the mines, they radio the news back to the central column, so that screens can be doubled, collision doors closed and course altered. It is while they are endeavoring to maneuver past these mines that the Earth destroyer divisions attack. They come up by groups from outside space and behind, and as they cross the bows of the formation, they let successive waves of self-accelerating rocket torpedoes go, fanwise.

With torpedoes coming at them from the beam, the ships in the formation are likely to turn themselves by means of their jet deflectors so as to head toward the torpedoes. Their screens are more effective that way, and they also offer a narrower target. But at the same time they continue to drift sideways along their old course from momentum, and therefore will strike many of the mines.

It is just at this moment of confusion that the waiting battleship squadrons overtake them and add their gunfire and torpedo salvos. This attack comes on the opposite flank from the mines. The Martians are beautifully trapped in a three-way cross fire.

THE Earthmen’s attack is essentially a hit-and-run affair. To overtake the enemy as shown in the diagrams, they must have built up much greater velocity than the Martians and will therefore sweep by at terrific speed, letting go their missiles at the predetermined moment. The Martians have little opportunity to hit back, and will probably sustain heavy damage. Once the defenders are up ahead, they can swing out again, kill their velocity, and prepare to repeat the maneuver.

It must be observed that in this campaign, the defenders are given an advantage—superior information. For any campaign to be decisive, one side or other always has an advantage, otherwise a stalemate will result. To reverse the situation so that the Martians could win, all that is necessary would be to deprive the Earth of its scouts. They would not know then where or when to plant their ambush. Or the Martians might be given an additional advance guard of scouts and heavy ships to entice the Earthmen to come out of their ambush. Such an advance guard would take a heavy beating, but the Earthmen would have exposed their tactics and have shot on ahead. The main body of invaders, ten million miles to the rear, could alter course slightly and avoid both the minefield and any lurking warship divisions.

Terrestrial warfare today leans heavily on the service of information. In the future, information will be paramount. Superior forces are useless if it is not known where and when to employ them. Last year the German pocket battleship Graf Spee furnished an excellent illustration of that. The Allied navies were at all times overwhelmingly more powerful and numerous, yet the Spee roamed the seas for many weeks. Her immunity was due to the fact that her enemies did not know where she was. It took many weeks of searching by great numbers of destroyers and light cruisers to find out where she was not. By the process of elimination they discovered her. Once her location was known, her destruction was inevitable.

In the incredibly vast reaches of the void where up and down is as limitless as any other direction, and where speeds are so great and distances of passing so huge that vision is ruled out, the problems of scouting are magnified a thousand-fold. The war fleets of the future, as I see it, will consist chiefly of scouts—perhaps a hundred for every heavy-duty fighter. Weapons, however powerful and wonderful, are useless ornaments if the enemy cannot be located and brought within range.

Even The Angels

Unknown Fantasy Fiction, August 1941

MR. HERBERT P. MCQUIGLEY died, was buried, and duly mourned. He was a good man, as men are judged in Pearlburg. He did not smoke, drink, dance, or play at cards. He married early, and he was the kind of man that did not take his marriage vows lightly. His private life, in short, was impeccable. His reputation for utter rectitude had never been clouded by the slightest breath of scandal except for one brief rumor that turned out later to be a base canard. At a time when Mr. McQuigley was attending a bankers’ convention in Cincinnati, the police happened to raid a gambling dive. Part of their haul chanced to be a man, quite drunk, who was clicking a stack of chips with one hand while his disengaged arm held a chorine he was dandling on his knee. The culprit gave his name as H. P. McQuigley of Pearlburg, and the thing got in the papers. But all that was straightened out and explained, and the appropriate apologies made public by the papers. The fellow happened to be a ne’er-do-well cousin, of the reprobate Orangetown branch.

So much for Mr. McQuigley’s private life. He was a lawyer by profession, but eventually got into business where he was acclaimed to be a success. He became president of the local bank and acquired the town’s leading mercantile establishment in addition to much good farmland. Disgruntled persons who had business dealings with him often complained he was a hard bargainer and a merciless collector, but to those Mr. McQuigley always said—and the logic of it is indisputable—that since he never demanded more than was due, he should not be expected to concede less. To those who complained that the laws were unfair, he suggested they change the law. In politics he was a conservative.

But as previously stated, he died and was buried. His widow and the brethren of the First Orthodist Church, of which he was a deacon, gave him an imposing funeral. He was buried in a private burial ground and a modest stone placed to mark the spot. A few centuries rolled by, and in the course of them the headstone sagged and fell into the patch of weeds that had taken the plot. The world passed on, busy with its own affairs, not knowing or caring that once the McQuigley name was one to conjure with in Pearlburg. Sic transit gloria inundi!

Not so, however, in Heaven. Or rather, in that sector of it given over to the Orthodists. Two hundred years, four months and five days after the demise of Mr. McQuigley a routine report from the Heavenly Auditor to the Rectifier of Wrongs started a chain of activities whose reverberations continued to echo in the Hereafter for a long time to come. Perhaps as good a way as any to plot the course and expose the anatomy of that Celestial headache is to offer the Heavenly file, enriched by the interpolation of certain unofficial memoranda exchanged among the harassed angels and demons concerned.

The very first entry is the Auditor’s report alluded to above. It is dated the 204th day of the year 88,011, absolute—which is meaningless to us. The report itself is self-explanatory, except that Mesram’s use of the word “recently” will bear a little interpretation. He is no doubt alluding to the two-hundred-and-odd years that had intervened between the passing of Mr. McQuigley and his own entry into the case. It must be borne in mind that to an immortal such a period of time is not impressive. Here is the report:

From: The Heavenly Auditor To: The Rectifier of Wrongs.

In Re: Satanic Complaint about Allotment.

Your Reverence:

Pursuant to your gracious instructions I have looked into His Malevolency’s demand for a larger allotment for fuel and his request for additional appropriation for salaries and upkeep of one demon and three imps. I regret to, state that for once His Devilship appears to have a well-grounded complaint. A comparison of the rosters of the Blest and the Damned with an actual head count on the job shows that there is one soul too many in the Pits of Gehenna, while the Celestial Chorus is shy one tenor.

A superficial investigation indicates that this unfortunate soul is one Herbert P. McQulgley, a devout Orthodist, recently admitted, known on the records as Inmate 1,218. He was received on the night of August 14, 1941, Gate Tender, Saleph, angel, second class; Deputy Recording Angel of the Watch, Mosoch; Sorter of the Sheep from the Goats, Riphath. The latter, acting on a transcript of the record furnished by Mosoch, sentenced McQuigley to an eternity in the Pits. Curiously, the transcript upon which he acted has since disappeared. Sorter Riphath, when interviewed, said that to the best of his recollection the alleged sins were gambling, drunkenness and lascivious conduct. These sins do not appear in the official record.

A miscarriage of justice may have occurred. I recommend a searching inquiry into the whole matter of McQuigley’s entry and commitment. But may I suggest to Your Reverence that it is high time someone put a bug in Satan’s ear? He is no doubt a good angel for the job, but it seems to me he lies awake nights thinking up ways to worry and embarrass us here in Heaven. After all, we aren’t damned.

Yours faithfully,

Mesram

From: Rectifier of Wrongs,

To: The Heavenly Auditor.

In Re: Your Report.

Submissive Sir:

Your report received and will be acted upon.

The last four lines of your report are rejected and you are hereby rebuked for having written them. When your opinion is desired on such matters, it will be asked for.

Abimael.

Unofficial scribble to First Deputy Recording Angel, attributed to Judith, private secretary to Abimael.

“Stand by, sanctikius, to go through the wringer. It’s always that McQuigley mix-up. Somebody’s going to sizzle for it. Satan squawked and old nosy Mesram has been poking around. So far he’s pinned it on Riphath, but you can bet your last bowl of ambrosia that holy old coot isn’t going to accept the buck. You’d better tip Thiras off so he can be thinking up the answers—I just finished engrossing the official scroll. It’ll hit you in a day or so. For ever and ever,

Judy.

From: Special Investigator Nahum,

To: The Rectifier of wrongs,

In Re: Scandalous Laxity in Bureau of Records of the Living.

Your Reverence:

I have the honor to report that the Angel Riphath, though guilty as charged of having wrongfully committed Inmate 1,218 while sitting as Sorter of the Day, is completely exonerated. He had no choice but to proceed from the Divine Record, a presumably authentic copy of which was before him at the time.

The fault lies in the Recording Bureau. whence the false document emanated. After a very painful investigation the following facts have come to light:

On New Year’s Eve of the first day of 88,000, absolute, they threw a party in the Recorder’s office—much nectar and nec—Well, you know—the usual thing. Present were: First Deputy Sarug and Judith, of the your own office, and a brace of Soothers of the Blest, and several minor deputies. Thiras, who was on watch at the time, joined them and lost contact with his watchees for the space of several hours. To cover up, he later used the current Earthly AP dispatches as a source of recordable sins, on the theory that only stuff that gets into the papers is serious enough to be worth writing down anyhow. In the interim a report had come through to the effect that H. P. McQuigley—Inmate 1,218—had been arrested in Cincinnati on various charges and that his guilt was apparent, which Phiras inscribed on the blotter.

Somewhat later a correction came through and was duly made, but it was delayed somehow and in the meantime the said McQuigley had died, been received and committed, leading to the unhappy dilemma we have now to face. It scared Sarug and Thiras. They rectified the records, but there was no way to undo the commitment without exposing themselves, so they entered into a conspiracy to forget the whole thing, trusting no one would pay attention to McQuigley’s wails that it was all a mistake.

These are the facts. I have no recommendations to make.

Nahum.

From: The Rectifier of Wrongs,

To: Sarug, Thiras, Judith,

In Re: Your Misconduct.

Children:

Report to me at once for assignment of penance.

From: The Rectifier of Wrongs,

To: The Archangel Asarmoth, Chief of Legal Department.

In Re: Erroneous Commitment.

Your Holiness:

Please advise me how to rectify the foregoing error.

Abimael.

Unofficial note, Asarmoth to Abimael.

You can’t. Best thing to do is forget it. What is one damned, more or less, among the Orthodists? I’ve never been able to figure out how any of ’em get by, their views are so strict. Anyway, what makes their Heaven any more desirable than their Hell? We only work here, you know, but we can’t help having our personal opinions.

But seriously, old boy, you’re up against something. The fellow has a legitimate kick, I suppose, but we can’t back down on the doctrine of the infallibility of our courts. And you are perfectly aware of what we will be letting ourselves in for if we admit a single instance of error in the records. Every damned soul in Hell will be clamoring for a review. No, old-timer, it won’t do. Why not send one of your slick-tongued persuaders down there and have a talk with him?

As for Satan, there is no pleasing him. I’ve never liked him, but then I am not omniscient. What’s more to the point. I’m not, omnipotent. You might hush him up by giving him what he asks for, but mind you, not an obulus more. He’ll get the idea he has something on you, and then there will be Hell to pay! Excuse the pun, old fellow, but Heaven is a dull place at times.

Cordially,

Asarmoth.

From: The Rectifier of Wrongs,

To: Special Investigator Nahum,

In Re: McQuigley.

Dear Servitor:

Go to Hell. In Pit 47 in Subdivision 3 of West Gehenna you will find Inmate 1, 218. Have him fished out and cooled off and have a talk with him. You know all the facts. Tell him as little as you have to—maybe the best thing to say is that we have arranged a pardon for him. In any case, give him a thorough brushing off and tell him we are transferring him to Heaven. That ought to do it. Let me know as early as possible how you make out.

Abimael.

Copy of requisition on Celestial Stores and Supplies, submitted by Rachel, secretary to Nahum.

“Please furnish at once:

Item 1. Two brand-new wings, size 38, style XIV-B. To replace former ones, badly singed and unfeathered by trip to Hell.

Item 2. Fresh head of hair, as per sample—only a couple of shades redder, and slightly more curly, if you don’t mind. Same reason as above, except there was no defeathering.

Item 3. Complete new outfit of robes, as above.

P. S. If I’ve got to do this again, for Heaven’s sake, furnish asbestos weave—especially the skirt. You should have seen those poor sinners writhe! It was too, too cruel.

From: Special Investigator Nahum,

To: The Rectifier of Wrongs,

In Re: McQuigley.

Your Reverence:

This McQuigley is a tough egg. He has the legal mind. To make a long story short, he won’t play ball except on his own terms.

First off, he was stubborn and wouldn’t get out of the pool. Said he’d stood it for two centuries and would stand it as many more. All he wanted was justice. That is, justice and retribution. He kept saying that over and over, and all the while he was splashing that damned vitriol all over us. Rachel was taking down the chatter, and it made her pretty sore. She was all burned up, and I’m not being funny about it, either.

But to get to the point. He claimed he had been framed and could prove it. Said he had been through the same thing on Earth and came out on top, and what’s more, got big damages. Says he expects as much or more here. I promised him Heaven, but he said that was not enough. He rated Heaven. In addition, he wants to know, what does he get for two hundred years of torment in blazing brimstone and boiling vitriol? He was entitled to damages. What are we offering to keep him from blabbing to the Big Boss?

That smacks of blackmail, I know, but he is shrewd, and knows where he has got us. I pointed out that it was impossible to add anything to Heaven, since Heaven itself is the gratification of every proper human desire. He snorted at that; said he’d settle for an archangelship. I made the counter-offer of a demonship, but he said no. Archangelship or nothing. Well, that’s out, I know. An archangel is allowed a few faults, but one thing he must have, and that is some understanding and sympathy for human beings. An Orthodist of his type has neither. What’s more, he would start out with a grievance against all the Blest, because they had been there from the first, while he had just come from the Pit.

It looks bad. I borrowed a few yards of unused vitriol strainer and wrapped Rachel up in it and brought her home. Fortunately the parchment she used was acid-proof, so the transcript of the interview has been preserved. It is inclosed herewith.

Nahum.

Unofficial, Asarmoth to Abimael.

Herewith the sequel. Read it and weep. Now what?

Unofficial: Asarmoth to Abimael.

Nahum did quite right. But send him back to talk some more. Keep on fishing for counter-proposals. Sooner or later the bird will come across with one we can handle. It’s likely to be a slick proposition, for McQuigley was a lawyer and a clever one. But then I’m a lawyer, too. Let me worry about our angle.

From: Special Investigator Nahum,

To: The Rectifier of Wrongs,

hi Re: The McQuigley case.

Your Reverence:

Things came out better this time. He refuses absolutely to accept a pardon for a sin he did not commit, but says he has no scruples against accepting one for a sin he did commit. It seems that the basic cause of his bellyache is that he has had to suffer for some alleged concentrated sinning that he didn’t get any fun out of. I gather that he spent most of his life yearning to go on a big bust, get pie-eyed, watch the little ball fall, and the rest of it, but being a pillar of society in a hick town and getting rich at it, he didn’t dare. Anyhow, what he wants now is to be permitted to go back to Earth for a weekend with an understanding in advance that he can shoot the works and get away with it. Then he will come back to Heaven with no hard feelings.

Nahum.

Unofficial, Abimael to Asarmoth.

I am afraid of this. It is revolutionary. But it may be an out. What do you think?

Same: Asarmoth to Abimael.

It’s worth a shot, but not via the pardon route. To get such a pardon we would have to go to the Big Boss. He must know, of course, since He knows everything, but since He chooses to pretend not to notice, it’s a hint to us not to emphasize it. Suppose we do it by contract—I will draw up the contract—and sign it with him? We’ll have lots of witnesses so he can’t squirm out of it later.

By the way, it wouldn’t do him any good to go back to Earth now. Things have changed. Better cut him back to his own time—say, swap his personality with that of the erring cousin who got him into this mess. That’ll take a miracle, but I guess you can wangle that out of the Miracle Bureau without going higher. We don’t want this small time chiseler’s wails to make too much noise.

From: The Rectifier of Wrongs,

To: Chief of Bureau, Miracles and Apparitions,

In Re: Case of H. P. McQuigley—brief of transcript attached.

From the inclosure you will readily see the dilemma we are facing. Knowing nothing is impossible to you, I want to ask a favor. Will you—without making too much fuss about it—arrange to have this soul transferred back to 9:15 the night of Saturday, the 15th of June, 1940, and kept there until 3:22 the following Monday morning? House it in the body of his black sheep cousin Hank. I presume you can do the necessary juggling of the consciousnesses of the parties concerned so that the substitution will go unnoticed.

Abimael.

Unofficial (very). From Miraclist’s Helper Joel, to Nahum.

Your chief sure wished an assignment on us this time! Boy! You should have seen that sainted hellion of yours perform. He did everything, and how! He lapped it up. He went at his sinning like an old-timer and added a few touches of his own. First he socked the roulette layout for a couple of grand, and then he shifted to stud. He played his cards like a fish, but he had ’em, so he mopped up. And drink—wow! I’ve heard of the unquenchable thirst of the Pit, but I never saw it in action before. He settled down to straight rum finally, and polished off two full bottles by dawn.

He slept awhile after that—who wouldn’t—and then got up and tapered off on champagne. By midafternoon, when the chorines came in, he was in form again. He didn’t miss any bets with them, either. That night they danced awhile and shot craps in the intermissions. He never let down a minute until the cops came in and the show was over.

Anyhow, your miracle is done, and I hope it helps. But for Pete’s sake, what’s it all about? How is a guy like that going to stand it in the Orthodist Heaven?

Cancelled pass, lifted from hook in the gatekeeper’s lodge. Southern Portal of the Pearly Gates:

Good for one exit from Hell and one re-entry to Heaven. Signed, Abimael; countersigned, Asarmoth. Taken up by Gatekeeper Ebal, 240th day, the year 88,011.

From: Satan,

To: The Rectifier of Wrongs.

In Re: Your pet, McQuigley.

Think you’ve pulled a fast one, don’t you? Wait. That guy belongs in my joint, if I know anything about sinners.

Anyhow, I’m keeping the fires going in his pit and his demon Meroz on the job, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll pay the bills. Here’s something else to put in your pipe—when you start raiding my place to populate yours, you’re simply raising Hell! He! He!

Beelzebub.

From: Supervisor of Distribution of Blessings.

To: Rectifier of Wrongs.

Your Reverence:

My flock is turning sour and something’s got to be done about it, A new saint hit here the other day, but there is something fishy about him. He has a low number, for one thing. Moreover, he grouses all the time, which no true saint ever does. He threw his first goblet of nectar in the cherub’s face and howled because it didn’t have kick enough to make a gnat grunt. And his manner with the lady saints is … well, uh … unsaintly. That’s not all, he openly boasts of having sinned on Earth and says he is going to get away with it. The rest of my charges are deeply offended. Do you suppose a hatch was left open and the fellow crawled up from Downside?

Shadrach.

Unofficial, Abimael to Asarmoth.

Now look what you got me into. I’m sunk. What do we do next—build him a special private Heaven? I’m afraid there will be riots both here and down there. One thing the Big Boss’ll never stand for and that is discrimination. You said you’d do the worrying. Well, hop to it. I’m worried out.

Asarmoth to Abimael.

Ah, ye of little faith! Leave it to joint, if I know anything about sinners. Uncle Dudley. How long since he came back—five months, Earth time, isn’t it? Send for a couple of Michael’s strong-arm angels and have them give him the bum’s rush. His old pit is warm and ready.

Abimael to Asarmoth.

He’ll holler. Then we’ll have an investigation.

Asarmoth to Abimael.

Let him holler. Tell him to file an appeal in your court. Then send for me.

Transcript of significant portions of hearing before Special Court of Rectification held in Gehenna, Justice Abimael sitting. Satan is present as an interested party. The demon Meroz is acting as sergeant at arms. Attorney General Asarmoth is acting for the authorities, the shade of Herbert P. McQuigley as his own counsel—at his own insistence. The Miraclist Joel has testified as to the sins committed. Satan, and various shades, both from the Pits and from among the Blest, have appeared as character witnesses. Their testimony is unanimous on one point. McQuigley is a typical non-repentant sinner of the most arrogant variety. At last McQuigley takes the stand, Asarmoth questioning.

Q. You complain that you were tormented for the space of two hundred years and five months? And without justifiable reason?

A. I do. And fearfully. There was no justice in it. I should have spent that term in Heaven.

Q. Quite so. The court concedes it. Since then you have spent five months in Heaven?

A. Yes, after much—

Q. Never mind that. You admit it. Now, as a member in good standing of the Orthodist sect, what do you think is a fitting punishment for a man who gets beastly drunk and fritters away his substance in gaming?

A. Eternal damnation!

Q. Good. Yet you did that very thing?

A. Yes, all but the frittering part. (Witness smirks.) But I had in my pocket—

Q. We know what you had in your pocket. It was this. I show you a contract. Do you recognize it? Do you admit it to be your own free act, done without coercion or any promise given outside the terms set down and agreed upon in its text?

A. Sure. Why not? (Defiantly.)

Q. One more question and then we will examine the contract. Was it not a lifelong tenet of yours that one should be satisfied with the letter of a contract, neither demanding more nor accepting less?

A. Absolutely. It still is.

Asarmoth opens contract and reads.

Q. The essence of this agreement is in Stipulation III. I read:

“Having been unlawfully deprived of two hundred years and five months of Paradise and in lieu of it having been compelled to suffer a like period of the most bitter torment, the party of the second part—that is, McQuigley—contends that he is thereby entitled to whatever benefits that may have flowed from the alleged sins for which he was punished; and that in order to possess himself of those intangible benefits, it is necessary that he be released from Hell long enough to commit the sins from which they flow”—Correct, Mr. McQuigley?

A. (Witness nods emphatically.) To the dot!

Q. (Continuing reading): “—and to achieve that end he voluntarily consents to accept that punishment appropriate to the deeds which he has already suffered, and further waives all right, title and interest in the two hundred years of bliss of which he has been defrauded, provided the party of the first part concurs. The party of the first part—The Heavenly Authorities—agree.” Still correct, Mr. McQuigley?

A. (Smugly): What could be righter? The text is plain.

Q. Quite so. You came here an innocent man. Through a clerical error you wrongfully suffered a period of punishment—an extremely short period, I may say, in view of the extent of Eternity. As soon as the error was discovered you were offered any atonement within our power, but you rejected everything but this—your own idea. We have carried out the contract. You accepted the period of punishment and waived the two hundred years of bliss. The five-odd months of Paradise to which your original entry entitled you has been given you. The accounts are balanced, all terms fulfilled. There is nothing left to do but file this document among the archives.

Asarmoth, turning toward the bench: Your Reverence, the case is complete. The sinner’s plea is frivolous. Let Meroz take him back to his pit.

McQuigley: Hey! You can’t do that to me. What about the rest of it—what you promised? From now on—

Justice Abimael: You came here in the beginning as a flawless soul, so far as the record showed, meriting eternal bliss. There was an unfortunate error made, but it has since been compensated for on terms of your own dictation. Justice is satisfied. But in your second coming, you appear as a confessed and unregenerate sinner and thus merit a perpetuity of damnation. It is by your own act that—

McQuigley: B-but I understood … it was implied … that is, I … uh … thought that—

Justice Abimael, shaking his head wearily: Not in the contract! Meroz, take him away!

Most unofficial, from the Archangel Asab, Keeper of the Great Seal of All the Heavens and personal attendant on the All Highest.

To Asarmoth:

God’s in his Heaven and all’s right with the world. I heard the Big Boss chuckle last night—the first time in eons. You got away with it, kid, but for a while you were on awfully thin ice. Don’t stick your neck out again!

You Can’t Win

Astounding Science Fiction, November 1941

IT’s tough to be broke on Venus! They never … well, hardly ever to… give you a break there. It’s always the old army game.

Larry Hoyt was the first to come. And for a long time he wished he hadn’t, for his head ached abominably, his mouth was filled with fuzz that tasted like Eros swamp water, and he knew that those hot pains down in his belly could only come from an injection of concentrated lye. But after a while he ungummed one eye and blearily looked around.

For a minute or so the smoke-filled, dank air revealed nothing; then he saw he was in a flophouse—one of the joints down in the Asiatic quarter. The walls were lined with bunks, and every one held an inert form, stentoriously and alcoholically snoring. The soggy floor was paved with other prone forms—last night’s sweep-up of the better—or shall we say, less bad—dives. A bartender with a conscience or with some glimmering of pride in the reputation of his house must have, in each case, called in one of the harpies waiting outside and flung him a quarter of a sol to take care of the souse until he woke up again. It was Venus’ only concession to decency, but made virtually necessary by the deplorable tendency of men to die when bounced unconscious out into the soup-paved dark alley of the City of Love. The scavenger squad—Public Health Service to you—complained bitterly whenever the night’s take of corpses exceeded a hundred.

Hoyt looked, gagged violently, then fell back, weak and jittery. The men in the other bunks were all yellow, red or brown. His pal Jimmy Elkins was not among them. Unless, of course, he was in the bunk underneath; and Hoyt, in his dizzy condition, dared not risk leaning out far enough to look into that. He lay for a little while trying to piece things together, but try as he would, the fog always closed in just as he was about to snatch a scene from the lurid evening before.

Presently an attendant came—an almond-eyed, ocher-faced old man wearing a robe of cheap blue cotton cloth.

“Makee wakeside, huh?” he demanded, prodding Hoyt in the arm. “Oklay, now makee outside. ’Nother man need bunk.”

Hoyt groaned and sat up. That time he saw Jimmy Elkins in a far corner of the room, weaving uncertainly on his feet and trying to button up the only buttonable garment left to him—his khaki shorts. Otherwise he was dressed only in a mud-spattered singlet.

“Hey, Jimmy,” called Hoyt feebly, “what’s the dope? How did we get here?”

“A-a-arh,” growled Elkins, “another of your bright ideas. Nothing would do you but we go to the Flying Dragon. The usual thing happened, that’s all. You dropped a couple of hundred at the conjunction layout and then balked. So they sicked a couple of cuties on us, and like a damn fool I went with you into the booth. Then—well, blotto. Old stuff.”

“Hell,” said Hoyt. He had just discovered that his clothes were as incomplete as those of Elkins, and the pants pockets were turned wrong side out.

“Yeah,” affirmed Elkins, whose own eyes looked like two fried beets, “and now we gotta get down to the ship—looking like this!”

“We’d better stop off and get a shave first,” said Hoyt, rubbing his hand thoughtfully over his quarter-inch beard, “and a raincoat to cover us up with—”

“What with?” snorted Elkins. “We’re clean. There’s not a sou between us. What’s more, the old Clarissa may hop off any minute. God knows what time it is—or day, for that matter. Those Mickey Finns the Dragon dishes out are pretty potent.”

Hoyt completed his sketchy dressing in meek silence. Then the pair of them followed the silent Oriental to the door. A moment later they were ankle-deep in Venusburg’s slime, trudging along through the scalding drizzle that prevailed three hundred days out of three hundred.

“Nope,” said the man at the space-port gate when they finally reached it. They looked more like studies purloined from a sculptor’s studio than men. Wet clay caked them from head to foot. “Your ship—or what you claim was your ship—soared out two days ago. This is Wednesday, you know.”

“What!” gasped Hoyt. According to his reckoning, it should have been Monday. “B-but they couldn’t. I’m the chief engineer and this is the junior astragator—”

“Was, you mean,” snapped the gatekeeper. “These shippers don’t monkey around on Venus. You get back on time or else. Get going, you bums, or I’ll have you locked up.”

“You don’t understand,” intervened Jimmy Elkins. “The Matilda ought to be landing about now. We can explain everything to the skipper and go back on her; she’s of the same line, you know.”

“Git!” said the gatekeeper, loosening his blaster in its holster.

THE company’s agents in the Adonis Building were adamant. A rule is a rule, they said. If they started making exceptions, they would never lift another ship off Venus. It was tough, of course, the clerk commiserated, but you have made your bed—now lie in it. Hoyt and Elkins exchanged miserable glances and then slopped their way through the filthy streets to the Terrestrian consulate general.

“Sorry,” said the smug messenger, for the two bedraggled specimens were not permitted to enter the office, “but they can’t be bothered. If the consul general undertook to help such cases, he’d have no time for serious work. Sober up, get a job, and then pay your own passage home. It’s the only way.”

“Damn,” remarked Hoyt fervently. They had no choice but to turn away, for a swarthy Sikh cop was making unmistakable gestures with the heavy hardwood club he carried. Venus has small time for those who cannot take it.

“Now what?” asked Elkins. “You’ve always set yourself up as the brains of this pair. What does the master mind produce to get us out of this?”

“Aw, shut up,” growled Hoyt, but he led the way out into the rain. At the next corner he turned to the right and plunged down a sloppy ravine that led to the swamp’s edge. They slipped, slid and floundered, but they did not stop until they reached the door of the Flying Dragon, now strangely tawdry in the orange light of Venus’ daytime. By night it had—or seemed to have—glamour. Now it was unspeakably cheap and shoddy—a dump, in short.

“Just one more bounce,” sighed Elkins as the third series of rappings on the barricaded door brought no response. “That leech Rooney wouldn’t give you—”

“Well, what is it?” snarled a voice to one side of them. A hard blue eye was regarding them through a peephole. It was the eye of Mugs Rooney, proprietor of the palace of pleasure known to spacemen of the nine planets as the Flying Dragon.

“I want to talk with you, Rooney,” said Hoyt, with as much authority as he could put into his voice. It was a ludicrous attempt from such a disreputable figure. Rooney laughed a short, hard laugh.

“Money talks with Rooney,” he snarled. “Show me some and you get in, otherwise I’ll call the patrol and have you rounded up as vagrants. Five years in the swamps ye’ll get for that. We have bums enough on Venus as it is.”

The peephole cover began to close.

“Hold it, Rooney, I’m no bum!” shouted Hoyt, thoroughly angry and cold sober now. “I was here the other night with more than five thousand sols, and before I could spend two hundred of it your thieves drugged me and took it away. I want it, or enough of it to get off this damn planet. And I mean to have it—”

“Or else?” sneered Rooney with one final show of the eye. Then the peephole closed with a vicious snap. Hoyt stood quivering with impotent rage in the hot rain and cursed the man and all his kind.

“You think of brighter and brighter things every hour,” commented Elkins caustically. “What did you hope to get by that? If you had been halfway civil, we might have had a shot and a sandwich for a handout. The worst of them will do that—once. At least it would have pulled us through the day.”

“Ah, skip it,” muttered Hoyt disgustedly.

Then he turned and began the long, slithering climb back up the gully. His anger and disgust were chiefly at himself, for he was too old a spaceman not to know what to expect in a joint like Rooney’s. To go, carrying a whole year’s pay in his pocket, was no less than rank insanity. Suddenly he sat down in the mud and dropped his face to his hands. Elkins sank helplessly beside him. He was a good kid, in a routine way, but no good in a situation as bad as theirs. Once down on Venus, and a man was out.

“I’m thinking,” mumbled Hoyt when Elkins nudged him once and suggested casting about for something to eat.

The enormity of their position was more apparent every moment. Discharged and black-listed by the spaceship company, they could not hope to get out by working their way. It would take money, and lots of it. Moreover, Hoyt was seething with the desire to avenge his damaged ego. For a man of his experience to be put through the wringer like the rawest rookie or greenhorn cadet! It was intolerable. He wanted to make Rooney pay, and pay through the nose. He wanted to run him out of business. He wanted that worse than to get clear of Venus.

“Let’s go see Eddie,” he said at last, rising and whipping some of the muck off his legs. He had a plan. It was rudimentary, but a plan.

“Eddie?”

“Yes, Eddie Charlton, master mechanic over at the sky yards. We were buddies at school together, and since then I’ve thrown him lots of repair jobs.”

“That ‘buddies at school’ business wears pretty thin after a few years on Venus,” reminded Elkins, his pessimism deepened by the growing gnawing in his stomach, “but let’s go. It’s our only chance, as I see it.”

They got their first small break at the gate of the sky yard. The gate-man would not let them in, but he sent for Charlton and he came out. One look at the miserable pair told him the whole story, and he shook his head sadly.

“Sorry, Larry,” he said, interrupting the other almost as he began. “I know it backward. It happens every month, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I only make so much, and I simply cannot carry double. Here’s a five-spot for the both of you, and it has to be the last one—”

“Wait, Eddie,” implored Hoyt, “you don’t understand. I don’t want a handout. I want a stake. Enough credit in your shops for a small machine tool job. Do you remember when we studied mechanics and all that stuff about gears and roller bearings and the other parts that went into primitive machinery?”

“Vaguely—under old Professor Tinkham, that was.”

“Well, listen—”

Larry Hoyt drew Charlton aside and for fifteen minutes poured forth exposition and an impassioned plea. Charlton frowned at first, then nodded from time to time.

“Yes, yes,” he agreed, “I see it, but what’s the payoff?”

“Rooney will fall for it. It’s a gambling gadget, and he’ll go nuts over it as soon as it’s proved to him that a sucker can’t win at it. The beauty of it is that it’s strictly on the level.”

“I see where Rooney makes a lot of dough, but where do we get off after the manufacturing profit?”

“We won’t sell it to him outright—we’ll lease it on a royalty basis.”

“So you hope to get even with Rooney by making him richer than ever?”

“He won’t get as rich as he thinks,” said Hoyt cryptically.

Charlton thought it over for a moment. “O.K. You two fellows come in and get cleaned up. You’ll look better with those whiskers off and minus a few layers of mud.” Hoyt winked solemnly at Jimmy Elkins.

“First we go to the cleaners, then we go back and take Rooney.”

“You tried that the other night,” said Elkins sourly.

“I wasn’t tooled for it then,” laughed Hoyt. Despite his mud-incrusted skin, his aching head, and his complaining insides, he was feeling positively good by then.

“THERE she is,” said Charlton a bare four weeks later.

They stood in the assembly room of Shop No. 5. Before them sat a huge silvery bowl, breast-high, and some six feet in diameter. It had a small hole in its bottom, leading to a bucketlike catching basin; its cover was a convex glassite dome. Inside the dome was a cunningly contrived two-armed crane capable of manipulation from the outside. Beside the contraption stood many open boxes containing small balls of uniform size, all highly polished, but of obviously different materials. Some were gold, some were copper, some steel. Others were of white ivory, still others of clear crystal.

“Fine,” exclaimed Hoyt.

He was a very different-looking man than when he had first entered the plant. He no longer wore the horribly soiled remnants of the blue space officer’s uniform, but the trim brown business suit invariably affected by Terrestrial traveling salesmen. Where he had formerly been what was meant to be clean-shaven, he now wore a snappy mustache. Only people who had known him long and intimately would have been likely to recognize him.

“She’s true as a die,” expatiated Charlton, “a precision job if we ever turned one out. That bottom curve is mathematically correct to within a few wave lengths of light. She’s been buffed until the coefficient of friction is so near zero that you can forget about it. The gilhickey on the side is a vacuum pump that keeps the interior completely exhausted. And we topped it off by putting that continuous camera on the side so that you have a photographic record of both the start and finish. It’s strictly on the level, and it can’t be monkeyed with.”

Larry Hoyt examined it again. He smiled approvingly at the inverse curve that formed the bottom. Most people would have taken it for the lower half of an ellipse. He picked up a couple of balls at random and fed them to the clutching fingers of the small extensible cranes through the airlock slots available for the purpose. He worked the crane, placing them at random, and let them drop. They rolled down the incline and toward the hole in the bottom. There was a single gentle bong as they hit the concealed bell below.

“Fair enough,” said Hoyt. “Load her on a tractor and start her down. I’ll go ahead to the Flying Dragon in a rick.”

“Good luck to you,” wished Charlton with hearty sincerity. “That little job stands us three thousand sols. If your scheme doesn’t jell, my head’s in the bucket along with yours. We may go to the swamps together.”

“Not a chance,” laughed Hoyt, and picked up his professional-looking sales kit.

In it were elaborate plates of the equipment that was about to follow him to Rooney’s place. Not only that, but he had taken the precaution to have business cards printed, styling himself “Mr. Hoyt, Interplanetary Representative of the Tellurian Novelty Co.”

A half-hour later he was seated in the inner den of the notorious Mugs Rooney, face to face with that slippery gentleman himself. Rooney was studying a placard placed before him. His gorillalike eyebrows were puckered into a scowl, and he chewed his stumpy black cigar viciously. The placard was headed with heavy, bold face type. It read:

YOU CANT WIN!

Positively no magnets or house interference—you do everything—you pick the balls—you place them—you start them off—you say which one is running for the house and which for you—you judge the finish.

YOUR BALL CAN’T WIN!

Ten sols a throw—fry your skill and judgment. A no-limit game by special arrangement. Come on! If you insist on being a sucker—here’s your game.

Because

YOU CANT WIN!

“It don’t make sense,” growled Mugs Rooney, shaking his head dubiously. “It’s bum psychology. Why should I clutter up my floor with a machine nobody’ll play when I’ve got to make every square foot pay, what with protection and all? Sure, they’re suckers, but where’s the percentage in reminding ’em?”

“Did you ever figure how many dimes people feed into the pin games?” countered Hoyt. “And what do they win? Practically nothing. But they keep coming back. Because they hope they will do better next time. It’s like that.”

“Nope,” said Rooney with an air of finality. “Now if you could rig it so that a sucker could win once in a while—”

“That would spoil the whole appeal,” said Hoyt. He jerked his chair closer and assumed the air he so often watched in action in the dining saloons of the great interplanetary liners. “Now, Mr. Rooney, my company is favoring you with a rare opportunity. The machine I am bringing here is the only one of its kind in existence. You will have exclusive rights. We admit that after a while the novelty will wear off and the customers will stop playing it, but it will be at least a year before the news gets around. For that reason we are not proposing to sell it to you, but lease it. You give us fifty percent of your winnings and you keep the rest. As soon as the take falls below a certain amount we remove the machine. Isn’t that fair?”

Rooney scowled some more.

“What about the losses?”

Larry Hoyt smiled indulgently.

“How can there be losses? You don’t bet you can win—you simply bet the sucker that he can’t win. On this machine nobody wins. It’s always a tie.”

“Can’t see it,” grunted Mugs Rooney, rising.

“It’s on the way,” insisted Hoyt. “Here’s a counter proposition. Let me install it and operate it for three nights. I’ll pay you a flat floor rental of a grand a night, banking the game myself. You take over any time you sign the contract.”

“Have you got the thousand?” asked Rooney, brightening.

Hoyt dragged it out. It was the last of the stake Charlton had advanced him, less a ten-spot just to cover incidentals. It left him a skinny margin with which to bank a fast gambling game, but he thought it would be enough.

“Bring her in and set her up,” said Rooney, pocketing the grand note.

He clapped his hands for the bartender.

“A coupla slugs, Al, for the gent and me. The private stock, you know.”

THE Ball Race was the attraction of the evening. After all, a ten-spot was regarded as chicken feed in the Flying Dragon. Human curiosity being what it is, man after man came up and looked at the machine and wondered why it was unbeatable. So he took a chance. And having taken a chance, he took four or five or ten more. And some very persistent and optimistic drunks took twenty to a hundred.

A typical example was the spare, gray-haired old man who kept strictly sober the whole evening. He seemed to be a student of systems, for he carried notebooks with him and jotted down the play of the machines. For a long time he had been recording the outcome of the Conjunction game—that futuristic offspring of roulette—where nine circles, representing the planets, wheeled at varying speeds and were brought to a halt by chance. The game paid high odds for exact conjunctions, oppositions, quadratures and quineuxes, depending upon the number of planets so related, and lesser odds on approximations within ten degrees. But when he saw the “You can’t win,” sign he abandoned that table and came over to it.

He watched the game a while, then selected a pair of balls. One was of Venusian mock-ivory, as light as pith; the other of platinum, heavy and compact. He planked down his ten-spot and fed the balls into the machine. The heavier he placed, using the delicate little cranes, at the very top edge of the bowl; the lighter about an inch from the central hole. He released them simultaneously. The heavy ball dropped swiftly, almost straight down, and gained velocity as it sped across the steadily but more slowly declining path. The lighter ball stood almost stationary at the start; then, beginning to move, it rolled lazily toward the hole. The heavier ball caught up with it at the very lip, and they dropped through with a single “Bong!”

“Player fails to win,” chanted the croupier in his monotonous tones. “He chose the lighter one.”

The old man frowned and coughed up another fee. This time he interchanged the balls. The result was identical. He tried two platinum balls, discarding the ivory one. It made no difference. He tried a platinum and a copper one, each placed at an equal height, halfway up the slope. The result was the same.

“It can’t be,” he muttered, and dug down into his wallet for more funds.

He spent one hundred and eighty sols before he gave it up, baffled. No matter what the initial starting point, or of what material the balls, they always reached the hole at the same instant and fell upon the bell below with a single “Bong!” So it went. The more they were stumped, the harder they tried.

“Here’s your thousand for tomorrow night,” said Hoyt as the last jaded player staggered from the room. It was a one-grand note he had peeled off from the outside of his roll.

“To hell with it!” said Mugs Rooney, “I’m not interested in chicken feed. Here’s your contract. I’ll take over. You’ve got something there, brother.”

“I thought so,” chuckled Hoyt.

That morning he paid his ship-yard bill in full. Then he went out and hired an auditor—a man to stand by the machine each night and count the take. Every dawn that man collected the Hoyt half, deducted his own commission, and delivered it.

By the end of the week, Hoyt was not only out of debt, but positively rich. That was when he went into a second huddle with Charlton, and he did not miss having a few words in private with Jimmy Elkins, who he had been supporting in the interim.

“I don’t see it, but I can make ’em,” was what Charlton said.

“You’re a damn fool, but it’s your money,” was the Elkins response.

All the reply Larry Hoyt made was a wide and cheerful grin.

IT was a night after that, that Hoyt and Elkins showed up in the Flying Dragon. Hoyt had shaved off his dapper mustache and was once more dressed in the standard blue of a spaceship engineer; Elkins wore the uniform he was accustomed to. Neither had been seen in that make-up since the night of their original downfall; and no one, not even the proprietor, took notice of them. The Venusburg joints were one-shot affairs. They either cleaned you out and wrecked you so that you couldn’t come back, or they gave you such a liberal education you rarely ever chose to come back. So they didn’t bother to look for old customers at the door.

Both the boys had taken the precaution to stop by the Cupidon bar and have a few, so that they were equipped with an authentic breath appropriated to the time, place and occasion. They affected a slight stagger as they walked.

They each dallied with the Conjunction game awhile, losing several hundred net, despite one brief killing made by Elkins. Then they ambled over to the Ball Race game, about which were clustered a group of gaping suckers. Hoyt bought a pair of balls and lost. He bought several pair more, with identical results. He quit, apparently disgusted, and the seemingly soused Elkins followed suit. Then Hoyt backed away and reread the sign. It had been amended as he had originally suggested. Tacked to the bottom of the insolent invitation to play was the following addendum:

If you don’t trust the house’s balls, bring your own. There is a vender just outside. We charge fifty sols for verifying them. They must be of standard diameter and weigh the same as our balls of similar material.

“Jush-h a minute,” slobbered Hoyt, leering at the croupier. “I think try the outside balls. O.K.”

“Sure,” said the croupier, negligently. “But you can’t win.”

“We … we … we’ll shee,” gulped Hoyt, and staggered for the door.

Presently he was back. In the meantime the chief inspector of Venusian police had come in, accompanied by a couple of deputies. They stood in the background, watching.

“Here’s a gol’ ball—genuine gold,” floundered Hoyt, producing one from his left-hand vest pocket. “I’ll back it against anything you’ve got. Pick your own ball.”

“Nothing simpler,” said the croupier easily, “but we won’t take advantage of you. Commissioner, won’t you please pick a ball—any ball—and place it anywhere? I call on you to be a witness to the fairness of this game.”

“Sure,” agreed the commissioner, and he picked a bright-red copper ball and placed it. Hoyt set his at random and released the crane grips.

Everybody in the place gasped. For they had just watched the cashier caliper the ball for diameter, and weigh it on micrometer scales with a standard gold ball of the house in the other pan. They matched to the milligram. Yet Hoyt’s ball had lost! That time, for the first time in the local knowledge of the game there had been two bongs on the bell—the first when the house’s copper ball had hit it, the other when the slower golden ball had struck.

“Think of that,” murmured Hoyt, soddenly, “and I thought I had a sure thing.”

He retrieved his ball and stuck it back into his vest pocket. Then he pulled out a flask and took a big drag, glaring all the while at the silver bowl that had robbed him of another sixty sols.

“Hey, wait a minute!” he yelled, suddenly, “I’ve been gypped. I didn’t put it in the right spot. I wanna try again—”

“Why, certainly, sir,” said the obliging croupier, reaching out for the cash.

“But this time I’m goin’ to win—see? Gimme the manager. I wanna shoot the works.” He fished out the ball again.

“Just a minute,” said the croupier, suddenly hard as nails. “Let’s see if that is the same ball.”

Hoyt handed him the ball, blindly, and paid no attention while it was being measured and tested. In the meantime Mugs Rooney came up.

“What’s the squawk?” he asked, roughly.

“The guy’s lost a dime or so. Now he wants the sky for a top.”

“Shoot,” said the proprietor of the Flying Dragon. Then, sharply to Hoyt, “Where’s the dough?”

Larry Hoyt fumbled with his coat, then produced a fat wallet. He slapped it down on the table.

“Never mind counting it,” said Rooney, in an offhand way, with one eye on the police inspector. “We’ll do that in the morning when we’re making up the deposit. The guy can’t win. You know that, don’t you, fellow?”

Hoyt cocked a bleary eye.

“Sure, shoot!” he said. The inspector came closer to the table.

Hoyt set the two balls with fumbling hands, then wavered backward and asked Rooney if the house was satisfied.

“Anything’s all right,” said Rooney, indifferently. “Drop ’em.”

IN THE moment of pandemonium that followed, Elkins had a chance to lean over and have a few words with Hoyt.

“How? How did you do it?” he asked, in frank bewilderment. “It was the same ball. I’ll swear to that. Once it lost, now it won—”

“I had two balls,” whispered Hoyt, “but they were up to specifications. They were the identical diameter, weight, and had the same degree of polish. Only they were not homogeneous.

“You see, the contour of the bottom of that bowl is that of an inverted cycloid. That is a curve that has the peculiar property of being a tautochrone—that is, any freely rotating object released at any point on its surface and actuated upon by nothing but gravity, will reach the lowest point in exactly the same time as if released from any other point. That is why a platinum ball and a pith ball take the same time, whether let go from the top or at the very brink of the hole.”

“Yes,” nodded Elkins, “but once your ball went slower and you lost. This time it went faster and you won. How come?”

Hoyt smiled. People were milling about and Rooney looked flustered. He was busy counting the contents of the wallet under the watchful eye of the police inspector. But there was still a moment to talk.

“They weren’t homogeneous balls,” explained Hoyt. “The total weight was correct, but the first ball had a hollow center, a platinum shell, and a thin plating of gold outside. The other had a solid core, thin pith around it, plus the same outside plating. See? It’s all a matter of inertia.”

“Inertia?”

“Yes. The sole force acting on the balls was gravity. It could employ itself one of two ways, or a combination of both. It could either impart translation or rotation. On a dense core ball, the resulting movement is chiefly translation, as there is less leverage consumed in the rotation. On the hollow ball most of the energy went into rolling the ball over, and therefore there was little left available to give it forward speed. Therefore the difference in speed. In homogeneous balls the proportion is the same, whatever the total mass.”

“Why, sure. But I wouldn’t have thought of that!”

“I figured Rooney wouldn’t. I think he is in a jam.”

ROONEY was in a jam. He had counted out the contents of the wallet three times and he sat like a fish out of water, gasping helplessly.

“B—b—but I haven’t that much,” he stammered, “even if I throw the house in.”

“You know what we do with welshers in Venusburg,” reminded the inspector, sternly.

“Yeah,” wailed Mugs Rooney, “but the guy tricked me. Somehow. It’s not fair.”

“Too bad,” remarked the inspector, signaling one of his assistants to produce the irons. “Every man has his turn—you’ve had plenty. Read the sign up there—”

Rooney, feeling the grip of steel on his wrists for the first time, turned and gazed at his own sign. It said starkly:

YOU CANT WIN!

Soup King

(‘By Colin Keith’)

Astounding, January 1942

“WAW! Ga-a-ah! What slop!” roared Buck Reagan, captain of the interplanetary freighter Pelican, and hurled the offending bowl of broth from him. “Where’n hell is that fat slob of a swill-mixer? I’ll soup him … I’ll rip him into giblets … I’ll—”

In the pantry the usually sunny-disposition cook, plump little Jimmy Laird, heard and quailed. He had tried his best, but his bosses just wouldn’t  be pleased. And his bosses were everybody else in the ship, according to the age-old tradition that a ship’s cook is the lowest form of human life. The chow was bad, he knew that. But it wasn’t his fault. How could anybody dish up a palatable  meal when all he had to work with were vile-tasting and worse-smelling synthetics? What did they expect but stinking slops when the ingredients were slabs of the malodorous trephainin, flavored with the bitter, belch-inducing vitamoses, reinforced by calorigen tablets, and supplemented by the nauseous compound called proteinax? But whatever the newest bit of hazing Buck Reagan had planned for him, it was never applied. For, while the skipper was still bellowing his displeasure, the mate cut him off with a sharp warning.

“Hold it, chief,” shouted Holt. “We’ve lost the beam.”

“What!” blasted the captain. His angry eyes sought the visiscreen, but all that there was to be seen there was shapeless, swirling white mists. The nepholoscopes were just as noncommunicative—the readings all around and up and down were the same, one hundred percent. Clouds, clouds, everywhere. Venus was always like that, once you got below the topmost cirrus layers. Without the radio beam from Venusport, the planet’s only authorized port of entry, blind landings were impossible. There were too many uncharted mountain ranges. Reagan’s finger found the call button to the tube room and jabbed it.

“Up blasts,” was the curt order that followed, and they set themselves for the kick of quick acceleration, for they had already braked down to airborne glider speed.

The tubemaster never had time to comply with the order. A shape flashed on the screen—a gray, dripping, cruelly jagged pinnacle of rock trailing wisps of cloud showed for an instant, then vanished. And with its vanishing there was a heavy jar and the scream of rending hull plates. The Pelican caromed off, swerved like a shying horse, then plunged sharply downward. A tube sputtered, tried to fire, and then the ship sideswiped another crag, bounced heavily, only to plunge nose first into something immovable and hard. The lights went out as men were flung about like tenpins. Then for a time there was dead silence broken only by a hissing as the broken ship’s internal pressures adapted themselves to the lesser one of Venus’ substratosphere.

“WELL, at least we’re all alive,” drawled Holt, as the last man crawled out to join the huddled group shivering in the sleety rain. The deserted wreck of the Pelican sprawled before them, its crumpled nose embedded in a towering cliff and its precious cargo of food pellets for the Venusian colonists spilling out through the ragged wounds in its sides. They could see vaguely through occasional rifts in the misty curtain about them that murderous peaks rose everywhere. What lay in the valleys far below could only be guessed at, for they were buried under a blanket of scurrying clouds driven by the icy highland wind.

“Humph,” snorted the captain. Alive, yes. But their ship and cargo were a total loss, and they had little idea where they were. Somewhere, far down in the steaming jungles of the foothills, there might be a trading post or regional smelter, but how far and in what direction they could only guess. Conditions on Venus were most unfavorable to surveying and few maps existed. But Reagan unfolded a sketchy chart and began puzzling over it.

Avrig, the tubemaster, took the opportunity to stroll away. He rounded the broken stern and looked despondently at his smashed tubes. He saw the last of his fuel supply dripping from his gashed bunker tank. And then he walked on to have a look at the ship’s other side. It was as bad or worse than the other. Then he stared at the forbidding cliff that had stopped them. In another moment he was yelling madly and bounding back to where his shipmates stood.

“Hey, fellows—come see! I’ve struck it rich. Gold—tons of it. I’m a multimillionaire—”

“Whadda you mean, you’re a multimillionaire?” asked Holt scornfully. “This is a cooperative outfit.”

“Yeah,” bubbled Avrig, jubilantly, “but the cruise is over—the old Pelican is done for—through. That washes up our agreement. But don’t worry. I’ll need help to cash in, so you’ll all get a good cut—”

There were sullen murmurs among the crew and Holt growled.

“Our agreement says that all profits of the cruise ‘however derived’ shall be whacked up amongst us—a third to the skipper, a quarter each to you and me, and the rest divided equally among the men. Furthermore, the agreement is in effect until the end of the cruise, which means until we all get back to the port we started from.”

“It’s mine,” insisted Avrig stubbornly, “by right of discovery. I saw it first—”

“I put the ship down here,” said the captain coldly.

“Oh, yeah?” remarked Holt. “Or did I? I’m the guy that lost the beam.”

They glared at one another. Then Buck Reagan suggested it might be sensible to see whether Avrig had really found anything worth squabbling over. The bedraggled group rounded the battered stern and gazed up at the cliff. It was there, all right, a colossal treasure. A great fault had split the cliff and in the wide fissure masses of quartz were packed, heavily grained with metallic gold and studded with immense nuggets.

Jimmy Laird gaped with the rest, but he did not share their elation. For he and he alone of all the ship’s company did not share the common agreement. Behind his name on the muster roll were the qualifying words, “landsman for ship’s cook, for keep and wages only.”

There was a moment of stupendous silence as the onlookers made estimates of the wealth before them. Then the captain spoke.

“There we are, boys. It belongs to all of us. Break out those tools in No. 4 and hop to it.”

There was a chorus of approving yells and Avrig knew he was beaten. He shrugged and started away with the others.

“Excuse it, please, sir, but could I say a word?” Jimmy Laird had mustered up courage to address the captain otherwise than in frightened response.

“No. You’re out of this,” was Reagan’s curt reply. “Grab a pick and get in there and do something to earn your pay. It’s a cinch you’re no cook.”

“But, sir, the Venusian law—” Jimmy persisted.

“To hell with the Venusian law! With this dough we can grease our way past any law. Get going!” And Reagan emphasized his order with a swift kick.

Jimmy Laird went, crestfallen and wounded in spirit. For, despite his mistreatment, he still bubbled over with good will toward everyone, and he also feared the men of the Pelican were riding for a fall and felt that he should warn them. On a shelf in his galley there reposed a thick gray book entitled “The Revised Statute of the Dominion of Venus” and he had whiled away many of the tedious hours of the long voyage by reading it. Venus, he learned, had a very peculiar economy and therefore a very peculiar system of government and set of regulations. Jimmy Laird was a cook, not a lawyer, but he could read. Reagan’s crowd were going about things the wrong way.

He might have swallowed the last insult of the captain if he had not been put in Avrig’s gang for the afternoon shift. Avrig was full of rankling disappointment at having to content himself with a quarter share of his Golconda and consequently drove his men hard. And since many of them were as hard-bitten as himself and as likely to take a swing at him as not, he vented most of his irritation on the hapless cook, ridiculing him for his chubbiness and making sarcastic remarks about his flabby muscles.

That night, when Jimmy Laird huddled down with the other crew members in their makeshift shelter for a night of cold, damp rest, there was a glow of resentment in his ordinarily mild blue eyes, and a flush of shame on his cheeks. Moreover, his hitherto unused muscles ached abominably.

It was some time after the others began snoring that he rose and stole into his wrecked galley. There he stuffed his pockets with concentrated food tablets. Then he slipped out into the raw, windy night. A moment later he was plunging down the mountainside, loosing small avalanches at almost every stride. And so went the night.

MORNING found him deep in a forest of tall, coniferous trees in an upland valley. It was chill in that mist-filled grove, but not so chilly as on the bare ledges of the upper heights. When the fog was lightened and warmed somewhat by the invisible sun overhead, he fed himself and slept for a while. Later he got up and continued his journey downward. His theory was that if he followed the watercourses he would sooner or later come upon an outpost of what civilization there was on the cloud-enwrapped planet.

Day after day he went on, ever down, down, down. It got warmer as he descended and the vegetation more dense. He sighted many weird animals, but they scampered away as soon as they sensed his nearness. The greenery took on a tropical cast and the undergrowth grew thicker. Thorny creepers tore at his clothes and ripped his face and hands. His shoes wore out and had to be discarded. Yet he pushed ahead. He could not stop now. His food supplies were running low and when they were gone he would have to die. Venus was an inhospitable planet to Earthmen, despite its lush vegetation and teeming fauna.

He thought on that, one night as he rested beneath a giant fern. It must be due to the absence of ultra-violet light, he concluded. Nothing that walked, crawled, swam or grew leaves on Venus but what was poisonous to man. But it had not always been that way, as the many ruins of great cities now overrun by the jungle testified, or the exhumation of great numbers of mummies of highly developed anthropoids closely resembling man. Physicists attributed the toxicity of Venusian life to the presence of such excessive moisture in the air that the shorter rays of sunshine could not get through. That had been a recent development, dating only from a few hundred thousand years back at the time of the Neovulcan Age when myriads of volcanoes had spouted vast quantities of hydrogen into the air.

There was nothing Jimmy Laird could do about that except to take care not to eat anything of native origin. But it did explain the basis of Venus’ lopsided economy. Since it was fatally unsafe to eat anything of organic nature on Venus, her chief import was food concentrates. Such, indeed, had been the cargo of the ill-fated Pelican. Her exports, then, necessarily had to be minerals, in which the planet also abounded. Therefore her population was chiefly composed of miners, who, because of the hard and expensive living conditions, tried to clean up in two or three years and retire to Earth with their profits. Hence the greedy and grasping nature of the temporary residents that had earned the second of the sun’s orbs the name of “The Chiselers’ Planet.” And from those hard facts also rose the meticulous mining laws of Venus and the arbitrary nature of its government.

All of which was no help at all to Jimmy Laird during his next trying week. He ate the last of his proteinax pills and sighed. He no longer resembled his former self, for his grueling journey had stripped him down to bone and hard muscle. Now he was to know wasting hunger. But he struggled on, hoping against hope that somewhere in that foggy domain he would stumble upon a human settlement. He was in a lush, hill-inclosed valley, torn and twisted by many recent geological upheavals. The stream he followed broadened into a lake and he saw that the mouth of the valley was choked by a range of hills through which the mountain torrent had been forced to cut a canyon. To skirt the lake he had to make a wide detour along the flanks of the surrounding mountains. It was on that trail that he made an astonishing discovery.

He came to a gully, down which a rivulet trickled. The gashed bank on the other side clearly revealed the tormented and twisted nature of the underlying strata, for layers of sandstone, folded like the crumpled pages of a book, were in plain sight, interspersed with other layers of clay, lime-stones and dark-colored matter. The gully was deep, but not too wide. He thought he might leap it. He withdrew a few yards and ran, gathering himself for the jump. But at the very edge of the ravine a creeper grabbed his foot. Instead of leaping free, he tumbled heavily and fell, face-down, into the muck of the bottom.

It was disconcerting. For he had instinctively yelled as he fell and struck with a wide-open mouth. When he sat up, not only was his face plastered with the clinging filth of water-soaked, decayed vegetation, but his mouth was crammed with it. He sat up, clawing fiercely with his hands to free his face of the slimy stuff and spat energetically to rid his mouth of it. Then his expression underwent a strange transformation. He froze where he sat, and blinked. His tongue tentatively roved his mud-incrusted teeth, his throat automatically gulped down what was found there. The sludge slipped into his gullet and he licked his lips for more. The stuff was good! It had taste—such taste as the old dietetic legends told of as pertaining to such archaic items as broiled sirloin, mashed potatoes and gravy, luscious artichokes and the like. Jimmy Laird smacked his lips and his hands reached down into the gummy slime for more.

“Boy, oh boy,” he murmured, “not bad. No, not bad.” Then, reconsidering, he revised his opinion, “It’s wonderful,” he breathed ecstatically.

FOR five days he camped beside that stream, eating greedily of its mud. His formerly opulent belly, then hanging in loose, flabby folds, regained its plump tautness. Once again rosiness drove the pallor from his cheeks. Jimmy Laird was himself again, despite his early fears that he might have poisoned himself by eating the forbidden fruits of Venus. Yet nothing adverse happened, and he set about making the strange food even more palatable. On the second day, after the first blush of enthusiasm for sustenance had worn off, he became aware of a certain grittiness in his Heaven-sent manna. He cured that by the simple expedient of filtering the substance through the tail of his shirt. Then it occurred to him that heat would improve it. So he contrived to build a fire, and, using the abandoned carapace of a huge tortoise for a caldron, made himself a pot of soup.

“Yum, yum,” was his reaction, innocent of the fact that he was re-coining an expression that had not been used for many centuries. And, appropriately, he rubbed himself in the middle in gesture of gratitude to whatever forest god had thrown the miraculous food in his way.

By sniffing diligently about the spot of his find, he finally located the source of the edible matter. It came from an inverted horseshoe crevice in the creek’s bank, the barely exposed top of a sharp syncline. The waters of the stream had long since eroded most of the crumbly, olive-green substance that had composed the original stratum, but a good deal of it still clung to the top of the arch. He broke that off in chunks and made a pile of it beside his improvised camp. Then he systematically went about its refinement, bringing it to a boil, skimming off the scum that rose to the top, and filtering out the sand. Then he let it boil down to a stiff sludge which dried into a cake. Then he broke it into bits of convenient size and filled his empty pockets with them. Having thus fed, rested, and replenished his stock of provisions, he resumed his downward trek.

It was only two days after that that he stumbled upon a trail. It was a jumble of curious nine-toed footprints which he guessed to be the spoor of the sturdy hippoceras, the commonest beast of burden on Venus. Later he came across the ashes of old campfires, discarded food containers, and other evidence of man. It was not long before he smelled smoke and saw the stacks of a smelter looming up over the trees. And then he came to the edge of the clearing. Before him was a considerable town. The first leg of his journey was over.

He walked on, surprised that there should be so little signs of life. After a little, he entered a street between two rows of shacks. On the steps of one of the crude dwellings, two men sat. They were pale, gaunt and emaciated, as if from illness or long fasting, and their grimy miners’ rags flapped idly on them. They were sizing up the rotund figure of the newcomer with unconcealed disfavor. Or was it envy?

“Howdy,” said Jimmy Laird, ignoring their manifest hostility. “What town is this?”

“Hah!” snorted one, “as if you didn’t know, you gluttonous slob. I can tell you this, though, you’re wasting your time. We don’t want no truck with Hugh Drake or any of his hirelings. We’re hanging on to our claims, you understand, even if we starve. So you get to hell out of here while you’re all together. This ain’t a healthy section of town for profiteers or profiteers’ jackals. See?”

He spat disgustedly. The other man spoke.

“You can tell Hugh Drake that a friend of mine had a letter a coupla weeks ago from Venusport, and that it said the Pelican was due any day. So we know the food caravan will be coming in most any time now. Hugh Drake can go pound mud in his ear.”

“Hey,” said Jimmy Laird. “I’m from the Pelican, She won’t ever get to Venusport. She’s lying way up on the top of a mountain, all smashed up.”

The men looked at each other in frank consternation.

“Where?” they asked excitedly, springing to their feet.

Laird shook his head.

“I can’t tell you exactly. ’Way up there,” he waved his arm vaguely toward the misty region he had come from. “It took me the best part of a month to get down. The other men will be along later.”

The men’s faces fell. Now they registered blank despair.

“I guess Hugh Drake wins,” said one, apathetically.

Jimmy Laird didn’t quite understand the reference, but somehow he felt embarrassed. Absently, he put his hand in his pocket and drew out a chunk of his dried soup. He bit off a piece, then offered it to the others. They sniffed it, crumbled off bits, and popped them into their mouths.

“Say!” yelled the first one, “this is good. What is it—something new?” The other was chewing ravenously, the picture of bliss.

“It’s better with hot water,” said Laird, pulling a double handful from another pocket. “If you’ve got a stove and a pot. I’ll fix you up a mess.”

“We ain’t got any money,” said the starved miner, suspicious again, “and we ain’t trading a grade-A iridium claim for no bowl of soup—”

“Oh, that’s all right,” assured Jimmy Laird. “I wouldn’t think of taking money for this stuff. Anyhow, there’s plenty more where it came from.”

An hour later he was presiding over a huge tureen of steaming soup, while an endless procession of undernourished miners trooped past, each carrying a cup in hand. His new-found pals, Elkins and Trotter, had lost no time in passing the word around the neighborhood that Santa Claus had come to town. After the kettle had been emptied and refilled five times, the stream of starving men dwindled. Then Elkins and Trotter enlightened their benefactor as to the local situation.

“This Hammondsville is a tough town,” said Trotter. “Old Man Drake owns the smelters; he owns the store and the bank and all these houses, and he owns the hippo herds. No matter what we do, he gets his cut. But where he gouges us the worst is on his food racket. Every year the caravan comes up and stocks the government dispensary and carries back the ingots in return. The hell of it is that they never leave enough at the dispensary and it usually runs out before the caravan gets in again. That’s where Drake gets in his dirty work. At the dispensary we pay a pound of gold for an ounce of trephainin, but when we have to buy it from Drake, the sky’s the limit. He’ll say he hasn’t got any to spare until a guy’s practically starving and ready to assign his claim. Then Drake feeds him and pockets the mine. He’s got a lot that way.”

“He’s a skunk,” asserted Elkins, dismally. “Now you know what a jam we’re in here. Down at the caravan loading square there’s stacks of gold and iridium ingots as high as your head, and not a bite to eat. And if what you say about the Pelican is true, we may not get another caravan for months. The hospital’s already full, and a waiting list to get in. But even that don’t help. I hear they’re about out of concentrates, too.”

“Well, say,” said Jimmy Laird, emptying his pockets, “that’s not right. Take ’em this. I’ll go back and get another load.”

It was his turn to tell a story. He told them of the crackup of the ship, the gold strike, and what the captain and crew were doing. Trotter chuckled.

“I know that lode. It’s a good one, but it’s too far. Besides, you can’t get a hippo to go above the timber line. Those fellows woulda been smarter if they had loaded up with the pellets in the cargo and come down with them. The way things are here, they coulda had all the gold and platinum in town. You did better than all of ’em put together. There’s a big bonus offered for anybody that can start a food industry on this planet.”

Laird described his find in detail.

“Lemme see,” said Elkins, studying the ceiling. He felt very fine, now that his hunger was assuaged. “That would be Starvation Valley—all the strata churned every which way. You made a strike, then it dives outa sight. Many a one of us has gone broke there. It burns you up to keep having to drive new shafts, and even then you lose the pay streak nine times out of ten.”

“Wait a minute,” said Trotter. “This stuff of his is soluble. All we need is a drill rig and a donkey boiler and some pipe. Shove down a pair of pipes, shoot steam down one and soup comes up the other. Dry out the steam in condenser pans, and there’s your concentrate. I think the fellow’s got something.”

There was a little talk of ways and means. It did not take long to find willing helpers. A dozen miners, grateful for being saved from Drake’s clutches, came in with offers of the loan of equipment. Even a small herd of privately owned hippoceri was located. Then, at Trotter’s and Elkins’ insistence, Laird hied himself to the local registrar of claims and filed his claim. After that they assembled their expedition and set off.

IT IS remarkable what enthusiasm can do. In ten days Starvation Valley was a hive of activity. Men, not only willing but eager to work for mere food, had done wonders. Two donkey boilers puffed away, fed by cords of wood that had been cut by the volunteers. From four pipes driven deep into the sunken stratum, which Laird’s self-appointed experts found sloped sharply downward from the outcropping he had found, jetted rich soup. The pipes delivered their streams through strainers to drying pans from which the condensed essence was cut in cubes and wrapped. A few of the patient, plodding, piglike hippoceri were always present, being loaded with hundreds of pounds of their precious cargo for the lower valley.

“Old Hugh Drake will be plenty sore about this,” grinned Trotter, “He hasn’t made a dishonest nickel this year. But you’d better watch him, kid; he plays dirty pool.”

Jimmy Laird grinned back and pointed to the newly painted sign that one of his admirers had put up. It read: “Laird’s Luscious Soupery—Keep Out!”

“That won’t help you. kid, if the old pirate really gets his back up. He’s got drag.”

Laird found out that was true prophecy when he went down to Hammondsville again. He had just left the dispensary where he had been informed that the replenished stocks were more than satisfactory. “The stuff is swell,” the chemist in charge said. “We analyzed it, and it’s got everything—all the known vitamins, and calories enough to keep a working elephant going. we’ll take all you send at the regular rate. Venusport and the other towns can use it, too, and that means that hereafter we can import a few luxuries from Earth.” That had been reassuring, but when Jimmy Laird walked out and was halted by a member of the constabulary, he did not feel so good.

“Your name Laird?” asked the man. He was a hard-faced customer with steely blue eyes and a cast-iron jaw. Laird admitted that was his name.

“O.K. We’ve got a place all swept out for you at the hoosegow. This way.’’

Laird looked at the six feet of brawn, at the ham-like fists, at the flame gun at his belt, and back again to those boring, merciless eyes.

“Yes, sir,” he said. And he followed. He felt miserably insufficient, as he always had when he encountered a brutal, direct action type. He sighed, but there was nothing else he could do. Just follow.

Mr. Drake, he was soon to learn, had preceded him to the town’s police station. He was a skinny, grasping old man with gleaming eyes separated by a hawk nose.

“Get it all down,” he croaked to the booking clerk, “illegal entry, working a mine without a license, inducing men to work for him without wages. I claim the reward under the terms of Article 456 of the Mining Statutes, which entitles me to receive one third interest in any confiscated property denounced by me.”

“It’s all down, sir,” said the subservient clerk. “Officer, lock this man Laird up in Cell 21.”

Jimmy Laird was pretty downhearted. He had misgivings all along. For he had read those very statutes and knew they had him. To be eligible to own a mine on Venus, one must first duly pass the immigration office at Venusport, pay his head tax, and receive a license. The penalty for failure to comply was confiscation of the mine, a heavy fine, and deportation. If unable to pay the fine, he was subject to indenture to whatever citizen of Venus who did pay it. That meant he would probably become one of Drake’s vassals.

JIMMY Laird languished in that jail for a solid month with nothing to divert him but his own gloomy thoughts. Then came a day when the footsteps of a keeper resounded in the metal corridor and he was told to come out. Court was about to convene.

The courtroom was packed. As Laird found out later, a famous high judge had been sent up from Venusport to try the case, in view of its importance, but Jimmy had no inkling of that when he glanced up and saw his forbidding countenance, and the scowling prosecutor arranging his papers. So he sat down meekly in the prisoner’s dock and looked out onto the crowd of miners assembled in the seats. He picked out Elkins and Trotter and others he knew, and noticed that Elkins stood up and clasped both his hands together in the traditional distant salute of friendship. Then he turned to hear what the damning evidence against him was.

There was not so much of it at that. A drier-than-dust clerk of the central registration bureau at the capital testified that there had never been a mining license or entry permit issued to any James Laird. He sat down. Then Hugh Drake arose to speak of illicit mining operations in Starvation Valley he had observed from under cover, and of the distribution of non-approved food products at cut prices throughout the local area. He demanded confiscation of the mine, and all other penalties. After that the prosecutor summed up in a florid denunciation of schemers and would-be-get-rich-quick irresponsibles who tried to exploit the lovely planet of Venus for their own selfish needs. Jimmy Laird listened to his eloquence with a quivering and despondent heart.

“Therefore,” thundered the prosecutor, “I demand the condemnation of this Earthling upstart for illegal mining and the assessment of all the penalties he so richly merits.” He yielded the rostrum with a triumphant glare at a small, dapper gentleman who sat at a nearby table. Jimmy Laird looked at him, also, and in some surprise, for he had not noticed him before and had no idea who he might be. The new figure got up and addressed the judge.

“I move,” he said, in a startlingly clear voice, “that this case be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. This is a mining court. My client is not, and never has been, engaged in the pursuit of mining—”

Jimmy Laird started. He a client! How come? He had hired no lawyer, or even seen one. They had held him too tightly incommunicado for that. Yet here was a man referring to him as “my client.”

But the prosecutor was on his feet again and angrily objecting.

“Your honor, this motion is frivolous and absurd—mining is defined as the occupation of digging or tunneling in the ground. The defendant has done that. I know that my opponent in his brief contends that since the substance mined is organic, it ceases to be a mineral but a foodstuff. Again he is defeated by the definition. A mineral is anything that is obtained by digging, whatever its composition or ultimate origin. The decisions sustaining that point are too numerous to mention; the courts have invariably held that such products as petroleum, natural gas, coal, and even lignite are minerals.”

“Quite so,” smiled the dapper counsel for defense. “Are we then to presume that my learned adversary considers peanuts, truffles and potatoes minerals? Is the cutting of peat a mining operation?”

The judge blinked. Then said, “Go on.”

“I have been retained by the outraged citizenry of this town to assist in this case, and I have studied all its aspects thoroughly. The nature of the alleged mineral, for one. Both the Geologic and the Biological Bureaus have made investigations and reports. The former states that prior to the Era of Neovulcanisra, when Venus’ climate was not unlike the Earth’s, vegetables and animals nutritious to man abounded. At the time of the great eruptions, these were struck down, engulfed and buried by volcanic ash. The result was a layer of ancient forest mold enriched by the addition of many plants and animals. This was later overlain by other rocks, and became dessicated and compressed to its present form. But at no time has its essential organic nature been altered. The Biological Bureau reports that Laird’s Luscious Soup is nothing other than an infusion of that substance which we now know to be so rich in vital food values, and soup, traditionally, is just such an infusion of selected organic juices.

“Moreover, the Viceregal Decree of Decimo 14, 2047, for the Encouragement of Food Production on Venus uses these words: ‘Any person, of whatever planetary allegiance, and whether or not so specifically licensed, who may discover and develop a source of natural food upon this planet, shall be awarded a suitable bonus, a free site of operations, and shall be entitled to the full protection of the government, whether such food supply shall derive from farming, fishing, trapping, or otherwise.’ That otherwise, I submit, disposes of the charges completely.”

As the lawyer finished, the crowd broke into a wild cheering that made the walls rattle despite the judge’s vigorous pounding for quiet.

“Don’t let Hugh Drake put that over! … Hooray for Laird! … Boost home industry and tell the Synthetics Corp to go to hell!”

While the excited miners yelled, Trotter advanced down the aisle carrying a steaming pot of Laird’s Luscious Soup. The tumult was so great that no one could hear what passed between him and the judge, but in a moment the jurist raised the offered cup and took a sip. The smacking of judicial lips that ensued could not be heard, but the melting of his stern expression to one of easy contentment could be seen by all. Hugh Drake and the sycophantic prosecutor edged their way toward a side door. They had read the handwriting on the wall even before the judge sat up and cried;

“Case dismissed.”

“SHUCKS,” said Elkins, once they were outside. “It was no trouble at all. We passed the hat and then hired that fellow from Venusport. We figgered we owed that much to you.”

Laird bubbled his thanks. But he noticed Elkins seemed troubled about something. Jimmy asked him what was on his mind.

“Well,” drawled the miner, “it’s this way. The fellers have helped all they could and you have a fair start and all that, so they’re thinking something about their own business. You see, now that they’re fed and grub-staked for the season, they want to get back to work on their own claims, I know that’s going to be hard on you—there’s so little free labor hereabouts, what with Drake having all the down-and-outs bagged and bound out to his smelters—but the boys’d appreciate it if you could let them go.”

“Sure,” said Jimmy Laird, not wanting to discommode any other human being. “I’ll find a way.”

It was not easy, though. When he got back to Starvation Valley and let his helpers go, he found that there were not enough hours in the day for him to stoke both boilers, cut and carry wood, run his drying pans and the packaging. And it was out of the question to load the hippos and drive them down to Hammondsville and back, unless he shut down from time to time. With the whole planet clamoring for the new and tasty food, he was reluctant to do that.

It was just when he was wrestling with that problem that the first of his former shipmates showed up. It was one of the tube gang, and he was as haggard and bedraggled a specimen as ever came stumbling out of the jungle. His clothes were in shreds and he was wolfishly hungry. Moreover, he carried not an ounce of gold. He had discarded that a long time back in his frantic effort to find haven and food before he caved in. Jimmy Laird fed him and gave him a place to sleep.

By twos and threes, the remainder of the crew straggled in, all in the same or worse condition. They had made the initial mistake of starting out with too heavy a load of the nuggets and not enough of the Pelican’s bountiful supply of food pellets. The result was inevitable. By the time they reached Starvation Valley, they were empty-handed and mere shadows of men.

Captain Reagan was as hollow-cheeked and crestfallen as any. He took Laird’s handout without a word and gulped it eagerly. The warm, strong broth perked him up considerably, and he cast an inquiring eye about the clearing where the two puffing boilers stood, the neat sleeping shacks and the cooking pans. Then he asked if there was a town nearby where he could make arrangements for the transport of their mountain treasure.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Jimmy Laird, hospitably ladling out another bowl of the fragrant soup, “there is, but I’d hate to see you go there the way you are. It’s on account of those mining laws I tried to tell you about. They’ll grab your mine, if anybody thinks he wants it, and throw you in the clink. And then, when you can’t pay the fine, they’ll sell you as a smelter hand. It’s a hard game to beat.”

Buck Reagan looked unhappy. After his cook’s desertion, he had come across the volume of laws and read them.

“Of course,” Jimmy went on, “knowing how you feel about it, I kinda hesitate to offer you a job with me, but then again it might help you out of your jam. I need men. And I’ll pay good wages and feed you, too—”

“We’ll take it,” said Captain Reagan, despairingly, looking at the boilers with fresh curiosity. Jimmy Laird’s flamboyant sign faced downstream so its face could not be read from where Reagan sat. “What will we have to do?”

“Help me make soup,” said Jimmy Laird. And he never did understand why the captain almost choked.

The Superlous Phantom

Weird Tales, March 1942

THE Lights in the stalled subway train blinked and went out. A foreman leaned over the edge of the platform and waved a lantern.

“Okay, men—the current’s off. Grab him and get him up outa there. That’s swell! Now—up here with him.”

The two guards down on the tracks heaved and swung. The limp form rose and slid onto the station platform, then lay motionless. The morbid, sensation-hungry crowd that gathers as if by magic at every disaster, however trivial, reluctantly backed away a little, leaving a clear spot in the center of which lay the inert figure in its dirt-smeared, mussed brown suit. Only one man pushed forward—a smallish middleaged man with a moth-eaten looking goatee and carrying a dilapidated black satchel.

“I’m a doctor,” he told the guard who tried to stop him. He dropped to his knees and put a hand on the prostrate man’s chest. In a moment he stood up, shaking his head with an air of solemn finality. “He’s gone. No pulse—no respiration. There is nothing to be done.”

Some in the crowd thought they saw a sudden tremor sweep the corpse, one man claimed afterward that he saw an eyelid flicker, but at the moment no one said anything. They simply stood, as metropolitan crowds usually do under the circumstances, popeyed, gaping and moronic—looking on for the sheer lust of seeing.

The doctor did not wait, but bustled away as if in a great hurry to keep an appointment. The crowd closed its ranks behind him and continued to stare. There would be other things to see, soon. The police would come, and reporters and stretcher bearers. And best of all, photographers. Every super-moron there was dumbly hoping that somehow he might get included in the picture so as to have something to boast of to his friends tomorrow. ’Then, above in the street a gong clanged and a siren shrieked its wailing song. The climax was at hand!

“All right, all right—outa the way, you—get going!”

Husky policemen shouldered their way through the mass of thrill seekers in a resistless phalanx. The sergeant’s eye caught the picture of the train stalled halfway down the platform and thought he knew the answer—another suicide. But when he broke through to the inner circle and saw the prone figure on the concrete he saw that there was no blood on it. The guard shrugged and jerked a thumb toward the track. “Third rail,” was all he said. “The guy’s dead.”

The sergeant wheeled and called out to the men behind him.

“A shock case, fellows. Jump up to the wagon and bring down the pulmotor. Then go to work on him and don’t let up until I give the word. I’ve seen these third-railers pull through before.”

The Emergency Squad went into action and while they were administering artificial respiration other cops cleared the jammed station. One by one the onlookers gave ground.

“Such a nice looking young man,” commiserated one woman. “It’s a pity. Too bad they didn’t catch the man that pushed him.” But nobody paid attention. As they shuffled out a cameraman came dashing in, demanding, “Where’s the stiff?” and the outgoing sheep sighed. But they consoled themselves with the thought that in the very next editions they would be reading something like this:

“During the early rush hour today, a young man tentatively identified as John Wicks, 24, address unknown, jumped or fell in front of an uptown local. Trainman Horatio Z. Evans managed to stop the train before the wheels passed over the body, but when Wicks was extricated from beneath the first car it was found he had been electrocuted. Police rendered first aid, but their efforts proved unavailing. Service was resumed after a short delay.”

That is, that is what they expected to read. But, as a matter of fact, they did nothing of the sort. For the first aid efforts did avail.

After a few hours of mauling Johnny Wicks opened his eyes and saw the cops bending over him.

“Aw, lay off, won’t you,” he begged, “I wanna sleep.”

Whereupon he tried to roll over and call it a day. They didn’t let him do that, of course, but that is neither here not there. The big thing—the main point to be remembered about the little episode is this: Johnny Wicks did not die! Not for an instant.

We-ell—maybe for an instant, or for a couple of instants—but hardly longer than that. After a little he signed a lot of papers, then walked home, more sore about ruining his new brown suit than anything. He would have to throw it away, now. The only other immediate consequence of his mishap was that for a few days he had to take a lot of kidding from his friends. After that the memory of it simply faded into the past. He hardly ever thought of it any more.

THE summer turned into fall, fall into winter, and in the course of time it was summer again. It was on a hot August night that Johnny went to bed early so as to be up early the next day. He was about to go on his vacation and did not mean to lose an hour of it. He was considerably annoyed, therefore, when shortly after he fell asleep he woke up again. It was with a sudden, scared start that puzzled him, and to add to his mystification an unseasonally icy gust of wind swept the room. Somehow there was a hint of the uncanny in it and his skin goose-pimpled and crawled in spite of him, for he thought he detected in the chill air the mouldy odor of the grave—an observation which itself stuck him as odd the moment he made it, for not once in his whole life had he smelled a grave.

He glanced at the clock and saw by its luminous face that it was exactly midnight. At the same instant he unaccountably remembered that it was just a year to the day since he had that ridiculous experience in the subway when the jostling of a hoodlum had caused him to be pronounced dead. But that was water over the dam, Wicks told himself and reached down for the cover. He was not going to stay awake and suffer, even if it was a cold night in August.

It was then he saw It.

“What’s the big idea?” he demanded angrily of the seven-foot smoky apparition standing at the foot of his bed. The thing was vague and whitish, and as he challenged it it raised two elongated skinny arms and spread two sets of wispy, talon-like fingers.

“Who-o-o-o-osh! Ye-e-e-a-ow! Screee-e—e—e,” was what the thing said back to him, the last of its unearthly wails tapering off into a strangled silence.

“Oh, a ghost, huh?” commented Johnny, sitting upright in bed, wide awake by then. “Well, ghosty, run along and peddle your apples somewhere else. I haven’t murdered anybody and nobody was ever murdered in this room that I know of. Anyhow, I don’t believe in ghosts, so you’re wasting time. Scram!”

Johnny Wicks slid down into the bed again and adjusted his pillow. But he kept a wary eye on the amorphous cloud hovering over the foot of his bed. It was waveringly condensing into something shaped much more like a man, but except for its initial screeches had uttered no other sound. Presently the apparition completed its reorganization. Then it stretched forth its ghostly arm and pointed an accusatory finger at the young fellow in the bed.

“You didn’t kill me, no,” admitted the ghost, croaking the words in a deep sepulchral voice, “but you’re doing something worse and I can’t stand it.” It suddenly struck Johnny that the voice sounded a great deal like his own—that is, what his own might sound like if he had a bad cold and shouted down a cistern. “You’re ruining my career, that’s what you’re doing,” reproached the spectral visitor, “and for no reason except your own damn selfishness.”

Johnny Wicks was flabbergasted. He hadn’t the slightest idea what the phantom was talking about.

“I’m not taking it lying down, either,” continued the ghost, threateningly, his voice getting stronger and more distinct and more and more like Johnny’s own. “I’m going to haunt you until you make it right, that is what I’m going to do. You’ve gotta make things right—I can’t go on this way.”

The agitation of the spectre was painfully obvious. He swayed and twisted like a tornado cloud and his surfaces were wrinkled into little waves by the turbulence of the ethereal stuff of which he was composed. It made Johnny Wicks think of a dense cloud of cigar smoke over a poker table, stirred into erratic movement by the exhalations of the players.

“Me, Mac?” Johnny asked. “What have I got to do with you?” Then, realizing how ridiculous it was to be sitting up in bed at that time of night arguing with a strange ghost, he added, very firmly:

“Listen, you bunch of fog, whoever you are. I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you. I don’t get your racket and I don’t care a hang what it is. I’m not interested. I’ve got a lot of important sleeping to do between now and morning and I’m going to get on with it. So pull yourself together and get the hell outa here before I throw you out.”

“Yeah!” sneered the ghost, immediately belligerent. “Well, try it.”

He swelled up to double his size, looking very fearsome, and uttered another of his long-drawn “Whooshes.”

“Bosh!” said Johnny, and reached for the light switch.

The illumination did not dispel the ghost, however. He was still here. At first he appeared to be a shapeless blue-green cloud, but he shrank rapidly until he seemed to be almost as solid as the living Johnny Wicks himself. And, to Johnny’s further bewilderment, his own, exact double. Except that, instead of wearing pink pajamas, he wore the grease and lime stained brown suit of the night of the subway near-tragedy. It was amazing, for that suit had long since been burned.

“Start the rough stuff any time,” challenged the ghost, insolently, “only I’d advise you to take it easy. You can sock me all right, but watch out you don’t knock yourself out when you do. I’m not as solid as I look.”

Johnny was already swinging when the ghost said that, but he hastily pulled his punch. The warning had the ring of sound advice. Yet he had promised to throw his unwanted visitor out and he had to make good. Otherwise he might find himself permanently haunted, and that was one thing that Johnny Wicks felt was unneeded to round out his life.

He considered the cloudy, nebulous nature of his guest and decided upon another maneuver. On his table stood an antiquated electric fan which he rarely used for the reason that it was so noisy. But now he plugged it in and flicked the switch. He trained it on the phantom, listened and watched as the wheezy motor buzzed up to speed, but little happened. His unsubstantial caller merely wavered ripplingly, but did not budge from where he stood. Nor did he alter the supercilious I-told-you-so sneer that was on his face. That infuriated Johnny particularly, for he knew just what the thing was thinking—or thought he must—because it looked so exactly like himself.

“Live people,” remarked the ghost with exasperating smugness, “often make that error. Because we look like smoke, they think we are smoke. But go ahead. Experiment all you want—I’ve got all eternity. Then when you’ve made up your mind you’re stuck with me, we can get down to brass tacks. I came here to get justice, and by the Elder Shades, I’m going to get it, even if I have to haunt you night and day. And pal, believe me you. I’m one of the slickest haunters in the business. I’m only a young guy, but I’ve got a class A diploma from the S. P. S. and a cum laude to make it more binding.”

Johnny Wicks gritted his teeth. The conceit and impudence of the fellow was unbearable. It was all the more so because of the fellow’s close resemblance to him.

“And what the hell, if I may ask,” put he frigidly, “is the S. P. S.?”

“Why, you poor dope—the Spooks Preparatory School,” replied the phantom with some condescension. “You go there first—the minute you kick off. I was a natural for them. I got high marks in everything—chain clanking, body dragging, eerie yowling, materializations and dematerialization, stair-creaking, raising, mouldy odors, and all the rest of it. Gee! My prof was proud of me!”

The ghost paused to gloat a moment over the memory of his own prowess. Then his face suddenly clouded with the gloom he had displayed earlier. He sighed a dismal sigh—truly a ghastly sigh. “And to think,” he went on bitterly, “that after that I am not allowed to practice. And all on account of you, leading your selfish, heedless life. Five times I’ve been, hat in hand, to the head office of the L. P. A. G., and five times they’ve chucked me out. They won’t give me a haunting license.”

Johnny thought the apparition was going to break down and weep, he looked so dejected. He wasn’t at all sure he knew what the ghost was talking about, but since there appeared to be no way of getting rid of him, Johnny figured there could be no harm done in getting a little information. He was beginning to acquire an interest in the life and customs of the shades.

“If you were so darned good at the S. P. S.,” he asked, “why is it that the L. P. A. G., whoever they are, won’t let you practice? And when you bust in here and pester me this way, aren’t you practicing? And when it comes to that, if you are unlicensed and I want to sleep, why shouldn’t I report you to your own L. P. A. G. and let them handle it? I hate to be a squealer, Mac, but that’s the way I feel about it.”

“Go ahead and report,” defied the ghost. “Nothing would suit me better. To get to the big shot you have to die and serve your apprenticeship. And that’s all I want you to do. Then you’ll meet the fellow in charge of assignments for the League for the Protection of Authentic Ghosts. He’s the guy who says who can haunt and who can’t, and dishes out the locations. If you’re good—and on the level—he might slip you something choice, like the scene of a juicy triple murder. F’rinstance, I know a guy—but, oh hell, what’s the use? I can’t get anywhere as long as you’re alive.”

He stopped again and gave vent to another of his hollow sighs—a soul-wringing, swishy expiration calculated to send chills racing up and down the spine of any luckless listener. Those sighs were like gusts of stagnant air fanned from a long forgotten tomb.

“It’s a lousy system,” murmured the ghost disconsolately. “Why couldn’t they have told me I was a phoney before I put in all that time and hard work at school?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” answered Johnny Wicks, mildly. “I never considered that angle. But now that you bring it up, I thought that all ghosts were phoney. What makes you any different?”

“I’m illegitimate, that’s what,” replied the spectre sullenly. “You double-crossed me—you didn’t stay dead like you oughta had. That leaves me in a tough spot.”

The meaning of this strange interview was beginning to dawn on Johnny’s mind. Could it be that during the brief time he was unconscious that night that he had generated a ghost—a premature one, so to speak? But the ghost was continuing to pour out his woes.

“You see, I can’t prove that I … that is, you … I mean we—Oh, skip it, you know what I mean … that one or the other of us was killed when you fell on the third rail. I admit I was wrong—I shoulda waited. But when that doctor guy stepped right up and said you were dead, that was enough for me. I took right off. The next thing I knew I was in the primary class at the S. P. S. It was only last night when I took the final tests for a license that I found out you didn’t die at all. They put me on cemetery patrol, but there wasn’t a grave there I could call my own. The examiner got suspicious and wanted to see my death certificate. Of course, you know, every ghost don’t have to have a grave—like the ones of fellows eaten by tigers and things like that—but they do have to be dead.

“So they looked up my pedigree. Now I’m sunk. They say that as long as you’re alive, I don’t even exist. Can you tie that?”

“It’s tough,” conceded Johnny Wicks, “but I don’t see what I can do about it.”

“You bet it’s tough,” replied the ghost fiercely, “and there’s plenty you can do about it. You gotta make it right. You gotta kick off for keeps. Hang yourself, jump out the window or take a slug of cyanide—it’s all the same to me. But make it snappy so we can get back to headquarters in time to qualify.”

“Never mind the ‘we,’” said Johnny, a little angrily. “You leave me out of this. If you were dizzy enough to go off half-cocked on account of what some stranger said, that’s your hard luck. Why, you silly nitwit, you didn’t even know whether the fellow was a regular doctor or not. Anyhow, if you think I’m going to kill myself just to get you out of a jam, you’re plain nuts.”

“You’ll be sorry,” threatened the ghost, puffing himself up to three times his former dimensions and taking on what was intended to be a terrifying look. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

But Johnny Wicks was not going to be intimidated by any counterfeit ghost.

“Get this, spook,” he said very determinedly, “you can go plumb to wherever it is that no-good ghosts go to. Or go haunt the bozo that pushed me—er, us—off the platform. Or try your luck on the Interboro; they were the people that furnished the juice that killed me—you—damn it, you’ve got me doing it now! Or take a crack at that gyp doctor that started the trouble. But lay off me.”

With that he turned off the light, pulled the blanket over his head and paid no further attention to the screeches and howls that made the night hideous for awhile. Presently he fell asleep, and the phantom, discouraged by the indifferent snoring of his intended victim, faded slowly back into nothingness.

JOHNNY WICKS had a very pleasant vacation, unmarred by another visit from his spectral double. But the very first night he was back in town, the phantom appeared once more, making his entrance as before.

“Now what?” Johnny wanted to know, glowering at the intruder. Then he noticed his ghost appeared a good deal the worse for wear. One of his eyes had been blackened and his nose pushed out of place. He carried one arm in a sling and the hand of the other one was bandaged. He looked as if he had been the chief loser in a free-for-all.

“I tried all you said to do,” complained the phantom reproachfully. “It won’t work. So you’ve got to bump yourself off after all. That’s what I came to tell you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It was this way. I looked up the coot who pushed us off the platform. What a souse! That fellow don’t ever go to sleep—he just passes out. He’s haunt-proof. Then I tried the subway. I couldn’t work there, either. In the first place that station has four or five real ghosts on the job—suicides and lushes—that specialize in platform work. What I didn’t count on was all the dead groundhogs and blasters. Around midnight the tunnels are crawling with ’em. Some roughneck wanted to know who I was and wanted to see my card. Then a Floating Delegate came by, checking up, and he told ’em I was a phoney. So they ganged up on me. A mortal can’t hurt a ghost, but another ghost can.”

The phantom exhibited his injuries.

“What about the quack doctor?” asked Johnny, getting interested.

“Oh, him? That was worse. All doctors, even the good ones, are bad haunt prospects because too many people die under their hands for one reason or another. But that guy is in a class all to himself. The amount of malpractice he musta done would burn you up. I went up there one night, but couldn’t get near the place, the ghosts were so thick. They asked me what I had against the bird and I told ’em. You shoulda heard ’em laugh. Then they ran me off the place.”

“Well?”

“I’m just telling you. I tried to get by without your help, but it’s no go. Now you’ve got to do the Dutch. It’s the only way out.”

“Go chase yourself,” said Johnny, pulling up the covers.

“Tomorrow night I get tough,” warned the phantom, then vanished.

The ghost did get tough. He tried all the tricks of his trade, but none of the ordinary ones worked. So he settled down to a campaign of incessant, interminable talk. He showed up every night promptly at the hour of twelve and gabbled until morning. Where howling and chain-clanking or being smothered under filmy shrouds had failed to disturb Johnny in the least, the constant chatter began to wear him down. He had to listen, for the ghost, being an offspring of his own self, knew all his inmost secrets—the things that Johnny had half-forgotten and was willing to keep forgotten. He was prodded and taunted for every mistake he had ever made, and for every evil thought. That went on, night after night, for months, until Johnny Wicks was near the breaking point. He lost flesh by the pound, his hair grayed, and he took on the haggard, frenzied appearance of a man on the verge of madness.

“You look like a ghost,” his boss said to him one day, and Johnny jumped as if jabbed with a bayonet. The very word ghost, in his jittery condition, was almost more than he could stand. He wondered dumbly how much longer he could hold out. He had rebelled from the first on the suggestion of suicide, but lately it began to have an appeal. But, as is common in most people, the tendency to cling to life was strong, so he cast about for some means of eliminating his pestiferous double self.

He read books dealing with phantasms. Though he found that there were approved methods of exorcism as regards many, there was nothing that was helpful against ghosts. Silver bullets could dispose of werewolves, a stake through the heart would stop a vampire, garlic, crucifixes and other things were effective against certain classes of witches and demons. But man was helpless against ghostly persecution.

He complained to the police but the most helpful hint they gave him was that a short stay in Bellevue’s psycopathic ward would do him no harm. Ghosts were out of their line. They couldn’t be apprehended, or confined; bullets and blackjacks did not do them injury. Consequently, the police rule was to let them strictly alone. But they did recommend a lawyer who they said had some success in such matters.

Johnny Wicks took the address and looked him up. The lawyer was not an imposing one. On the contrary he was a dried-up wisp of a man of great but indeterminable age.

“Hmm,” he said, when Johnny had poured out his story. “Quite unusual, this. Haunted by your own ghost, eh? Most extraordinary!”

He pulled down a calfskin bound volume and studied its index. Then he shook his head rather hopelessly.

“During the Middle Ages,” he said, “there were numerous court decisions relating to ghosts and the like. But in our time the courts have the tendency to throw such cases out. The complainant against spectral annoyance rarely receives assistance. Here, for example. In an action brought by certain citizens of Calder’s Falls, Idaho, against the Western Sextons’ Association to abate nocturnal noises in the town’s cemetery, the court held:

“—the defendant is in no respect liable for the behavior of ghosts operating upon his premises. Ghosts have repeatedly been held to be a species of ferae naturae, or wild beast, or wild and unaccountable creatures, without ownership and beyond control. Moreover, the tendency to haunt is a natural instinct with a ghost, and as such, in the absence of any statute specifically to the contrary, not an offense.’”

Johnny Wicks blinked. That did not sound helpful.

“That attitude is the common one,” the lawyer went on to say. “Most judges would reject your case on the pretext that it does not fall within their jurisdiction. I am quite certain that should you attempt to obtain an injunction against your own ghost you would get nowhere. What he is attempting, of course, is a form of extortion, but it has been previously held that a man cannot blackmail himself. By extension, your own ghost, being a sort of alter ego, comes under the same rule. I am sorry, my young friend, but there appears to be nothing you can do.”

Johnny sighed miserably. He was very tired and needed sleep badly. He wondered if it would not be wise to cut his throat and be done with it.

“However,” remarked the old lawyer, shrewdly, “it follows that since you have no rights against the phantom, it also has none against you. You are perfectly free to deal with it as you choose.”

“I know,” said Johnny, hopelessly, “but how? You can’t sock the thing, you can’t pin it down, you can’t outtalk it.”

“Everything that ever lived is afraid of something,” observed the sage old man. “What is your ghost afraid of?”

“Other ghosts,” said Johnny, after a moment’s reflection. “But I don’t know any other ghosts.”

“Think it over, son. There’s your way out. Five dollars, please.”

Johnny Wicks fumbled for the money, paid him, and staggered out. It was five dollars wasted; all he had learned was that he was trapped. His only release would be death. But at least he would not have to listen to the tirades of his nightly visitor.

That afternoon he visited a hockshop and bought a revolver. He took it home with him, loaded it and placed it on the table. Tonight was the night. He undressed, listless and numb, and fell onto the bed. Nothing mattered any more. He slept. Then, at midnight, there came the icy gust and with it his ghastly double.

“Do you remember the time …” began the ghost.

“Cut it,” said Johnny, and snapped on the light. “You win.”

He got up and picked up the pistol, whirled its cylinder and verified that it was loaded and ready to go. Then he faced the phantom. This time he was defiant, for a dazzlingly new idea had just popped into his mind.

“You win,” he repeated, “but only the first round. In one minute I am going to blow my brains out. Then I’ll be dead. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Whatta pal!” exclaimed the ghost, beaming, “I knew you’d do the right thing.”

“Okay. But wait. In a few seconds I’ll be dead. Then I’ll produce a real, honest-to-God ghost that won’t look a thing like you—gray, thin, and older. Then I’ll go straight to the L. P. A. G. and denounce you for the impostor you are. After that …” he paused for an ominous silence. The ghost quailed. “After that I’m coming back and going to rip that foggy hide right off your back. I’m going to take you apart, one bunch of smoke at a time, until I find out what makes you tick. Then I’m going to stop it ticking. Get that?”

“You can’t do that to me!” wailed the spectre. “Ye-e-e-ow. Screee-e!”

“Watch me,” said Johnny Wicks grimly, and put the gun to his temple. But he did not pull the trigger. The phantom was in a state of intense agitation, its nebulous substance writhing and twisting horribly. But it was steadily growing fainter, and in half a minute or so more it became quite invisible. Johnny slowly lowered the gun. Then he tossed it into a drawer with a chuckle.

“What a damn fool I’ve been,” he said to himself. “I might have known that the best way to handle a blackmailer is to call his bluff.”

Article: Dispersion

Astounding  Science Fiction, March 1942

THE Germans have been bombarding Dover for some time. The results, considering the terrific costs, have been meager. Most of the projectiles fall in pastures or in the water or against the face of bare cliffs. Now and then a house is hit, but in general the proposition is analogous to trying to decapitate a sparrow at four hundred yards by shooting at it with a rifle. The target is too small compared with the dispersion pattern of the gun itself.

Despite the seeming efficacy of long-range shooting, as often demonstrated by battleships, it must not be forgotten that they employ the shotgun technique, not that of the rifle. They fire salvos. A full salvo of from eight to twelve guns is considered closely bunched if the several projectiles in it fall within a narrow ellipse of four hundred yards by forty. It is more likely to be spread over eight hundred yards, or even a thousand, and that after every controllable error is eliminated. A big gun, no matter how carefully constructed and served, cannot, at any considerable range, be considered a weapon of precision. An admiral in a battle would be very content if he knew he could count on two hits out of every salvo fired after the first one, and for very much the same reasons that a duck hunter is delighted if he puts three pellets out of every cartridge into a duck.

The more one knows about heavy artillery, the more he admires the ingenuity of the generations of gunners and scientists in running down the sources of error and devising ways to compensate for them. There is still a residuum of small ones, some unknown, others too trifling in themselves or too variable to admit of compensation. It is these and the imperfect correction of some of the larger factors that are responsible for dispersion. It may be of interest to run through the list, doing little more than making mention of them and stating their nature.

Stripped to its essentials, the problem appears simple. Schematically a gun is no more than a tube, closed at one end, in which a projectile is placed and expelled by an explosive. All that need be done is to point the tube in the direction desired, elevate it sufficiently, and give the projectile velocity enough to reach its destination. That big guns do hit at distances of thirty miles and more shows that these operations are susceptible of a high degree of control. But let’s start at the bottom and work up, looking at what the practical gunner has to contend with.

First, there is the gun itself. It is a tube of strong steel into which the projectile tightly fits. It is rifled.* In the rear of the projectile is a combustion chamber of somewhat larger bore than the gun proper. A gas-tight breechblock completes the assembly. The powder is exploded, and the shell starts forward. It has near its stern a rotating band of bronze which is of larger diameter than that of the bore, but not larger than that of the bore plus the grooves. The lands—the ridges between the grooves—bite into this and force the shell into rotation. By the time it emerges at the muzzle, it is spinning rapidly.

Now steel, while hard, is subject to wear. Each passing shell increases the bore slightly, so that after a number of shots the bore is appreciably enlarged. The result is that each subsequent shell fits more loosely, and part of the propelling gases blow by it on the way out. The result is a loss of muzzle velocity and a consequent steadily lowering of the range attainable. This wear may or may not proceed evenly, but it can only be dealt with in terms of averages. The rule of thumb is that a gun’s life is two hundred full-charge rounds—twelve-inch to sixteen-inch guns.

________________________

* Note: There are two kinds of rifling; uniform pitch and increasing pitch. Theoretically and actually the latter is better, but the cost of cutting spiral grooves of slowly increasing curvature is so great and the advantages so little that the straight twist is the one commonly used.

________________________

THE accuracy falls off rapidly after one hundred. There are also some exasperating byproducts. The copper wipes off and is smeared on the inner surfaces of the tube, decreasing its bore, sometimes to a dangerous extent. This copper has to be removed periodically by lapping. What is worse, steel, especially when hot, may be said to be actually viscous—that is, it will flow slightly under pressure. The result is that the shell in its forward motion drags the surface of the lining with it, with the resultant formation of “constriction rings” which also have to be bored out now and then. Big guns have been known to blow their muzzles off on account of these.

The fire-control officer deals with the above erosion error by keeping an accurate record of every firing of every gun, and deducting so many foot-seconds of velocity from each successive shot. It follows that where the guns of a given battery have been separately employed, they have to be given individual elevations in order to hit the identical target.

A variable very difficult to deal with is the “hot-gun correction.” In sustained firing, a gun heats up rapidly and to a considerable intensity. Smokeless powder burns faster when its temperature is higher, and when it does, it imparts higher velocities. If a gun—having just been fired—is loaded with a charge of powder, and then the next salvo delayed for a minute or so, how much faster is the powder going to be? Nobody knows exactly, for the time is too short for uniform heating. It is also too short—and irregular—to warrant making a correction, usually, though such a stepping up of the velocity may amount to a hundred or more foot-seconds at the muzzle.

Guns also warp and droop, but nothing is done about it, on the theory that they straighten themselves out under the internal stresses of firing. That is, if the sun is shining on the left side of a gun, that side will expand more than the other, and the gun will tend to curl away from the light. Since its muzzle is unsupported, it hangs down to a measurable extent. Whether this whipping about actually affects accuracy is hard to say. Probably not much, but it adds to the uncorrected residuum that makes dispersion.

DESPITE careful manufacturing control, no two batches of smokeless gunpowder have quite the same characteristics. Each is thoroughly mixed and samples proved, and the batch is given an index number. Each index has its own velocity-temperature curve. Naturally, every effort is made to keep magazine temperatures constant and the gunner notes those and the particular index he happens to be using at the time. Every degree more or less means a few feet more or less in muzzle velocity. What velocity will powder S. P. D. 857 impart if it has been in a magazine whose temperature has been 70° all night, but two hours ago rose to 80°, then taken out and kept in the handling room for five minutes—at 93°—and afterward put into a gun—whose paint is already blistering—and held for forty seconds? I have an idea that there is an uncertainty there of a dozen or so foot-seconds m. v. That sort of thing helps scatter shots.

We shoot the gun. The projectile emerges from the muzzle with the velocity it is supposed to have, plus or minus some number of feet of i. v. that is virtually unmeasurable. Does it leave squarely, or canted slightly, so that the frantic gases behind it rush past one side and add to the cant? If the latter, it begins its flight with a series of oscillations that may or may not damp out as it proceeds. Some shells have been observed to land stern first, having tumbled end over end all the way. What causes “noisy flight,” when a single shell going through the air sounds like an express train plowing through miles of barriers of plate glass? Maybe its rotating band sheared off, or came loose and is hanging out like a revolving rudder.

The shell is in the atmosphere now. Atmosphere has resistance, and modifies its trajectory. How much? Well, how humid is the air, how dense? Is there wind, and what is its strength and components? Those items have been noted both at the surface and by a plane ten thousand feet overhead, and corrections calculated. But this shell is going to travel fifty miles, and before it gets there it will attain an elevation of perhaps eighty thousand feet. Four or five seconds after it is launched it will be in the stratosphere where the surface breeze of thirty knots from the SW. and barometric pressure of 30.58 mean nothing. Up there it is forty below and a hundred-mile NW. gale blowing, even if it is thin air. Nobody knows what happens to the shell in that region.

Care is used in manufacturing shells. They are forged, heat-treated and machined, and tested frequently every step of the way. But does the center of gravity of each individual shell coincide to the millimeter with the point marked on the blueprint? Couldn’t it be a hair forward or behind, or a trifle off the axis of rotation? If so, what? Won’t it wobble or tumble or gyrate, and thereby set up more resistance? If so, it won’t go as far. Does the gyroscopic action of its spin keep its nose up even at the end of the trajectory, when it is falling at a sharp angle? If not, how does the shell point? This is an important consideration when firing against armor. It is also a factor in computing air resistance. Small wonder range tables and ranging formulas are empirical. Nobody would think of more than roughly computing what a hundred-mile gun would do. They would build it, fire it, and see what happens. The tabulated results would be its range table. From it they could deduce various coefficients that would be helpful in computing a hundred-and- twenty-mile range table, but without the previous experience they could only guess.

Deflection is the lateral error. It is a composite of wind effect, the earth’s rotational effect, sighting errors, and drift. Drift is the measure of the crawling to the right of the plane of the trajectory of a clockwise-spinning projectile. At most ranges its extent is fairly accurately given in the range tables. At extreme ranges it appears to be erratic. The earth effect is a complex function of latitude, time of flight and direction of fire, being opposite in sign in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. It is allowed for approximately by the ballistic correction.

HOW is our gun mounted? With its twin-girder mounting, recoil and counter-recoil systems, training and elevating gear, it will run into hundreds of tons weight. Armored housing will add enormously. We are speaking here of the best installations, such as are found in fortresses and on battleships, not the necessarily makeshift mounts of field artillery. The whole must admit of being whirled about as fast as possible, the gun elevated and depressed, and yet be at all times under delicate control.

The entire assembly is usually to be found in turrets sitting atop barbettes, or circular steel walls, and resting on a set of massive roller bearings. Steel, as has been said before, is not entirely rigid. In time, especially under spots, freuently used, such as the securing position, or along commonly used arcs, humps and depressions will be formed which will be reflected in the actual elevation of the gun. There are various means to compensate for these, but none are good forever, since the wearing continues to go on. The handiest is perhaps the sight-compensating cam, which is a wacky-looking contraption cut in opposite sign to the known irregularities of the roller path. What it does is to jiggle the sight up and down as the gun is brought around, so that the gun is depressed or elevated by the same angular amount caused by the bumps under it. Assuming the measurements were made accurately and the cam faithfully cut, it is a good correction until the hills and valleys begin to take on a new profile. There is a good chance that a few residual errors creep in here.

Next we might take up the actual training and elevating of the gun in connection with its sights, azimuth and elevation scales, et cetera. Turrets are revolved by rack and pinion, and guns are elevated by similar gears, usually motor driven. In time gears show wear and develop lost motion. If a turret, which has seen considerable use, is being trained from right to left, and either overruns the target or the target moves contrarily, its trainer must reverse his direction of train. At once errors are introduced. The turret will move appreciably before all the trains of gears concerned, including those affecting the sights, have taken up their slack. A few, or many, seconds of arc will be dropped. At fifty miles a few minutes of arc spell quite a few feet. The same thing goes on in the elevating gear, with far more serious results, as the degree of elevation is more sensitive than that of azimuth.

To this, point everything said is about an individual gun. Such guns are usually used in batteries. There must be horizontal spacing between guns, and there is often vertical spacing. That is, the guns are to the right and the left of each other, and perhaps higher or lower. That introduces parallax, which varies not only with the range, but with the bearing of the target. Parallax is a simple enough correction, mathematically speaking, but the trouble is—except for such exceptional situations as stationary batteries firing at a stationary Dover—that either the target or the battery or both are in motion. The bearing between them is changing momentarily. Moreover, the range is never known with exactitude.

For example, imagine a battleship firing at another, close to, having come up on it suddenly in the mist. The range is, say, only five thousand yards. The forward turrets are several hundred feet away from the after turrets, and somewhat higher. The traces of their several trajectories on the water will map out a long, lean “X.” A salvo that hits may be nicely bunched, but if it is much over or short, it will appear to be spread out, giving a false impression as to the deflection used. The illusion is added to by the movement of the ship after firing until the shots land and are visible. A prudent spotter will not attempt to correct both range and deflection in a single spot if the salvo is a bad miss in range.

If each individual gun in the battery suffers from its defects and uncertainties, the battery as a whole is subject to the sum of these, as well as a new group of its own. The data which are the basis of the fire control come in mostly through optical instruments, each of which has its own inherent errors. Operators have individual peculiarities due to synapse time and such. Graduated scales and verniers are only so accurate.* The transmission is electrical and subject to other lags and disturbances. Gyro repeaters have a way of wandering, and must be closely watched. The data flow in through range finders and target-bearing transmitters and are piped to trackers and range keepers where it are converted to rates and predictions. These in turn are piped to visuals and to director-scopes. Many small errors must creep in, but each too tiny to do anything about.

There comes a point where the exacting physicist throws up his. hands and withdraws, and the practical gunner has to take over. To the scientist dependable measurements on a battleship fighting in a seaway are as impossible as compounding a prescription atop a bucking bronco. She is rolling and pitching and yawing, and with it all she hogs and sags, for a ship is not so rigid as not to writhe and bend when supported, unequally by erratic wave crests. To complicate things she zigzags and makes frequent changes of speed, as dues her target. Smoke and spray and irregular atmospheric refraction do nothing to ease the task of the men at the eyepieces of the optical instruments. Gun platforms are weaving and swaying in irregular rhythms. Yet they must carry on. They look, they compute, they load and fire. And, miraculously, they hit!

Physics, chemistry and mathematics took them just so far. To go the whole way, they had to fall back on common sense and the snap judgment of well-trained and experienced men. No battleship ever made a long-range hit comparable to the feats of the pioneer squirrel shooters.

No one can say that long-range gunnery is not a science. Without science it would be impossible. But until science has disposed of dispersion, it must also be an art.

________________________

*This may seem an extreme statement. Let the skeptic read the Coast and Geodetic Survey’s instruction to field men as to adjustments and corrections to be made to observations made with theodolites. And those instruments are not cheap engineers’ transits.

________________________

“If You’re Smart—”

(‘By Colin Keith’)

Astounding, April 1942

“IF YOU’RE so damn smart, why ain’t you rich?”

That hoary wisecrack must have been all of three centuries old when Wolf Carmichael pulled it on Dr. Claud Kellog. The Wolf of Saturn loved it and used it often. That day he lay back in his swivel chair, chuckling offensively somewhere in the fatty depths of his triple chin, as he threw it. But his roving, piggish eyes showed no mirth. They were hard and scheming, the ruthless eyes that had made him master of all commerce and industry throughout the Saturnian system. To his money-grubbing mentality, this question was the ultimate in triumphant repartee.

“A scholar named Archimedes was asked that question once,” replied Dr. Kellog, flushing angrily, “and to prove he could be rich if he wished, he knocked off his important mathematical researches long enough to buy up all the wine presses in the country. It was winter, then, but when the next fall came the vintners had to have their presses back or else lose the grape crop. Archimedes made a tidy profit.”

“Never heard of him,” snorted Carmichael. “Musta been some little fellow on Venus. If he was a real big shot in the booze racket, he’d be on the board of Interplanetary Distillers. He aint.”

Carmichael threw away the stump of the cigar he was smoking and lit another.

“To get back to this gadget of yours,” he resumed indifferently. “Maybe it’s as good as you say, maybe not. But George Carmichael was always the boy to give a struggling inventor a chance—”

Kellog winced. Yeah. Wolf would back anything that promised sure profit and no loss—provided he was given control.

“—so here’s what I’m willing to do. Your proposition to have me lend you enough to get your machines built is out—the machines might flop, then where’d I be? What we’ll do is this—incorporate your whatchamacallit—”

“Antichron.”

“Antichron, huh? We’ll incorporate it first, then put it into production. I get fifty-five percent of the stock for promotion fee, we sell twenty to the public for working capital, and all the rest is yours. See?”

Kellog saw. It was a typical Carmichael proposition. Kellog would furnish the work and brains, the sucker public the money. If the venture failed, Carmichael couldn’t be hurt; if it succeeded, he would rake in the lion’s share. Kellog reached for his hat and jammed it on his head.

“That’s pure burglary, Mr. Carmichael,” he said fairly evenly, mustering all his powers of self-restraint. “I’ll see you in hell first.”

“Tut, tut, my boy,” said Carmichael with a repetition of his nasty chuckle, “how fiery you are! That’s bad. You should never mix emotion with business. Take me. Am I offended? No. I’ll be here tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, ready to do business with you. You’ll come back—they always do.”

Kellog only glared at him, then strode from the room, boiling at the arrogance of the grasping capitalist. And as he angrily made his way down the main street of Saturnport, everything he saw added to his rage—and to his gloom, too. For every enterprise of any magnitude on Titan, or on any of the other Saturnian satellites, was owned or controlled by Carmichael. The list was an imposing one. Carmichael was the president of the Titanic Trust Co., the only bank. He owned the Saturnport Supply Co. and Titan Shipyards outright. He had a fat finger in Rhean Ranches, Miman Mines, Titan Radio Power, the Dione angrauk packeries, and the ruby pits on Enceladus. What burned up Kellog the most was Trans-Saturnian Lighter Service.

That line of small intersatellite freighters had been established and built by his father, years before. It supplied a much-needed service, for the great interplanetary ships stopped only at Saturnport. The little lighters carried the slaughtered angrauks from Rhea to the packeries of Dione, and thence to the big port. They hauled ores from the mines of Mimas to the smelters on Titan, and did other chores of the kind. Carmichael saw it was a profitable line and tried to buy into it. The elder Kellog resisted. Carmichael shut down his mines for a year, cutting off important revenue. A quarantine on angrauks was mysteriously promulgated; taxes on intersatellite shipping increased. The bank called Kellog’s notes. His lighter service was forced into bankruptcy.

“And Carmichael bought it for a song,” muttered Doc, bitterly, “had the new taxes repealed and the quarantine rescinded. It broke dad’s heart.”

That was the way the Wolf of Saturn did things. Honeyed words, cash advances, at first, anything for a foothold. Then squeeze, squeeze until the enterprise was his. Now that he had the colonies of the Saturnian system well under his thumb, he was branching out into larger fields. He had ambitions of going back to the Earth one day and taking his place among the mighty in Wall Street, where the Systemic Stock Exchange was. He wanted to lock horns with such magnates as Aalman, head of Venus Exploitation, Inc., and chairman of the board of the Tellurian Master Bank. He wanted a bigger say-so in the operation of the Interplanetary Transport Co. and a directorship on Etherways, the planets’ communication system. Therefore, when he was not in his office at the Carmichael Building, he could be found in the brokerage office of Neville & Beardsley, trading fiercely in securities, trying to match wits with Aalman and the other tycoons.

Doc Kellog knew all that and knew how hopeless his fight was. Yet that illiterate taunt still rang in his ears. He was smart, but he wasn’t rich. There must be something wrong with his approach to things. Other men with half his brains got along and prospered; why couldn’t he? That thought was uppermost in his mind when he reached his laboratory.

“What luck, Doc?” asked cheery Billy Wade, his chief assistant.

“The usual,” growled Kellog. “He wants to hog the show, otherwise no dice. I told him to go to hell.”

“Swell,” grinned Billy Wade, admiringly, “but where do we get off? Fold up and get jobs somewhere?”

“Maybe.” Doc Kellog’s anger had cooled somewhat and dejection had succeeded it. But he was not quite ready to surrender. The memory of that sneering challenge still rankled. Kellog sat down and stared at the floor in deep thought.

THINGS looked black. The single model of his antichron worked perfectly. It had proved that his theory was correct. He could warp space-time, given power enough, and bring all the planets together, just as centuries before the introduction of telegraph and radio brought all the countries of the Earth together. But his money was gone, his bills mounting, and he was forced to deal with interlocking monopolies for all his supplies, power and credit. Carmichael knew that as well as he did and was waiting for the plum to drop in his lap. Kellog knew that Carmichael would fight him tooth and nail unless he cut him in. And that Kellog was resolved not to do.

He had never thought of his invention in terms of money before, but rather in terms of the immense boon it would be to all humanity, taking it for granted that his own compensation would be just and adequate. But now he was racking his brain for a way to turn it into money—lots of money—and quickly. He had exhausted all his own resources in building the one model he had, and the power bills were eating him up. If they were not paid by the end of the week, Titan Power would attach his laboratory and its contents, which was the same as saying Carmichael would.

Antichron—what were its chief virtues? What could he cash in on now? For he must not only save what he had, but construct other machines to introduce to the public. He sat up and looked at his model thoughtfully. It was a clumsy-looking device, a monster machine taking up the whole side of the room. Its main feature was a six-foot-square crystal window, framed by shiny steel panels studded with knobs, dials, glowing tubes, buttons and cranks. The crystal resembled an ordinary televise scanner of the type used by Etherways, except that it was thicker and double-faced. Whatever form of energy, whether heat, electricity or light, impinged on one face was immediately transmitted to the other. Where it differed from the standard models was that its two faces could be split apart when subjected to antichronic stresses, and separated by any number of millions of miles. But the same antichronic stresses also created a warp in space-time so that the interval seemed not to exist. It was a window that with the proper manipulations of its complex controls could be made to look upon any spot in the universe and receive energy impulse from it then.

That “then” was its great virtue. Long before space travel was an actuality, mathematicians had known that there was no such thing as simultaneity. Time, like space, was relative. They had had their first practical demonstration of it when they tried to use two-way television between the Earth and Moon. Radio waves took a little over a second to travel each way. A man would speak, then wait for two seconds before his answer began coming back to him. Later, that time lag became almost intolerable. From Callisto it was three quarters of an hour—you activated the machine, waited forty or so minutes for it to light up, and then you waited an equal period for the inquiring face looking at you to register understanding and begin his reply. Obviously, where an hour and a half intervened between question and answer, sprightly conversation was impossible. The antichron would cure that. With the space between warped out of existence, instantaneous response could be had.

“Why ain’t I rich, huh?” repeated Kellog, sourly, and began thinking on how men got rich. Not by inventing useful things or hard work, necessarily. He thought of Carmichael’s career, and Aalman’s, and those of others. They had one common denominator—they were men who bought and sold, bought cheap and sold dear. And where did they find their sellers and buyers? Why, on the Stock Exchange, of course. Kellog’s eyes lit up and he almost trembled with excitement as the full implications of that chance thought dawned upon him. He jumped up and called Wade to him.

“How much money have we?” he asked excitedly.

Billy Wade pulled out a wallet and squinted at its contents.

“There’s about a thousand here of my own and the three thousand you gave me to keep for the power bill.”

“Willing to gamble?”

Wade just grinned and handed over the money.

“Quick, now. Grab the current ‘Ephemerides’ and find the Earth’s present position and rate of relative movement. Then look up the exact latitude and longitude of the lower tip of Manhattan Island—that’s in New York.”

Kellog ran over to the antichron and began setting the dials as Wade called out the figures. Then he threw a master switch and the machine hummed into activity. In a moment the screen was glowing, then transparent. It was as if Kellog were looking out of a window high over a green park surrounded on three sides by water. He adjusted the mechanism and caused the projected screen to lower itself to a great sprawling building that lay below. He forced it through a wall, and there he was—looking in on the trading floor of the nerve center of the Solar System, the Systemic Stock Exchange!

Thousands of men were milling about beneath, gesticulating and shouting. At the other end of the vast hall an immense annunciator board stood, on which names and numbers appeared. A flickering screen beside it was displaying news flashes.

“A notebook! Hurry!” exclaimed Doc Kellog. He jotted down quotations as he watched. Callistan Radioactives was high and climbing—a sale at 423-1/2, then another at 428, then at 430-1/4. A flash came over the screen saying Martian Gems had passed its dividend. Martian Gems promptly dropped twelve points. Etherways and I. P. T. were strong. The market generally was strong.

“Let her run,” Doc shouted, shoving the book into his pocket. “Damn the power bill. If I’m right, it won’t matter; if I’m wrong, it won’t matter either. I’ll be seeing you.”

Then he was out and gone, hurrying to Neville & Beardsley.

MR. NEVILLE took the money, but he looked at the young scientist dubiously.

“Small margin accounts are dangerous,” he warned. “We accept them, but we don’t solicit them. Those wolves out there will take the shirt off your back so quick it will make your head swim.”

“Fair enough,” answered Kellog cheerfully. “As a matter of fact, I am in the market for a few wolfskins myself. Here, buy me some Callistan Radioactives and sell some Martian Gems; all you can for the money.”

Neville grunted disapprovingly, but took the money. Nobody but an ignorant fool would sell Martian short, and Callistan was no bargain above 400. Kellog went on into the board room and sat down behind the group of local capitalists who were scanning the board in a listless, bored way. Kellog had a hard time restraining his elation, for the figures on the board they were looking at were ancient history to him. His information was over an hour ahead of it. After a while he got up and phoned Wade from a booth.

“Read me the latest dope,” he said. Then listened as Wade gave him the quotations. Martian had stopped falling; there was a flurry in Oberon Metals. He hung up and stopped at Neville’s desk on the way back to his chair.

“Cover that Martian sale, then buy me some Oberon.”

Neville blinked. Oberon had been inactive for days. But he noticed Kellog had doubled his money on the Martian transaction, and had a nice paper profit on his Callistan stock.

“Beginner’s luck,” he cautioned, as he filed the order.

When Kellog got the day’s close from Wade, he closed out his line. It was not a bad day’s work. His cash balance on Neville’s books was over fourteen thousand. He left it there; tomorrow was another day.

The next day he ran the fourteen thousand up to forty-five. The day after that he finished up with a couple of hundred. He drew enough of it to pay the power bill, then walked on to the booking office of Titan General Shops.

“Last week,” said Kellog to the clerk, “I left an order here for some parts for a special televise machine—”

“It’s N. G.,” said the insolent clerk. “Credit disapproved.”

“I’ve got the money now,” added Kellog. But the clerk shook his head and walked away. Over his shoulder he flung:

“You gotta get Wolf’s O. K. He stopped it—personally.”

“Oh,” said Kellog. So he wouldn’t be permitted to develop his invention on Titan even if he had money! Carmichael held the reins—the supply house, the shops, the power plant, transportation. Kellog walked slowly back to his laboratory, thinking on the way what his next step would be.

The following day he had better luck. When he looked from his antichron onto the clamoring mob of Wall Street brokers he knew at once that something unusual was afoot. Pandemonium reigned, and often awed faces would turn to stare up at the quotation board with its ever-changing symbols of good and bad news. Kellog read the last bulletin hurriedly.

“Following the suicide early this morning of Charles Bean, general manager of Venus Exploitation, rumors persist that the company’s billion-dollar investment in mimil plantations has had to be written off as a total loss. The stock opened at 240, but fell off over a hundred points in the first few minutes of trading. The last sale was at 97—”

Kellog waited, tense. He watched Exploitation sink rapidly to 60, 50, then 40. A gong rang and the screen lighted up again.

“A correction to the last bulletin,” it said. “President Aalman has made a statement. He says that Bean’s suicide was due entirely to domestic difficulties. The mimil venture has been tremendously successful. So much so that the board of directors announce a one hundred percent stock dividend and an equal amount in cash. He further states that he will buy personally all the stock that is offered under 500.”

At once the tumult on the floor increased to a howling typhoon of sound as the brokers suddenly reversed their position and began hunting sellers as fervidly as they had previously been hunting buyers. The bidding was wild, leaping by bounds to ever-higher figures. Exploitation rose from its depths like a soaring skyrocket—up into the hundreds, past the five-hundred mark of Aalman’s bid, on to a thousand and upward.

Another gong. Another announcement.

“It is apparent that an effort is being made to corner Venus Exploitation. The Exchange authorities have ordered, dealings in the stock suspended. Speculators short of stock may settle at the rate of two thousand dollars per share.”

“Wow!” yelled Doc Kellog, and a moment later he was burning up the road to Neville & Beardsley.

THE BOARD room was crowded when he got there. All the big shots of Titan were present, not excepting Carmichael. There was sheer panic in the faces of some as they stared at the earlier bulletins, for Exploitation represented a heavy investment for most of them. Even Wolf’s usually expressionless face showed concern as he saw his spare millions dwindle to half and less. He was so intent on following the damning figures that he did not notice the entrance of Kellog, or that he sat down beside him in the chair vacated by a haggard man who had just rushed despairingly from the room.

“It’s more of Aalman’s skulduggery, the pirate!” growled Carmichael to the fellow sitting on the other side. “He’s looted the company, that’s what. We’re stuck. I’m getting out while I can.”

He wrote an order and beckoned to Neville.

“The hell of it is,” Wolf added, to his crafty-looking partner, “that while this order is getting to New York, the stock will drop forty points more. Damn that time lag!”

Neville approached, bowed respectfully, and took the order. He looked at it, then remarked:

“This is for more than you own. Are you taking a short position?”

“Right! The stuff’s wallpaper. When Aalman milks ’em, they stay milked. Tomorrow I can cover at three. Get rid of this—quick.”

Neville bowed again and turned away. Kellog plucked him by the sleeve. He had sneaked a look at the order. The amount he had on balance would margin it.

“I’ll take that—at the current price,” he whispered. “You needn’t send it to New York.”

“You’re crazy,” said Neville, but he noted the order.

Kellog sat back and waited, gloating. In a few minutes the news would come through that the market had reversed itself. He had made a brilliant double play. If Carmichael’s selling order had gone through in the regular way, when it hit New York his stock would have brought him hundreds of dollars a share; conversely, if his own buying order had, he would have had to pay the corresponding price. As it was, he got Carmichael’s stock at 43, close to the bottom, and for it Wolf received but 43.

“Whipsawed!” Carmichael yelled when Aalman’s bullish statement was broadcast. “The dirty rattlesnake. He started the rumors to depress the stock; now he’s buying it in at a bargain. Neville! Cancel my selling orders.”

Neville was late in coming. In the meantime the later flash showed on the screen—the one telling of suspension of trading and the penalties levied on short-sellers.

“Sorry, sir,” said Neville, as placatingly as possible, “but it is already executed. You said quick, so I disposed of it locally.”

Carmichael snorted and looked about him.

“What fool—” he began, but Neville simply said, “The gentleman on your right.”

Carmichael glared at Kellog. Kellog glared right back.

“You!” howled Wolf, his porcine eyes incredulous.

“Me,” grinned Kellog. “You owe me five thousand shares of Exploitation, I believe. I want it.”

Carmichael sputtered and gazed questioningly at Neville. It must be a joke—this silly upstart of a scientist holding the whip hand over him. Why, only a few days before he had come whining to his office for the loan of a miserable few thousand. Now he was demanding ten million. Preposterous!

“If you haven’t the cash, I’ll settle for a deed to Titan Shops, lock, stock and barrel,” offered Kellog smoothly, but he could not conceal the triumph in his eyes. “I am rather anxious to get a little job done there, but up to now they haven’t been very … uh … co-operative.”

Carmichael grunted like a prodded boar, frowning. He was in a tight spot; he knew it. He had to settle and he did not have the cash. Moreover, it hurt him to give up a property. But there seemed to be no choice, and he was aware that the other speculators in the room were watching him closely. He couldn’t welsh—not openly.

“Done!” he exploded.

THAT NIGHT Kellog took over the Titan General Shops. He and Wade worked late, laying out the program for the following day. Tomorrow they would start construction on the first batch of commercial antichrons. But just at midnight a messenger came, bearing a communication from the power company. It read:

You are hereby notified that due to inadequate generating facilities, Titan Radio Power finds itself compelled to curtail its service. Since our contract to furnish your plant with power was made with Mr. George Carmichael personally and not with the Titan General Shops, the change of ownership voids it. All service will be discontinued within four hours.

“The dirty rat!” blazed Kellog.

“Wolf is the word,” corrected Billy Wade with a sigh. “You can’t beat him.”

“We’ll see,” said Kellog grimly. “Let’s have a look at the electrical hook-up here. Maybe we can use antichron in another way.”

Neither he nor Wade attempted to sleep that night. They were much too busy. The machine was retuned and put in search for the New York home of the general manager of Tellurian Power. They found him, aroused him and made their proposition. Yes, the Earth plants had unlimited power. Yes, if Kellog could project a receiving plate into one of Tellurian’s generating plants, its men would connect leads to it. The general manager doubted whether power could be transmitted from planet to planet—it had never been done before—but if they would pay for it, he would send it.

Kellog closed the deal. Then he and Wade went about altering the antichron for gathering pure current, not light. They marked the back face to show where the Earthly electrodes should be placed. On the front they attached their own connections. Those led to the shops. Then they set the space-time warper to working. In a moment the back face was gone. No doubt, at that instant, startled engineers were puzzling over the bizarre outlet that had suddenly appeared in their plant.

“Say,” said Billy Wade. “He said unlimited power, didn’t he? And the rate there is a tenth what it is here. Why not peddle some juice on the side?”

“Right!” yelped Kellog, and he reached for a pad.

Power for sale, cheap

Owing to surplus productive capacity provided by new owners, Titan General Shops is in a position to furnish any quantity of power at the rate of ten cents a mega-watt hour.

“Get that to the Saturnport Herald to be run in the next edition,” he told Wade.

“This’ll wash up Titan Power, if my guess is any good,” remarked Wade cheerfully. “They’ve been getting away with murder.”

“Yep,” said Kellog dreamily. Carmichael would have to write off another asset, for local power could not possibly compete with Tellurian now that there was a way to transmit it. And the power monopoly was the biggest plum in Wolf’s basket.

In an hour the first surges of energy were coming in from Earth, flowing from the antichron into the local radio distributing emission set. The electricians at the plant simply tuned out on Titan Power and in on the laboratory set. The shift was made.

CARMICHAEl did not take the fresh assault upon him lying down. He promptly went about getting an injunction against the unfranchised sale of power, but it was several days before he could get it issued. In the meantime, with the full facilities of the shop at his disposal, Kellog had completed a batch of sight-sound antichrons for use in communication. He hired and instructed operators. Then the machines were focused on the various important planets, satellites and asteroids. At one stroke Saturnport became the central clearing house of the Solar System for news. If necessary, a Pluto signal could be relayed through Titan to Earth in only the time necessary to make the connections. Etherways was at once ruined. All its equipment was junk, except for nearby use.

“That ought to hurt,” observed Billy Wade, jubilantly. “They say Wolf had a pile of Etherways Preferred.”

“Probably,” said Kellog. But he was smarting under the injunction. The corrupt local court had forbidden the outside sale of power. Not only that, the Saturnport Council—all creatures of Carmichael—issued an edict prohibiting the importation of power generated outside of Titan. This time the shops did have to close down until Kellog could improvise some old-fashioned magnetic generators of the field-armature type. Not content with inflicting those inconveniences on Kellog, Carmichael might be expected next to bring suit for personal damages ensuing from the collapse of Etherways. Etherways represented the investment of important money, and the men who lost were not the type who would console themselves that their company had been replaced by something incomparably better.

“I’ve got to go all the way,” concluded Kellog, soberly. “If I don’t get him, he’ll get me.”

Again he put his and Wade’s head together and designed a new type of antichron. It was three-dimensional—a cubical box, to be exact, with four sides and a bottom, but open at the top. It worked on the same principle as the flat screen, but with slight variations. It operated as a shuttle, not continuously.

Kellog put one of his television machines in focus with the mine on Mimas. Miman Mines was only partly owned by Carmichael; he controlled the industries on the lesser satellites by virtue of his strangle-hold on transportation. So the manager was willing to talk to Kellog.

“What do you pay that buccaneer to haul ore to Titan?” asked Kellog.

“Twenty cents a ton.”

“I’ll haul it for two.”

“You can’t,” objected the manager. “The Trans-Saturnian Lighter Service’s charter says—”

“I know what it says,” snapped back Kellog. “My father drew it up. It confers a perpetual monopoly on all intersatellite ship-borne commerce. Now listen. Clear a place about twenty feet square and arrange to dump ore in it from twenty feet or more above. Mark it off with safety lines and don’t ever let a man step across the lines. Then watch my smoke.”

He cut the connection long enough to send similar instructions to the receiving station by the smelter. Then he watched through the antichron while the preparations were being made at both ends of the line. When they were ready he turned the machine over to Wade.

Wade sat down and got to work. His job was very much like that of the operator of a grab bucket. He kept his eyes on the visual screen, his hands on the controls of the cubical one.

Current!—the empty cube appears on Mimas—an avalanche of ore fills it—shift current—it disappears from Mimas, appears at the smelter on Titan—the unloading cradle on which it materializes tips and dumps the ore—when it is upright again, shift current. Mimas, fill; Titan, dump. Mimas, fill; Titan, dump. That was all there was to it. Hundreds of tons a minute, delivered in Titan the day it is mined.

“That shoots Interplanetary Transportation and Trans-Saturnian all to hell, I should say,” drawled the editor of the Herald, who had been invited to watch the demonstration. He was conducting a campaign to have Carmichael’s injunction revoked. Now that the people knew cheap power was available, they were angry about it. “Yes,” continued the editor, “they’re sunk. I’m going to stroll down to the bank and draw out my balance before the run starts.”

“What do you mean?” asked Kellog.

“Plenty. The bank is really a sort of holding company for Wolf. Now that his companies are all shot, it’ll crash. You may not know it yet, but Carmichael is ruined. He will be a very sick wolf in an hour or so.”

WHO IS the Wolf of Saturn? People on Titan will point out a blowzy, sodden old derelict who hangs out in a dive near the skyport and tell you that “Carmy,” as they call him now, used to wear that title. He was a big shot once, they say.

But if you should ask any of the frequenters of the big building on lower Manhattan who the Wolf of Saturn is, they will tell you instantly. It is a crackpot on Titan by the name of Kellog. He was the fellow who ruthlessly and without warning wrecked two of the biggest and most profitable enterprises in the universe—Etherways, Inc., and Interplanetary Transport—and many of the smartest financiers of the System with it. What a guy! Not only that, but he wrecked the System’s entire price structure with his cheap services. “Benefactor?” they will squall. “He’s a wild man—a wolf!”

The Old Ones Hear

Unknown, June 1942

Yesterday our forces occupied the island of Aea.

Axis War Communique.

THE PROMONTORY loomed ahead, vague and shadowy. Behind it, dark against the starry western sky, lay the remainder of the small island. The commander who sat in the stern sheets leaned forward and spoke quietly to the men on the after-most thwart.

“Land ahead,” he said. “Pass the word forward to make no noise.”

Under the dim starlight the men sent the whispered message on its way. The scantily dressed lieutenant and midshipman who sat on either side of the boat officer shivered and pulled their blankets tighter about their shoulders. Their blouses had been ripped apart and blown off by the terrific blasts of the bombs that had sunk their ship.

The boat went on. All was silent except for the faint ripple under its bows and the swish of quickwater along the sides. Even the wounded were quiet, though the faithful mast groaned once or twice as the hastily rigged sail slightly shifted its position.

It was a strangely assorted boat load, those men huddled together on the thwarts and in the spaces between. Thirty-odd of them were various ratings of his majesty’s ship Peeblesshire; nine were Anzacs, all wounded; four were what was left of the crew of a cargo ship sunk four days before. The oddest was a queer old Greek, clad in his quaint skirted uniform. He had been the Anzacs’ mountain guide and had fought with them from Mount Olympus, down through the desperate stand at Thermopylae, across the flanks of lofty Parnassus, past Delphi to the water’s edge. A little touched, they thought him, for when they had rigged the mast he produced a leather bag as if from nowhere and hung it on the mast by the nock of the sail. “For good luck,” he had grunted, by way of explanation. Ever since, he had sat doggedly on the third thwart and never taken his eyes off it.

The commander peered anxiously ahead. It had been a hard trip, even though luck had been with them, just as the old Greek had foretold. They had driven more than sixty miles through the winding waterways of the Gulf of Corinth and that of Patras, and always with a miraculously favorable breeze. Not once had a roving Stuka found them, nor the prowling coastal motorboats. But they had to leave their ship in a hurry and there was room only for men, not for spare stores of provisions and water. The wounded were very miserable, and some were near death. The commander wondered what the island was, and whether it held capture for them, or haven.

There was not a glimmer of a light to be seen. Nor could his keen, night-piercing eye detect that there had ever been a light on the end of the jagged cape which he passed close aboard. He gave the tiller a touch and headed up into the cove that lay inside. Suddenly he started. For dead ahead, square across his bows, he could distinctly see the masts and upper-works of a cruiser. It was an enemy cruiser. He knew that at a glance from its fat, single stack with a deal of rake to it. He had laid his sights on a sister of it, not two weeks before, and watched her disappear in a gush of flame, smoke and splinters.

“Douse the sail,” he ordered huskily, and put his tiller up.

The sail came down with a rush and with remarkably little noise, but the nails of the commander’s disengaged hand were biting hard into the palm. He expected momentarily to hear a staccato challenge or be fixed in the prying beam of a searchlight. There were such things as picket boats, too, which might be lurking anywhere. But there was no challenge. The ship was as dead, apparently, as a hulk left to rot in some back channel.

The boat had way enough upon it to neatly round the stern of the alien warship. He eased it off a little and studied his unexpected adversary more closely. There was not a man on deck, so far as he could see, and, astonishingly enough—for it lacked only an hour or so to the dawn—her colors flapped at both bow and stern, for all the world like noontime on a gala day.

“Out oars,” he whispered, and waited patiently while the extra men slid off the thwarts and lay down out of the way in the soggy bilges. Of a sudden a daring idea had come to him. Perhaps the bulk of that cruiser’s complement were on shore, and the remainder, certain of their safety, had been celebrating an easy victory over an undefended island. It might be that they were all drunk. He had heard that discipline on some of those ships was not of the best.

“Give way together,” he ordered, and pointed the nose of his overladen craft toward the unguarded gangway.

For several minutes there was only the rhythmic stroke of the oars and the sound of water dripping from their uplifted blades as they swept forward for the next impulse. The commander steered her deftly, and after a few more low-spoken orders, felt the bow graze the platform of the accommodation ladder. Ready hands grasped at stanchions, and the rowers boated their oars without a sound. The moment they were alongside, the commander leaped like a panther to the landing stage and swiftly mounted the ladder.

There was no one at the top of it. A quick turn around the deck revealed nobody. He listened at a hatchway and at a ventilator. The ship was silent as the tomb, except for the faint throbbing of machinery far below decks. He went back to the gangway and beckoned his men to come up.

They swarmed up the ladder, all of them that could walk, gripping what pistols and rifles they had contrived to keep with them in their hurried evacuation. There was a low conference and the group split up into several smaller squads. They parted, some going forward, some aft, the remainder below. Fifteen minutes later they reassembled, as had been agreed upon.

“A rum thing, sir,” said a petty officer. “Not a living soul in the ruddy ship. But there’s lights below and some auxiliaries running. They left a few burners going, so there’s some steam in the boilers, though their water’s low.”

“How long will it take to get steam enough up to move her?” asked the commander sharply.

“Two hours, sir. Maybe less.”

“Get at it. Mr. Torkingham!”

The lieutenant acknowledged.

“Have the wounded men brought up out of the boat and put ’em to bed. When you have found yourself some warm clothes, go up on the bridge and get acquainted with all the gadgets there. When there is steam enough to work the anchor engine, heave short. We’re getting under way in two hours.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“I notice there’s not a boat on the ship. Every set of skids and davits and all the booms are empty. I’m curious about that. While you are making ready, I am going to take a pull ashore and find out what has happened. I’ll be back shortly.”

THE commander waited stolidly at the top of the gangway while the injured men were being carried up. He was concealing his impatience as best he could, for he felt he could not leave this unknown island without some explanation of his bizarre landfall. Never in all the histories of the navies of the world had there been a precedent for it. To leave a modern warship all standing with not even an anchor watch or a water tender on board! It was incredible. Not even during the darkest, undisciplined days of the Menshevik revolution at Kronstadt had it a counterpart.

He thought back over the escape and the marvels of the previous day and night. When he had left the shattered Peeblesshire she was an inferno of raging flames. There had been no opportunity to salvage a chart. Yet the boat had found her way through the winding channels to this place he did not recognize, and always with a good, stiff following breeze that veered and hauled as if to order. He wondered quizzically about the queer old Greek and his “windbag” and his talk of good luck. Well, they had fair winds. And as for good luck! Just now he stood on the quarter-deck of a ship quite as good in some respects as the one he had blown from beneath him. And he had taken it without a vestige of a struggle. He was short-handed, of course, but he could manage.

It occurred to him to ask the men about the Greek. He wanted to question him as to what island this was, how it lay as regards Cephalonia, and how far from Cape Matapan. But none of the men knew where he had gone. No one had seen him since they made the gangway. He had not come on board. He was not now in the boat. Maybe, feeling himself safe among his own people and his duty done, he had swum ashore.

The commander shrugged. It did not matter greatly. He had never been able to get anything out of the old fellow, anyway, but scarcely intelligible mumbles. He picked out a few men for a boat’s crew, then slid down the ladder and into the boat. By that time it was full light, though still gray, and he could see that the pull would not be a long one.

He stood up in the boat on the way in, examining the shore. Ahead of him was a quay of antique masonry, hung over with green moss; Alongside it lay the abandoned cruiser’s boats—power boats, pulling boats, even life rafts ripped from the bases of the masts—but in none of them was a boatkeeper. The desertion of his prize’s crew had been absolute and complete.

To the right and left stretched sandy beaches, studded with the protruding ribs of vessels left to go to wrack many years before. They marred the beach as the straggly, yellow teeth in the gums of a hag mar her smile, transforming it into something sinister and ominous. As he drew closer he saw one peculiar relic and he knew it from its unique shape. It was covered with green patina of many centuries, but it could have been but one thing—the bronze ram of an ancient trireme.

He mounted the worn treads of the ancient steps of the quay with misgivings that grew with every foot of progress he made. This unknown islet—and he thought he knew them all, for he had cruised this coast many times since his midshipman days—appeared to be the graveyard of ships. Was it subject to a strange and swift pestilence? If so, why had it not been mentioned in the “Sailing Directions”? A sense of disquiet, unease, descended upon him, far more disturbing than had been the roar of the plunging Stukas or the screaming of their deadly bombs. He wondered whether he should go on or turn tail and fly. But curiosity drove him forward.

“Wait here,” he said tersely to the boat crew, and strode off up the gentle slope, doing his best to quell the thrills of expectancy, amounting almost to fear, of imminent disaster.

There was no town to be seen, nor houses of any sort. Nor were there tilled fields. The place was more of a park, lovely in its grassy stretches, and spotted with clumps of trees and hedges. He found a path which ran between two winding rows of bushes and followed it for some distance. At a turn farther on he caught a glimpse through the copses of an establishment of some sort on the top of the hill.

“Ah,” he thought, “the villa of a rich playboy, perhaps a retired munitions millionaire, or an exiled grand duke.”

He stopped to survey it, though he could see little except the red tiles of its roof and the olive grove surrounding it. But his viewing of the place was cut short in an unexpected way. Before he knew what was happening, a horde of snapping wolves descended upon him. There were hundreds in the pack and they swarmed about him, leaping and snarling.

He drew his pistol, but hesitated to use it. He did not want to advertise his presence on the islet. He pivoted on one leg and kept himself in an incessant swinging, kicking at the fangs of those animals that threatened him most. Once or twice he succeeded in landing a vicious kick squarely in the jaws of the plunging brutes, and after that the others kept at a more respectful distance. He noticed then that they were not truly wolves, but near-wolves—a noisy pack of blustering jackals, willing and eager to pull down a lamb, but not overbold when it came to man. Yet they surrounded him, and their ceaseless yapping and snapping annoyed him. He could defend himself, but hardly progress.

AGAIN a miracle happened. In his turning and twisting he had put his back to the villa on the hill, but now he heard a vibrant, contralto voice berating the creatures in tones of withering scorn. He did not recognize the odd dialect she used, but he did know the biting end of a black-snake whip when he saw one. The end of a long lash flashed by him, nicked a patch of yellow hair from the rump of one of the howling doglike creatures, which promptly slunk away, yelping and whining miserably. He heard the whistle and snap of the lash again and the distressed cries of another victim. He wheeled to see who his rescuer might be.

His senses reeled, and he could only gasp. The wielder of the lash was a woman; he had already surmised that from the voice. But nothing in his previous life had prepared him for what he saw. He was gazing at a woman, but such a woman as exists ordinarily only in visions and dreams. She was the incarnation of ideal voluptuous beauty, but at the same moment she was also the incarnation of cold, vindictive fury as she laid mercilessly about her with her whip. Her hair, under the touch of the first ray of the morning sun, was as a mass of flame, and there was an uncanny quality to her flashing green eyes which had the curious property of seeming to repel yet attract irresistibly at the same moment. There was hardly a detail of her exquisite figure he did not take in at that first startled glance, for she wore only a filmy veil of a garment that revealed more than it hid.

She seemed suddenly to become aware of him, as if she had not observed him before. Raging scorn melted from her face and she took on an expression of utter tenderness and longing that was more than he could bear. In that instant she cast her whip away from her and stretched out her arms to him in passionate welcome. He staggered forward blindly, all thought of ship or duty vanishing from his mind. He only knew that unless he reached her and embraced her, the drum-like roll of his throbbing pulses would drive him mad.

Yet he had taken not more than one or two strides before her manner altered again, and he froze where he stood under the compulsion of her calm, imperious gaze. She was cold and haughty now, and queenlike, and regarded him with a cool, appraising look that was almost as terrifying as had been her fury and her ardor.

“You are a Briton, our ally?” she asked, a trifle hesitantly. “The man Hermes brought?”

“Hermes?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t know, of course. He assumes many forms.” She relaxed her forbidding attitude and permitted herself a little smile. “But you were not to come upon my island. You were brought to take that hideous, smoking iron galley away—”

“But its crew—what became of them?”

She stooped and picked up her whip, flicking it tentatively as she did. The wolfish animals which had been cowering and whimpering about her feet slunk a little farther away.

“Have no fear of them. They will not return to interfere with you. Later, when I have disciplined them properly, I shall take them to the other side of the island and turn them into the pasture with my swine. Those are they who came to me from the sky.” She seemed to be laughing inwardly, as if at a pleasant reminiscence.

The softening of her mood brought back his earlier yearning with all its imperativeness. He sprang forward to snatch her into his arms, but she recoiled and looked at him with something like horror.

“No, no!” she cried. “Not you! You are our friend, our ally. It cannot be. Take what the gods have provided and go. It is a privilege few have had who have stepped upon this island and dealt with me, but it is so ordered. Go!”

The kaleidoscope of emotions to which he had been subjected in this last strange hour showed a new phase. A chilling sense of awe began to grow upon him as the monstrous truth of what he had seen and heard began to dawn upon him. He looked at her now with something akin to fear, yet there was a degree of grudging respect in it, too. That these long dormant ones should stir themselves now to help, if only a little, was something to be honored. He felt impelled to bow.

“I will go,” he said quietly, “at once. But tell me—I must know, for my sanity’s sake—who are you?”

Her eyes widened, as if she were deeply hurt.

“I? In the old days I had a name, but that does not matter now. I am everywhere, anywhere, and my Work is always the same—I turn men into beasts.”

She shuddered, and her look changed. It was a horrible mixture of passion and power—and agony.

“Go!” she said.

Fighters Never Quit

Unknown, August 1942

CHIEF BOS’N Jockens was exceedingly annoyed. And as the moments slipped into the seconds, and the seconds into minutes, he became more annoyed. Chagrin was what he felt chiefly, polluted with dismay and disgust. For he was rapidly becoming convinced that he was up to his neck in a situation that simply couldn’t happen—not to anybody, and least of all him! The bitter pill that the good chief bos’n had to swallow was this: he had become a ghost! And Jockens was one of those feet-on-the-ground people who absolutely did not believe in ghosts. His orations on the subject were well remembered in every W. O. mess in the fleet. Hence his extreme mortification.

It all came about when that big Jap battleship came barging out of the mist and let go with all she had at the already hard-pressed El Paso. Five sixteen shells at close range can do plenty to a light cruiser, even if the light cruiser had not already been amply riddled. The El Paso’s reaction was the simple and obvious one—she shuddered as the lethal lumps of steel tore through her sides, then blew up with a terrific bang. What five tons of hurtling H. E. might not have completed, her own magazines did. Within five seconds all that was left of the gallant cruiser and her crew was a towering mushroom of smoke and a drizzle of splinters and fragments.

Jockens remembered that explosion vaguely, but the force of it had been too vast and so instantly applied as to give no time for sensation. He only knew that he had been hurled upward and that, without his feeling it in the least, his limbs had been ripped off him to disappear in a blast of flame. After that came a brief period when all that remained of him was a sort of disembodied consciousness hovering over a patch of flotsam in the water. Then things began to change subtly.

A couple of feet below him floated the splintered loom of an oar. Sloshing about in the water a yard away was a gruesome object which the late chief bos’n studied with a deep and morbid interest. It was horrible, that thing, being only a torn and blackened portion of a human torso to which the neck and head were still attached. But, although it floated face down, he knew from a vivid scar on the back of the neck and a conspicuous mole on the shoulder that what he was viewing was a bit of his own mortal remains. It was that discovery that had convinced him he was dead—certainly a discovery in no way shocking, since few on the El Paso had expected any other outcome since their harried flight from the battle of the Banda Sea began. Jockens, in common with many of his kind, was necessarily a fatalist. What was to be would be, and he accepted the present fact with a mental shrug. But dying properly while doing his job was one thing, and the disconcerting tranformation that followed it was another. Jockens most emphatically did not yearn to be a ghost and forevermore haunt the empty ocean over the spot where his ship had sunk.

Yet that was unmistakably what was about to happen. He was becoming aware of taking visible, if not tangible, shape. He now perceived that he was sitting astride that broken oar, clad in immaculate whites and wearing the ribbons of all his many badges and medals. It was a tenuous and nebulous body he was acquiring, to be sure, but yet a faithful copy of his old one. What disturbed him most was the fact that though he steadily became more and more solid to the eye, he could still see the pale shaft of the oar beneath him even though he had to stare down through his phantom abdomen to see the whole of it. And worse, the oar rose and fell as easily as if it bore no burden. On the heels of that discovery he observed a parallel phenomenon. As he himself grew in apparent solidity, the things he knew to be real grew fainter. The water which bathed his legs took on a misty, iridescent quality and he saw that it did not wet him at all. The fragment of real body paled to a blob of cloudy stuff and eventually disappeared as does a blown-out candle flame, and with it the slender apparition of the oar. In ghostland, it was beginning to be evident, things of the spirit wore the aspect of reality, while the concrete became illusions.

There was almost instant verification of that observation from all about. On every hand his shipmates were popping into visibility, swimming along in the faint and ethereal ocean. They seemed to have a common goal. He turned his eyes that way and saw what it was. The El Paso, too, had been reconstituted in the spirit, and was even then steaming slowly along, picking up its men. Jockens rolled over on his side and began swimming for it with steady, even strokes. He was a little disappointed to find that the art of levitation—which the silly ghost believers had always attributed to ghosts—was not his, but perhaps that would come later. Yet swimming in the fictitious ocean served quite well, and he shortly found himself grasping at the lower rung of a Jacob’s ladder someone had lowered over the side.

Harkey, the radio gunner, gave him a hand as he crawled over the bead molding and onto the quarter deck.

“Hi, spook,” he greeted, grinning from ear to ear. “How do you like it?”

“Don’t rub it in,” growled Jockens, It was only last night in that former world that Jockens had completely demolished every argument his supersitious messmate had advanced in favor of a sort of in-between state of after life. But under the present circumstances nothing occurred to him to say.

Jockens looked about the decks in astonishment. Things were as trim and shipshape as the day they had been commissioned, except that the spud locker, empty for a week, now bulged with spuds, and more spud crates were stacked on the deck beside it. So all the spuds they had eaten had come back as well! And in a moment similar discoveries were being made elsewhere in the ship. The gunner said his magazines were stuffed to capacity with powder and shell. The engineer reported full bunkers and replenished lubricating oil drums.

“Muster the crew,” ordered the skipper, who had been taking the situation in without comment.

There were only five absentees—sea-lawyers all and chronic gripers, men whose heart had never been in the war.

“The first rule of ghosthood, it appears,” remarked the commander ironically, “is that consciously or subconsciously, you who want very badly to carry on, do. I commend all present for that.”

Just then there was a surprising diversion. A youthful seaman—the ship’s inveterate cut-up had stolen out of ranks and was clambering up the ladder to the maintop. He stopped a yard short of the pinnacle and shouted to those below.

“Hey, we’re immortal now. Watch what we can get away with!”

With that he let go both hands and dived straight for the deck below. There was the gasp conditioned by long habit. Then the hurtling body struck the steel carapace of a gun housing with a sickening thud, only to slide off onto the deck where it lay motionless, a broken thing. It was all too clear that the neck and arms were broken and that the body was a corpse. Men ran up, but at once were forced to stand back in an awed semi-circle. For a flicker of green flame played over the crumpled figure a moment; there was a quick blaze and then the body was no more. There was simply nothing there!

“Hm-m-m,” murmured the surgeon, who had been the first to arrive. “Add Rule 2. A ghost can be killed, if ghostly means are employed. You men had better watch your step.”

A hundred pairs of eyes were turned speculatively on the chaplain, but that officer did not see fit to speak. Perhaps the gnawing thought in his own mind as well as that of his silent questioners was, “After the first stage of ghosthood, what? And how many stages? And—”

The general alarm was ringing, and the men broke from their spell and dashed for their battle stations. Very, very faint, but plainly recognizable, the Jap battle-wagon and two of its attendant cruisers were approaching. No doubt they wanted to cruise through the floating wreckage in expectation of picking up a prisoner or so, or other information. On the El Paso ranges were being taken and ammunition brought up. Battle orders rang out—the big fellow was to be the target.

“Commence firing!”

The cruiser heeled to the recoil of her broadside, and the control officers watched eagerly for the behavior of their salvo. What they saw was disappointing. The shells must have gone squarely through the oncoming ship, for mountains of white water sprang up just beyond. But it was as if the projectiles had merely passed through a wall of mist. The battleship did not notice. It came steadily on, and the phantoms on board the El Paso saw that its turrets had been secured. As far as it was concerned, the battle was over. There was only empty sea on which bits of debris floated.

The battleship came on, slowed, then passed squarely through the flimsy illusion that stood for the sunken cruiser. It was evident that neither could feel the other or have any material effect, and it was equally evident that while the ghosts could see the living Japs faintly, the Japs could not see them at all.

Chief Bos’n Jockens watched the show from his station on the fo’c’s’le, and the more he saw the greater did his disgust with his new status grow. It was all very well to be reconstituted in what seemed to be flesh and on a convincing phantom of a ship that was well-fueled, well-armed and well-provisioned. But where did it get them?

There had been a discouraging silence from the bridge ever since that one futile salvo had fallen. The commander had checked fire and waited. Now he was watching the passing victors. Suddenly he sighted something, and a fresh clamor of orders rang out.

“On the machine guns, there! Look aft on that second Jap cruiser—see those solid-looking figures. Let ’em have it!”

The second cruiser was one they had exchanged a few shots with and scored a hit or so before the arrival of the heavy stuff. On the after-deck a broadside gun had been dismounted, but not destroyed, as its filmy haziness attested. Alongside it, however, were ranged a score of very material-appearing Japs. The conclusion was inevitable—they must be the ghosts of the dead gun crew.

The machine guns chattered, the smoky tracers leading fairly to their mark. The Japs, still bewildered at the new state of existence which they did not understand, began disappearing by twos and threes in little puffs of dazzling green fire. A wild cheer went up from the decks of the erstwhile El Paso. Not a single watcher but comprehended the significance of what was being revealed. They could not kill living Japs, but they could send dead ones another leg on the road to Hell!

The same thought had swept the bridge, for as the last of the enemy gun crew flickered out into the unknown second stage of the hereafter, the rudder had been put hard over and the engine telegraphs moved to “Flank Speed.” The sailors of the El Paso knew without waiting for the orders that would follow what to do. They broke out torpedoes and loaded their tubes. Fresh charges rang home to their seats in the guns. Twenty miles away—over the horizon—there must be the shades of the four Jap destroyers they had just sunk when the battleship came up and made them run for it.

It was less than an hour before they picked them up. The destroyers were heading dismally for their homeland, indicating that the Japanese psychology did not comprehend the possibilities or responsibilities of ghosthood.

“Ha!” snorted Jockens, seeing their state of unreadiness. “Now it’s our turn to do a sneak attack.”

The attack went home. The second version of the morning’s battle was short, and to the attackers doubly sweet. They watched with satisfaction as the phantom foes blew up and sank in quick succession. Five miles farther on they came upon a windfall—a bomber they must have shot down and not known about. It still rested on the waves and its crew was trying to make a take-off. A few bursts of ack-ack disposed of it, leaving once more an empty ocean.

“Now what?” asked the navigator.

“Back to the Macassar Straits and Bali,” snapped the captain. “I am not exactly sure what we gain by this, but it’s fun—and it smells like progress.”

The ship straightened out on a southerly course, but not for long. Late in the day came the lookout’s cry, “Sail-ho!” Three pairs of binoculars and a long glass came to bear on the object. It was plainly visible, though miles away; and therefore clearly another phantom. But it was no gray-hulled warship of any modern navy. Beautiful in the low slanting rays of the setting sun, she flaunted many square yards of snowy canvas, complete with studding sails, top royals and skysails. The commander rang down for more blowers on. He wanted to reach the distant clipper before the coming night blotted her out.

The cruiser made it, just at the edge of dusk, and as her screws churned the water astern to rid her of her way, it could also be seen that the clipper flew the Stars and Stripes, though of a design strange to modern eyes. It bore only half the number of stars displayed on the ensign at the El Paso’s gaff. The friendly phantom ship was obviously a Yankee of the old China trade, fully a century old, and the smart seamanship with which she backed her sails and got the quarter-boat away was further evidence of it. A few seconds later the boat was being rowed with swift, sure strokes toward the cruiser. A tall, gaunt man whose face was framed by whiskers, but whose chin and upper lip were clean shaven, sat in the stern sheets, tending the tiller.

“Boat ahoy!” hailed the cruiser.

“The Bethesda, one hundred and two years and five months out of Boston,” came the response, clear but husky, from a voice that must have had far more than that number of years of experience in bellowing orders through a speaking trumpet into the teeth of a gale. “Ezra Sitwell, master. We want gunpowder, rum and vittles, if we can git ’em.”

“Come alongside,” replied the voice from the cruiser, and a moment later was giving orders for rigging cargo lights and dropping a ladder over the side. It was Jockens who attended personally to the last item and who was present when the grizzled skipper of a century ago climbed aboard.

Captain Sitwell solemnly saluted; then shook hands all around.

“Howdy, cappen,” he said. “Glad to fall in with you. Newcomer to these parts, eh? We heard tell there was a new war on, and that soon we’d be having plenty of company. It gits mighty dull hereabouts some years, what with nothing but typhoons to depend on for recruits and provisions. ’Twas a hundred years ago come September that we wuz caught the same way—typhoon took our sticks out and threw us up on the shore of Shikoku. Fight we tried to, but we were half drowned, and the murdering heathen beachcombers came at us with their wicked knives. I’ve haunted their coast ever since, picking up fishing boats mostly. But black powder and honest round shot are hard to come by these days, and lately we’ve had to depend on our cutlasses and sheath knives.”

“We’ll try to help,” said the commander of the El Paso. Yet he made no move to order up the supplies asked for, partly because he had little of either and partly because he wanted to know more of this ghostly existence that had fallen to their lot. “Tell me,” he asked, “don’t ghosts ever die?”

“Nope. Only by violence, and that from ghosts or ghostly stuff.” Captain Sitwell chuckled. “The sea can’t hurt us, because it ain’t real. Neither are the rocks and shoals—”

“But old age, disease—”

Sitwell shook his head. “Ghosts stay the same age. ’Bout disease—four-five years ago I fell in with a foundered yacht—had a modern doctor on board—had plenty of whiskey on board—we talked all night. He told me about microbes and why they don’t bother us. Ornery critters they were, he said, too little and ornery to have souls. So they don’t bother us.”

The commander noted the inquiring look that followed the simple explanation, and knew he must do something about the request at hand.

“What’s your armament?”

“Carronades, muskets and pistols.”

The commander shook his head. He had a few hundred pounds of black powder for his saluting battery, but no other ammunition suitable for ancient ordnance. Nor did he have any rum on board. He offered a dozen modern rifles and four one-pounder boat guns with ammunition to match, but the skipper of the sailing ship looked dubious.

“Nope,” he said, “I’ve tried those newfangled things before. We’d best stick to cutlasses and knives, I reckon.”

“I believe we can fix him up, commander,” volunteered Jockens.

A moment later men were scouring the storerooms of the ship. Presently they were coming up, bringing the results of their search. All the black powder there was, two kegs of rivets and two more of assorted nuts—which would be useful for grape shot for Sitwell’s carronades. There was some other miscellaneous scrap iron, a few sheets of gasket lead, and eight bags of sugar. The Bethesda, being manned by the old-fashioned, self-sufficient breed of sailors, could undoubtedly cast her own bullets and make her own rum. To that store of necessities, the cruiser added onions, spuds and eggs, things not easily come by among the salvage of the Eastern Seas.

“Many thanks, cappen,” said Sitwell, beaming. “I’ll do all right now. By the way, a couple of weeks ago I spoke to a brother clipper down by Tai Wan. He says a lot of you fellows have shown up in the South China Sea and around Java. Says they made a big killing and have cleaned out everything. Last he saw of them, they were going on to India for fresh pickings there. Says they even hunted down a cruiser that’s been plaguing us old fellows for twenty years or more—a German ship called the Emden. I sure hated that fellow, but all I could ever do was run from him. He wasn’t so fast lately, ’cause he was a coal-burner and coal’s getting almost as scarce as black powder.”

Captain Sitwell said no more. Nor did the frowning captain of the El Paso. That last news was not too encouraging. If the sunken Asiatic Fleet had gotten on the job as quickly as they seemed to have, there was nothing left for his own ship to do. The months ahead looked dreary.

“In your experience, Captain Sitwell,” he asked, “is it possible to communicate with the living?”

The Bethesda’s skipper walked to the lee rail and relieved his cheek of an immense load of tobacco juice.

“Wa-al,” he drawled, “yes. And no. There’s mediums, but mighty few of ’em are any good. You can only send a word or two and they mostly get those mixed up. What they send back don’t hardly ever make sense. Anyhow, living folks can’t help us much.”

“Maybe not,” admitted the commander, but he cast a thoughtful eye toward Jockens, just the same. The last of the supplies had been sent down into the Bethesda’s boat and Jockens was back, watchful and drinking in what was said.

Captain Sitwell repeated his thanks and made his formal farewells, adding as an afterthought:

“They do tell me this newfangled thing you call radio will do it. The messages you send, the living folks call static; but if you could find an operator that was a medium, too, you might get somewhere.”

Jockens cocked his head to one side and delivered himself of a solemn wink. Then he disappeared below. Presently he emerged with Harkey, and the pair hurried away to the radio shack. In the meantime the boat had shoved off, the El Paso was picking up speed along her resumed course, and the faint running lights of the clipper were dropping fast astern. High up between the masts, an antennae set began crackling out static. Half an hour later Jockens stole softly out of the room and mounted to the bridge.

“Sir,” he said, addressing his skipper, “Harkey and me’s found the answer. He was always telling me about a niece of his he claims is psychic. I always thought that was so much hogwash, but lately I’ve been thinking maybe it’s not. Anyway, she’s in Communications at Honolulu. Harkey just got a message through and she managed to dope it out. We told her we’re sunk, and where and how, and what a hole we’re in for something to do next. She came back in plain English and said, ‘I hear you perfectly and understand. The admiral’s here and is interested. He wants to know what can we do for you?’”

The commander sighed. What, indeed, could the living do for the dead?

“Nice try, Jockens,” said the skipper, “but I can’t think of what to say to him. Can you?”

“Sure, sir.” Nobody could see Jockens’ wide grin in the dark, but it was there, as big and persistent as a Cheshire cat’s. He was about to do some plagiarizing, but under certain conditions and with certain famous phrases, plagiarism becomes a virtue.

“Well?” snapped the commander, his nerves on edge.

“Why, sir, we could turn around and go scouting for live ones. They can’t see us, but we can see them. Then we could send word to the admiral where they are, how many, and how they’re heading—”

“Swell,” answered the skipper, suddenly cheered. The El Paso sunk could still partly do her job in the world they had left, though her own guns and tubes would be useless. “Swell,” he repeated, “but it doesn’t answer the admiral’s question. He wants to know what he can do for us.”

Jockens chuckled.

“Send us more Japs!”

The Goddess’ Legacy

Unkown, October 1942

WHEN man bites dog, they say, that’s news. It’s news, too, when a waiter tips his customer. I saw that done not long ago—quite surreptitiously to be sure—in the dining room of the Hotel Angleterre in Athens. To say that I was amazed would be to put it mildly, for I knew both men and the thing was impossible. It was not that Herr Scheer took the gold—for gold it was, strangely enough—but that Mike Pappadopoulos should have offered it. I would have thought that Mike would let himself be torn apart by wild horses before trafficking with the enemy. But there it was; I couldn’t blink it. The fierce old patriot must have broken under the train of sustained tyranny. No other explanation of the bribe was tenable. For bribe I took it to be, and wondered what extremity had driven the old Greek to the necessity of giving it.

The part played by Herr Scheer in the furtive transaction was no mystery at all. He was simply a murderous, blood-sucking leech of the type all too frequent in Europe these days. I had known him for some time as the traveling representative of an optical house in Berlin and as such had often had business dealings with Him. But with the coming of the troops of the occupation forces he promptly dropped the mask and showed himself in his true colors. Anton Scheer had been the advance man of the dreaded Gestapo. It was from his long prepared secret lists that hundreds of victims for arrest and spoilation were selected, and from those same lists that the few Hellenic Quislings were appointed to puppet administrative posts. Now that he was the resident chief of Hitler’s secret operatives, his cruelty and rapacity knew no bounds. It was also common knowledge that his zeal for his beloved Fuehrer and Fatherland was not untinged by keen self-interest. In other words, Herr Scheer could be “had.” Enough money, discreetly conveyed, would unlock the tightest prison gates.

No, the sight of Scheer’s curt nod and the clutching hand below the table top was no surprise to me. It was in character. My astonishment arose from the fact that old Mike had paid.

THE first time I ever saw Mike was on the Acropolis one bright moonlight night about four years ago—shortly after my company had made me their Near Eastern manager with headquarters at Athens. As any American would have done, I visited the ancient rock at the first opportunity and promptly fell under the spell of the magnificent ruins atop it. Thereafter I became a frequent visitor, and soon learned that the best condition under which to view the old temples was when the moon was up. On such nights the shattered colonnades of the Parthenon stand forth in all their noble grandeur, the chips and scars mercifully softened by the silvery light. And it was on such a night that Mike first spoke to me.

I was prowling about in the ruined temple of Athena when I came upon him. He was standing rigid, as if in a trance, gazing fixedly upward into nothingness. It was in the naos, or inner sanctum, and where he stood was before the spot where tradition had it Phidias’ superb ivory and gold figure of the goddess once sat enthroned. By the mild light of the moon I could see that there were several baskets on the pavement at his feet and they seemed to be filled with olives. There was a tray, too, in which were folded cloths of what I took to be embroideries. I paused and looked at him a moment, but in his rapt state he did not notice me. I was but a few feet from him, but not wishing to disturb him, I passed on.

After a brief stroll through the remainder of the interior, I went outside and climbed onto a segment of a fallen column. There I sat for a while, drinking in the splendor of the night and marveling at the perfection of the lines of everything about me. I must have fallen into a deep reverie which lasted longer than I was aware, for when I was aroused again the entire aspect of the ruins had changed, owing to the shifting shadows of the moonlight. I started, then observed that the man I had seen inside the temple was standing beside me and his baskets sitting on the ground nearby.

“You are not one of us,” he was saying, and I suddenly knew that it was his voice that had awakened me from my vivid waking dream, “yet you seem, to see—the power, the sublimity and the glory of it all—”

“Who could fail to?” I asked, looking back at the noble facade, broken though it was.

The simplicity and purity of its lines should have moved the crudest savage. And yet I was startled to realize that I had not been thinking in terms of aesthetic values at all, but dreaming of quite other things. I had been dreaming of a long past time when the rocky summit was dazzlingly crowned with snowy white new marble structures and thronged with gayly dressed people and armored warriors. It is true that in the picture I saw the delicately carved and unbroken cornices and the rich friezes and pediments studded-with perfect statuary set off by backgrounds of magnificent reds, deep blues and gold. But it was on the people that I was intent. I saw wealthy aristocrats march by with slaves bearing heaped-up platters in their train. Those fruits of the field I knew were being brought as offerings to their divine patroness and protector. Eager young men in bright armor were there, too, swarming into the temple for blessings and inspiration to victory in the campaign they were about to begin. Then, so real was my illusion, I was about to follow them into the sacred edifice to see what ritual the priests of Athena followed, when the words of the enigmatic Greek broke the train of my reverie.

“She, Pallas,” he said, with his strange dark eyes fastened upon me as if he read my every thought, “is the kindest and wisest of them all. Under her strong aegis none can hurt us. It was against that shield that Xerxes and his Persian hordes beat in vain. She is, and always will be, the guardian of this city and all the cities of Hellas.”

“Is?” I said, cynically. The thought that just flitted through my mind that, whatever Athena’s power may have been once, it had long since gone. Since the repulse of the Persians, Greece had been overrun many times—first by the Romans, then the plundering Goths, and finally the Turks. It was centuries before the last of them was dislodged.

“Yes, is,” he said fiercely. “She sleeps, it is true, but her power is not gone. You yourself shall see it. I promise you.”

“You are a pagan?” I asked. An hour earlier I would have thought that too fantastic a question to put to anyone in these modern times, but it did not ruffle him.

“I am,” he said simply.

I looked away from him and at the ruined temple standing in the mellow light of the moon. A queer duck, I thought, perhaps a little cracked. Then I turned to ask him another question. Were the baskets he had with him filled with his own offerings? His delusion might be that complete. But when I looked at where he had been he was not there. Nor were his baskets. He was gone. And the hour being late. I slid from the stone and made my way to the grand stairway that led to the sleeping city below.

THE next day a cable sent me to Smyrna and thence to Stamboul. I was gone for weeks and when I came back to Athens a full moon again rode in the sky. That night I revisited the Parthenon and again saw the mysterious man with his baskets of olives and fruits, but he ignored my presence. Again he took them into the naos and, as before, brought them out again. That, I argued, was an unusual procedure if the contents of the baskets were meant as offerings.

A day or so later I had a partial answer to that. While strolling through a crowded market street, I came upon a booth presided over by the man of the Parthenon. On its counters various products of the country were offered for sale. The embroidery and lace displayed were exceptionally fine and I bought several pieces of it. He took the money without a word or flicker of recognition.

For a few minutes I stood hesitant, then walked away with a peculiar crawly feeling of the skin. There was something distinctly uncanny about the market stall and the queer man who tended it. Though the choicest fruits and the finest needle-work of the street were for sale there, few persons stopped to look and fewer still to buy. I watched them pass with expressionless faces and unseeing eyes, as if they did not see the place. Two priests came striding down the street, and, when they approached the stall, they plucked up the edges of their habits and walked softly by with averted faces as if fearful of contamination.

The peddler himself—the man of the Parthenon—had something about him that was singularly disturbing to the peace of mind. I cannot say what that was unless it was the impression he gave of utter and infinite age. Or, perhaps, agelessness. Absurd as the statement may seem, I would not venture to guess his age within a century or so—or a millennium or so for that matter. That was odd, too, for in most of the details of his appearance he might have been a well-knit, hale man of about forty. It was the profound wisdom that one saw in his weary eyes that bespoke great age. He had the look of one who had lived for eons and had long ago tired of it.

Bewildered, I left, carrying my parcel hugged to me tightly. Down the street a little way I encountered a local man I knew and asked him about the proprietor of the market stall, but he shook his head. He did not know whom I meant. Nor did any others of the several I asked. It was not until I got to the hotel and asked the ancient concierge about him that I found one who knew the man I meant. Even he looked uneasily about before he spoke, as if it was a matter to be whispered, not to be blurted out.

“You are favored,” he said, cryptically. “Not many know Mike of the Parthenon. I do not, except that he is not what he seems to be. My grandfather knew him well, but then my grandfather was a silent man. I do not know what Mike’s real name is or what is his story.”

That was all I could draw from him. Needless to say, that little whetted my curiosity to the utmost and there were few moonlit nights after that I failed to spend part of the night on the Acropolis. The enigmatic Mike was always to be found there, and gradually he became used to my presence and occasionally spoke. I was careful not to say or think anything that might offend him, and little by little his discourse grew less guarded and more fluent. In the end there were times when words would burst forth from him in a fervid torrent.

The talk was never about himself, but of Pallas Athena and her lovely temple, or of her subjects and their vicissitudes. Night after night I listened eagerly, inexplicably aware that I was hearing things only partially guessed by archaeologists, and that often wrongly. He told me of the earlier temple on whose site the present Parthenon had been constructed; of the labors of the multitudes of slaves in quarries and in transportation to make the later building possible. From him I learned which of the groups had been designed by Phidias and which by others, and of the perfect craftsmanship of the sculptors Agoracritus and Alcomenes. He described also the long missing sculptures pilfered or destroyed by vandals.

Whenever he touched on that theme his tone took on a vindictive bitterness of the most intense sort. The man he hated most heartily was the Venetian, Morosini, who had bombarded the Parthenon with artillery in the year 1687. That act alone would have incurred Mike’s undying hatred, but Morosini compounded it with what he viewed as sacrilege. In an attempt to rob the building of one of its pediment statuary groups, he had his soldiers rig for the job of lowering the marbles. But in their clumsiness they dropped the goddess’ own chariot and shattered it to bits on the pavement below. Mike hinted darkly that for that impiety Morosini had died horribly some time after.

He also spoke rancorously of the many misuses made of the building by temporary conquerors of Greece. One of the emperors, Constantine, had converted the pagan shrine into a church dedicated to St. Sophia. Later the Turks transformed it into a mosque. As a self-appointed apostle of Athena, Mike detested Christian and Moslem alike, but it was the Turkish embellishment to the Parthenon that angered him most. They had defiled its classic lines by erecting a tawdry minaret—an offense even more grave than their later use of the building as a powder magazine. He assured me that its architect, even as Morosini was to do later, had faced frightful retribution for the deed. I was left to infer that Athena, or her agent, had performed the executions.

All that and more he told me. I took it for the most part in silence. I marveled at the extent of his historical knowledge, but wondered that he should be so wholesouledly devoted to a goddess long enough dead to have degenerated to the status of a mere myth, useful only to poets and their ilk. At times I came near to twitting him on Athena’s many failures to protect her people—her vaunted protection seemed to me to have failed lamentably during the last twenty centuries. But I forbore. I had come to like the man and did not want to wound him. It was not until the blackening war clouds over the Balkans actually broke and the neo-Roman legions began hammering at the north-west border that I ventured to murmur something about the time having come for Athena to rouse herself and show her power.

“Bah!” he snorted. “For those yelping jackals? They attack only because they think the prey is sick. They do not matter. It is those who will come later that are terrible. It is with those she will deal.”

THE situation worsened fast and soon my business troubles prevented me from spending much time outside my office. Romania was betrayed, and Bulgaria. The Nazis were overrunning Serbia. “Then came the day when the panzer armies rolled into Greece. They were not stopped on the slopes of Mike’s revered Olympus, nor yet at the historic pass of Thermopylae. I thought of the queer pagan and wondered whether even the thunderbolts of mighty Zeus himself could prevail, even if faith could reanimate him. No, Zeus, Athena—all the old gods—they might still live in a few solitary hearts, but they had lost their potency.

Athens fell. The Nazi juggernaut crushed it, then rolled on to other conquests. They left behind them regiments of black-shirted scavengers to pick the bones. They left, too, their own minions—such as Herr Scheer and his storm troopers—to do their own peculiarly discreditable work. All of that was bad, but the crowning insult came when the invaders flaunted their arrogant banner of the hooked cross above Mike’s beloved Parthenon. The Acropolis was closed to all civilians; moreover, the hungry harpies denuded the market of all its edibles and any other thing of value. Mike’s shop was looted and wrecked. His temple was defiled. Mike’s occupation was gone.

It must have been a month after that before I saw him again. That was when he appeared as a waiter in the dining room at the hotel, and I learned that he went by the name of Pappadopoulos. He chose to ignore me, but I watched him with interest, since I knew the implacable hatred in his heart toward all the fat and greedy exploiters he served. Yet he went about his work with all the unctuous suavity of his adopted calling, and the serene composure of his bearing was almost incredible. I could not help but admire the man. There are few who can bear themselves well when their most precious bubble bursts—when their dearest vision proves to be but a barren mirage. That, I knew, had happened to Mike. Greece groaned miserably under the heel of a new oppressor, yet the long-ago gods lay inert in their graves. It was pathetic.

And then that monstrous thing happened. One night he leaned over Herr Scheer’s shoulder and whispered something. Then the rest, as I have related—Scheer’s cold acknowledgment, the passage of the bribe. It was astounding.

I pretended not to see. I turned away and busied myself with the food on my plate. But before I did I saw that at least one other than me had also seen. That one was a Major Ciccotto, an officer of the local garrison whose power far exceeded the nominal rank he held. It was Ciccotto who had earned eternal infamy by his ruthless seizures of food. His raiding of the people’s granaries had turned Greece into a land of gaunt, fear-ridden, starving people. At that moment it is hard to say which I loathed most—the cruel Scheer, or the rapacious Italian. But he had seen. The greedy glitter in his piggish eyes was the confirmation of that. I arose and left the room, over-whelmed with disgust.

A few hours after that I encountered Mike in an upper corridor of the hotel. He was carrying a tray of empty dishes and I stopped him.

“You had better be more careful,” I warned. *“I saw gold pass tonight. Others may have seen, too. With all these harpies about, you know—”

“I hope so,” he said, with a queer, grim smile. If he had been a man less intense, I am sure it would have been a grin. And with that astonishing reply he pushed past me and went on down the hall.

I fairly gasped, for to openly display real money in the Angleterre’s dining room was comparable to exposing a crippled lamb to the sight of a pack of hungry wolves. Except for me, every man present was a predatory agent of one or the other of the Axis powers. I shuddered for Mike’s personal safety.

My misgivings were amply justified the very next day. Mike was absent from his usual station in the dining room. So was Scheer. But the next day Mike showed up, looking considerably the worse for wear. His lips were badly swollen and cut, one eye blackened, and there were other signs of having been severely manhandled. But he waited on his customers with his usual outward serenity. It was beyond my understanding. I took a furtive look at the nearby table where Ciccotto sat. He was watching Mike eagerly, and presently I saw him beckon him to his table,

Mike went as meekly, I thought, as a lamb to the slaughter. In obedience to the major’s imperative gesture, Mike stooped to listen. There was a moment of urgent whispering, then Mike nodded and went away. He came back in a few minutes, made a pretense of brushing crumbs from the table, and I saw his hand slip into his pocket and out again. Again a few gleaming gold coins changed hands! It was utterly baffling. I tried not to think of it any more.

BUSINESS took me away from Athens for several days and when I came back I had to go consult with my firm’s banker. Jimmy Duquesne was his name; he was an old friend and one who could be counted on for an unlimited amount of off-the-record gossip. When we had finished our commercial transactions he led me to a back room where we sat down over cups of coffee.

“These totalitarians,” he sighed, wagging his head, “what a nose for loot they have! It’s incredible. You know how scarce gold is—has been for years—in Europe. Well, I’m swamped with it.”

I lifted my eyebrows. What he had just said was strangely interesting. But I made no comment.

“Three days ago,” he went on, “that unspeakable butcher Scheer came in. He had two bagfuls of it, all he could carry. He cleaned me out of paper marks and drachmae. Naturally, I had to give him literally bales of the worthless stuff in exchange. Then yesterday in walks that skunk Ciccotto with another lot of it. I could not possibly pay him off with what I had in the vaults, but, luckily, he was content with a draft on our Milan branch for the required number of lira. Now where do you suppose they found the stuff?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I answered, quite truthfully, though I could guess where a little of it came from. “Was it in bullion or coin?”

“Coin,” he exclaimed, “and what coin! Much of it must be museum pieces worth I don’t know how much. There was everything from a Roman aureus to modern Turkish pounds—medieval ducats, crowns, guilder—I don’t know the name of half of them. I bought solely on the basis of weight.”

He broke off and flicked the ash from his cigar with a worried look.

“Well?” I knew there was bound to be a sequel. No bank under the fiscal control of Nazidom could have a hundred-weight of metallic gold in its vaults without repercussions.

“All day today,” he said dismally, “I have been overrun by secret agents—Gestapo and Ovra men. They want to know all about the gold. Where it came from, who brought it, what they said, what I paid—everything. The inner circles, it appears, are running wild.”

“They would,” I said grimly. “They want their share.”

“Perhaps,” he said, thoughtfully. “But there is more to it than that. You see, both Scheer and Ciccotto have disappeared. Without a trace!”

Things happened fast after that. Big planes dropped down daily, bearing fresh inquisitors from Belgrade, Bucharest, Vienna, even from Berlin. New contingents of Gestapo men, high-ranking army officers, and other mysterious persons swarmed out of them and descended upon the bank demanding information. Others of their stamp kept coming from Italy, also bent on the combined purpose of plunder and finding their missing predecessors. For each batch of operatives who had come before had disappeared shortly after their arrival. It was eerie. All Athens held its breath.

There were no clues, no bodies found, nothing. Men came simply to disappear. Others trailed them to find out why, only to disappear themselves. Savage reprisals were taken. Greeks were rounded up by the thousands and herded into prisons and camps, charged with being Communists, Jews or traitors. A tight curfew was imposed and severer food restrictions made on an already starved people. Yet the disappearances went on. Hundreds of Himmler’s men vanished like so many extinguished candle flames. The Italian garrisons were denuded of their officers. Athens was an unhealthy place for invaders, apparently. The Germans wanted to know why, but no one broke. The conquerors were up against a blank wall.

“I wonder how long Adolf and Benito can stand the strain?” remarked Duquesne one day. “According to my computations half a thousand of their smartest, and most unscrupulous gumshoe men have faded from the picture. It is a deep well that has no bottom.”

Evidently the Powers That Be came to the same conclusion. An abrupt change of policy toward Greece took place. The curfew and food restrictions were lifted and the jails emptied. A benevolent old Italian general was sent to be governor and the severity of the occupation was relaxed in many ways. Gestapo men and Ovra agents were still to be seen, but the grapevine had it that those few had strict orders to forget about their missing predecessors, and also to forget all about gold, whether for personal account or for the coffers of “the party.”

Oddly, the wave of disappearances promptly ceased.

MIKE of the Parthenon coughed discreetly and I looked up. He was standing by my side in his usual obsequious way and with a napkin folded across his arm.

“They have hauled the swastika down and opened the Acropolis again,” he said, and there was a gleam of exultation in his eyes, “did you know? You see, the shield of Athena still protects.”

“So it appears,” I said. Then I recalled that there was to be a moon that night. “Shall I meet you in the Parthenon later?”

“No,” he said; “At another place. You almost came to believe. Then you scoffed. I want to show you with your own eyes. Meet me at the end of the street in an hour.”

I found him at the place appointed. He was half-hidden behind a low stone wall. Nearby was tethered a pair of donkeys. We mounted those and rode off. In a little while we were following a twisty hill trail skirting the shoulders of Mount Lycabettus. The country grew more rugged as we progressed, until at last we came to a low cliff that blocked our way. There we dismounted and he led me through the brush and along a path I would never have found by myself, We had not gone a great way when we turned abruptly into a clump of shrubbery hugging the cliff side. He drew back an armful of the tangled branches and uncovered a dark and gaping hole.

“Crawl in,” he said.

I hesitated. It was a small hole, hardly thirty inches high by about as wide. Many persons had already disappeared—non-Greeks all—and here I was alone with a man who many would have thought demented. But my curiosity overcame my fears. I dropped to all fours and crawled into the black cave. I could hear him scuffling along behind me, and once or twice he warned me to watch out for my head where the ceiling was low or where we were about to make a turn.

After a dozen yards of such progress, the winding passage widened and I could no longer feel the brush of the rocky roof against my back.

“You can stand up now,” he said, and flashed on a torch.

The place we were in appeared to be a sort of antechamber to the cave. Tortuous passages ran off from it in all directions, each floored with soft white sand. He beckoned me to follow and preceded me down one of them. It ended blind, but just before it ended I came upon a shallow hole dug out of the sand. A few gold coins of antique vintage lay scattered around it.

“That is where Scheer got his first gold. He made me show him where it was.”

Then he wheeled and led me past several other wing passages. He flashed a light down one.

“Same story here—Ciccotto’s gold find. He threatened to have me shot unless I told him.”

He hurried on. In another divergent tunnel he showed me four leather bags neatly packed with gold coins. They were sitting on the sand and a short spade beside them. Footprints led away toward deeper recesses.

“They came back looking for more,” he explained. “I think they went farther into the cave to scout out other deposits.” He said it with a ghastly chuckle that chilled the soul.

“And got lost?” I asked. Some caves are like that. I pictured rotting corpses and whitening bones deeper within the labyrinth.

“Lost!” he cackled. “Yes. They are lost. Lost forever.”

“I am a poor guesser,” I said, sitting down on the sand and looking straight at him. “If your purpose in bringing me here was to explain something, explain it.”

“I brought you to convince you,” he said, with immense dignity, “that the shield of Athena still protects. These baubles”—and he indicated the packed bags of gold with a contemptuous gesture of the hand—“are only bait. The gods have always been wise enough to know that the only kind of men whom they need fear are the greedy ones. And it is by their own greed that the gods slay them. Shortly I will show you what happened to the German Scheer and the Italian and all the others who followed them.

“It was an easy matter to lure them here. I had only to pretend to be in distress—I told them I had an aged aunt in prison charged with harboring a wounded British soldier. I offered money for a favorable consideration of her case. Scheer said it would take much money. I gave him gold. He wanted more. They took me to the police station and submitted me to much abuse. At length I agreed to show him where I got my money. It was from an old temple treasure, I told him, buried in a cave. I showed him the way in and the way back. He left that first night because he had all he could carry. I knew he would go back for more. I knew, too, that he would not be content with merely what I had shown him. He would search the whole cave. The Italian Ciccotto behaved exactly in the same way. It was very simple.”

“But of so many,” I asked, “why did not some come back?”

“The legacy of Athena, of which I am the earthly executor, has extraordinary properties. There are vast fortunes buried in these caves—things so valuable that once men look upon them they cannot leave. Come!”

Mike led me into a transverse passage for a long way. As we proceeded it was unnecessary for him to use his electric light, for the cavern was bathed in a soft and mysterious luminosity of a faintly rose hue. He turned into a doorway on the right.

“This room is no longer used,” he said.

I looked in. It was a huge semicircular room much along the lines of a Grecian theater. Directly opposite the door was an empty raised stage or dais. Between it and the doorway the amphitheater sloped upward. But the room was not empty. It was crammed with statuary.

“Examine them,” Mike directed.

You have seen habitat groups in museums? It was something like that, except that the figures here were of mixed nationalities—all ancient.

There were hooded Egyptians, and many Romans—some togaed, others encased in armor. The figures were of stone, cleverly and perfectly carved, but were dressed in the habiliments of living men of the era. The figures must have stood where they were for many centuries, for many were nude, moldy fragments of their former clothing lying at their feet. Much of the armor was encrusted with rust and scale, though here and there a golden casque bespoke an aristocrat. The faces all had one thing in common: the features were frightfully distorted as if in an ecstasy of horror.

“Come,” he said. “I will show you another room—more modern.”

It was a duplication of the first, except the type of statue had changed. Here stood big-muscled, athletic figures of men, all beautifully executed in white marble. Over their shoulders heavy animal skins were flung, and there were other skins wrapped about their middles. There were many Turks there, too, and soldiers of a type I took to be Janizaries. As before, the stony faces registered utter terror. Many of the figures had their arms thrown halfway up, as if the sculptor had caught them in the act of warding off some fiendish thing that threatened them.

Mike led me through the throng of statuary much as one would tread a sidewalk mob when the persons in it are intent on studying a bulletin pasted on a wall. For it was noteworthy that all the figures had their faces turned the same way and their stony eyes fixed on a spot in midair some yards above the empty dais. He stopped one and tapped it on the shoulder.

“This one was Morosini,” he said, with cold venom, “the chief ravager of her shrine. But we must go. There is one other room to see.”

I was brimming with questions, for nothing shown me yet had shed much light on the mystery of the recent disappearances. Where had the gold come from—especially the modern coins? Who had executed the vast assemblage of life-sized figures, and why were they entombed in this hidden and unknown spot? Were any of the more recently missing Gestapo men still alive?

“The modern gold,” he said promptly, as if I had asked the questions out loud, “is the tribute of the faithful. I and those before me have long sold the offerings of the peasants who still have faith—you saw my market booth. Its profits buried here. The other questions will answer themselves soon.”

He lapsed into silence and took me back in the direction whence we had come. Presently we came to the passage by which we had entered and he turned deeper into the cave. I saw that loose gold was scattered along the path, a tempting lead to go further.

Suddenly Mike stopped before an open door.

“The other rooms were abandoned long ago,” he said. “They became too full. It is in this one that Athena presides during the intervals when she is awake. Her sleeping compartment is in the rear, but that is forbidden to mortal man. Here, put on these.”

He handed me a pair of peculiar-looking binocu lars, and I noticed he had a similar pair for him self. They were a sort of cross between prismatic binoculars and spectacles, for the lenses were blanked off and there were hangers to hook over the ears. I found when I put them on that I could see perfectly well, but the images came to me through artificially widened eye-spacing, giving me a keener perception of depth. They were quite as satisfactory as straight vision, but I could not help wondering why he insisted on my wearing them.

“Now,” he directed, “take my hand and walk backward.”

We backed into the remaining hall. We had gone only seven strides until I stopped with a gasp. I had passed and was now facing a portrait statue of a German Gestapo man I knew! The marble figure stood rigidly with the contorted ex pression of stark horror on his chiseled features I had seen elsewhere. His clothing was modern to the minute. I had seen the man and in those very clothes not three weeks before. It was a figure of one of the missing men, dressed in that man’s clothes!

We went on. I passed a replica of an Italian major, more Gestapo replicas. At length Mike jerked me to a halt.

“Here is Scheer,” he said. It was. Except for the fact he was in marble and not in the flesh and that his horrified expression differed from the one of smug arrogance I had been accustomed to, there was no whit of difference.

“Now,” said Mike, “turn around.”

I turned. The dais before me was not empty as the others had been. Upon it was a colossal throne-chair—at least twenty feet in height. Over the back of it a cloak of cloth-of-gold was thrown and atop it perched a huge, solemnly blinking owl and beside him a snow-white cock. A slender silver lance of some fifty feet in length leaned against the chair, a coiled serpent lay on the step before it. On the right side of the chair an immense golden shield stood. It was adorned with intricate carvings and I started to take off the glasses I wore in order to study its detail better.

“Don’t, you fool!” said Mike, harshly, gripping my wrist with fingers of steel. “Do you want to be like the others? That is the aegis—the shield of Pallas. You cannot bear the naked sight of it—use your mirrors, man!”

I did not quite understand, and then, as I looked again, I did.

In the midst of the shield, where another shield would have a boss, there was a head. My blood chilled at the sight of it and I felt goose flesh pop out all over me. My hair lifted and I knew that my face was as twisted in the same horrified contortions as those of the cold figures all about. For the face of the head on the shield was indescribably hideous—horrid fangs protruded from a misshapen and lipless mouth—wild eyes filled with living hatred and immeasurable fury glared out from beneath frightening eyebrows—and all about the vile face the writhing hair of the head twisted and untwisted. But it was not hair, but a mass of hissing snakes.

I wanted to scream, to faint, to die. The sight was intolerable—no man could bear it. A blessed blackness blotted out my vision. I realized I had gone blind, but I was grateful for it. That did not matter, for I had clutched at myself and found reassurance—my flesh was still warm and yielding—I had not been turned to stone. For at that moment I knew what it was that I had gazed upon, and how I had been saved. It was by looking through the prismatic mirrors, even as Perseus had when he severed that frightful head from its former body. I had forgotten until then that he had gratefully presented the bloody, writhing trophy to his patroness and that she had set it in her shield.

“Medusa,” I murmured, half hysterically, “the Gorgon, Medusa.”

“Yes,” said Mike of the Parthenon, grabbing me firmly by the arm and leading me way. “it still has power. Her aegis is impregnable—”

I heard no more. Even the memory of that hideous sight was unbearable.

Article: Vulcan — Ice King

Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1942

IT would be the height of irony if this coming winter Japan should annihilate Hitler and Nazidom. If it is done—and it may very well be—it will be done without intention or malice; even unwittingly. For by Japan is meant Japan, not its rulers, its armed might, or its people, but the island of Honshu itself—an inanimate thing of rock and soil. Islands before this have wrecked empires, and there are signs now—summer, 1942—that it is about to be done again. Asamayama is reported to have erupted! Will Hitler, who but recently complained of the unfairness of last winter’s cold, freeze outright next? He well may. That will depend upon the magnitude of Mount Asama’s action—let us pray that the violence of its explosion was of the first order. For only that will freeze over the Baltic, exterminate the invaders of Russia, and reduce the fuel-impoverished inhabitants of Germany to shivering wretches whose only thought is to obtain warmth at any cost.

Extravagant? Fantastic? Not at all. We are too prone to think of volcanic catastrophes in terms of local disaster. While such explosions do wipe out entire populations and level cities to the ground, the aftermath of them is far more widespread than that. Eruptions of terrific violence—the kind that in the course of a few seconds vomit millions of cubic yards of stones, bombs and cinders into the high heavens—cause darkness to fall upon all the regions around, and thermometers to tumble the world over. The latter effect is, as often as not, the more serious, since it affects more people and is more persistent. The desolation wreaked in the immediate vicinity of the restless mountain may be done in a matter of hours, after which there is peace. The blizzards and gloom that are spread over all mankind may endure for months and years. It is those by-products which we hope that Asama will endow us with in this particular year. For Asama is the king of ice makers. It is conceivable that a score of Asamas, erupting in stately rotation like the firing of the massive cylinders of a Gargantuan motor, could start another glacial age.

Possibly Asama first exerted itself in modern times in the year 1707. Of its identity there is no certainty, as Japan at that time was closed to all outsiders except a handful of Portuguese missionaries, but there is little doubt that an “unknown Japanese Volcano” was the chief culprit responsible for the extraordinarily cold years 1708 and 1709. Two other volcanoes participated, Vesuvius and Santorin—on Thera, in the Aegean—but judging from Asama’s subsequent performance later in the century, their role was probably a minor one. The results were these: following the triple eruptions of 1707 there was bitter cold all over Europe and in the colonies of North America for two years. The River Thames and the Adriatic froze; there was ten feet of snow in Spain and Portugal. Even the summer of 1709 was cold and rainy.

This was not a freak performance, though it is the first time that a Japanese volcano is mentioned in connection with European or American harsh winters. From the days of the destruction of Pompeii the literature of the times reveals that bitter weather usually followed in the wake of violent eruptions. Hecla, in Iceland, was an occasional offender, being charged with the cold winters of 1637 and 1694. 1695 was a bad year, too, with long and severe cold followed by a chilly summer, but that was due to the activity of an East Indian trio of craters—Celebes, Amboina, and Gunong Api. Europe’s own Vesuvius went into eruption in December, 1631, almost equaling its performance in 79 A.D. It threw up dust clouds to the height of forty-eight kilometers, and the resultant murk brought intense cold in its train. The following year was marked by destructive snows, a short summer, and again early frosts and more snow. While it was yet early fall—October 4th—a detachment of soldiers froze to death between Montpelier and Baziers, which is in the south of France and close to the Mediterranean.1

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1.The Instances cited above and hereafter are selected from a table correlating volcanic activity with unusually severe winters in the Chapters on on “Volcanism as a Factor in Climate Control,” “Physics of the Air,” W. J. Humphreys, published by the Franklin Institute, 1920. The writer is deeply Indebted to this work for what appears herein, and much else. It is highly recommended to anyone desiring a good grounding In its subject.

From 1707 to 1783 there were several instances of volcanoes bringing snow and ice to the world, but it was not until the latter year that another really major eruption occurred. And that, when it did come, was the most frightful and devastating on record. When Asama exploded in 1783 the damage it did to Japan was vast, but it also spread intense cold and dimmed the skies over all the world. This state of affairs endured for three years, assisted no doubt by the concurrent explosion of Skaptar Jökull, in Iceland, and prolonged by one of Vesuvius in 1785.

Benjamin Franklin, in May, 1784, wrote:

During several of the sunnier months of the year 1783, when the effects of the Sun’s rays to heat the Earth in these Northern regions should have been the greatest, there existed a constant fog over all Europe and a great part of North America. This fog was of a permanent nature; it was dry, and the rays of the Sun seemed to have little effect toward dissipating it, as they easily do a moist fog arising from the water. They were indeed rendered so faint in passing through it that, when collected in the focus of a burning glass, they would scarce kindle brown paper. Of course, their summer effect in heating the Earth was exceedingly diminished.

Hence the surface was early frozen.

Hence the first snows remained on it unmelted, and received constant additions.

Hence perhaps the winter of 1783-4 was more severe than any that happened for many years.

The cause of this universal fog is not yet ascertained. Whether it was adventitious to this Earth, and merely a smoke ball proceeding from the consumption by fire of one of those great burning balls or globes which we happen to meet with in our course round the Sun, and which are sometimes seen to kindle and be destroyed in passing our atmosphere, and whose smoke might be attracted and retained by our Earth; or whether it was the vast quantity of smoke, long continuing to issue during the summer from Hecla, Iceland, and that other volcano which arose out of the sea near that island, which smoke might be spread by various winds over the northern part of the world, is yet uncertain.

It seems, however, worthy the inquiry, whether other hard winters, recorded in history, were preceded by similar permanent and widely extended summer fogs.

THIS excerpt has been quoted at length because it gives both a description of the effects of extreme volcanic action, whatever its point of origin, and hits closely at the explanation of them. Franklin was a shrewd and observant man, and the bulk of his surmises and speculations have since been confirmed by the findings of science. The fog he spoke of was Asama’s volcanic dust, a potent obstacle to the Sun’s rays.

As a virtually solo performance, the great blast of Asama of 1783 is supreme. For a full century no other single mountain approached in ferocity its outbreak of that date. Nevertheless, in the interim a very interesting phenomenon occurred—the coldest and most sustained period of misery in the annals of man. It was due, not to the terrific explosion of one virulent mountain, but to the activities of a group of them acting seriatim. This series of eruptions was initiated in the year 1812— the one that ruined Napoleon—by Soufrifère on St. Vincent. On April 30th, just when Bonaparte was about to launch his ill-fated attack on Russia, Soufrifère—not to be confused with the mountain of the same name on neighboring St. Lucia, or Grand Soufrifère on Guadaloupe—blew off. That it was bitterly cold in northern Europe during the winter that followed no one needs be told. Though Napoleon may have blundered, and granting that Kutusoff’s Cossacks did their work well, adequate credit is due the smoky frost giant of the West Indies.

Soufrifère’s blow-off was only the beginning. Two years later mighty Mayon, one of the more murderous of Luzon’s many explosive cones, thundered into eruption, so there was no relenting of the frigid weather. But worse was yet to come. On April 7, 1815, Tomboro let go with appalling violence, killing fifty-six thousand persons at one stroke. For three days darkness prevailed for three hundred miles around, so vast was the quantity of ash and dust heaved up by the mountain. And Tomboro, being situated on Sumbawa, which lies between Java and Timor and therefore in the midst of a hotbed of craters, jolted many of those into activity by its blast.

It is not to be wondered at, then, once the relation between Vulcan’s fires and iciness is conceded, that the succeeding year should break all records for bleak chilliness. The period 1832-16 culminated in what is variously known as “the year without a summer,” “poverty year,” or, in the quaint American idiom of the day, “eighteen-hundred and froze-to-death.” It was in that year of 1816 that snow lay unmelted throughout the summer in districts as far south as the Ohio, and when the current seasonal illness for August was frostbite, not sunstroke.

In the six decades subsequent to that pinching year there were nine other major eruptions, but none of sufficient violence to cause more than a single winter of undue inclemency. Their listing is omitted here for the sake of brevity, but the fact that each of them was trailed by much lower temperatures than was reasonable to expect adds to the already impressive accumulation of evidence of the linkage between vulcanism and cold.

It was in 1883 that Asama’s runner-up for the volcanic championship made its bid for fame. Krakatoa, between Java and Sumatra, tore itself asunder in a blast second only to that of the old master in 1873. Thousands of people were killed; titanic forces were unleashed. The mountain itself and the islet on which it stood disappeared, and tidal waves of such size and force as to be perceptible as far away as Cape Horn were set up. The amount of volcanic dust ejected was prodigious, and it is estimated that much of it was hurled to the incredible height of eighty kilometers.

A few months later an Alaskan volcano went into violent eruption, adding its not insignificant contribution to the dust of the stratosphere. For the next several years there was unseasonable cold and harsh winters, but by way of amelioration the Earth was treated to gorgeous sunsets everywhere, colored by the dusty atmosphere. Often by day the reddish-brown corona known as Bishop’s Ring could be seen surrounding the sun, which itself shone feebly as through a veil—corresponding to the phenomenon remarked upon by Franklin the year after Asama. And then, just as the dust clouds were about to settle. New Zealand’s Tarawera, far in the south, belatedly exploded in 1886, prolonging the period. All the winters from 1883 to 1886 were severe, and old New Yorkers still speak with awe of the great blizzard of ’88, though that may have been from other causes.

The great trio of ice giants—Asama, Krakatoa, and Tomboro—are aided and abetted by many lesser members of their tribe. Bogoslof and Awoe gave us the hard winters of 1890-91-92; Pelèe, Santa Maria, and Colima, the ones of 1902-03. Greater than these was our own Alaskan Katmai, which erupted with immense violence in 1912, throwing out a vast amount of cinders and ash, and darkening and denuding the country for hundreds of miles around. It was on account of its action that the winter of 1912-13 was so biting. Heavy snows fell far south—in Texas, Mexico, and some in the desert States. That was the year that icicles hung from Los Angeles buildings, and the orange planters burned smudges in their groves night and day in the effort to save them. (Outraged Angelenos please consult the record before sitting down to write.)

THERE it is, a convincing list. Well, not quite. It also happens that there have been many severe winters preceded by no volcanic activity whatever. Also many volcanoes have erupted without appreciable effect on the weather except immediately and locally. The above list admittedly is one of selected coincidences, but with the difference that it is wonderfully consistent—there is a common denominator somewhere. And about forty years ago scientists set out to find out what it was.

Climate, as distinct from weather, is made up of a number of things. Roughly speaking, they may be divided into two classes, local factors, and general ones. The local factors are more apparent and more readily understood. Thus, the climate of Greenland differs from that of Sumatra chiefly because of difference in latitude; that of California from that of Nevada, though the States are sitting side by side, a difference due to the existence of a high mountain range between them, shutting the inner State off from the moist air of the sea. The altitude of Mexico City makes it cool, while Vera Cruz, nearby at sea level, has typical tropical climate. And so on.

The exterior factor affects them all together—cooling or heating more or less equally from pole to pole. That factor—I use the singular for convenience—is insolation—the measure of the intensity of solar radiation as received at the outer edge of the atmosphere. Insolation itself is affected by a number of factors, but the complexity of them is of scant interest to the majority of us who live down here on the surface of the Earth. It varies from time to time within a range of about ten percent due to diurnal irregularities and a number of cyclical ones. Solar activity, solar distance, perihelion phase—which has a period of about twenty-one thousand years—and other changes of far greater periods all enter. The only one we feel, as a rule, is the variation due to the sunspot cycle, which has a period of between ten and eleven years. For obscure reasons we receive less heat from the Sun when sunspots are most numerous than when they are few. Thus, in the main, every eleven years we should expect several winters in a row that are rather more severe than the average, followed by increasingly milder years, until we come to the middle of the cycle where we have fairly warm winters for a year or so. It is this feature that gives meaning to Humphreys’ comparative table of eruptions and succeeding cold weather. The cold winters he lists as “discrepancies.” That is, they came at a time in the sunspot cycle when they should normally be warm. And they were experienced all over the world; not locally from identifiable special conditions prevailing. Curves of pyrheliometric values kept since 1882 come down invariably when a big volcano goes into action. It was apparent that there must be a connection. What was it that volcanoes did to make things cold?

To take one last look at the general observational data before seeing what answer the physicists found, let’s mention a few of the salient discrepancies noted. After Asama’s great outbreak mean temperatures tumbled two degrees Centigrade. That may not seem much, but a two-degree drop in mean temperature, if prolonged indefinitely, would give rise to a mild glacial age, since it would lower the snow line about a thousand feet. This drop occurred in a year when there were very few sunspots—about twelve. In like manner, the year 1811 was one of minimum sunspots—the fewest ever observed, zero, to be exact, if I read the curve correctly. Yet Soufrifère, despite the indications calling for an exceptionally mild winter, did what it did to the Grand Army of France. Tomboro, on the other hand, blew-off at one of the sunspot peaks, when cold weather was to be expected, though the number of spots was low for a maximum, being but forty-five. The very exceptional sequel of “the year without a summer” could certainly not be attributed to such a few sunspots.2

The explanation of why volcanic eruptions impair the warmth of the Earth is simple—like all other scientific explanations, once a score or more of hard-working scientists have given years to piecing the jigsaw puzzle together for us and boiling the answer down to a phrase or so. It Is the high-flung dust that does it, by reflecting and scattering the incoming solar radiation, while at the same time not barring the escape of terrestrial radiation of heat.

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2. Curiously enough the only “discrepancy” listed by Humphreys of opposite sign to the ones being discussed was the year 1778, which was inexplicably warm. That year the greatest number of sunspots ever observed were counted—one hundred and fifty. No volcanoes were involved. He is at a loss to account for the absence of icy weather unless the solar constant jumped unaccountably for a short time.

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Thoughtful men from Franklin’s time, or perhaps earlier, had noticed the connection and suggested the answer. But the argument post hoc ergo propter hoc has never met with much respect in scientific circles. The scientists wanted to know, not what, but how and why. Mathematics had to back up empyrical knowledge. Their earlier attempts to find justification for the action of the dust as a filter of radiation produced a disappointing answer. Rock dust, they computed—for rock it must be—would absorb terrestrial radiation and reradiate it, thereby raising the mean temperature slightly rather than otherwise.

Later it was suggested that a lot might depend upon the size and shape of the rocky fragments. Ascertaining the size of particles of a cloud hanging fifty kilometers overhead would seem to be quite a chore, but Pernter tackled the job and gave us a formula for it. He approached it by starting with the Bishop’s Rings. Those are about ten degrees wide and have an outer radius of twenty-three degrees. From that and the known laws of diffraction of sunlight he arrived at something under two microns as the dimensions of the particles.

Since volcanic dust is known to be often in the form of thin-shelled bubbles, or fragments of such bubbles, both their tiny size and nature made them far more efficient reflectors and scatterers of the short-waved solar radiation than of the longer-waved terrestrial radiation, the ratio being thirty to one, about. The obvious result would be that so long as the veil of dust persisted, a fifth or more of incoming solar heat would be shut out while virtually none of the escaping Earth heat would be shut in—a sort of inverse hothouse effect. So long as that prevailed, the equilibrium of heat normally maintained between incoming and outgoing radiation would be upset and the Earth rapidly cooled.

But even high, wind-borne dust falls if given time. Other computations were made as to the rates of fall. The various factors are many, but the rough answer is that dust ejected far up into the stratosphere will require from one to three years to settle, depending upon its fineness and initial height. Some dust is as small as half a micron in diameter. So far, theory amply jibes with observed facts. Terrific eruptions do create cold. Perhaps, now that we have balloons capable of exploring the air, when next there is such an explosion more direct data can be gathered.

It is worth noting, also, that the dust is a better reflector of oblique rays than of those falling nearly normal, and, therefore, the chilling effect is the more pronounced in the higher altitudes, thus steepening the interzonal temperature gradients, This gives rise to gales, rains and snows which accelerate the cooling process in the middle latitudes. One is tempted to speculate on the effects of a long, continued series of scattered volcanic explosions, since the situation of the volcano has no bearing whatever on the consequences. They are world-wide in every case in which the dust reaches the stratosphere, where the high winds spread it evenly all over the world. Humphreys has computed that the mean temperature of the Earth has been a half of a degree (C) lower since 1750 than it would have been had there been no volcanic activity; four or five times the amount of activity we have experienced could easily start another ice age. We should be thankful, therefore, that eruptions are as infrequent as they are.

By the same token, let’s hope, for this year at least, that Asama will give us an encore to the performance of 1783. It will mean shoveling snow for us, shivering and ice-bound rivers, but I think we can take it. The Russians have proved they can; the Nazis have proved that they cannot. So up and at ’em, Asamayama, boy—do your stuff!

Sand

(‘By Colin Keith’)

Astounding, November 1942

THE grimmest Joke on Mars is the daily weather forecast. You see it—if you can see anything—just as you leave the skyport at Ghengiz. It is engraved in inch-deep letters on a monolithic block of permalite, and even that unabradable stone is worn round on the corners from years of sand blasting. The standing prophecy says:

WEATHER FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW

Hot, dry, and windy, with sandstorms and shifting dunes.

It is a triumph in paradoxes, for it is not only a masterpiece of accuracy, but of understatement as well.

Special Investigator Billy Neville found that out before he had been on the ruddy planet five minutes. The light scout cruiser that had brought him hardly had her grapnels firmly engaged in the deeply anchored mooring net than he could see a small blue police tank careening across the field toward him. He could only glimpse it now and then, for the driving sand was as impenetrable to vision as is flinging sleet. Then the little tank bumped alongside and a moment later a man crawled through the lee entry port. He carried a heavy suit on his arm.

“Here you are, sir,” he said, “your anabrad. Put it on over your uniform, otherwise you’d be naked and flayed after about a minute out there.”

Neville picked up the garment. It was not greatly unlike a diving suit except that it was unarmored. It was of a tough, rubbery texture, had leaded soles for weight, and a helmet with flexible, unscratchable glanrite goggles. He put it on, shook hands with the skipper of the cruiser, then stepped out into the blast.

The local man helped him into the little tank and pulled down the lid. Then it veered away from the cruiser, rose on one set of treads, and sailed dizzily across the field, heeled over at a sharp angle to the “breeze.” The driver slowed at the gate just long enough to grin and point out the forecast for the day. Then he pulled his blue bronco back into the wind and bucked his way up what Neville took to be the main street of Ghengiz.

“The boss’ll be glad to see you,” yelled the driver, above the steady hissing of the rain of sand on the tank’s foreplate. “Things have sure gone to hell here, and I don’t mean maybe.”

Billy Neville granted. He had not the faintest idea of what Martian problems were, nor anything about the planet. But it was, a safe assumption that when he was sent anywhere, things were tough. Just now he was coming from Venus after a hectic year spent in cleaning up the gooroo peddlers. He had hoped for a few weeks’ leave on Earth en route, but apparently that was not to be.

He disregarded his garrulous driver and peered out the sand-stricken visiport. He could not help but notice how peculiar Martian architecture was. None of the buildings had any opening whatever below the second-floor level, and few there, unless on the lee side of the house. All were supplied with rows of grab irons or outside ladders by which the climb from street to door could be made. He guessed, and rightly, that on some days the shifting dunes partly buried the buildings. This day, though, the street was clean and glistening, as if made of polished steel.

The tank teetered and bucked its way ahead, cut a corner, skidded hard against the buildings on the lee side of the street, caromed off and wheezed to a stop before a gloomy structure of heavy permalite.

“Local headquarters,” said the driver, and pushed up the hatch. “Take the right-hand ladder.”

Neville grabbed at it and climbed, like a rigger going up a smokestack. Two floors up he came to a sheltered platform and a door. The door was yanked open and he darted in. A minute later be was in the presence of a haggard and weary-looking major of the Interplanetary Police. The major was just hanging up the phone.

“Well, Neville,” said he, scrutinizing the young S. I. with hard, blue eyes, “you hit here at the psychological moment. The Xerxes has just been robbed. That is the fifth this year, the fifteenth in the last four years. I’ve ordered a copter and as soon as it comes we’ll fly out and look it over while the trail is hot. I am afraid this will be as hard a nut to crack as all the others have been. But maybe I’m getting stale. That’s why I asked for you. A new broom, you know—”

“I hope so, sir,” said Billy Neville, modestly. He was still wondering what it was all about. He knew that the only industry on Mars was the production of super-diamonds and that there had been a number of robberies of mines. But that was all he did know. In the jungles of steaming Venus one did not bother much about anything but the immediate job in hand.

He waited, but the major did not see fit to speak again. He merely sat tapping nervously on his desk and frowning down at the papers on his blotter. Then he raised his eyes and looked wearily at Neville, but still said nothing.

“Nasty weather you’re having,” observed Neville, politely, waving his hand toward the outside generally. “Does it blow like this all the time?” The older cop smiled feebly.

“The obvious answer to that crack is the old wheeze they used to use back in Wyoming. No. It does not. It’ll breeze along like this for a week or so. Then it’ll set in and blow like hell. But if you think this is bad, you ought to see it down in the equatorial regions. They have sand typhoons there. The mines are in the temperate zone with only strong trade winds to worry over. Yet these circumpolar breezes you see up here are gentle zephyrs compared to those.” He sighed, and added, “It’s not the wind that we mind. It’s those damned dunes. They won’t stay put. Mars, my boy, is not a nice place to live.”

The phone buzzed. The worry on the major’s face deepened as he picked up the earpiece.

“Yes? … What! The Hannibal! … How do you know it was eleven days ago? … Oh, hypnosene, eh? They just came to and found the safe blown and looted. … I see. Well, do what you can. They knocked over the Xerxes not five hours ago. I’m going there first.”

He hung up and spread his hands despairingly.

“Gas, always gas. And always a different gas. First it was cyanogen, then phosgene, carbon monoxide, chloroform. We devised masks. Then they sprung thanatogen, neuronoxylene and other fancy ones. There are never any clues—we can’t catch ’em—we can’t stop ’em. I’m going nuts.”

“It might help if you began at the beginning,” suggested Billy Neville, mildly. “You know I got here less than half an hour ago.”

“To be sure,” replied the major, scribbling on a pad. “In just a moment—”

The phone buzzed again. That time it was a husky voice saying the copter was ready.

“Come on,” said the major, buckling on a blaster. “I’ll explain on the way.”

WIND—and sand—swept Ghengiz faded behind them. They were up out of the dust. Two navigators were busily taking sights on the Sun, and on Deimos and Phobos, both, fortunately, happening to be up.

“The only way you can find your way around this blasted planet,” explained the distraught major, “is by stellar navigation. The terrain doesn’t mean a damn thing. That range of dunes you are looking at won’t be there in another hour. They will not only move west, but they will change their whole contour doing it. Sometimes you see a town—sometimes you don’t. It all depends on whether it happens to be buried. We never know. On Earth you can figure the tides, but dunes are different. They move haphazardly and at random rates of speed.”

“I’m beginning to find Mars interesting,” remarked the special investigator.

“Yeah? Well, listen. Mars is a queer customer. If you know a geologist whose heart you want to break, bring him here and ask him to explain it to you. As near as I can make out, the planet congealed suddenly while it was still a viscous mass of about half iron and half granite, mixed indiscriminately. Somewhere you find outcroppings of steel, in other places stone. Later on it must have acquired an atmosphere. At least we have plenty of it now. That weathered the granite and gave us all this sand. The sand goes round and round and comes out nowhere. At the Equator the dunes are a mile high. At the poles there are no dunes. In between you have every depth. Look!”

He had the copter brought lower and pointed to a deep valley between two ranges of dunes. It looked almost as if there was a mountain lake in its depths. But there was more. A considerable town could be seen in the very midst of the shiny spot. It was a mass of small domes dependent upon a larger central dome, above which rose a slender minaret or smokestack reaching high to the skies. The top of the stack was at least as high as the neighboring dune crests. A turretlike structure sat atop it and sprouted a double ventilator, one cowl turned into the wind, the other away.

“That is a mine—a big one—the Wellington,” said the major. “It is sitting on bed steel, and beneath it is a rich pocket of diamonds. When Mars solidified only part of the carbon went into solution in the iron. Bits of it were pressed into Martian diamonds, far harder and of purer fire than anything ever found on Earth. They are immensely valuable. The tough job for a prospector is finding them, for he never gets more than a fleeting glimpse of the real surface of this planet. After that comes the tougher job of building the mine in spite of the steady waves of dunes that roll over it and keep burying it. Once a mine is set, everything is grand—or would be if somebody had not thought up a way to rob them.”

The copter rose higher and continued on southward. A little later it dipped again and the major pointed out something else.

“Another mine—the Robert E. Lee, I believe. It’s buried now.”

Neville looked. All he saw was a tiny circular building supporting a turret. But above the turret stood the same type of double ventilator he had seen at Wellington.

“Until the dune passes,” added the major, “they must draw and expel their air through that trunk. It is also an access and escape hatch. What has us stumped is that all the robberies take place while the mine is submerged and yet no one ever enters through the trunk or leaves by it. How they get in and get away is what we want to find out. For they usually kill everybody in it and pick the place clean before they leave. If you can solve that one, you are as good as you are reputed to be.”

Neville did not answer. He wanted to know more. After all, promotions in the I. P. went by merit, not pull, and despite the dejection and apparent defeatist attitude of the major, he knew he must have something on the ball. He would not have been made supervisor of Mars otherwise. So Neville merely bobbed his head and continued to listen.

“There’s the Xerxes now!” exclaimed the major, indicating a blob on top a sand dune. It did not look in the least like the full-fledged mine Neville had been shown before. It was just another lonely turret sitting on the sand, like the Robert E. Lee.

The copter circled in the sandy gale, made five tries and finally lassooed the turret with her grapple noose. Then they snubbed down and held bobbing against the turret lee.

“You get an idea,” murmured the major, “how impossible it would be for a criminal copter to approach the air intake and pollute it. It takes many tries, and at that it is not always successful. When you think of the armed guards at the top of the trunk—”

But they were already being hauled over the parapet into the turret. Four grim-looking men stood there, armed with electronic rifles. On the floor lay a fifth, dead. He was hideously bloated and covered with purple blotches that stood out in great welts.

“Just in time, inspector,” said one who appeared to be their leader. “The air below is clearing now. I think you can go down.”

He turned and indicated the graphs hanging on the ventilation ducts. The one on the intake side showed the irregularity—straight air being brought in for days and days. But the exhaust index showed the automatic and continuous samplers of incoming and outgoing air had done their work well. Eight hours earlier the needle had jumped far out and left a quavering track in the poison zone. Since that time it had dribbled its way more and more to the center. The latest reading showed the usual exhaust air—just air, slightly warm, slightly polluted, but no worse.

Major Martin indicated a trapdoor and one of the men pulled it open. A minute later they were climbing down a short ladder into a compartment below. The hatch closed over them, shutting out the howling banshee of the Martian gale. The two huge ventilating trunks filled up one half the circular platform, a tiny elevator being hung between them. The other half of the circle was occupied by a circular iron staircase that went down and down. The major led the way down it a few steps, then thumped the outer wall. It was solid permalite.

“The only access to these mines,” he said, “is through these chimneys until the trough comes, and the chimneys have no openings in them except at the top. Another copter load of our operatives will be along in about five minutes to begin at the top and search downward. They will not find anything, but it is routine, starting with a search of the guards up there and then this chimney, inch by inch. We may as well go on down.”

They retraced their steps to the upper platform, got into the elevator, and started down. The descent took several minutes, but shortly they emerged into a circular room at the base of the chimney. Overhead great ducts carried the ventilation system, and an outlet immediately above was blowing clean, fresh air. Two corpses lay on the floor, blotched and bloated like the dead guard above. Apparently, from their attitudes, they had died instantly. Major Martin gave them but a glance.

“Necrogen,” he said. “It kills at the first whiff.”

A corridor took them through the living compartments where the men ate and slept when off shift. The bunks were full of dead. Here and there a body lay slumped in a chair or across a table. It was the same in the office where the heavy safe stood open and empty, its door hanging loosely on warped hinges. It was the same down in the pit, where tough-jawed machines cut the diamond-bearing iron matrix away in chunks. It was the same in the stamp room, and no different in the place where the acid vats were in which the matrix was dissolved away from the imprisoned sparklers. There was no one left alive in the Xerxes. Shortly a careful tally showed that not one of the employees was missing; they were all present—dead. Then the major showed Neville the great iron doors that gave the plant its lower exit onto the iron subsurface of the planet.

“That door opens outward.” he said, “and at this moment against a pile of fine sand a thousand feet deep.”

“Tunnel?” suggested Neville.

“You don’t do much tunneling through diamond-studded steel,” replied Major Martin dryly, but we keep searching for them. There are none. Moreover, even if there were, there could be no practicable outlet. They have yet to invent a mole or any kind of vehicle that can navigate under sand. The only locomotion available on Mars are the crawlers, as we call the little tanks. Copters are reserved for police use only.”

Neville glanced at the ventilating duct over head and at the scattered corpses. The job was obviously done by admitting poison into the air-feed system, but how could the murderer get away, even if he had a gas-proof suit?

“What about the guard at the top of the chimney?” he asked sharply. “Why couldn’t they have pulled the job, thrown the loot and other evidence down to an outside confederate, and then turned in the alarm?”

“They could have,” admitted the major, “but they didn’t. Two of the members of that guard are my own trusted operatives, acting under cover. We had another down here, but we’ve lost that poor fellow. No, it is an outside job.”

Neville thought that over. Then his eye caught a little mound of raw diamonds beside one of the acid vats. They had evidently come out of the processing machine just as the robbery occurred, and had therefore not been picked up the collectors and added to the other stock in the vault. He was amazed to see that they were of a11 different colors—ruby-red, emerald-green, water-white, sapphire-blue, moss-green, pink, yellow and pale-blue.

“Do Martian diamonds come like this—all colors out of one hole?”

The major nodded.

“Another tough aspect of the case. If they only produced red ones at one place and white at another, we might hope to trace them after they are stolen. But Martian diamonds are wonderfully uniform in respect to everything but color, and those are invariably mixed as you see them here. It makes it nearly impossible to find the fence.”

“Hm-m-m,” said Neville, pocketing the handful of sparklers.

WHEN they arrived at the Hannibal they found it completely uncovered, and were able to land in its lee on the slick hard surface of the mother planet. The story there was much the same, accept that the gas had not killed, but put to sleep. The only dead were the tower guards, and they appeared to have been rayed down from behind.

Neville took the occasion to have a close look at the outside of the mine. He could not rid himself of the suspicion that there must be some way to enter one except at the very top or bottom. He scrutinized especially closely the slender stack that rose twelve hundred feet above him. On its lee side an iron ladder rose all the way to its pinnacle, otherwise the chimney was bare, sand-blasted permalite. Neville set up a telecamera and made careful shots of the chimney all the way up and from every angle.

“I’ve seen enough,” he said at last, picking up a few sample of the Hannibal stones. “This is a job that will take some thinking over.”

“I’ll say,” said Major Martin, sourly.

By nightfall they were back in Ghengiz and at headquarters.

“What do you think?” asked the major desperately. “You have inspected two, and when you’ve seen one you have seen them all. The technique is identical. Who is doing it, and how?”

“Dunno,” smiled Neville, who had slumped back in his chair and was gazing dreamily at the ceiling. “I haven’t got that far yet. What I’m trying to dope out is the motive.”

“Motive! Why, money, of course.”

“Sure. But how much money? Even pirates don’t go into wholesale massacre for the sake of a few bushels of diamonds once in a while. And the details of the Hannibal incident prove that the robber doesn’t have to kill to get at his loot. It seems to me—”

The phone was buzzing.

“Yes,” acknowledged the major wearily. He listened a moment, grunted, then hung up. He turned to Neville.

“The miners at the Cortez and Attila have struck. They are afraid to go on working and demand a police escort to bring them into the labor barracks here at Ghengiz, That makes the sixth mine to shut up out of fear of bandits.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Neville calmly, “and that gives us our No. 1 suspect. Tell me who stands to gain most by closing all these mines, and you will name the man behind these robberies. He is a clever man and thoroughly unscrupulous. What is his name?”

Major Martin frowned at his desk, considered the question a moment, then said, “Mario Hustings answers the specifications. I have thought of him as a possibility before. But there is absolutely no hookup. Moreover, he is our most dignified, wealthy and powerful citizen. We will have to practically convict him before we even accuse him. He is owner of the Consolidated, which embraces the Wellington, the Custer and the Scipio—”

“I thought you had an antitrust law here,” challenged Neville.

“We have. But it was enacted after Hustings built his first three mines. Since then they must be individually owned and operated, or be shut down and revert to the public domain. The only monopoly that Hustings has is the Martian Construction Co., and he has that by virtue of patent rights. He devised the type of building you have seen, and when anyone gets a charter to open a mine it is Hustings’ company that does the construction work. After that he has no more to do with it.”

“That’s interesting,” murmured Neville. “One more question. How much have your diamond exports fallen off since the robberies began?”

“Not any. Which doesn’t prove a thing. Of course, the sales of Consolidated have risen with the robberies, but so have those of the independents. It has been the custom of the diamond industry from the beginning of time to maintain an even supply so as not to break the price. All the companies have reserves—much of it here in the government vaults. So when one or two mines fade from the picture, the others make up the loss out of stock. You won’t get an anywhere along that trail, I’m afraid. Even if you suspected the other companies were acting as fences, you still could not prove the diamonds were stolen unless you catch the thief in the act. Martian diamonds are indistinguishable.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Neville. “On Earth they are all different.”

The major talked on, his gloom deepening as he talked. Mars was surrounded by a cordon of fast cruisers, giving absolute assurance that no unauthorized ships landed or left. The only port of entry was Ghengiz, and the most minute searches were made of every ship coming and departing. Major Martin was willing to stake his reputation that not one of the stolen diamonds had been taken away from the planet yet. The outbound cargoes were all from the government-bonded warehouses. The more he talked, the more hopeless he made the case appear. There were no criminals on Mars, or any place for than to hang out. Ghengiz was the only town, and it was well policed. Otherwise there were only the mines.

Neville yawned, got up and stretched.

“I’m going to putter around in the laboratory for a while before I turn in,” he said. “By the way, will you have your operatives get me a few diamonds from each of the mines? Make sure they were mined there, too, and were not just in the vault.”

“Certainly,” agreed the major, and jabbed a button. “I already have them.”

The next activities of Special Operative Billy Neville might have mystified another man, but Major Martin took them with patience and a measure of hope. For he knew that Neville was reputed to be the best trouble-shooter on the force. Neville spent hours studying the enlarged photos of the mine stack. He spent other hours sitting before a huge vacuum tube in which he bombarbed diamonds with high-tension current. The results were not wholly encouraging. Some threw back  phosphorescence of an apricot hue, others of pale-green, red and orange. But, to his disappointment, not all the sample diamonds from the mines showed distinguishing phosphorescent colors. After that he sat in the dark for a while, idly rubbing them with a silk rag.

By morning, though, he was reasonably satisfied. His next request was that sample lots of diamonds be brought to him from the bins of the mines in the bonded warehouse. After he had looked over a few of those he announced his intention of calling on Mr. Hustings.

“What for?” asked the major.

“To size him up, for one thing,” replied Neville, casually, “and to jolt him for another. Please have two of your best shadows on the job, for I want him tailed from the time I leave.”

The local inspector merely raised his eyebrows, but signified he would comply.

“While I am gone,” added Neville, “I would like to have a crawler made ready, with an assortment of pipe wrenches, nipples and connections in it. And a container of harmless gas with a distinctive odor to it. Peppermint oil, say.”

“Done,” was all the major could say.

THE interview with the diamond magnate was brief. Neville found him in the offices of his company and was admitted immediately. The millionaire met him at the door and shook his hand cordially. Mario Hustings was a fine-looking man for all his sixty years, well built, bronzed and with a genial smile.

“Well, well,” he said, as he pumped the hand, “So you’ve come to solve our crime wave, eh? I wish you luck, but I fear you will be here quite a while. I am sure you will, unless you are far more competent than our local sleuths.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Hustings,” said Neville, evenly, “I expect to return to Earth within a very few days. I find the case simpler than I expected, It is already solved. I do not think you will have any more robberies.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Hustings, dropping the hand. It was a long-drawn “ah” and ended with a rising inflection.

“The culprit is still at large,” Neville hastened to add, “but we expect to apprehend him shortly.”

“Good work,” said Hustings heartily. “That will be a great relief to us all. Cigar?”

“No, thanks. There are a few loose ends to pick up yet and I can’t stay.”

Neville hurried back to the laboratory and spent another hour hurriedly scanning the dossiers of all of Hustings’ employees. By the time he had found what he wanted, the tank was ready. Major Martin chose to accompany him.

“Find me a mine,” said Neville, “that is about half submerged.”

The rough riding little vehicle lurched off, swaying and plunging in the wind to the steady hissing of the driving sand against its sides. They plowed through lesser dunes, but as they got farther south the dunes became more and more mountainous. At times the tank would climb steeply, only to fall into a side-slide and go slithering down the face of the wave, like a wind-blown chip in the ocean. As the wind rose, they caught fewer and fewer glimpses of the sky through the curtain of driving sand above them. The tank driver made his way by compass and other mysterious instruments on his dash.

Presently it halted, crawled ahead and stopped. At first Neville could see nothing. But in a moment he made out that they were in the lee of a segment of a stack. He could not see the top of it, for it was obscured by the whipping sheets of sand, but he could see a few rungs of the outside ladder leading upward.

“They can’t see us, either,” he pointed out to the major, meaning the men of the tower guard.

“Now let’s rig a safety line and get around on the windward side of this chimney. That is what I am interested in.”

The other side was smooth, seamless permalite, despite its continual assault by sand. They had to wait for fully an hour until the growing dune had pushed them thirty feet higher. Then Neville saw what he was looking for—a little projection. It was the stub of a one-inch pipe, sticking out just far enough to admit a cap being screwed on. A helper brought the bag of wrenches and a moment later the cap was off, the connection being made, and the tank of aromatic oil brought up to be hooked on to them.

Neville screwed the last union home, then hunted for the other thing he was looking for. It was only a few feet away and almost invisible, it was camouflaged so perfectly. It was simply a short lever, recessed in the face of the chimney wall. He tripped the valve on the gas container, waited until its contents hissed away, then seized the lever and jerked it down. A small section of the wall slid open, making a doorway just large enough to admit a man clad in an anabrad Or a gas-proof suit. He beckoned to Martin to follow and ducked inside. Then he shut the panel quickly so that no more sand would blow in.

Down below the alarm sirens were howling and men were shouting.

“Better get word to them it is a false alarm,” suggested Neville. “We don’t want to be cut down as burglars.”

They stayed but a few minutes, then went out as they had come in. They wanted to get out before the secret door could be buried by sand.

“IT’S AS simple as that,” Neville remarked on the way back to base. “This thing has been planned for years. There are several of those pipe connections and secret doors at different levels. They were put there when they built the stacks. The pipes lead into the intake air duct, the door is so closely fitted and so placed that the most rigid inspection of the interior would hardly be expected to reveal it. I spotted them on my enlargements of the plates. They have gone undiscovered from the outside for the reason that it is impossible to inspect the weather side of one of these chimneys except as we just did, and heretofore no one has thought it necessary to do that.

“Hustings’ man could simply come here, screw on his poison gas whenever the sand rose to the proper level, go down and rob the place as soon as the gas did its work. Ten minutes later he could make his getaway, unseen and unsuspected.”

“Hustings’ man, huh?” growled the major. “How are you going to prove that? It is true his company built the chimneys, but that does not necessarily involve him personally.”

“It’s going to be hard,” admitted Neville, “but I think I can do it.”

BACK at headquarters they encountered two sheepish operatives. Shortly after Neville’s visit, Hustings had hopped into a crawler and hurried away to the southward. The I. P. men trailed him in two other tanks, but he lost them in a sandstorm. When last seen he was heading somewhat to the westward.

“That would be the Scipio,” was the major’s guess.

“Absolutely. That is where his poison gas is made,” asserted Neville. “Apparently he took my visit seriously.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Major Martin.

“His head chemist there formerly worked for Tellurian Chemical. He is a recognized expert on lethal gases. Moreover, the present superintendent of the Scipio was formerly a construction foreman for the Martian Building Co. It is my hunch that all of Hustings’ accomplices live and work at the Scipio. I found out plenty this morning when I read their dossiers. We can make the arrest any time now. I am satisfied—”

The alarm bell on the wall began to tap. The phone buzzed.

“Sorry, Neville. But you are dead wrong about Hustings,” the major said after he had taken the message. “The Scipio has just been knocked off. Hustings wouldn’t kill his own men.”

“Oh, wouldn’t he?” said Neville grimly.

A moment later the door opened and Hustings himself walked in. His genial manner was gone. It was plain that he was excited and angry.

“A fine lot of policemen we have here!” he roared. “Yesterday you tell me you have broken the robbery ring, yet just now I get word my Scipio Mine has been robbed and all its people murdered. Necrogen again. What about the man you said you were going to take into custody? What are you waiting for?”

“For you to come back,” said Neville quietly. “The man is in custody. Put the nippers on him, boys.”

The two operatives sprang forward and despite Hustings’ roars slapped the irons about his wrists.

“You got away with a lot, Hustings, but it’s all over now. Your killing the man who built your trick chimneys for you and the man who made up your poison gases along with the jackals that did the dirty work won’t let you out. It merely saves us that many trials and a mass execution. We have enough on you to hang you without their testimony.”

“You can’t connect me with those chimneys,” Hustings yelled, his eyes ablaze and his face purple, “or the gas, either. Suspect and be damned, but what can you prove?”

“Well,” drawled Neville, “leaving out of account the train of circumstantial evidence—of which there is a lot, I assure you—and the quite obvious advantage it would be to you to have all the other mines driven out of business, we have the simple fact that you are in possession of all the diamonds stolen from the looted mines. They are all impounded in this very building.”

“Pah!” snorted Hustings, struggling with his wristlets. “Martian diamonds do not carry any brand. The phosphorescent test is meaningless here—they all respond the same—”

“So I discovered,” said Neville dryly, “or, rather, most do. However, I applied a test you seem to have overlooked. Did you ever hear of triboluminescence? It is astonishing that a man of your cunning should have missed it—”

Hustings was glaring, panting.

“Rub a diamond in the dark with wool or silk and it is likely to give off a dim light. Your Martian gems are most responsive to it. The Hannibal stones, for example, glow pale green, whereas the Custer’s are a deep magenta. Every local mine has its characteristic color. What’s more to the point, the vaults in the warehouse bear that out. Each mine’s output corresponds with the stones it produces. Except yours. In your vault we found not only stones from your mines, but several bushels each from all the robbed mines. But none at all from the unrobbed mines! If you can explain that—and where you have been the last six hours—you have nothing to worry about. Take him away, boys!”

Special Investigator Billy Neville sank into a chair. He was tired, and the ceaseless whine of driving sand was getting on his nerves.

“It’s all yours now, major,” he said. “Call a cruiser, won’t you? I want to see some water for a change—not sand.”

Article: God’s Footstool

Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943

WE science-fictionists become so intent on inventing and exploring strange and fantastic other worlds that we are apt to forget that the one we live upon is still far from being completely known. It will surprise many to be told that an elemental dimension such as the Earth’s diameter has yet to be determined with exactness. When it is considered that dimension happens to be the yardstick by which we have settled upon the dimensions of the Universe, it will be apparent how important it is. For from it as a base we have triangulated upon the Sun, Moon and planets and determined the size, distance and or bits of all the principal members of our own solar system. From the far longer base line of our own orbit—as determined above—we have triangulated on the nearer stars. And from those figures we have calibrated such ultramodern measuring devices as the spectroscope with which we probe the outer reaches of space. Any error in our primary base line becomes magnified as we reach out from it. A few hundred meters of inaccuracy here becomes a few trillion miles on the way to the Clouds of Magellan.

The difficulty lies in the fact that there is no way of directly measuring our own diameter. It must be computed from still shorter base lines carefully measured on the ground. This computation becomes difficult for the reason that so far we do not know the shape of the Earth. Exactly, that is. We were told as children that it is an “oblate spheroid” and has a mean diameter of seven thousand nine hundred eighteen miles. But how oblate? And is it regular? And how many diameters were used to make up the mean? The answers are that we are not yet in agreement as to the degree of eccentricity of the oblateness; that apparently the “geoid” is not regular, since there are unaccountable flattenings and bulges here and there—not all measured; and that there are at least three distinct dimensional axes giving as many basic diameters. Between those extremes there are as many individual diameters as there are places.

Mankind has been struggling with this problem for close to three thousand years. If we could pick up the Earth as we would a ball bearing and place it between the jaws of a cosmic pair of calipers, there would be no problem. Or, if we had suspected sooner that the Earth was something other than a sphere, a great deal more of progress could have been made.

The early Greek philosophers were practically unanimous in the belief that the Earth was round. Thales of Miletus, along about 600 B.C., was the first to clearly expound the theory; and Anaximander, in the very next generation, made the first globe. A few hundred years later we find Dicaearchus computing latitudes by measuring shadows at noon and constructing crude stereographic maps of the world. All these men went on the assumption that the Earth was spherical and that the Sun and Moon were also spheres, revolving about it. But they could not bring themselves to believe that the Earth could be as large as their rough measurements indicated it to be, and in consequence their little geocentric cosmos was woefully out of scale.

Two and a half centuries before the beginning of the Christian Era, Erastosthenes came on the scene. He was primarily a poet and a dramatist and librarian of the great library at Alexandria, but he was also interested in cartography and therefore in astronomy. He is called the Father of Geodesy because he was the first to make an accurate estimate of the Earth’s true size. He knew that if you measure a considerable arc of any great circle on a sphere it is possible to compute all its other dimensions. So he undertook to measure an arc of slightly over seven degrees of the meridian passing through Alexandria. Having been born in Syene, some four hundred odd miles up the Nile and nearly due south of Alexandria, he recalled that at noon on a midsummer’s day objects there cast no shadows. So he took Syene to be under the Tropic, and therefore directly beneath the Sun on the day of the summer solstice. By observing how far the Sun was from his own zenith on the same day, he would know the difference in latitude between the two places. Using a gnomon—or shadow-throwing stick—he found that to be 7° 13’. Then, by referring to the cadastral maps of the lands between, which had been made by the Egyptian tax collectors, he computed the length of the arc on the ground.

There were errors in all his work, since Syene and Alexandria were not quite on the same meridian and also Syene was thirty miles or so from the Tropic. Likewise, his computation of the distance was probably inaccurate. But his results were astonishingly good. He found the plane of the ecliptic to be 23° 51’, or within twenty minutes of what we know it to be today. He stated the length of a degree of latitude to be 61.945 miles, which is off only three and one half percent from the figure 59.8 used now.

His work enabled Hipparchus, who followed, to vastly improve the astronomy of the time. Ptolemy rounded out the job by discovering the effects of atmospheric refraction on observed altitudes of celestial bodies, and by devising a plausible and ingenious theory of the solar system. The Ptolemaic theory was wrong, but it worked well enough for the times. It is one of the great tragedies of the human race that at about this point the beginning of the Dark Ages ensued For more than a thousand years all the splendid work of the early Greeks was lost, and the blight of superstition fell upon the world. The infant sciences of geodesy and astronomy became interdict. Later they had to be begun all over.

DURING those bleak and barren years all work did not stop, but unhappily we have lost the record of it. One Caliph Abdullah al Mamur caused a considerable arc of a meridian crossing the Plains of Shinar in Mesopotamia to be measured, and other Arabs carried on elsewhere. But the Western world had to await the coming of Galileo and Copernicus before picking up the thread again. Then came Keppler, Newton and Huygens. And with them the modem concept of the solar system, the telescope, and the famous Newtonian theories of motion and gravitation.

However, it was left to a comparative unknown—a Dutchman named Snell—to upset the apple cart and shake these theories to their foundations. He was a surveyor and wrote in Latin under the name of Snellius, or Erastosthenes Batavus. It was he who rediscovered the law of refraction and other refinements of observation, but his most significant work was the completion of an elaborate survey of the Low Countries, in the course of which he had carefully measured several degrees of their principal meridian. The year was 1615, which may be taken as the starting point of modern geodesy. What hurt about his findings was that if they were to be accepted as accurate, then the accepted notion of the size of the Earth was wrong.

Newton and Huygens read them and were disturbed. After considerable thought, Newton finally made the admission that perhaps the Earth was not a sphere, but something else—say an ellipsoid like the onion-shaped planet Saturn. After all, their computations had been based chiefly on measurements taken in Mediterranean Europe and northern Africa. The area was not large enough to develop any appreciable flattening as one approached the pole or increasing curvature toward the Equator.

A glance at the accompanying figure will show at once the predicament one finds himself in when he finds himself on a relatively huge—as to himself, that is—body whose size he can only compute from piecemeal measurements and whose precise shape is unknown to him. Given good telescopes, a knowledge of the phenomenon of atmospheric refraction, and a fair approximation of horizontal parallax, the determination of latitude presents little difficulty. By careful observations the altitude of celestial bodies at the moment of meridian transit, corrected for date, he can compute it directly. If the Earth were the simple sphere the Alexandrian Erastosthenes assumed it to be, and if his observations had been carried out with sufficient accuracy, no more would have to be done. But the figure shows the problem Snell uncovered. On the circle CQ all the degrees of latitude are the same length; on the profile of the oblate spheroid OQ the degrees get progressively longer as the pole is approached; on the prolate spheroid LQ the reverse is the case. The only way our surveyors and astronomers can find out which—whether onion, billiard ball, or lemon—they are standing on is to take samplings of the lengths of various arcs of the meridian at all latitudes.

We know now that the Earth is shaped like a roundish onion that has rolled down the cellar stairs and been battered slightly in the process. But they did not know it then. We do not know all about it yet, though the first serious effort to find out was begun about 1750. The kings of Spain and France had been induced to sponsor the appropriate expeditions, since in such world-wide undertakings international co-operation is essential, and in those days any major effort could only be made at the whim of a king. They authorized a joint expedition to the Spanish possession of Peru, which then included what we know now as Ecuador. La Condamine was in charge, and his task was to measure three degrees of a meridian adjacent to the Equator. At the same time, one Maupertuis went to Lapland to measure an arc from the top of the Gulf of Bothnia to the Arctic Sea. Wildly varying degrees of eccentricity were arrived at and it was apparent that the more they measured the less they knew. For the Maupertuis figures indicated that the Earth was not an oblate spheroid as postulated, but a prolate one.

The surveyors turned back to the more convenient middle latitudes. There they measured the ten degrees of arc lying between Barcelona and Dunquerque, then offset the line and ran up Britain with it as far as the Shetlands. By 1792 the scientists thought they had the answer. Lavoisier and others worked out the metric system with the meter as its base—supposedly exactly one ten millionth of the polar-equatorial distance. In 1801 Napoleon solemnly promulgated the system; the meter was the last word in accuracy. That it was not, but only a fair approximation, was due to several causes. For one, the profile of the Earth had other tricks up its sleeve that the French savants hadn’t dreamed of. Moreover, their methods, judged by modern standards, had certain crudities. But more will be said of methods a little later, and of the subtle problems that are forever rising to plague the surveyor.

AS great wars invariably do, the Napoleonic Wars brought an abrupt stop to all sciences depending upon international co-operation. But the moment they were over, the geodecists were at it again. This time they bit off the biggest chunk yet—the measurement of the long arc of land meridian stretching from the mouth of the Danube in the Black Sea straight up through Russia and Finland to the Murmansk coast. That arc is over twenty-five degrees long and has the added virtue of running over plains country most of the way. Yet it took from 1816 to 1855 before the work was done. They learned more about the geoid, but ran into a puzzling flattening in the higher middle latitudes. So they went on to Spitzbergen and measured the short arc available there. In the meantime, work had been done in other countries, among them the United States.

Still the answer eluded them, though as early as 1841 the figure known as the Bessel Spheroid had been adopted as the ideal one of reference. No one today accepts the Bessel figure as the correct one, but the surveyors of Europe still cling to it, chiefly for the reason that it seems to fit the contour of Europe fairly well, and more practically because they have mountains of tables and computations based on it and the shift to a more ideal one would be impossibly costly. Our own Coast and Geodetic Survey uses the Clarke Spheroid of 1866, which is somewhat flatter than the Bessel one, but conforms more closely to this continent. The true spheroid is thought to lie somewhere in between. In the meantime—and between wars—the surveyors of the world plod on, doing a little here and a little there and begging their governments for appropriations.

The task is truly stupendous and probably will never be completely done. The geoid they envisage is the figure the Earth would present if it were covered wholly by water. We, therefore, take the mean levels of the oceans as they exist as our starting point. That alone is a sufficiently hard task, as the oceans rise and fall twice daily with the tides, and prevailing winds pile up water for weeks at a time where it should not be. But by working patiently over the years with many tide gauges and duly correcting the results for the phase of the Moon and other things, a working basis for a beginning has been fairly well established. We think we know with some exactitude what we mean by mean sea level. But the moment the geodecist starts inland, his troubles begin.

The land is not flat. Vast areas of it are in accessible. Worst of all, its composition is far from being homogeneous. The last trait is more troublesome than would at first appear, for the lack of homogeneity of the land masses has a disturbing effect on g, the value of the acceleration due to the force of gravity. Which is unfortunate, for g has other uses than merely telling how fast things fall. It is, or should be, an infallible way of determining the elevation of land.

Any high school student knows that g is a reliable constant and that its value is thirty-two feet per second. But the simple, round figure given in our intermediate physics text books is an oversimplification of the fact; it is at best a mean, or a theoretical value. To find what g actually is at any particular spot requires the swinging of a pendulum of known characteristics for many weary hours and counting the total swings against time. In the past few decades surprising results have been obtained.

Generally speaking, the force of gravity varies inversely with the distance from the attracting body. Therefore, since the Polar semidiameter is less than the Equatorial, we may expect objects to fall faster over the poles than at the Equator. They do, and also for the reason that g is tempered somewhat by the centrifugal force applied by the Earth’s spin—though our planet’s angular speed of rotation is only half that of the hour hand of a watch. So g is a function of latitude. And also of elevation, for a mountaintop is farther removed from the center of the Earth than the seashore. But pendulum experiments show variations due to the density of the underlying crust of the Earth. It may surprise many to learn that the ooze of the ocean bottoms, cubic mile for cubic mile, is far heavier than our seemingly massive mountains. That is the reason the mountain ranges have been squeezed upward. The g over Nebraska and Missouri is more out of proportion than over the Rockies, due to the denser sedimentary soil beneath.

It follows from that, that while g is an extremely useful adjunct in surveying, it is only one more tool. Coupled with other surveying methods, it is a check and it also tells us something of the nature of the substrata. The result is that the geodecists assist the geologists and vice versa—each assisting the other in making approximations, then further refining their observations.

There are other methods of telling elevation, such as vertical triangulation—which is not practicable except in rugged country—and the use of the barometer. But the barometer is even more subject than g to local conditions, varying as it does with humidity and temperature and more obscured causes. In consequence, the surveyer has had to perfect spirit leveling. In its highest form it is called “precise leveling.” The standards for that are high. No line of levels is acceptable to the Coast and Geodetic Survey where the probable error exceeds a millimeter to the kilometer. And in this connection we must bear in mind that the elevations of the Earth are not like the elevations of the various layers of a layer cake, but like the differences between the outer and inner shells that make up an onion. The levels are actually observed as tangents to the surface of the Earth at the point taken, but if carried faithfully and far enough, would result in gross errors. How gross will be at once apparent when one remembers that the Earth’s surface falls away from the tangent at the rate of six hundred feet in the first thirty miles, or twenty-four hundred feet in double that distance! The surveyor, therefore, has to be constantly correcting for that drop due to curvature, even while he is trying to determine just what that curvature is. Higher surveying is something like trying to hoist one’s self by his bootstraps.

Yet, is it necessary to run the levels inland, for it is inland that the measurements of the meridian can only be made, and those measurements must later be reduced to sea level—whatever that really is. The problem looks insuperable, but marvelous accomplishments have been made. But essentially the program for the past three centuries has been this: make an assumption; measure; correct assumption; measure; re-correct—and on and on. The ultimate approximation is still a long way ahead of us.

TO get back to the business of the measurement of an arc of a meridian itself, let’s digress a moment from method to resume the history of the study of the world from where we left it with the establishment of the two principal geoids of reference. In 1898 the governments of Mexico, the United States, and Canada, made a mutual agreement to measure that portion of the Ninety-eighth Meridian that lies in their respective territories. It is the longest possible one to be found on land in North America, being over sixty degrees long and extending from within twenty degrees of the Pole to the Pacific a little south of Acapulco, Mexico. It also possesses the advantage of running over plains country much of the way, crossing as it does the Province of Manitoba, our prairie States and considerable fairly even country to the south. A great deal of work has already been done on this job—and on many others, at the same time—but it is a task of great magnitude and cannot be finished without a great deal of time and money. A glance at some of the things a field party has to do on a primary triangulation will show why.

Let us say that it is desired to measure the meridian from A to D as shown in the No. 2 Diagram of the figure. Assume that the arc is about ten degrees, or roughly six hundred miles, and that a range of mountains, a forest, a considerable lake, and a big city lie between its ends. It is manifestly impossible to measure the distance directly along the ground, so it must be done indirectly by triangulation. That will require two or more base lines—one to start from and the others as checks—which will not necessarily have to lie on the meridian itself—as shown—but at any convenient nearby place. Since the geographical co-ordinates of the end points A and D must be known to three decimal places of seconds of latitude and longitude, and the distance between them with an uncertainty of less than one part in a million and a half—which tolerance amounts to about half in inch every fifteen miles—the surveyer must lay out his base lines with the utmost care.

The end points will have to be located geographically by observations on celestial bodies. That is usually done at night. The latitude is determined by observing the altitude of selected stars at the moment of their meridian passage; the longitude by the time of that passage. We have the advantage of our ancestors in now possessing accurate star tables, but are especially fortunate in the matter of time. Formerly chronometers were depended upon. They still are, but now they may be checked daily or oftener by radio buzz.

The most laborious part of the base line establishment is the actual measurement of it. The site must be level, and since level stretches of several miles in length are rarely to be found, it must be made level. That is done exactly as it would be done for a no-grade section of railroad—by cut and fill. Once the site is leveled, the measurement can start.

In the earliest days that was done by dragging chain or tape, but the best tapes stretch with pull and expand with heat, and however carefully both sources of error are measured and compensated for, the residual errors are intolerable. Then came the day of the Invar steel ice-packed bar, but even that has been superseded. Invar steel has a remarkable low coefficient of expansion, and when housed in a tube of crushed ice with only the polished faces of the end of the bar exposed to the outer air is very constant in length, but yet less reliable than the perfectionists of the Coast and Geodetic Survey could bear. Today they use the Duplex Measuring Rod, which is more accurate and does not require expensive and often impossible icing.

This rod really consists of two rods—tubes, rather—one of brass and the other of steel, set close together in a common housing. The whole, some five meters long, rests on a pair of tripods with leveling heads such as support theodolites. The ends of the rods protrude just a little and may be extended slightly by adjustment knobs fitted with verniers that may be read under a microscope. Two Duplexes are carefully lined up at the start, almost in contact with each other, and leveled. Then the tubes are brought into bare contact by means of the knobs, brass to brass and steel to steel. They are allowed merely to touch; pressure would shorten them! The exact temperatures and the lengths used are noted, then the rear rod is switched forward and the line extended.

The virtue of this arrangement is that two simultaneous lines are run, one with rods of brass, the other of steel. Since both metals expand at different rates, the gross lengths of the two lines will not be the same. But the difference of the expansion of the two rods—expansion being a highly reliable phenomenon—tells the surveyors the temperature to more decimal places than they could hope to learn by direct measurement of it. So, when they apply their temperature corrections, they are not a great way from being right.

An interesting feature of this Duplex rod is that the tube wall thickness of each tube is based on that metal’s conductivity and also with regard to its specific heat. Moreover, each rod is nickel-plated, so that they will then have equal power of absorbing and radiating heat. The resultant expansions, therefore, are strictly comparable.

THE surveyors may measure and remeasure the base line a number of times, averaging the results, but once they are satisfied with it, they are ready to proceed with the triangulation proper. By then the “signals” will have been built at strategic points all over the country they are to cover. A signal is something like a tripod oil derrick, except that it is built double, one tripod within the other, and without mutual contact. The purpose of the double construction is to permit the observer to mount his instrument atop the inner tower while standing himself on the outer. This is to keep his pulse and breathing and shifting of weight from time to time from jiggling the theodolite. The signal is also fitted with a carefully centered flagpole or other sighting point, so that it may in its turn be observed from another station.

The observer climbs to his station, sets up his theodolite, carefully shields it with a big umbrella, and starts to work. The umbrella is to keep direct sunshine off his instrument, as otherwise the tripod leg on the sunny side would keep expanding and pushing the theodolite out of level. A great deal of work is done at night, the reason being that it is possible to see lights a great deal farther than day signals—a necessity where continuous hazy atmosphere is encountered.

A theodolite is a glorified engineer’s transit, being larger, heavier and far more accurately built and graduated. They are carried in padded boxes and handled like babies, and are subject to many field adjustments which it would be tedious to describe here. It is sufficient to say that by the time they have been put into operation, they are as level and as accurately pointed as human ingenuity can do the job.

The observer next proceeds to measure the angles between all the other signals in sight of him, going entirely around the horizon. But he takes them one by one, measuring each angle hundreds of times. He gains a great deal in accuracy by accumulating his observed angles, rather than adding up a great many and averaging the results. This he does by manipulating his two azimuth plates so that each observation is added to the sum of its predecessors. An instrument large enough to be read to fractions of a second of arc would be too heavy to lug around, so the fractions are arrived at by dividing the sum of a great many observed angles by the number of them. Thus, what would appear as a thirty-degree angle to an ordinary engineer, equipped with a transit whose vernier only reads to half minutes, would come out to be 30° 00’ 06.14 to a geodetic engineer who has a theodolite whose vernier can be read only to the nearest second. That is because he has observed that particular angle one thousand times and the accumulated total is 3001° 42′ 22″, which divided by a thousand gives the above.

To make dead sure that he has it right, he then goes at it backward and unwinds his angle! The result ought to be 00-00-00, but rarely is. So he has a second thousand readings to average with his first. Then to the next angle, the next and the next, until he is back to where he started. He has finished at that station.

All but his notes, that is. The sum of those angles must be 360°, plus or minus nothing. He may very well have an excess or shortage of a second or a fraction thereof. He will, therefore, doctor all his angles slightly by distributing the error among them. Then he goes on, station by station, until they are all done. It may take years for him and his mates to get from one end of their net to the other, depending on their luck with the weather, the size of the net and the number of men employed. But eventually there will come the day when they tie in to the base line at the far end.

The computation begins at this point—some of it in the field, most of it at head quarters at Washington. The interior angles of a plane triangle have to add up to 180°, but the interior angles of a spherical triangle may add up to a lot more. On this earth, as soon as a triangle gets to be as big as about seventy square miles, it rates another second. The bigger the triangle, the greater the “spherical excess.” So our field man checks over all his triangles and has to do some more doctoring. It may seem paradoxical, but while the sum of the angles about a single point remains the same, the triangles may have anything in them. He has to know whether they are approximately right before submitting them to the boss.

The computers at the head office check everything and compute from one terminal base line to the other through various routes of selected triangles. They are very likely not to come out the same even though a geodecist scorns anything briefer than a seven-place log table. There will be discrepancies in the lengths of the legs of the various triangles depending upon the approach. At length, when all the preliminary computation is done, the intricate mathematical critique known as the Theory of Least Squares Adjustment is applied. That reveals the weak lengths in the chains and where the greatest likelihood of error exists. With those clues at hand, the computers proceed to distribute the errors in the proportion indicated. In the end final values are assigned and the field notes filed away.

SUCH Primary Triangulation nets cover many parts of our country. They are linked together by Secondary nets, the establishment of which are less exacting. They are further filled out by a system of Tertiary nets where the standards are even lower, but yet far higher than those by which ordinary land surveyors and other engineers work. Finally, the Geologic Survey fills in the grids with topography, which is tied to the entire basic structure. At last the maps are published and made available to the nation. Civil engineers of every kind make use of them, whether to locate railroads or highways, or to compute drainage areas for flood-control projects or culvert design; and State and county engineers tie to them when establishing boundaries. The practical value of the work done by these unpublicized government agencies alone justifies the meager appropriations on which they work. For the cost to the country of careless or ignorant basic survey work is far greater than is generally realized.

As an example of the consequences of crude work of our forebears, I shall mention one example, for it is a typical one of what breeders of grief and litigation sloppy surveying can lead to. It promises to give rise to contention for years to come.

The eastern boundary of the Texas Panhandle, which separates that part of the State from the State of Oklahoma, is defined as the one hundredth degree of longitude west of Greenwich. The line in question has been a boundary for more than a century; the above definition is rooted in historical fact. It was so described in an old treaty between France and Spain, concerning the boundaries between the possession of their territories Louisiana and New Spain. It has been persistently confirmed by later treaties between their successors—between the United States and Spain, after the Louisiana Purchase; between the United States and the Republic of Texas; and eventually between the United States—acting for the Indian and Oklahoma Territories—and the State of Texas. The boundary has always been the One Hundredth Meridian. Early surveys located it and marked its corners. The early surveys happened to not only be wrong, but badly wrong. They not only marked it as being many hundreds of feet west of where it really is, but skewed it. And that is how the trouble began.

Ordinarily, a boundary dispute between two States is a matter of small moment to anyone but the fiscal authorities of the States themselves, since what is transferred amounts chiefly to the authority to levy taxes. But when Texas wins an award in an important border dispute, it is a different matter. For Texas, alone of all the States, entered the Union late and as a sovereign nation. She reserved her public lands to herself, with the result that the United States does not own, or ever owned, a single acre of Texas public lands. Now, the validity of a deed derives from the validity of the original land patent from which it springs. So when it was discovered that this more than hundred-mile strip of land was not in Oklahoma but in Texas, there was hob to pay. Though in parts of it there are producing gas and oil fields, every single landowner on it finds that he does not own his land, and never owned it! For the original grants of land were made by the United States government, which was without the right to make them. The Texan who discovered the error made haste to purchase the entire tract from the land office of that State. Now what?

Endless litigation, apparently. The supreme court of the United States has already issued its final ruling on the subject. The boundary is wherever the One Hundredth Meridian is, not where someone may have supposed it to be. The survey has been made and the boundary moved. All taxes previously paid to Oklahoma were erroneously paid; any income derived from the land by its former occupants is recoverable by someone—maybe. The situation looks to this writer like a lawyer’s paradise. And there you are—the results of careless field work.

HAVING digressed to the extent of relating that one case—though there are many thousands of others—one thing more should be mentioned in connection with Geodesy. That is the item known as Back Azimuth. If the direction of B from A is its azimuth from A, then A’s direction from B is known as the back azimuth. They are not merely directions in reverse—that is, if B is southeast of A, then A is not northeast of B. Not ever. If they are close together, the discrepancy will not be much; if they are distant from one another, the discrepancy is enormous. This is a harder thing to explain to the layman than why you skip a Wednesday, or have two successive Wednesdays when you cross the International Date Line. But I’ll tackle it.

It happens that on certain special great circles and in certain special cases, back azimuth is exactly 180° different from azimuth. Points on any meridian may be due north or south of one another; points on the Equator may be east or west of one another. That’s all. There are no other special cases. Anywhere else, or in any other direction—even on those selected circles—the direction coming back differs from that going.

To try and clear that up, I am going to use a silly so-called brain teaser now current as the horrid example. It goes like this: “If you walked five miles due south, then five miles due east, then five miles due north and wound up where you started from, where are you? Why, at the North Pole, of course.” Wrong. All wrong. The creator of that little gem was blissfully unaware of back azimuth, and therefore the fallacy in his brain teaser. Let’s have a look at it.

Figure 3 of the Diagram represents a five-mile circle about the Pole. It makes a very handy illustration, for at the Pole the convergence of the meridians is most obvious, and also the small area involved makes it possible to treat the situation as if it occurred on a plane figure and not a spherical one. So we will trace the Polar wanderer and see where he comes out.

He walks due south to A. There he turns due east. Due east would be at right angles away from north. If he goes five miles in that direction, he will wind up at B. Very well. He’s at B. Now, if he goes due north from there for five miles, he will arrive at C, which is about two miles short of the Pole. The hypothenuse of a right triangle is longer than its sides, and he can’t improve on it. Perhaps the author of the stunt intended him to travel the obviously circular path to B, but then, that would not be due east, unless the walker were hairsplitter enough—and mathematics would permit—to break up his journey into an infinite number of infinitesimally small steps. No; due east, if he persisted long enough on the great circle that leads due east from A, would take him within five miles of the South Pole and back to A again. Nor would turning a second right angle at B and going to C help the situation any. He would still be five miles from the Pole. You work it out; I can’t.

Here’s what’s wrong. B is east of A. But A is northwest of B. Any conscientious observer station at B with a sight of both A and the Pole would swear to it. There’s your back azimuth. Due to the convergence of the meridians, no great circle crossing them at any angle whatever, no matter how closely spaced the meridians, will ever cross successive ones at quite the same angle.

In connection with that, try to dope out what direction a place in Siberia, exactly 180° east of New York and on the same parallel of latitude, is from New York, and vice versa. I contend they are north of each other. Certainly if you went due east from New York you would never come within thousands of miles of Siberia. If everything is foggy still, let me suggest the habit of globe study in place of maps.

HAVING dealt somewhat briefly with ways and means, let’s return to the main theme—what is the form and size of the Earth? It may have been observed already that everything said so far deals chiefly with the Northern Hemisphere. The studies of our half of the globe have developed anomalies enough, since among other things we have learned that our world is some two hundred fifty meters thicker ninety degrees away from the Meridian of Greenwich than it is where Greenwich crosses the Equator. Is there, then, any reason for believing that the Southern Hemisphere is symmetrical with respect to our own? Who knows? Not much has been done there. Not much can be done there—there is so much water and so little land.

Arcs of meridians have been measured in Uganda and Rhodesia, and no doubt some geodetic work has been done in Australia and South America. There are two likely places where work might be done, but the fact remains they have not been exploited yet. The two adequately long meridians lying in the Southern Hemisphere are in Africa and South America respectively. The first is the extension of the old Finland-Danubian line measured during the first half of the last century. If that were prolonged, it could be followed almost to Capetown—the longest continuous land arc anywhere. The other is the Sixty-fifth Meridian west of Greenwich which traverses South America from Venezuela to Patagonia. It has the defect of crossing almost impassable mountain ranges and the notoriously inhospitable Valley of the Amazon, with the further defect of lying in relatively poor and thinly populated country. From the present looks of things, it will be another century before those lines are run. Until then we can only take it on faith that our Earth is onion-shaped all over, instead of being a Burbank cross with a pear.

As things stand now, we know the diameter of the Earth to within about a half mile—a matter of no great concern to anyone but a geophysicist. It is entirely possible that we shall never hereafter reduce the amount of that uncertainty by much. Our Mother Earth is an enigmatic—and unstable—creature. The same tides that daily sweep the seas also sweep the supposedly rigid continents. There are, moreover, vast subsidences and upheavals in constant progress. Eccentricity and lack of homogenuity cause our plumb lines to point to anywhere but the center of the Earth, unless by accident. Our poles of rotation wobble, and when they do our latitudes and longitudes wobble with them. Likewise our magnetic poles wander about and the agonic lines between them are in ceaseless motion. It is going to take some time to get to know our home planet. Until then, the stairs can wait.

Blind Alley

Unknown, June, 1943

NOTHING was further from Mr. Feathersmith’s mind that dealings with streamlined, mid-twentieth-century witches or dickerings with the Devil. But something had to be done. The world was fast going to the bowwows, and he suffered from an overwhelming nostalgia for the days of his youth. His thoughts constantly turned to Cliffordsville and the good old days when men were men and God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. He hated modern women, the blatancys of the radio, That Man in the White House, the war—

Mr. Feathersmith did not feel well. His customary grouch—which was a byword throughout all the many properties of Pyramidal Enterprises, Inc.—had hit an all-time high. The weather was rotten, the room too hot, business awful, and everybody around him a dope. He loathed all mention of the war, which in his estimation had been bungled from the start. He writhed and cursed whenever he thought of priorities, quotas and taxes; he frothed at the mouth at every new government regulation. His plants were working night and day on colossal contracts that under any reasonable regime would double his wealth every six months, but what could he expect but a few paltry millions?

He jabbed savagely at a button on his desk, and before even the swiftest footed of messengers could have responded, he was irritably rattling the hook of his telephone.

“Well?” he snarled, as a tired, harassed voice answered. “Where’s Paulson? Wake him up! I want him.” Paulson popped into the room with an inquiring, “Yes, sir?” Mr. Paulson was his private secretary and to his mind stupid, clumsy and unambitious. But he was a male. For Mr. Feathersmith could not abide the type of woman that cluttered up offices in these decadent days. Everything about them was distasteful—their bold, assured manner; their calm assumption of efficiency, their persistent invasion of fields sacred to the stronger and wiser sex. He abhorred their short skirts, their painted faces and their varnished nails, the hussies! And the nonchalance with which they would throw a job in an employer’s face if he undertook to drive them was nothing short of maddening. Hence Mr. Paulson.

“I’m roasting,” growled Mr. Feathersmith. “This place is an oven.”

“Yes, sir,” said the meek Paulson, and went to the window where an expensive air-conditioning unit stood. It regulated the air, heating it in winter, cooling if in summer. It was cold and blustery out and snow was in the air; Mr. Feathersmith should have been grateful. But he was not. It was a modern gadget, and though a touch of the hand was all that was needed to regulate it, he would have nothing to do with it. All Paulson did was move a knob one notch.

“What about the Phoenix Development Shares?” barked the testy old man. “Hasn’t Ulrich unloaded those yet? He’s had time enough.”

“The S. E. C. hasn’t approved them yet,” said Paulson, apologetically. He might have added, but thought best not to, that Mr. Farquhar over there had said the prospectus stank and that the whole proposition looked like a bid for a long-term lease on a choice cell in a Federal penitentiary.

“Aw-r-rk,” went Mr. Feathersmith, “a lot of Communists, that’s what they are. What are we coming to? Send Clive in.”

“Mr. Clive is in court, sir. And so is Mr. Blakeslee. It’s about the reorganization plan for the Duluth, Moline & Southern—the bondholders’ protective committee—”

“Aw-r-rk,” choked Mr. Feathersmith. Yes, those accursed bondholders—always yelping and starting things. “Get out. I want to think.”

His thoughts were bitter ones. Never in all his long and busy life had things been as tough as now. When he had been simply Jack Feathersmith, the promoter, it had been possible to make a fortune overnight. You could lose at the same rate, too, but still a man had a chance. There were no starry-eyed reformers always meddling with him. Then he had become the more dignified “entrepreneur,” but the pickings were still good. After that he had styled himself “investment banker” and had done well, though a certain district attorney raised some nasty questions about it and forced some refunds and adjustments. But that had been in the ’30s when times were hard for everybody. Now, with a war on and everything, a man of ability and brains ought to mop up. But would they let him? Aw-r-rk!

Suddenly he realized he was panting and heaving and felt very, very weak. He must be dying. But that couldn’t be right. No man of any age kept better fit. Yet his heart was pounding and he had to gasp for every breath. His trembling hand fumbled for the button twice before he found it. Then, as Paulson came back, he managed a faint, “Get a doctor—I must be sick.”

For the next little while things were vague. A couple of the hated females from the outer office were fluttering and cooing about the room, and one offered him a glass of water which he spurned. Then he was aware of a pleasant-faced young chap bending over him listening to his chest through a stethoscope. He discovered also that one of those tight blood-pressure contraptions was wrapped around his arm. He felt the prick of a needle. Then he was lifted to a sitting position and given a couple of pills.

“A little stroke, eh?” beamed the young doctor, cheerily. “Well, you’ll be all right in a few minutes: The ephedrine did the trick.”

Mr. Feathersmith ground his teeth. If there was anything in this topsy-turvy modern age he liked less than anything else it was the kind of doctors they had. A little stroke, eh? The young whippersnapper! A fresh kid, no more. Now take old Dr. Simpson, back at Cliffordsville. There was a doctor for you—a sober, grave man who wore a beard and a proper Prince Albert coat. There was no folderol about him—newfangled balderdash about basal metabolism, X-rays, electrocardiograms, blood counts and all that rot. He simply looked at a patient’s tongue, asked him about his bowels and then wrote a prescription. And he charged accordingly.

“Do you have these spells often?” asked the young doctor. He was so damned cheerful about it, it hurt.

“Never,” blared Mr. Feathersmith; “never was sick a day in my life. Three of you fellows pawed over me for three days, but couldn’t find a thing wrong. Consolidated Mutual wrote me a million straight life on the strength of that and tried their damnest to sell me another million. That’s how good I am.”

“Pretty good,” agreed the doctor with a laugh, “When was that?”

“Oh, lately—fifteen years ago.”

“Back in ’28 huh? That was when even insurance companies didn’t mind taking a chance now and then. You were still in your fifties then, I take it?”

“I’m as fit as a fiddle yet,” asserted the old man doggedly. He wanted to pay this upstart off and be rid of him.

“Maybe,” agreed the doctor, commencing to put his gear away, “but you didn’t look it a little while ago. If I hadn’t got here when I did—”

“Look here, young man,” defied Mr. Feathersmith, “you can’t scare me.”

“I’m not trying to,” said the young man, easily. “If a heart block can’t scare you, nothing can. Just the same you’ve got to make arrangements. Either with a doctor or an undertaker. Take your choice. My car’s downstairs if you think I’ll do.”

“Aw-r-rk,” spluttered Mr. Feathersmith, but when he tried to get up he realized how terribly weak he was. He let them escort him to the elevator, supporting him on either side, and a moment later was being snugged down on the back seat of the doctor’s automobile.

THE drive uptown from Wall Street was as unpleasant as usual. More so, for Mr. Feathersmith had been secretly dreading the inevitable day when he would fall into a doctor’s hands, and now that it happened, he looked out on the passing scene in search of diversion. The earlier snow had turned to rain, but there were myriads of men and lots of equipment clearing up the accumulation of muck and ice. He gazed at them sourly—scrape, scrape, scrape—noise, clamor and dirt, all symptomatic of the modern city. He yearned for Cliffordsville where it rarely snowed, and when it did it lay for weeks in unsullied whiteness on the ground. He listened to the gentle swishing of the whirling tires on the smooth, wet pavement, disgusted at the monotony of it. One street was like another, one city like another—smooth, endless concrete walled in by brick and plate glass and dreary rows of lamp posts. No one but a fool would live in a modern city. Or a modern town, for that matter, since they were but unabashed tiny imitations of their swollen sisters. He sighed. The good old days were gone beyond recapture.

It was that sigh and that forlorn thought that turned his mind to Forfin. Forfin was a shady fellow he knew and once or twice had employed. He was a broker of a sort, for the lack of better designation. He hung out in a dive near Chatham Square and was altogether a disreputable person, yet he could accomplish strange things. Such as dig up information known only to the dead, or produce prophecies that could actually be relied on. The beauty of dealing with him was that so long as the fee was adequate—and it had to be that—he delivered the goods and asked no questions. His only explanation of his peculiar powers was that he had contacts—gifted astrologers and numerologists, unprincipled demonologists and their ilk. He was only a go-between, he insisted, and invariably required a signed waiver before undertaking any assignment. Mr. Feathersmith recalled now that once when he had complained of a twinge of rheumatism that Forfin had hinted darkly at being able to produce some of the water of the Fountain of Youth. At a price, of course. And when the price was mentioned, Mr. Feathersmith had haughtily ordered him out of the office.

The doctor’s office was the chamber of horrors he had feared. There were many rooms and cubbyholes filled with shiny adjustable enameled torture chairs and glassy cabinets in which rows of cruel instruments were laid. There were fever machines and other expensive-looking apparatus, and a laboratory full of mysterious tubes and jars. White-smocked nurses and assistants flitted noiselessly about like helpful ghosts. They stripped him and weighed him and jabbed needles in him and took his blood. They fed him messy concoctions and searched his innards with a fluoroscope; they sat him in a chair and snapped electrodes on his wrists and ankle to record the pounding of his heart on a film. And after other thumpings, listenings and measurings, they left him weary and quivering to dress himself alone.

Naked as he was, and fresh from the critical probing of the doctor and his gang, he was unhappily conscious of how harshly age had dealt with him after all. He was pink and lumpy now where he had once been firm and tanned. His spindly shanks seemed hardly adequate for the excess load he now carried about his middle. Until now he had valued the prestige and power that goes with post-maturity, but now, for the first time in his life, he found himself hankering after youth again. Yes, youth would be desirable on any terms. It was a thoughtful Mr. Feathersmith who finished dressing that afternoon.

The doctor was waiting for him in his study, as infernally cheerful as ever. He motioned the old man to a chair.

“You are a man of the world,” he began, “so I guess you can take it. There is nothing to be alarmed over—immediately. But you’ve got to take care of yourself. If you do, there are probably a good many years left in you yet. You’ve got a cardiac condition that has to be watched, some gastric impairments, your kidneys are pretty well shot, there are signs of senile arthritis, and some glandular failure and vitamin deficiency. Otherwise, you are in good shape.”

“Go on.” Now Mr. Feathersmith knew he would have to get in touch with Forfin.

“You’ve got to cut out all work, avoid irritation and excitement, and see me at least weekly. No more tobacco, no liquor, no spicy or greasy foods, no late hours. I’m giving you a diet and some prescriptions as to pills and tablets you will need—”

The doctor talked on, laying down the law in precise detail. His patient listened dumbly, resolving steadfastly that he would do nothing of the sort. Not so long as he had a broker on the string who could contact magicians.

THAT night Mr. Feathersmith tried to locate Forfin, but Forfin could not be found. The days rolled by and the financier felt better. He was his old testy self again and promptly disregarded all his doctor’s orders. Then he had his second heart attack, and that one nearly took him off. After that he ate the vile diet, swallowed his vitamin and gland-extract pills, and duly went to have his heart examined. He began liquidating his many business interests. Sooner or later his scouts would locate Forfin. After that he would need cash, and lots of it. Youth, he realized now, was worth whatever it could be bought for.

The day he met with his lawyers and the buyers lawyers to complete the sale of Pyramidal Enterprises, Inc. Mr. Blakeslee leaned over and whispered that Forfin was back in town. He would be up to see Mr. Feathersmith that night. A gleam came into the old man’s eye and he nodded. He was ready. By tomorrow all his net worth would be contained in cash and negotiable securities. It was slightly over thirty-two million dollars altogether, an ample bribe for the most squeamish demonologist and enough left over for the satisfaction of whatever dark powers his incantations might raise. He was confident money would do the trick. It always had, for him, and was not the love of it said to be the root of all evil?

Mr. Feathersmith was elated. Under ordinary circumstances he would have conducted a transaction of the magnitude of selling Pyramidal with the maximum of quibbling and last minute haggling. But today he signed all the papers with alacrity. He even let Polaris Petroleum & Pipeline go without a qualm, though the main Polaris producing field was only a few miles south of his beloved Cliffordsville. He often shuddered to think of what an oil development would do to a fine old town like that, but it made him money and, anyhow, he had not been back to the place since, he left it years ago to go and make his fortune.

After the lawyers had collected their papers and gone, he took one last look around. In his office, as in his apartment, there was no trace of garish chromium and red leather. It was richly finished, in quiet walnut paneling with a single fine landscape on one wall. A bookcase, a big desk, two chairs and a Persian rug completed the furnishings. The only ultramodern feature was the stock ticker and the news teletype. Mr. Feathersmith liked his news neat and hot off the griddle. He couldn’t abide the radio version, for it was adorned and embellished with the opinions and interpretations of various commentators and self-styled experts.

It was early when he got home. By chance it was raining again, and as he stepped from his limousine under the marquee canopy that hung out over the sidewalk, the doorman rushed forward with an umbrella lest a stray drop wet his financial highness. Mr. Feathersmith brushed by the man angrily—he did not relish sycophantism, he thought. Flunkies, pah! He went up in the elevator and out into the softly lit corridor that led to his apartment. Inside he found his houseboy, Felipe, listening raptly to a swing version of a classic, playing it on his combination FM radio and Victrola.

“Shut that damn, thing off!” roared Mr. Feathersmith. Symphonic music he liked, when he was in the mood for it, but nothing less.

Then he proceeded to undress and have his bath. It was the one bit of ritual in his day that he really enjoyed. His bathroom was a marvel of beauty and craftsmanship in green and gold tiles with a sunken tub. There was a needle bath, too, a glass-enclosed shower, and a sweat chamber. He reveled for a long time in the steamy water. Then, remembering that Forfin might come at any time, he hurried out.

His dinner was ready. Mr. Feathersmith glowered at the table as he sat down. It was a good table to look at, but that was not the way he felt about it. The cloth was cream-colored damask and the service exquisitely tooled sterling; in the center sat a vase of roses with sprays of ferns. But the crystal pitcher beside his plate held certified milk, a poor substitute for the vintage Ponimard he was accustomed to. Near it lay a little saucer containing the abominable pills—six of them, two red, two brown, one black, and one white.

He ate his blue points. After that came broiled pompano, for the doctor said he could not get too much fish. Then there was fresh asparagus and creamed new potatoes. He topped it off with fresh strawberries and cream. No coffee, no liqueur.

He swallowed the stuff mechanically, thinking of all the while of Chub’s place, back in Cliffordsville. There a man could get an honest-to-goodness beefsteak, two inches thick and reeking with fat, fresh cut from a steer killed that very day in Chub’s backyard. He thought, too, of Pablo, the tamale man. His stand was on the corner by the Opera House, and he kept his sizzling product in a huge lard can wrapped in an old red tablecloth. The can sat on a small charcoal stove so as to keep warm, and the whole was in a basket. Pablo dished out the greasy, shuck-wrapped morsels onto scraps of torn newspaper and one sat down on the curb and ate them with his fingers They may have been made of fragments of dog—as some of his detractors alleged—but they were good. Ten cents a dozen, they were. Mr. Feathersmith sighed another mournful sigh. He would give ten thousand dollars for a dozen of them right now—and the ability to eat them.

Feathersmith waited impatiently for Forfin to come. He called the operator and instructed her to block all calls except that announcing his expected guest. Damn that phone, anyway. All that any Tom, Dick or Harry who wanted to intrude had to do was dial a number. The old man had an unlisted phone, but people who knew where he lived called through the house switchboard notwithstanding.

At length the shifty little broker came. Mr. Feathersmith lost no time in approaches or sparring. Forfin was a practical man like himself. You could get down to cases with him without blush or apology.

“I want,” Mr. Feathersmith said, baldly, “to turn the hand of the clock back forty years. I want to go to the town of Cliffordsville, where I was born and raised, and find it just as I left it. I propose to start life all over again, Can you contact the right people for the job?”

“Phew!” commented Mr. Forfin, mopping his head. “That’s a big order. It scares me. That’ll involve Old Nick himself—”

He looked uneasily about, as if the utterance of the name was a sort of inverted blasphemy.

“Why not?” snapped the financier, bristling. “I always deal with principals. They can act. Skip the hirelings, demons, or whatever they are.”

“I know,” said Forfin, shaking his head disapprovingly, “but he’s a slick bargainer. Oh, he keeps his pacts—to the dot. But he’ll slip a fast one over just the same. It’s his habit. He gets a kick out of it—outsmarting people And it’ll cost, Cost like hell.”

“I’ll be the judge of the cost,” said said the old man, stiffly, thinking of the scant term of suffering, circumscribed years that was the best hope the doctor had held out to him, “and as to bargaining, I’m not a pure sucker. How do you think I got where I am?”

“O.K.,” said Forfin, with a shrug. “It’s your funeral. But it’ll take some doing. When do we start?”

“Now.”

“He sees mortals only by appointment, and I can’t make ’em. I’ll arrange for you to meet Madame Hecate. You’ll have to build yourself up with her. After that you’re on your own. You’d better have plenty of ready dough. You’ll need it.”

“I’ve got it,” said Mr. Feathersmith shortly. “And yours?”

“Forget it. I get my cut from them.”

THAT night sleep was slow in coming. He reviewed his decision and did not regret it. He had chosen the figure of forty deliberately. Forty from seventy left thirty—in his estimation the ideal age. If he were much younger, he would be pushed around by his seniors; if he were much older, he wouldn’t gain so much by the jump back. But at thirty he would be in the prime of physical condition, old enough to be thought of as mature by the youngsters, and young enough to command the envy of the oldsters. And, as he remembered it, the raw frontier days were past, the effete modernism yet to come.

He slept. He dreamed. He dreamed of old Cliffordsville, with its tree-lined streets and sturdy houses sitting way back, each in its own yard and behind its own picket fence. He remembered the soft clay streets and how good the dust felt between his toes when he ran barefoot in the summertime. Memories of good things to eat came to him—the old spring house and watermelons hung in bags in the well, chickens running the yard, and eggs an hour old. There was Sarah, the cow, and old Aunt Anna, the cook. And then there were the wide open business opportunities of those days. A man could start a bank or float a stock company and there were no snooping inspectors to tell him what he could and couldn’t do. There were no blaring radios, or rumbling, stinking trucks or raucous auto horns. People stayed healthy because they led the good life. Mr. Feathersmith rolled over in bed and smiled. It wouldn’t be long now!

The next afternoon Forfin called him. Madame Hecate would see him at five; and he gave a Fifth Avenue address. That was all.

Mr. Feathersmith was really surprised when he entered the building. He had thought a witch would hang out in some dubious district where there was grime and cobwebs. But this was one of the swankiest buildings in a swanky street. It was filled with high-grade jewelers and diamond merchants, for the most part. He wondered if he had heard the address wrong.

At first he was sure he had, for when he came to examine the directory board he could find no Hecate under the H’s or any witches under the W’s. He stepped over to the elevator starter and asked him. Whether there was a tenant by that name.

“If she’s on the board, there is,” said that worthy, looking Mr. Feathersmith up and down in a disconcerting fashion. He went meekly back to the board. He rubbed his eyes. There was her name—in both places “Madame Hecate, Consultant Witch. Suite 1313.”

He went back to the elevators, then noticed that the telltale arcs over the doors were numbered—10, 11, 12, 14, 15, and so on. There was no thirteenth floor. He was about to turn to the starter again when he noticed a small car down at the end of the hall. Over its door was the label,. “Express to 13th Floor.” He walked down to it and stepped inside. An insolent little guy in a red monkey jacket lounged against the starting lever. He leered up at Mr. Feathersmith and said:

“Are you sure you want to go up, pop?”

Mr. Feathersmith gave him the icy stare he had used so often to quell previous impertinences, and then stood rigidly looking out the door. The little hellion slid the door to with a shrug and started the cab.

When it stopped he got off in a small foyer that led to but a single door. The sign on the door said merely “Enter,” so Mr. Feathersmith turned the knob and went in. The room looked like any other midtown reception room. There was a desk presided over by a lanky, sour woman of uncertain age, whose only noteworthy feature was her extreme pallor and haggard eyes. The walls were done in a flat blue-green pastel color that somehow hinted at iridescence, and were relieved at the top by a frieze of interlaced pentagons of gold and black. A single etching hung on the wall, depicting a conventionalized witch astride a broomstick, silhouetted against a full moon, accompanied by a flock of bats. A pair of chairs and a sofa completed the furnishings. On the sofa a huge black cat slept on a red velvet pillow.

“Madame Hecate, is expecting you,” said the cadaverous receptionist in a harsh, metallic voice. “Please be seated.”

“Ah, a zombi,” thought Mr. Feathersmith, trying to get into the mood of his environment. Then as a gesture of good will, though he had no love for any animal, he bent over and stroked the cat. It lifted its head with magnificent deliberation, regarded him venomously for a moment through baleful green eyes; then, with the most studied contempt, spat. After that it promptly tucked its head back in its bosom as if that disposed of the matter for all eternity.

“Lucifer doesn’t like people,” remarked the zombi, powdering her already snowy face. Just then a buzzer sounded faintly, three times.

“The Credit Man is ready for you,” said the ghostly receptionist. “You’ll have to pass him first. This way, please.”

For some reason that did not astonish Mr. Feathersmith as much as some other features of the place. After all, he was a businessman, and even in dealing with the myrmidons of Hell, business was business. He followed her through the inner door and down a side passage to a little office. The fellow who received him was an affable, thin young man, with brooding, dark-brown eyes, and an errant black lock that kept falling down and getting in his eyes.

“A statement of your net worth, please,” asked the young man, indicating a chair. He turned and waved a hand about the room. It was lined with fat books, shelf after shelf of them, and there were filing cases stuffed with loose papers and photographs. “I should warn you in advance that we have already made an independent audit and know the answer. It is a formality, as it were. Thought you ought to know.”

Mr. Feathersmith gazed upon the books with wonderment. Then his blood ran chill and he felt the gooseflesh rise on him and a queer bristly feeling among the short hairs on the back of his neck. The books were all about him! There were two rows of thick volumes neatly titled in gold leaf, such as “J. Feathersmith—Private Life—Volume IX.” There was one whole side of the room lined with other books, in sets. One set was labeled “Business Transactions,” another “Subconscious Thoughts and Dreams,” and then other volumes on various related aspects of their subject. One that shocked him immensely bore the horrid title of “Indirect Murders, Et Cetera.” For an instant he did not grasp its import, until he recalled the aftermath of the crash of Trans-Mississippi Debentures. It was a company he had bought into only to find it mostly water. He had done the only thing to do and get out with a profit—he blew the water up into vapor, then pulled the plug. A number of suicides resulted. He supposed the book was about that and similar fiascoes.

He turned to face the Credit Man and was further dismayed to see that gentleman scrutinizing a copy of the contract of sale of the Pyramidal company. So he knew the terms exactly! Worse, on the blotter in plain sight was a photostat copy of a will that he had made out that very morning. It was an attempt on Mr. Feathersmith’s part to hedge. He left all his money to the Simonist Brotherhood for the propagation of religion, thinking to use it as a bargaining point with whatever demon showed up to negotiate with him. Mr. Feathersmith scratched his neck—a gesture of annoyance at being forestalled that he had not used for years. It was all the more irritating that the Credit Man was purring softly and smiling to himself.

“Well?” said the Credit Man.

Mr. Feathersmith had lost the first round and knew it. He had come in to arrange a deal and to dictate, more or less, his own terms. Now he was at a distinct disadvantage. There was only one thing to do if he wanted to go on; that was to come clean. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. There was one scribbled line on it. “Net worth—$32,673,251.03, plus personal effects.”

“As of noon, today,” added Mr. Feathersmith, handing the paper across the desk.

The Credit Man glanced at it, then shoved it into a drawer with the comment that it appeared to be substantially correct. Then he announced that was all. He could see Madame Hecate now.

MADAME Hecate turned out to be the greatest surprise so far. Mr. Feathersmith had become rather dubious as to his ability to previse these strange people he was dealing with, but was quite sure the witch would be a hideous creature with an out-jutting chin meeting a down-hanging beak and with the proverbial hairy warts for facial embellishments. She was not like that at all. Madame Hecate was as cute a little trick as could be found in all the city, She was a vivacious, tiny brunette with sparkling eyes and a gay, carefree manner, and was dressed in a print house dress covered by a tan smock,

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Feathersmith,” she gurgled, wiping her hands on a linen towel and tossing it into a handy container. “The audience with His Nibs is arranged for about an hour from now. Ordinarily he only comes at midnight, but lately he has had to spend so much time on Earth he works on a catch-as-catch-can basis. At the moment he is in Germany—it is midnight there now you know—giving advice to one of his most trusted mortal aids, No doubt you could guess the name, but for reasons you will appreciate, our clientele is regarded as confidential. But he’ll be along shortly.”

“Splendid,” said Mr. Feathersmith. For a long time it had been a saying of his that he wouldn’t wait an hour for the Devil himself. But circumstances had altered, He was glad that he had only an hour to wait..

“Now,” said the witch, shooting him a coy, sidelong glance, “let’s get the preliminaries over with: A contract will have to be drawn up, of course, and that takes time. Give me the main facts as to what you want, and I’ll send them along to the Chief Fiend in the Bureau of Covenants. By the time His Nibs gets here, the scribes will have everything ready.”

She produced a pad and a pencil and waited, smiling sweetly at him.

“Well, uh,” he said, a trifle embarrassed because he did not feel like telling her quite all that was in his mind—she seemed such an innocent to be in the witch business, “I had an idea that it would be nice to go back to the town of my boyhood to spend the rest of my life—”

“Yes?” she said eagerly: “And then—”

“Well,” he finished lamely, “I guess that’s about all. Just put me back in Cliffordsville as of forty years ago—that’s all I want.”

“How unique!” she exclaimed, delightedly. “You know, most men want power and wealth and success in love and all that sort of thing. I’m sure His Nibs will grant this request instantly.”

Mr. Feathersmith grunted. He was thinking that he had already acquired all those things from an uninformed, untrained start in that same Cliffordsville just forty years ago. Knowing what he did now about men and affairs and the subsequent history of the world, what he would accomplish on the second lap would astonish the world. But the thought suggested an addendum.

“It should be understood,” he appended, “that I am to retain my present … uh … wisdom, unimpaired, and complete memory—”

“A trifle, Mr. Feathersmith,” she bubbled, “a trifle, I assure you.”

He noticed that she had noted the specifications on separate sheets of paper, and since he indicated that was all, she advanced to a nearby brazier that stood on a tripod and lit them with a burning candle she borrowed from a sconce. The papers sizzled smartly into greenish flame, curled and disappeared without leaving any ash.

“They are there now,” she said: “Would you like to see our plant while you wait?”

“With pleasure,” he said, with great dignity. Indeed, he was most curious about the layout, for the room they were in was a tiny cubicle containing only a high desk and a stool and the brazier. He had expected more demoniac paraphernalia.

She led the way out and he found the place was far more extensive than he thought. It must cover the entire floor of the building. There was a long hall, and off it many doors.

“This is the Alchemical Department,” she said, turning Into the first one. “I was working in here when you came. That is why my hands were so gummy. Dragon fat is vile stuff, don’t you think?”

She flashed those glowing black eyes on him and a dazzling smile.

“I can well imagine,” he replied.

He glanced into the room. At first sight it had all the appearance of a modern chemical laboratory, though many of the vessels were queerly shaped. The queerest of all were the alchemists, of whom about a dozen sat about on high stools. They were men of incalculable age, bearded and wearing heavy-rimmed octagonal-lensed eyeglasses. All wore black smocks spattered with silvery crescents, sunbursts, stars, and such symbols. All were intent on their work. The bottles on the tables bore fantastic labels, such as “asp venom,” “dried cameleopard blood,” and “powdered unicorn horn.”

“The man at the alembic,” explained the witch, sweetly, “is compounding a modified love philter. You’d be surprised how many star salesmen depend on it. It makes them virtually irresistible. We let them have it on a commission, basis.”

She pointed out some other things, such as the two men adjusting the rheostat on an electric athanor, all of which struck Mr. Feathersmith as being extremely incongruous. Then they passed on.

The next room was the Voodoo Department, where a black sculptress was hard at work fashioning wax dolls from profile and front-view photographs of her clients’ most hated enemies. An assistant was studying a number of the finished products and occasionally thrusting pins into certain vital parts. There were other unpleasant things to be seen there and Mr. Feathersmith shuddered and suggested they pass on.

“If it affects you that way,” said the witch, with her most beguiling smile, “maybe we had better skip the next.”

The next section was devoted to Demonology, and Mr. Feathersmith was willing to pass it by, having heard something of the practices of that sect. Moreover, the hideous moans and suppressed shrieks that leaked through the wall were sufficient to make him lose any residual interest in the orgies. But it was not to be. A door was flung open and an old hag tottered out, holding triumphantly aloft a vial of glowing violet vapor.

“Look,” she cackled with hellish glee, “I caught it! The anguish of a dying hen! He! He!”

Mr. Feathersmith suffered a twinge of nausea and a bit of fright, but the witch paused long enough to coo a few of words of praise.

She popped her head into the door beyond where a senile practitioner could be seen sitting in a black robe and dunce’s cap spangled with stars and the signs of the zodiac. He was in midst of a weird planetarium.

“This is the phoniest racket in the shop,” she murmured, “but the customers love it. The old guy is a shrewd guesser. That’s why he gets by. Of course, his horoscopes and all these props are just so much hogwash—custom, you know.”

Mr. Feathersmith flicked a glance at the astrologer, then followed her into the next room. A class of neophytes appeared to be undergoing instruction in the art of Vampirism. A demon with a pointer was holding forth before a set of wall charts depicting the human circulatory system and emphasizing the importance of knowing just how to “reach the carotid artery and jugular vein.” The section just beyond was similar. It housed the Department of Lycanthropy and a tough-looking middleaged witch was lecturing on the habits of predatory animals. As Feathersmith and his guide looked in she was just concluding some remarks on the value of prior injections of aqua regia as a resistant to possible silver bullets,

He never knew what other departments were in the place, for the witch happened to glance up at one of the curious clocks that adorned the walls, She said it kept Infernal time. At any rate, His Nibs was due shortly. They must hurry to the Apparition Chamber.

That awesome place was in a class by itself. Murals showing the torments of Hell covered the long walls. At one end was a throne, at the other a full length portrait of His Nibs himself, surrounded by numerous photographs. The portrait was the conventional one of the vermilion anthropoid modified by barbed tail, cloven hoofs, horns, and a wonderfully sardonic leer. The rest of the pictures were of ordinary people—some vaguely familiar to Mr. Feathersmith.

“His Vileness always appears to mortals as one of their own kind,” explained the witch, seeing Mr. Feathersmith’s interest in the gallery. “It works out better that way.”

Two imps were bustling about, arranging candles and bowls of incense about a golden pentagon embedded in the black composition floor. There were other cabalistic designs worked into the floor by means of metallic strips set edgewise, but apparently they were for lesser demons or jinn. The one receiving attention at the moment was immediately before the throne. The witch produced a pair of ear plugs and inserted them into Mr. Feathersmith’s ears. Then she blindfolded him, patted him soothingly and told him to take it easy—it was always a little startling the first time.

It was. He heard the spewing of some type of fireworks, and the monotone of the witch’s chant. Then there was a splitting peal of thunder, a blaze of light, and a suffocating sulphurous atmosphere. In a moment that cleared and he found his bandage whisked off. Sitting comfortably on the throne before him was a chubby little man wearing a gray pinstriped business suit and smoking a cigar. He had large blue eyes, several chins, and a jovial, back-slapping expression. He might have been a Rotarian and proprietor of a moderate sized business anywhere.

“Good morning,” he said affably. “I understand you want transportation to Cliffordsville of four decades ago. My Executive Committee has approved it, and here it is—”

Satan snapped his fingers. There was a dull plop and an explosion of some sort overhead. Then a document fluttered downward. The witch caught it deftly and handed it to His Nibs, who glanced at it and presented it to Mr. Feathersmith.

Whether the paper was parchment or fine-grained asbestos mat, that gentleman could not say. But it was covered with leaping, dazzling letters of fire that were exceedingly hard to read, especially in the many paragraphs of fine print that made up the bulk of the document. Its heading was:

COMPACT

Between His Infernal Highness Satan, known hereinafter as The Party of the First Part, and one J. Feathersmith, a loyal and deserving servant, known as The Party of the Second Part To wit:

THE perusal of such a contract would have been child’s play for the experienced Mr. Feathersmith, had it not been for the elusive nature of the dancing letters, since only the part directly under his eye was legible. The rest was lost in the fiery interplay of squirming script and had the peculiar property of seeming to give a different meaning at every reading. Considered as a legal document, thought Mr. Feathersmith out of the depths of his experience, it was a honey. It seemed to mean what it purported to mean, yet—

At any rate, there was a clause there that plainly stated, even after repeated readings, that The Party of the Second Part would be duly set down at the required destination, furnished with necessary expense money and a modest stake, and thereafter left on his own.

“The compensation?” queried Mr. Feathersmith, having failed to see mention of it. “You’ll want my soul, I presume.”

“Dear me, no,” responded Satan cheerily, with a friendly pat on the knee. “We’ve owned that outright for many, many years. Money’s all we need. You see, if anything happened to you as you are, the government would get about three quarters of it and the lawyers the rest. We hate to see that three quarters squandered in subversive work—such as improved housing and all that rot. So, if you’ll kindly give us your check—”

“How much?” Mr. Feathersmith wanted to know, reaching for his checkbook.

“Thirty-three million,” said Satan” Calmly.

“That’s outrageous!” shouted the client. “I haven’t that much!”

“There was to be one percent off for cash, Your Vileness,” reminded the witch sweetly.

Mr. Feathersmith glared at both of them. He had been neatly trimmed—right down to chicken feed. His first impulse was to terminate the interview then and there. But he remembered that, given youth and opportunity, he could make any number of fortunes. He also had in mind the dismal future forecast for him by the doctor. No. The transaction had to be gone through with. He meekly signed checks for his full balance, and an order on his brokers for the delivery of all other valuables.

There was one more thing to do—sign the pact.

“Roll up your left sleeve,” said the witch. He noticed she held a needle-tipped syringe in one hand and a pad dampened with alcohol in the other. She rubbed him with the cotton, then jabbed him with the needle. When she had withdrawn a few cubic centimeters of blood, she yanked the needle out, unscrewed it and replaced it by a fountain-pen point.

“Our practitioners did awfully sloppy work in the old days,” she laughed, as she handed him the gruesomely charged pen and the pact. “You have no idea how many were lost prematurely through infection.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Feathersmith, rolling down his sleeve and getting ready to sign. He might as well go through with it—the sooner the better.

“Your transportation,” she added, handing him a folding railroad ticket with a weird assortment of long defunct or merged railroads on it, queer dates and destinations. But he saw that it ended where and when he wanted to go.

“Grand Central Station. Track 48, 10:34 tonight.”

“Better give him some cash,” suggested Satan, hauling out a roll of bills and handing them to her. Mr. Feathersmith looked at them with fast-rising anxiety; the sight of them shook him to the foundations. For they were large blanket-like sheets of paper—none smaller than a fifty—and many with yellow backs. Satan also handed over a coin purse. In which were some gold pieces and six or eight big silver dollars. Mr. Feathersmith had completely forgotten that they used such money in the old days—pennies and dollar bills were unknown in the West, and fives and tens in paper so rare as to be refused by shopkeepers. How much else had he forgotten? It rattled him so that he did not notice when Satan disappeared, and he allowed himself to be ushered out in a mumbling daze by the little witch.

BY train time, though, he had cheered up. There was just the little journey halfway across the continent to be negotiated and the matter of the forty years. No doubt that would occur during the night as a miracle of sorts. He let the redcap carry his luggage aboard the streamlined flier and snugged himself down in his compartment. He had not had to bother with having clothes of the period made to order; for the witch had intimated that those details would be taken care of automatically.

His next job was to compose the story he was going to tell to explain his return to Cliffordsville: Besides other excellent reasons, he had chosen the particular time for his rejuvenation so as to not run foul of himself in his earlier personality or any of his family. It had been just at the close of the Spanish War that both parents had died of yellow fever, leaving him an orphan and in possession of the old homestead and the parental bank account. He had lost little time in selling the former and withdrawing the latter. After that he had shaken the dust of Cliffordsville from his feet for what he thought was to be all time. By 1902 there was no member of the Feathersmith family residing in the county. His return, therefore, would be regarded merely as an ordinary return. He would give some acceptable explanations, then take up where he had left oft. Sooner or later he would pull out again—probably to Detroit to get in on the ground floor with Henry Ford, and he thought it would be a good idea to grab himself some U. S. Steel, General Motors and other comers-to-be. He licked his lips in anticipation of the killing he would make in the subsequent World War I years when he could ride Bethlehem all the way to the top, pyramiding as he went, without a tremor of fear. He also thought with some elation of how much fun it would be to get reacquainted with Daisy Norton, the girl he might have married if he had but stayed in Cliffordsville. She was cold to him then, but that was because her father was a rich aristocrat and looked down upon the struggling Feathersmiths. But this time he would marry her and the Norman acres under which the oil field lay. After that—

He had undressed automatically and climbed into his berth. He let his feverish anticipations run on, getting dozier all the time. He suddenly recalled that he really should have seen the doctor before leaving, but dismissed it with a happy smile. By the time he had hit his upper twenties he was done with whooping cough, measles and mumps. It had been all these years since, before he required the services of a doctor again. He made a mental note that when he next reached sixty he would take a few precautions. And with that happy thought he dropped off into sound sleep.

The Limited slid on through the night, silently and jarless. Thanks to its air conditioning, good springs, well-turned wheels, smooth traction, rock-ballasted roadbed and heavy rails, it went like the wind. For hundreds of miles the green lights of block signals flickered by, but now and again another train would thunder by on an eastbound track. Mr. Feathersmith gave no thought to those things as he pillowed deeper into the soft blankets, or worried about the howling blizzard raging outside. The Limited would get there on time and with the minimum of fuss. That particular Limited went fast and far that night—mysteriously it must have covered in excess of a thousand miles and got well off its usual route. For when Mr. Feathersmith did wake along toward dawn, things were uncannily different.

To begin with the train was lurching and rocking violently from side to side, and there was a persistent slapping of a flat wheel underneath. The blizzard had abated somewhat, but the car was cold. He lifted the curtain a bit and looked out on a snow-streaked, hilly landscape that strongly suggested Arkansas. Then the train stopped suddenly in the middle of a field and men came running alongside with lanterns. “A hotbox,” he heard one call, which struck him as odd, for he had not heard of hotboxes for a long time.

After about an hour, and after prolonged whistling, the train slowly got on its way again. By that time Mr. Feathersmith noticed that his berth had changed during the night. It was now an old-fashioned fore-and-aft berth with an upper pressing down upon it. He discovered he was wearing a flannel nightgown, too—another item of his past he had failed to remember, it had been so long since he had changed to silk pajamas. But by then the porter was going through the car rousing all the passengers.

“Gooch Junction in half a hour, folks,” he was saying. “Gotta get up now—dey drop the sleeper dore.”

MR. FEATHERSMITH groaned and got up. Yes, yes, of course. Through sleepers were the exception, not the rule, forty years ago. He found his underwear—red flannel union suit it was—and his shirt, a stiff-bosomed affair with detachable cuffs and a complicated arrangement of cuff holders. His shoes were Congress gaiters with elastic in the sides, and his suit of black broadcloth beginning to turn green. He got on the lower half of it and bethought himself of his morning shave. He fished under the berth for his bag and found it—a rusty old Gladstone, duly converted as promised. But there was no razor in it of any type he dared use. There was a set of straight razors and strops and a mug for soap, but he would not trust himself to operate with them. The train was much too rough for that.

But he had to wash, so he climbed out of the berth, bumping others, and found the lavatory. It was packed with half-dressed men in the process of shaving. The basins were miserable affairs of marble and supplied by creaky pumps that delivered a tablespoonful of water at a time. The car was finished in garish quartered oak, mahogany, mother-of-pearl and other bright woods fitted into the most atrocious inlays Mr. Feathersmith could have imagined. The taste in decoration, he realized, had made long steps since 1902.

His companions were “drummers”—heavy, well-fed men, all. One was in dry goods; one in coffee, tea and spices; another in whiskey; and two of the rest in patten medicines. Their conversation touched on Bryan and Free Silver, and one denounced Theodore Roosevelt’s Imperialism—said it was all wrong for us to annex distant properties like the Sandwich Islands and the Philippines. One man thought Aguinaldo was a hero, another that Funston was the greatest general of all time. But what worried them most was whether they would get to Gooch Junction at all, and if so, how much late.

“We’re only an hour behind now,” said the whiskey drummer, “but the brakeman told me there’s a bad wreck up ahead and it may take ’em all day to clear it—”

“Many killed?”

“Naw. Just a freight—engine, crew and brakeman and about a dozen tramps. That’s all.”

“Shucks. They won’t hold us up for that. They’ll just pile the stuff up and burn it.”

It was ten when they reached the Junction, which consisted of only a signal tower; a crossing, and several sidings. There was no diner on, but the butcher had a supply of candy, paper-thin ham sandwiches on stale bread, and soda pop. If one did not care for those or peanuts, he didn’t eat. Dropping the sleeper took a long time and much backing and filling, during which the locomotive ran off the rails and had to be jockeyed back on. Mr, Feathersmith was getting pretty disgusted by the time he reached the day coach and found he had to share a seat with a raw farm boy in overalls and a sloppy old felt hat. The boy had an aroma that Mr. Feathersmith had not smelled for a long, long time. And then he noticed that the aroma prevailed in other quarters, and it came to him all of a sudden that the day was Thursday and considerably removed from last Saturday and presumptive baths.

It was about that time that Mr. Feathersmith became aware that he himself had been unchanged except for wardrobe and accessories: He had expected to wake up youthful. But he did not let it worry him unduly, as he imagined the Devil would come through when he had gone all the way back. He tried to get a paper from the butcher, but all there was were day-old St. Louis papers and the news was chiefly local. He looked for the financial section and only found a quarter of a column where a dozen railroad bonds were listed. The editor seemed to ignore the Orient and Europe altogether, and there was very little about Congress. After that he settled down and tried to get used to the temperature. At one end of the car there was a potbellied cast-iron stove, kept roaring by volunteer stokers, but despite its ruddy color and the tropic heat in the two seats adjacent, the rest of the car was bitter cold.

The train dragged on all day, stopping often on bleak sidings and waiting for oncoming trains to pass. He noticed on the blackboards of the stations they passed that they were now five hours late and getting later. But no one seemed to worry. It was the expected. Mr. Feathersmith discovered he had a great turnip of a gold watch in the pocket of his waistcoat—a gorgeously flowered satin affair, incidentally—and the watch was anchored across his front by a chain heavy enough to grace the bows of a young battleship. He consulted it often, but it was no help. They arrived at Florence, where they should have been before noon, just as the sun was setting. Everybody piled out of the train to take advantage of the twenty-minute stop to eat at the Dining House there.

The food was abundant—fried ham, fried steaks, cold turkey, roast venison and fried chicken and slabs of fried salt pork. But it was all too heavy and greasy for his worn stomach. The fact that the vegetables consisted of four kinds of boiled beans plus cabbage reminded him that he did not have his vitamin tablets with him. He asked for asparagus, but people only looked amused. That was stuff for the rich and it came in little cans. No, no asparagus. Fish? At breakfast they might have salt mackerel. They could open a can of salmon. Would that do? He looked at the enormous, floury biscuits, the heavy pitchers of honey and sorghum molasses and a bowl of grits, and decided he would have just a glass of milk. The butter he never even considered, as it was a pale, anaemic salvy substance. They brought him an immense tumbler of buttermilk and he had to make the best of that.

By the time they were back in the cars, the brakeman was going down the aisle, lighting the Pintsch lamps overhead with a lamplighter. The gas had a frightful odor, but no one seemed to mind. It was “up-to-date,” not the smelly kerosene they used on some lines.

The night wore on, and in due time the familiar landscape of old Cliffordsville showed up outside the window. Another item he discovered he had forgotten was that Cliffordsville had been there before the railroad was run through. On account of curves and grades, the company had by-passed the town by a couple of miles, so that the station—or depot—stood that distance away. It would have been as good a way as any to approach the town of his childhood, except that on this day the snow had turned to drizzling rain. The delightful clay roads were all right in dry weather, but a mass of bottomless, sticky, rutted mud on a day like this. Mr. Feathersmith walked out onto the open platform of the car and down its steps. He viewed the sodden station and its waterlogged open platform with misgiving. There was but one rig that had come to meet the train. It was the Planter’s Hotel bus—a rickety affair with facing fore-and-aft seats approached from the rear by three steps and grab-irons, à la Black Maria. The driver had his storm curtains up, but they were only fastened by little brass gimmicks at the corners and flapped abominably. There were four stout horses drawing the vehicle, but they were spattered with mud up to the belly and the wheels were encrusted with foot-thick adhesions of clay.

“Stranger here?” asked the driver, as he gathered up his reins and urged the animals to break the bus out of the quagmire it had sunk down in. “I’ve been here before,” said Mr. Feathersmith, wondering savagely why—back in those good old days—somebody had not had enough gumption to grade and gravel-surface this road.

“Does Mr. Toler still run the hotel?”

“Yep. Swell hotel he’s got, too. They put in a elevator last year.”

That was a help, thought Mr. Feathersmith. As he remembered the place it had twenty-foot ceilings and was three stories high. With his heart, at least for the first day here, he was just as happy at not having to climb those weary, steep stairs. And, now that he thought of it, the Planter’s Hotel was a darn good hotel for its day and time. People said there was nothing like it closer than Dallas.

The drive in took the best part of two hours. The wind tore at the curtains and gusts of rain blew in. Three times they bogged down completely and the driver had to get out and put his shoulder to a wheel as the four horses lay belly-flat against the oozy mud and strained as if their hearts and backs would break. But eventually they drew up before the hotel, passing through streets that were but slightly more passable than the road. Mr. Feathersmith was shocked at the utter absence of concrete or stone sidewalks. Many blocks boasted no sidewalks at all, the others were plank affairs.

A couple of Negro boys lounged before the hotel and upon the arrival of the bus got into a tussle as to which should carry the Gladstone bag. The tussle was a draw, with the result that they both carried it inside, hanging it between them.

THE hotel was a shattering disappointment from the outset. Mr. Feathersmith’s youthful memories proved very false indeed. The lobby’s ceiling was thirty feet high, not twenty, and supported by two rows of cast-iron fluted columns topped with crudely done Corinthian caps. The bases and caps had been gilded once, but they were tarnished now, and the fly-specked marble painting of the shafts was anything but convincing. The floor was alternate diamond squares of marble—black with blue, and spotted with white enameled cast-iron cuspidors of great capacity, whose vicinity attested the poor marksmanship of Chancellorsville’s chewers of the filthy weed. The marble-topped desk was decorated, by a monstrous ledger, an inkpot and pens, and presided over by a supercilious young man with slicked-down hair neatly parted in the middle and a curly, thick brown mustache.

“A three-dollar room, of course, sir?” queried the. clerk, giving the register a twirl and offering the pen.

“Of course,” snapped Mr. Feathersmith, “the best. And with bath.”

“With bath, sir?” deprecated the young man, as if taking it as a joke. “Why, there is a bath on every floor, Just arrange with the bellboy.”

The old financier grunted. He was forgetting things again. He glanced over his shoulder toward the rear of the lobby where a red-hot stove was closely surrounded by a crowd of drummers. It seemed to be the only spot of warmth in the place, but he was intent on his bath. So he accepted the huge key and tag and followed the boy to the elevator. That proved to be a loosely woven, open-cage affair in an open shaft and operated by a cable that ran vertically through it. The boy slammed the outer door—there was no inner—and grasped the cable with both hands and pulled. There was a throaty rumble down below and the car began gradually to ascend. Inch by inch it rose, quivering, at about half the speed of a modern New York escalator. Mr. Feathersmith fumed and fidgeted, but there was no help for it. The elevators of forty years ago were like that. It was just too bad his room was 303.

It was big enough, twenty by twenty by twenty. A perfect cube, containing two gigantic windows, which only a Sandow could manage. The huge double bed with heavy mahogany head and foot pieces was lost in it. Several rocking chairs stood about, and a rag rug was on the floor. But the pièce de rèsistance of the room was the marble-topped washstand. On it rested a porcelain bowl and pitcher and beside it a slop jar. Mr. Feathersmith knew without looking what the cabinet beneath it contained. He walked over to it and looked into the pitcher. The water had a crust of ice on top of it. The room had not a particle of heat!

“I want a bath. Right away,” he said to the bellboy. “Hot.”

“Yassir,” said the boy, scratching his head, “but I ain’t know ef the chambermaid’s got around to cleaning hit yit. They ain’t many as wants bath till tomorrow. I kin go look and see, though.”

“I’ve got some laundry, too. I want it back tomorrow.”

“Oh, mister—you-all must be from New Yawk. They ain’t no such thing here. They’s a steam laundry, but they only take up Mondays and gita it back on Sat’day. My ma kin do it fer you, but that’ll have to be Monday, too. She irons awful nice. They’s mighty little she ever burns—and steal!—why, white folks, you could trust her with anything you got. Now’n then she loses a hand’chuf er some little thing like that, but steal—nossir.”

“Skip it,” snorted Mr. Feathersmith, “and see about that bath.” He was relearning his lost youth fast. There had been times when metropolitan flunkyism had annoyed him, but he would give something for some of it now. He pulled out a dime and gave it to the boy, who promptly shuffled out for a conference with the maid over the unheard-of demand of a bath on Friday afternoon.

One look at the bathroom was enough. It was twenty feet high, too, but only eight feet long by three wide, so that it looked like the bottom of a dark well. A single carbon filament lamp dangled from a pair of black insulated wires, led across the ceiling, and gave a dim orange light—as did the similar one in the bedroom. The bathtub was a tin affair, round-bottomed and standing on four cast-iron legs. It was dirty, and fed by a half-inch pipe that dribbled a pencil-thin stream of water. In about two hours, Mr. Feathersmith estimated, his bath would be drawn and ready—provided, of course, that the maid should remove in the meantime the mass of buckets, pans, brooms, mops and scrub rags that she stored in the place. One glance at the speckled, choked other piece of plumbing in the place made him resolve he would use the gadget underneath his own washstand.

“I kin bring hot water—a pitcher ur so,” suggested the colored boy, “ef you want it.”

“Never mind,” said Mr. Feathersmith. He remembered now that a barber shop was just around the corner and they had bathtubs as well. It would be easier to go there, since he needed a shave anyway, and pay an extra quarter and get it over with.

He slept in his new bed that night and found it warm despite the frigidness of the room, for the blankets of the time were honest wool and thick. But it was the only crumb of comfort he could draw from his new surroundings.

THE next morning Mr. Feathersmith’s troubles truly began. He got up, broke the crust of ice in his pitcher, and gaspingly washed his face and hands. He waited tediously for the slow-motion elevator to come up and take him down to breakfast. That meal was inedible, too; owing to its heaviness. He marveled that people could eat so much so early In the morning. He managed some oatmeal and buttered toast, but passed up all the rest. He was afraid that grapefruit was unheard of; as to the other fruits, there were apples. Transportation and storage had evidently not solved the out-of-season fruit and vegetable problem.

It also worried him that Satan had done nothing so far about his rejuvenation. He got up the same, gnarled, veiny hands, florid face, and bald head. He wished he had insisted on a legible copy of the contract at the time, instead of waiting for the promised confirmation copy. But all that was water over the dam. He was here, so, pending other developments, he must see about establishing his daily comforts and laying the foundation for his fortune.

There were several things he wanted: to acquire the old Feathersmith homestead; to marry Daisy Norton; to bring in the Cliffordsville oil field—wasn’t there already Spindletop, Batson and Sour Lake making millions?—then go back to New York, where, after all, there was a civilization of a sort, however primitive.

He took them in order. Representing himself as a granduncle of his original self, he inquired at the local realestateman’s office. Yes, the Feathersmith place was for sale—cheap. The former cook, Anna, was living near it and available for hire. It did not take Mr. Feathersmith long to get to the local livery stable and hire a two-horse rig to take him out there.

The sight of the place was a shock to him. The road out was muddy in stretches, and rocky and bumpy in others. At last they came to a sagging plank gate in a barbed-wire fence, and the driver dragged it open. The great trees Mr.Feathersmith had looked back on with fond memory proved to be post oaks and cedars. There was not a majestic elm or pecan tree in the lot. The house was even more of a disappointment. Instead of the vast mansion he remembered, it was a rambling, rundown building whose porches sagged and where the brown remnants of last summer’s honeysuckle still clung to a tangle of cotton strings used for climbers. They should have a neat pergola built for them, he thought, and entered.

The interior was worse. One room downstairs had a fireplace. Upstairs there was a single sheet-iron wood stove. What furniture that was left was incredibly tawdry; there was no telephone and no lights except kerosene wick lamps. The house lacked closets or a bath, and the backyard was adorned with a crazy Chic Sale of the most uninviting pattern. A deserted hog-pen and a dilapidated stable completed the assets. Mr, Feathersmith decided he wouldn’t live there again on any terms.

But a wave of sentimentality drove him to visit Anna, the former cook. She, at least, would not have depreciated like the house had done in a paltry two years. He learned she lived in a shack close by, so he went. He introduced himself as an elder of the Feathersmith family, and wanted to know if she would cook and wash for him.

“I doan want no truck with any kind of Feathersmith,” she asserted. “They’re po white trash—all of ’em. The ole man and the missus wan’t so bad, but that young skunk of a Jack sold out before they was hardly cold aind snuck outa town twixt sundown and daylight an we ain’t never seed ur heard tell of him since. Jus’, let me alone—that’s all I ask.”

So! thought Mr. Feathersmith. Well, he guessed he didn’t want her, either, He went back to town and straight to the bank. Having discovered he had three thousand dollars in big bills and gold, a sizable fortune for Cliffordsville of the period, since the First National Bank was capitalized for only ten, he went boldly in to see Mr. Norton. He meant to suggest that they jointly exploit the Norton plantations for the oil that was under it. But on the very moment he was entering the portals of the bank he suddenly remembered that the Cliffordsville field was a very recent once, circa 1937, and therefore deep. Whereas Spindletop had been discovered by boring shallow wells—a thousand feet and mostly less—later day wells had depths of something over a mile. In 1902 the suggestion of drilling to six thousand feet and more would have been simply fantastic. There was neither the equipment nor the men to undertake it. Mr. Feathersmith gulped the idea down and decided instead to make a deposit and content himself with polite inquiries about the family.

Mr. Norton was much impressed with the other’s get-up and the cash deposit of three thousand dollars. That much currency was not to be blinked at in the days before the Federal Reserve Board Act. When money stringencies came—and they did often—it was actual cash that counted, not that ephemeral thing known as credit. He listened to Mr. Feathersmith’s polite remarks and observed that he would consider it an honor to permit his wife and daughter to receive the new depositor at their home. Personally fingering the beloved bank notes, Mr. Norton ushered out his new customer with utmost suavity.

The call was arranged, and Mr. Feathersmith put in hia appearance at exactly 4:30 p.m. of the second day following. Ransacking his mind for memories of customs of the times, he bethought himself to take along a piece of sheet music, a pound of mixed candies, and a bouquet of flowers.

The visit was a flop. Befitting his new status as an important depositor, he took a rubber-tired city hack to the door, and then, to avoid the charge of sinful extravagance, he dismissed the fellow, telling him to come back at five. After that, bearing his gifts, he maneuvered the slippery pathway of pop bottles planted neck down, bordered by bricks and desiccated rosebushes. He mounted the steps and punched the doorbell. After that there was a long silence, but he knew that there was tittering inside and that several persons pulled the curtains softly and surveyed him surreptitiously—At length the door opened cautiously and an old black mammy dressed in silk to match let him in and led him into the parlor.

It was a macabre room, smelling of mold. She seated him in a horsehair-covered straight chair, then went about the business of opening the inside folding blinds. After that she flitted from the room. After a long wait Mrs. Norton came in, stately and dignified, and introduced herself. Whereupon she plumped herself down on another chair and stared at him. A few minutes later the giggling Daisy came in and was duly introduced. She also bowed stiffly, without offering a hand, and sat down. Then came the grandmother. After that they just sat—the man at one end of the room, and the three sedate women in a row at the other, their knees and ankles tightly compressed together and their hands folded in their laps. Mr. Feathersmith got up and tried to manage a courtly bow while he made his presentations, thinking they were awfully stuffy.

He thought so particularly, because he had formerly had Daisy out on a buggy ride and knew what an expert kisser she could be when the moon was right. But things were different. He introduced various possible topics of conversation, such as the weather, the latest French styles and so forth. But they promptly—and with the utmost finality—disposed of each with a polite, agreeing “Yes, sir.” It was maddening. And then he saw that Daisy Norton was an empty-headed little doll who could only giggle, kiss as required, and say, “Yes, sir.” She had no conception of economics, politics, world affairs—

“Awrr-rk!” thought Mr. Feathersmith. The thought took him back to those hellcats of modern women—like Miss Tomlinson, in charge of his Wall Street office force—the very type he wanted to get away from, but who was alert and alive.

He listened dully while Daisy played a “Valse Brilliante” on the black square piano, and saw the embroideries her fond mother displayed. After that he ate the little cakes and coffee they brought. Then left. That was Daisy Norton. Another balloon pricked.

ON the trip back to the hotel he was upset by seeing a number of yellow flags hung out on houses. It puzzled him at first, until he remembered that was the signal for smallpox within. It was another thing he had forgotten about the good old days. They had smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and other assorted diseases that raged without check except constitutional immunity. There was the matter of typhoid, too, which depended on water and milk supply surveillance. And it came to him that so long as Satan chose to keep him aged, he must live chiefly on milk. Cliffordsville, he well remembered, annually had its wave of typhoid, what with its using unfiltered creek water and the barbarian habit of digging wells in the vicinity of cesspools. Mr. Feathersmith was troubled. Didn’t he have enough physical complaints as it was?

He was reminded even more forcibly of that shortly afterward when he came to sitting up on the floor of a barroom with someone forcing whiskey into his mouth.

“You fainted, mister, but you’ll be all right now.”

“Get me a doctor,” roared Mr. Feathersmith. “It’s ephedrine I want, not whiskey!”

The doctor didn’t come. There was only the one, and he was out miles in the country administering to a case of “cramp colic”—a mysterious disease later to achieve the more fashionable notoriety of “acute appendicitis.” The patient died, unhappily, but that did not bring the doctor back to town any quicker.

THE next morning Mr. Feathersmith made a last desperate effort to ‘come back.’ There was a bicycle mechanic in town who had recently established a garage in order to take care of Mr. Norton’s lumbering Ford and Dr. Simpson’s buggy-like Holtzmann. Those crude automobiles thought it a triumph to make ten miles, without a tow, had to be cranked by hand, and were lighted at night by kerosene carriage lamps or acetylene bicycle lamps.

“Why not devise a self-starter,” suggested Mr. Feathersmith, recalling that millions had been made out of them, “a gadget you press with the foot, you know, that will crank the engine with an electric motor?”

“Why not wings?” asked the surly mechanic. He did not realize that both were practical, or that Mr. Feathersmith had seen better days. The trouble with Mr. Feathersmith was that he had always been a promoter and a financier, with little or no knowledge of the mechanical end of the game.

“It works,” he insisted solemnly, “a storage battery, a motor, and a gilhookey to crank the motor. Think it over. It would make us rich.”

“So would perpetual motion,” answered the garage man.

And that was that. Dr. Simpson, when contact was made, was even a poorer consolation.

“Ephedrine? Digitalis? Vitamins? Thyroxin? You’re talking gibberish—I don’t know what you mean. Naturally, a man of your age is likely to get short of breath at times—even faint. But shucks, Mr. Feathersmith, don’t let that bother you. I’ve known men to live to a hundred that didn’t stack up as well as you. Take it easy, rest plenty with a nap every afternoon, and you’ll be all right. We’re only young once, you know.”

WHEN Mr. Feathersmith found that the good doctor had nothing to offer better than a patented “tonic” and poultices for his rheumatism, he thereafter let him strictly alone. The situation as to vitamins and glandular extracts was worse than hopeless—the dieticians had not got around yet to finding out about calories, let alone those. Mr. Feathersmith worried more and more over Satan’s inexplicable delay in bestowing youth befitting the age, for Forfin had insisted the Old Boy would fulfill his promise if the price was paid. But until that was done, the old financier could only wait and employ his time as profitably as he could.

He kept ransacking his brains for things he could invent, but every avenue proved to be a blind alley. He mentioned the possibility of flying to the circle that sat about the lobby stove, but they scornfully laughed it down. It was an obvious impossibility, except for the dirigible gas bags Santos Dumont was playing with in France. He tried to organize a company to manufacture aluminum, but unfortunately no one had heard of the stuff except one fellow who had been off to school and seen a lump of it in the chemical laboratory. It was almost as expensive as gold, and what good was it?

Mr. Feathersmith realized then that if he was in possession of a 1942 automobile no one could duplicate it, for the many alloys were unknown and the foundry and machine-shop practice necessary were undeveloped. There was nothing to paint it with but carriage paint—slow-drying and sticky. There were no fuels or lubricants to serve it, or any roads fit to run it on. He played with other ideas, but they all came croppers. He dared not even mention radio—it smacked too much of magic—or lunacy. And he most certainly did not want to be locked up as a madman in an insane asylum of the era. If standard medicine was just beginning to crawl, psychiatry was simply nonexistent. So he kept quiet about his speculations.

Since life had become so hard and he was cut off from any normal intercourse with his fellow townsmen, he yearned for good music. But, alas, that likewise was not to be had outside one or two metropolitan orchestras. He went once to church and heard a home-grown, self-taught soprano caterwaul in a quavering voice. After that he stayed away. He caught himself wishing for a good radio program—and he had altered considerably his standards of what was good.

A week rolled by. During it he had another stroke that was almost his last. The New York doctor had warned him that if he did not obey all the rules as to diet and other palliatives, he might expect to be taken off at any time. Mr. Feathersmith knew that his days were numbered—and the number was far fewer than it would have been if he had remained in the modern age he thought was so unbearable. But still there was the hope that the Devil would yet do the right thing by him.

That hope was finally and utterly blasted the next day. Mr. Feathersmith was in the grip of another devastating fit of weakness and knew that shortly he would be unable to breathe and would therefore fall into a faint and die. But just before his last bit of strength and speck of consciousness faded, there was a faint plop overhead and an envelope fluttered down and into his lap. He looked at it, and though the stamp and cancellation were blurred and illegible, he saw the return address in the corner was “Bureau of Complaints and Adjustments, Gehenna.” His trembling fingers tore the missive open. A copy of his contract fell out into his lap.

He scanned it hurriedly. As before, it seemed flawless. Then he discovered a tiny memorandum clipped to its last page. He read it and knew his heart would stand no more. It was from the cute little witch of Fifth Avenue.

DEAREST SNOOKY-WOOKY: His Nibs complains you keep on bellyaching. That’s not fair. You said you wanted to be where you are, and there you are. You wanted your memory unimpaired. Can we help it if your memory is lousy? And not once, old dear, did you cheep about also having your youth restored. So that lets us out. Be seeing you in Hell, old thing.

Cheerio!

He stared at it with fast dimming eyes.

“The little witch, the bad, badgering little—” and then an all-engulfing, blackness saved him from his mumbling alliteration.

Heaven Is What You Make It

Unkown Worlds, July 1943

I.

COMMODORE Sir Reginald Wythe-Twombley, R. N. D. S. O., etc., sighed deeply and twisted unhappily at his gray mustaches. Damn these strong-minded women—especially the American variety. Why do they persist in pushing their noses in where only men belong?

“Well?” she demanded. She did not tap her foot, or plant her hands on her hips. It was unnecessary. That “well’ contained both. And a lot else.

The harried commodore sighed again. As if he didn’t have trouble enough already. He could only suppose she had done it that way in London, too. How else could she have obtained that absurd letter from the minister? Yet he had to dispose of her.

“But, my dear,” he protested, “after all! As a nurse, now, or a lorry driver that would be practicable. But to go into a Commando unit as just … just … why—”

“The letter is clear,” she reminded him, icily.

She stood there, imperturbable and determined. She was big for a woman—a darkish blonde with cool gray eyes and a chin that might have been chiseled out of granite. Her passport gave her age as thirty-three. It may really have been that, but she was of the type that did not suggest queries as to age. Her most salient characteristic was competence. She fairly oozed efficiency at every pore.

The commodore coughed. “It happens”—he tried to hedge—“that … uh … there are none of our units in the Orkneys just now. Of course, if you are very insistent about it, you could wait here at Kirkwall, but I assure you you would be more comfortable in … well, Edinburgh, let us.”

“What about the Tordenskjold?” she asked, with a firmness that reminded him painfully of a former governess. “I understand it is about to raid the Vigten Islands and Namsos Fjord.”

“Quite so,” he admitted, grudgingly. At least she seemed to be well informed. “But it is officered and manned entirely by Norwegians, Danes and Frisians. You would not—”

“I speak all the Scandinavian languages fluently,” she said, coolly. “Moreover, to save you your next remark, I might remind you that I have been principal of a school in the Gowanus Canal section of Brooklyn for the past ten years. I’ve handled rough-necks and hoodlums beside which even your dreaded Nazis are gentle. As for these fine men who will be my comrades—Well!”

The commodore surrendered. He hated to do it, for the Tordenskjold was going on something very much like a suicide mission, but he reached for a pad of blank chits. He scribbled a few lines on it, and then his initials. He felt himself a weakling, for the first time in many years, in taking the easy way out with this woman. But she still stood there, unmoved, looking at him and waiting. Then he called his orderly.

“Have the cart out,” he told the marine, “and take Miss … Miss.—”

“Miss Ida Simpkins,” she supplied, without a quiver of an eyelid or a trace of thanks.

“Er, Miss Simpkins,” continued the commodore, “to the dock at the North Anchorage in the Flow. Put her in the Norwegians’ boat and then return.”

The marine saluted, and picked up Miss Simpkins’ bag.

She sat stonily beside the driver all the way, looking neither right nor left. Once or twice the driver attempted conversation, but he spoke a strange archaic language that was neither Scandinavian, Scotch nor yet Gaelic. The marine sat moodily in the back of the cart with the bag for company. Like his superior, he sighed, too, from time to time, for he was a veteran of the last war and knew that such things as this had never happened on Earth or in Heaven before.

The kommandör-kaptein of the quaint bid cruiser received her with more equanimity than any other military man she had encountered since her strange quest began—the Saturday after Pearl Harbor. He merely read her papers through, asked three crisp questions, and assigned her to duty. She was to be the bridge messenger on the starboard watch. She was told where she could sleep and eat, and that was all there was about it. Dusk was already at hand, and shortly the old ship and the destroyer Garm would be stealing out through Hoxa Gate. Tomorrow promised to be foggy, so that under its cover they might possibly reach their destination after all. It was on those things the captain was thinking, not on the unorthodox addition to his crew.

IT was early in the evening of the next day that they began to close with the rugged land. The mists had held and the sea had been calm. Except for a heavy ground swell that made the vessel wallow constantly, the voyage had no outstanding feature. The men, grim-faced and ready, and bundled up in heavy clothes, stood always by their guns, which were loaded and trained outboard for anything that might loom suddenly on their beam.

It was just at seven bells it happened. The fog had been thicker for the past half-hour, when suddenly it lifted. A scant three miles away a large ship was charging along, throwing spray over her bridge at every swell she met. Its silhouette was unmistakable. She was a Nazi cruiser. In another instant the guns of all three ships were blazing.

The little Garm looked as if she would capsize, as she heeled under hard-over rudder and full speed to make her torpedo attack, but her larger consort clung doggedly to the old course. After that first moment, nothing was very clear. Geyserlike splashes bloomed suddenly close aboard, with deafening noise as the sensitive shells exploded on contact with the water. Spray showered the ship, and in it were deadly shell fragments. The löitnant of the watch received one such in his left eye and another in the knee. He fell to the deck with a brief groan.

“Get Fenrik Janssen,” he muttered. “Quickly.”

Miss Simpkins ran aft to where she knew he would be, by the 5.9” battery control station. But just as she was well clear of the bridge, another salvo struck. That one was a fair straddle, and many things happened, fore and aft. The bridge went up in a fountain of flame, smoke and splinters, and with it the captain and the wounded lieutenant of the watch. The after turret spouted fire heavenward, which meant it had been penetrated and whatever powder was exposed ignited. It was clear that the minutes left to the faithful old warship were numbered.

Miss Simpkins sprang to the nearest broadside gun, where she saw the trainer—a mere boy—sagging in his saddle. She embraced him with capable arms and lifted him out; then laid him gently on the deck. Half his head was gone. After that she climbed quietly into the place she had thus vacated, and grabbed the handles of the training gear. She flattened her face against the buffer of the sight and found the Nazi cruiser. She tried the handles, and found that by turning them this way and that, she could bring the vertical crosswire she saw inside the telescope so that it would be in alignment with the German’s principal mast. She supposed that was the idea, so she held it there, though every few seconds the gun beside her would go off with a snapping bark that nearly caved in her eardrums. Moreover, it jolted her to her very skeleton as it lashed backward in its recoil, and the muzzle blast smote her from head to foot.

But she clung on, doing her bit as she saw it—saw bright blossom after bright blossom flower on the hated enemy’s side, and saw the orange ripple of flame that marked his return of the compliment. She knew from the acrid smoke that drifted past her own nostrils that her own ship was afire, but she noted with grim delight that so was that of the Nazis. For an instant she got a glimpse of the sinking destroyer, itself blazing from stem to stern. And then she saw the vast explosion that rent the German. She saw that instantaneous blot against the sky, shot through with flame, and knew it was the Garm’s last torpedo that must have done it, for suddenly she realized that her own gun had been silent for fully a minute now.

Indeed, there was no sound whatever about her, except the wild hiss of escaping steam and the crackling of flame. There was an almost inaudible moaning somewhere in the murk, but not the boom of cannon. She slid off her seat and looked about her. All she could see through blistering smoke were the legs of a dead man lying directly behind the gun. That would be one of the loaders. Then something struck the ship a blow that shook it as if it had hit a rock at full speed. Almost in the same instant there was a concussion of such stupendous violence that Miss Simpkins had only the vaguest impression of it. She only knew she was being hurled upward and outward. The dying Nazi must have delivered its own torpedo as its swan song—that was her only thought.

She was very numb about the whole thing. It had all happened so quickly, and she had been utterly unprepared. She did know, though, that she had done her best, and hoped it had helped. She was starting to fall then, and wondered how it would feel to drown. Or did it matter?

It was then that what she thought was her delirium started. There was a jumble of wildly mounting music, queer triolets that reminded her somehow of Wagner and grand opera—though it must have been from a record she had heard somewhere, since she thought opera both sinful and a waste of time and money. There was a distant, but approaching chorus of yoo-booing—“Yohohoto, yohohoto, aiaha!” it went. Last of all she saw the horses! A cavalry charge from the skies! Dozens of galloping horses were bearing down on her, and on each was mounted a fierce Amazon, armored and helmeted and waving a spear and yelling at the top of her lungs.

“So death is like this,” thought Miss Ida Simpkins, bitterly, “and I always supposed it would be angels who would come, not heathen apparitions.”

She was not far from the water by then. The dark waves were rushing up to meet her. It was at that moment that a great white charger swooped beneath her and a strong left arm swept her into its embrace. It was a woman’s arm, and snowy white, and in the next instant Miss Simpkins felt herself pressed against two breasts encased in golden chain mail. They were zooming upward next, and the Amazon rider of the horse, a powerful woman with honey-colored hair, was bending forward to kiss her.

“No, No!” screamed Miss Simpkins, fighting fiercely at her.

But it was of no use. The warrior blonde’s full red lips were against hers, full of tender kiss. Miss Simpkins tried one final struggle, but to no avail. She was in cool darkness now. There was no woman, no horse, no ocean—nothing. And Miss Simpkins knew exactly what that meant. Ida Simpkins was dead.

IN blackness there is no sense of time. Who knows? Perhaps there really is no time. Nor was there time in the gray stage that followed. It was a formless sort of gray, like the inside of a cloud, where there is nothing overhead or beneath or to any side. But Ida Simpkins had a kind of awakening. She was aware of herself again. She was capable of memory, and thought, and even reasoning. It puzzled her. was she dead, or wasn’t she? Maybe she had been picked up and was merely sick. Or could it be that all her ideas of the hereafter were not exactly correct after all. Perhaps this was a transition stage of some sort.

For her ideas of the hereafter had always been most definite. It was a thing that had interested her profoundly, and she had been wicked enough—though a devout and unyielding Methodist—to read the outrageous beliefs of all the pagans, and even the mistaken views of some of the other sects of her own general faith. There was nothing in any of it that resembled this endless grayness. It was tedious, maddeningly monotonous.

She tried thinking about her past; of her strict upbringing, and how steadfastly she had always hewed to the line. She remembered well those days of school teaching in blighted districts, of physical instruction, and of having to learn not only boxing and wrestling, but jujitsu, so as to be able to handle the tough boys she taught. All that seemed so long ago now, though in reality it could have been but a few months. For her martial career had been a short one. One brief day, to be precise, leaving out of account the two months’ battle she had to get the opportunity to die the way she did.

Ida Simpkins had always been a profound pacifist. It was one of her many strict ideals. Smoking, drinking and gambling were wrong to her because they were injurious and wasteful, as well as sinful. Fighting and war were wrong for the same reasons, except that war embraced all the vices on such a grand scale as to be the most hateful of them all. The rape of Europe and China had offended her sense of propriety, but she had entertained the feeling that those crimes were foreign affairs. That in a sense it was due punishment for their own foul crimes. Were not the Chinese pagans? Were not the French and Viennese notoriously loose-lived? All right-thinking persons knew those things.

It was war for America that she was against. The draft was wrong, any preparation was wrong, since it implied the recognition of that which should be firmly denied. It was Pearl Harbor that jolted her out of that beautiful but impractical belief. It was late that Sunday when she first heard of it, and all that night she lay in harrowing combat with herself. Must one fight, or should one turn the other cheek? Ida Simpkins was in a dreadful dilemma. For she was a good Christian, as she understood the term, but when it came to the cheek-turning business she was notoriously stiff-necked. Her struggle with herself went on through that night and the next and next. It was nearly dawn on Wednesday when she arrived at her decision. At that moment she threw pacifism overboard and went all out for belligerency. Thereafter, she practiced it with all the fanatical fervor she applied to her other ideals.

It was not until Saturday of the same week that she penetrated the last barrier and came face to face with one of the Powers That Be. Sorry, no, they told her in Washington, but we have no battalion of death—not yet. Maybe there will be a Woman’s Auxiliary Service later, something on the order of what the British have, but that is a long way off. That was enough for her. She wangled a passport and managed to get to England. There she pestered an already overburdened War Ministry until she got the coveted letter she sprang on the bewildered commodore at Kirkwall. She battered down his defenses. She got to the front. And now—now the war was over, as far as she was concerned.

She quickly tired of memories, being no introvert. The perpetual grayness began to pall on her. Was it going to be like this all Eternity? She had a wholesome respect for Eternity. Eternity was a long time, and one should arrange his life so that it would be spent in reasonable comfort. She remembered all that from a very long way back, and had faithfully followed the rules taught her.

Was this interminable grayness to be the reward?

But she was in the beginnings of awareness of other things than mere featureless grayness. There was a sense of physical contact, of lying jack-knified face down on a moving something. As her senses became acuter, her impressions became clearer. She was lying across something short-haired and warm, and it had a detestable horsy smell. She could feel muscles and bones working beneath her, and then she knew that she was nearly naked. All that she had on were her panties, and a firm hand held them by the seat in a tight grip.

This is madness, she thought at first, until her dying dream began slowly to piece itself together again in her consciousness. But what troubled her most just then was the sense of being undressed. In her dazed and buffeted condition while at the trainer’s seat at the gun, she had not noticed that the blast of every shot or every nearby bursting shell had blown some garment to shreds and entirely off her. All that was left, apparently, were the panties. But those, thank goodness, were durable—being, as they were, heavy knitted bloomers. But what was she doing face down on the shoulders of a galloping horse, and who was it holding her on? Then the dream stood forth in perfect clarity. That woman—ugh!

Ida Simpkins opened her eyes and squirmed. All she could see was the plunging shoulder of the horse and a white human leg from the knee down. It was a naked leg—like her own, only plumper, or perhaps beefier would be the word. Ida clawed at the charging horse and tried to get upright, to slide off behind—anything. It was disgraceful for her to be in this grotesque pose—her, Ida Simpkins, formerly mistress of Gowanus Settlement House! Who did this so-and-so who had kidnapped her think she was, anyhow?

But the so-and-so’s grip was unbreakable. However, she quickly shifted it to an embrace, and before Miss Simpkins knew what was happening, she had been picked up, upended, whirled about, and set astride the horse facing her captor.

“Hail, hero! Yo-ho!” shouted the beefy blonde. I’m Brynhild—”

Her mouth dropped open and Ida thought for a moment she was going to fall off the horse. The horse seemed to sense something, for it slowed its mad gallop to an easier pace.

“Y-y-you’re a woman!” gasped the Valkyrie, as if the utmost in sacrilege had been done. “How did I get hold of—”

“Of course I’m a woman,” snapped Miss Simpkins.

“But it was a ship full of Norse heroes,” protested the Valkyrie, “fighting against odds. Me and my girls—”

“My girls and I,” corrected Miss Simpkins, firmly.

“My girls and I were watching from afar,” continued Brynhild, still so taken aback by the scandalous error she seemed to have committed that she accepted the reproof meekly. “You were the last survivor, serving nobly at a gun and surrounded by raging flames. The ship blew up and you went up with it. I gathered you up in fragments as you rained down. It might have been better if I had a bucket. I must have mixed things up—somehow.”

She finished lamely, and shook her head dazedly. War in the good old days was not like this. All you had to do then was gather up a spare arm or ear or so, and maybe a head, and you had all your hero—and nothing else. The way things were going now, a poor battle maiden never knew what she was getting.

“So what?” Miss Simpkins wanted to know, entirely unmoved by Brynhild’s discomfiture. “What am I being taken for a ride for? Why did you horn in on my affairs, anyway?”

“Because,” explained the badly rattled daughter of Wotan, “I thought you were a Norse hero, and should be taken to Valhalla along with the others. See them—over there? And Bifrost ahead? The bridge that only gods and heroes may cross?”

Miss Simpkins looked, blinked and looked again. Sure enough, a whole squadron of cavalry was charging along their flanks, each steed with a Valkyrie and a sailor astride. She had to twist her head to see the bridge, but there it was, unmistakably—a great, glorious rainbow that had thickness as well as breadth, rearing itself above the clouds they rode upon.

Brynhild did not look happy.

“Were you really a warrior,” she asked, finally, “or did I make a terrible mistake? According to the Law, no woman has, or ever will, set foot within Asgard.”

“I was aiming a gun,” replied Miss Simpkins sharply, “if that’s what you mean by being a warrior. By the way, how long have I been dead?”

“A long, long time,” answered Brynhild, cryptically, “and in the other direction.”

Ida Simpkins thought that over. Dead a long time, huh, and headed for Valhalla! She knew her mythology, having studied it and taught it to the tough brats of Red Hook. Up to this moment everything was regular—providing only she were ancient Norse. There was the business of death in battle, the death kiss of the Valkyrie, and the translation to Valhalla. That, she knew, lay just over the bridge that was close ahead. It was a rowdy place, as she recalled it, but—

“If you hadn’t been so darned hasty,” reproached Miss Simpkins, with considerable acidity, “my own people would have got me. As it is, I don’t know how to get back. I guess we’ll have to go on now, even if it breaks your old law. It’s a fool law anyway. I’m not going back to the gray place, I can tell you that, sister.”

“We’ll see what Heimdall says,” said the Valkyrie, in some dejection. “He’s the guardian of the bridge.”

Ida Simpkins said nothing, but squirmed around so as to face the way the charger was going. The whole situation was bitterly clear now. It was a tough break to die and get taken to the wrong heaven through someone’s clumsy interference, but if that was the way it was to be, so it was to be. At least, before she made any hasty decisions, she meant to look the place over and see what possibilities it had. It might be a sinful thing to spend Eternity in a heathen heaven, but who knew? There might be a purpose behind it.

That was the sweet, consoling thought that sustained her. Didn’t missionaries spend their lifetime among the benighted heathen? She could not but be thrilled.

Come to think of it, had any missionary ever penetrated so deeply into the territory of the misguided and the nonbeliever? She saw a great mission ahead, and the light of battle came into her cold gray eyes and the granite mouth set itself on the old familiar lines. On to Valhalla! Ida Simpkins’ work had just begun!

II.

THE passage of Bifrost was a truly nerve-shaking experience. The frail but beautiful bridge quivered, swayed and bucked under the thunderous hoofs of the cavalcade bearing the honored dead. Ida looked down once only and gasped. The bridge was built of nothingness—a curious web of interwoven strands of fire and air and water. Its dazzling iridescence was almost more than human eye could bear.

Then they were at the summit of the great bow. Brynhild’s steed, and the others following, slowed and came to a halt at what appeared to be a tollgate barring the road. At the right was a gold-plated shack, set upon a bracket extending out over an abyss so deep that Miss Simpkins dared not think about it. By the side of the door hung a huge trumpet, In the door stood a tall, fair young man in silvery armor. That must be Heimdall, keeper of the bridge and chief greeter of the fallen heroes.

He stepped out and unlatched the gate.

“You did well, Brynhild,” he remarked, making a sign for the rest of the cavalcade to pass. “This will prove the greatest hero of them all. I have sharp eyes and ears, you know, and can see and hear for thousands of miles and thousands of years. This is a day that will never be forgotten in Valhalla.”

Miss Simpkins compressed her lips still more firmly. That was just what she was thinking. But as she looked down at herself, it annoyed her to be in her present state of dishabille. She yearned for more adequate covering than the gray panties, useful though they were. Heimdall must have read the thought, for he entered his golden shack and at once reappeared with an armful of cloth and glittering hardware.

“With the compliments of Alberich, King of the Dwarfs,” he said, bowing. “Magic has been worked into these garments. While they are intact, no man can harm you.”

“Intact or not intact,” snapped Miss Simpkins, “just let one try!”

But she snatched at them and, although it irked her to dress herself by the side of a public road with a flock of leering dead seamen galloping by, she managed to get the outfit on, though Brynhild had to help her with some of the straps and buckles. By the time the job was finished, she was rigged out in a style similar to that affected by the Valkyries, except that she was given a short sword instead of a spear.

“But what will papa say?” asked the worried Brynhild.

“Ah,” smiled the ever-agreeable Heimdall. “I wonder.”

Brynhild helped Ida mount, much to the latter’s annoyance, but she found she could not manage herself very well in the cumbersome gold armor. Then they thundered on in the wake of the other heroes, hearing a gentle farewell toot of Heimdall’s horn as they left.

They galloped down the other half of the bridge and into the shimmering, gold-leaved grove called Glasir. Even the ultra-practical Miss Simpkins was impressed by it, for it was all it was cracked up to be, not like the fabulous “palace” Heimdall was reputed to have atop the bridge. After a little they came out onto an extensive flat place. Ida Simpkins’ reaction was that she had entered a vast airdrome, for the field was large enough to accommodate the armies of the world, and beyond stood an immense building that could easily have housed a score of Zeppelins. But she knew from its silvery, fluted walls, and the roof of overlapping golden shields that it must be the great hall of Valhalla. Distant as they still were from it, she could hear the resounding cheers of the old-timers as they hailed the newcomers. Ida Simpkins tightened herself for the coming fray, for she intended to take no nonsense from any of them, not even Wotan himself.

“Don’t forget,” cautioned Brynhild, icily, for she was heartily sick of her find, “that when papa presides over the veterans, he styles himself Valfather.”

“It’s all one to me,” said Miss Simpkins, indifferently. She firmly resolved never to board another horse again without at least thick stockings on. This one shed horribly and she knew the insides of her bare legs were plastered with white felt.

They rode in through a portal that would have admitted a battleship, and straight up through an aisle made through a mob of howling, armored men—huge, beefy, red-faced men, all of them, many with red or yellow beards and drooping walrus mustaches. On a dais far ahead, stood a spare man in armor, wearing a winged helmet. As they drew nearer, Ida could make out the missing eye. Yes, that was the Valfather.

Just before the throne, the horse stopped abruptly, and Ida slid off—over its neck and head. She got up crimson, furious with Brynhild, the horse, and herself. But neither Wotan nor Brynhild were looking at her.

“Another Valkyrie?” Wotan was asking, looking a little baffled. “My memory seems to have slipped. Really, I must see Mimir soon. Who was her mother, and in what country did she live? Perhaps I may recall the incident.”

Miss Simpkins was not to be put upon. Before Brynhild could answer she spoke up for herself.

“I’m not a Valkyrie. Catch me traipsing all over the country picking up strange men, and dead ones at that! And you can’t make me wait on tables here, either. It may be a technicality, but I’m a hero, and as such I want my rights.”

“A hero?” asked the Valfather, dumfounded, rolling his one good eye solemnly from first one of them to the other.

“That’s what I thought,” said Brynhild, defiantly, “and that’s what Heimdall says. He let her across the bridge. That’s something.”

“Oh, dear,” said the Valfather, anxiously. “Those Norns are holding out on me again. Why didn’t I know about this before?”

Miss Simpkins could think of nothing appropriately tart to say to that. Nor did she care to. For she was beginning to relax a little and there was something about the bewildered old man that appealed to her. He seemed so good, yet so utterly impractical. She regarded him for a moment with speculative eyes. A man like that had possibilities—salvage possibilities, that is. Under firm management, he might eventually amount to something. At the moment, he seemed completely lost in the face of the inexplicable situation that had suddenly confronted him. And not unnaturally, for it must be embarrassing to a self-styled god who supposedly knows the past, present and future to its utmost detail, to have something laid in his lap that wasn’t in the book. Something had to be done.

“Well, I’m here,” snapped Miss Simpkins. “When do we eat?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said the Valfather, hurriedly, and clapped his hands. A tall old geezer with a shiny bald head and flowing white beard stepped forth, plucking a few tentative notes on a bejeweled harp he carried.

“Sound mess call, Bragi,” said the god of all the heroes, and sank limply onto his throne.

“Just take any vacant seat, dearie,” said Brynhild in Ida’s ear. “You’re on your own now.”

Miss Simpkins gave her a dirty look, but it was wasted on dimpled shoulder blades. Brynhild was making for the kitchen. A Valkyrie’s work is never done.

In the meantime the milling crowd of heroes were beginning to sort themselves out and line up along the many long troughs that covered the floor of the vast hall. There were benches on one side of the troughs, and the warriors were shucking their outer armor and stacking it beside the place they meant to sit. Ida had a look about. Wotan seemed to have gone to sleep. There seemed to be no course open except to follow the catty advice she had just received. So she walked over to the nearest table where men were beginning to seat themselves. They were spread out pretty well, but there would easily be room for another if they would move over a little. She came up between two big huskies and pushed them gently but firmly apart. Then she unbuckled her sword belt and laid it down on the bench. She was reaching for the corselet buckles when the storm broke.

“Hey,” said the big bruiser on the right, “what’s the big idea? Get in the kitchen where you belong and hurry up with the chow.”

Her answer was to unsnap the holdings of the corselet and fling it on the bench. Then she calmly sat down beside it. A roar went up that filled that entire side of the hall. A hairy paw snatched at the back of her neck and a blustering voice began to say something. Whatever it was, it never got said, for it turned into a howl of pain and rage. A small but strong thumb was digging into a vital nerve of the gripping paw, and another small but strong hand had seized the elbow farther up. There was a mysterious twist, a heave and another twist, and the hero went flying headfirst across the trough and lit face down a dozen feet beyond. He skidded on, plowing up the sawdust for another yard or so, then sat up with a groan.

“That,” announced Miss Simpkins, calmly, standing now and facing the circle of amazed heroes that had come up, “is known as the Kata Otoshi, or Shoulder Overthrow. A very tricky race of warriors called Japanese invented it. Do any of you want to make something of it?”

There was a gleam in her eyes that had not been there since the day of the big riot back there, on the back water front of Brooklyn. It seemed that nobody cared to make anything of it. Moreover, fighting in the hall was a breach of etiquette. They would have all afternoon for that out on the field.

“To set you straight.” she added, “I’m a certified hero, like it or not.”

Suddenly there was a great gust of laughter throughout the hall. Her victim was getting dazedly to his feet, rubbing his skinned nose with one hand.

“Ha. Gunnar,” yelled one tall Viking, “how does it feel to be tossed on your ear by a woman?”

Gunnar growled and turned away amidst the guffaws of the crowd. He went over to another table and sat down, leaving his arms and armor where he had left it on the seat beside Ida Simpkins. She swept them off onto the floor to make more room beside her. Everywhere the men were sitting down now, though there was much conversation going on behind the backs of hands into ears. Heimdall’s prophecy had matured faster than most. It was indeed a day to be remembered in Valhalla. For few of the heroes had a greater reputation for toughness in a rough-and-tumble than Gunnar, brother and slayer of Sigurd, the lover of Brynhild. The reverberations in Asgard would not die down for ages.

But a distraction was at hand in the form of food. Columns of Valkyries were deploying into the hall, each Valkyrie either bearing a huge tray of smoking meat or a horn of mead. They had shed their armor and were now in long white gowns with their yellow hair hanging free about their shoulders. Still other Valkyries were coming along the bench side of the troughs, handing out drinking vessels. One stopped sulkily beside Ida and handed her a silver-mounted white stein. It was a ghastly-looking thing, being fashioned out of a freshly scraped human skull. The mouth, nose and eyeholes had been deftly plugged with chased silver.

“What’s this thing?” demanded Miss Simpkins.

“Your drinking mug,” answered the handmaiden. “It is made from the head of one of your enemies. You got fourteen, according to our count, but the other thirteen are not made up yet. They’ll be up later.”

“Take it away,” said Miss Simpkins, firmly, “and bring me a glass of water. I don’t drink mead, and I won’t drink out of that thing.”

“Water?” echoed Skaugul, for that was her name. “What is this ‘water’?”

“Water,” reiterated Ida. “the stuff they fill lakes with—what they poison to make liquor of.”

“But here everyone drinks the lovely mead—”

“Up till now,” snapped the ex-schoolteacher. “Now. listen, don’t start any arguments with me. I’ve passed all the tests and here I am—a hero. As such I rate anything I want. If these dumbbells are content to guzzle the slop they do, that’s their affair. I want water. Get me?”

Skaugul took on the same unhappy look that Ida had noticed several times on Brynhild’s broad face. She went away. Presently she came back— and with water. In the meantime the line of Valkyries had passed by on the far side of the trough, filling skulls as they came, and dumping enormous quantities of what looked and smelled like barbecued pig into the troughs.

“Skol!” rang out tens of thousands of booming voices in unison, as all lifted their drinking mugs and emptied them. Miss Simpkins took a sip of her precious water. She had already noticed a lot of things about the service that were going to be bettered before she lived much longer; but, after all, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Her companions up and down the line were grabbing up joints of the roast pig with both hands and cramming them into their mouths. The entire Valkyrie force was now concentrating on the almost impossible task of keeping the mugs filled. Miss Simpkins ignored them all. Instead, she fumbled amongst her cast-off armor and found her little sword and drew it. With it and the one hand she could not help getting greasy, she sliced off a small sliver of the part of the carcass in her section of the trough.

It was not bad, though a little gamy, and she ate another slice. Her fellow heroes had already gone through their first joints and, after some intermediate burping on a truly colossal scale, had tackled their seconds. A few hearty eaters were even yelling for thirds, which were promptly brought on the run by the obedient Valkyries. After a little they began giving up, one by one, and sat back on their benches in sated contentment, taking only a gallon or so of the abundant mead as the ultimate chaser. Miss Simpkins beckoned Skaugul, who had been hanging around somewhat frightenedly in the immediate background.

“No vegetables? No greens? No dessert?” demanded Ida, coldly, knowing perfectly well there were not.

But Skaugul merely looked blank and a little scared. She bobbed her head in what might have been an attempt at a curtsy of a sort, then scurried away. It was a long time before she returned, but return she did, and with a bowl of dark-green leaves. Her guest glowered at them.

“From the tree Yggdrasil,” said the poor little Valkyrie, trembling. Ida did not know it, but Skaugul had always thought a lot of Gunnar. Next to Thor, she always told the other girls—

Ida was glaring at her.

“Greens, you said,” Skaugul explained, timidly. “Heidrun eats them. Maybe you could.”

“Who’s Heidrun?”

“She’s the goat—the one that gives the mead.” By that time Skaugul was on the verge of collapse. Greens this strange female hero had asked for, and greens she had brought—the only green thing on Asgard. It was all very weird, but there was at least the precedent of the goat. So Skaugul saw no harm in mentioning it.

“Skip it,” snorted Miss Simpkins. She was going to have to tackle this problem nearer its source. There was no use in punishing the child more. She tried to close her ears to the mouth-smacking and belching that filled the hall about her. She thought grimly for a moment on this subject also. What beasts uncontrolled men can be, she thought. And when Ida thought about control—well, there was only one proper kind of control in Ida’s mind. That was the Ida-directed variety. She might have begun to do a little planning then and there, but at once a great shout filled the hall.

“Let’s fight!” it boomed, and on the instant the men were heaving their stuffed bulks off the benches and clambering into their harness. A number were already dressed and on their way out. Ida looked at her own little pile of gilt junk and decided to leave it where it lay. It might do for ceremonial occasions, but in a fight it would be a distinct handicap to her. For she firmly intended to attend the fight. It was the custom, and she was resolved to follow the customs. Oh, she would modify them, bit by bit, but still she would not buck them.

“I’m Sigmund,” bellowed a towering blond giant beside her. “How’s for a little scrap? Berserk, you know, with no holds barred.” She noted that he had left off his hardware as she had done. “I want to get the hang of that stunt you worked on Gunnar. Ha, ha, ho, ho, haw, haw!”

“Lead the way,” she said, crisply.

THEY were late getting onto the field. By the time they arrived practically everybody had teamed off and were going at it hammer and tongs. There were many styles of fighting in progress. Some combats were duels, others between groups. Some men fought in full armor with buckler and long sword, others dispensed with the shield and flailed about them with eight-foot two-handed swords that were about as light as crowbars of the same length. Still others used war clubs and maces, and some hammered away with mailed fists. There were wrestling matches as well.

Some of the fights had already terminated, for the ground was beginning to be strewn with stray heads, severed arms and legs, and not a few of the heroes lay on their backs, split from shoulder to navel by some lucky swipe of a battle-ax. Miss Simpkins picked her way through the carnage with considerable disgust, though she knew that they would all come alive when mess call sounded again. Oh, what a wacky place, and how lucky for them that she had at last got there!

They eventually reached a comparatively clear spot, about a mile from the hall. Until then they had to duck and dodge repeatedly to avoid losing their own heads through the backsweep of the sword of some fighter too intent to note what was going on behind or beside him. Ida stopped, and Sigmund walked on beyond about twenty paces. Then he turned, vented a tremendous roar, and charged.

She stood stock-still until he was almost upon her. At that, she gave but a little bit—just enough not to be bowled over by the impact. She did not go into action until his arms were already about her, ready to begin a bearlike squeeze. Then a lot of things happened fast. Something gouged him in the small of the back, and a sharp elbow was sticking in his throat. Sigmund hit the ground, bit out a hunk of turf, and came up yelling.

He closed again, but that time she did not throw him. She grabbed one hand and crossed his arm with hers. Then she snuggled up to him and twisted. He howled with pain and refused to go down on his knees as any mortal would have. So she increased the pressure by a hairbreadth and was slightly sickened by feeling and hearing the bones pop. Not that it mattered. They would be whole in time for dinner.

He staggered back, looking incredulously at his dangling arm, folding it up and down across its break to make sure there was no mistake about it.

“W-wh-what … how?” he stammered.

“The first maneuver,” she replied primly, “is known as the Sora Towoshi, or Sudden Fall. The second treatment is called Ude Ori, or the Arm Break. You should have dropped to the ground. Then I would not have had to spoil your arm.”

He could only gaze and fiddle with his arm in blank amazement. Yet he towered a good foot above her and probably tipped the scales at three hundred flat. It wasn’t reasonable!

Ida Simpkins was aware of a sudden hush on the battlefield. Hundreds of whole and maimed heroes had knocked off their encounters and were hurrying up to see the fun. In a moment there was a deep ring about them, listening open-mouthed to the stories being told by the score or so that had witnessed Sigmund’s trimming. There were deep curses, or heavy sighs, depending upon the temperament of the auditor.

“It’s magic,” whispered one, but in the voice of the gale.

“Stuff and nonsense,” whipped out Miss Simpkins. “Who said that?”

A burly man clad in red-gold armor, complete with shield and broadsword, stepped sheepishly forward.

“Me. Hogni. I say it’s magic. But it will not avail against an armed man. Not a man of courage and skill.”

“Yeah? Well, come on and do your stuff. I’ll show you the Taka Tooi, It’s not magic, but it’ll stop you.”

Hogni seemed to regret his outspokenness, for he showed no anxiety to put his words into action, but the hoots and jeers of his messmates soon stimulated him into action. He twirled his sword and charged in the same reckless bull-fashion that Sigmund had. A gasp that must have made every leaf on Yggdrasil quiver rose from the watching crowd. For the woman stood quietly waiting, the only tense thing about her, her eyes. Then he was upon her, with his sword upraised for the smashing cut that would have split her to the pelvis. But it never fell. Like lightning, a hand shot up and grasped his wrist, yanking the charging hero forward, and twisting at the same time. In the same split second she interposed her heel behind his and gave a sidewise shove. Hogni spilled quite neatly a couple of yards away.

Ida gave him an appraising look as he scrambled, muttering, to his feet. He was really enraged now, as the whole of Valhalla made the welkin ring with their ribald comment. He forgot his shield and sword and was coming at her full lilt, grasping and ungrasping his huge paws. She calmly turned her back on him and started to walk away.

She felt the wind on the back of her neck as he reached out for her. No eye among the bystanders was quick enough to see what followed. Some said she merely stooped and that he dived over her. Others said she tossed him. Whatever she did, Hogni was through for the afternoon. When they turned him over and took stock of his condition, his head lolled indifferently in any direction. That hero broke his neck.

Ida Simpkins had enough, too, but she did not want to admit it. She was grateful now for Tim Hannigan, the big cop on the beat back home. He used to come into her gym and work out with her, and taught her tricks for some she taught him. But at that, throwing heavy men around is work, and Ida was hard put not to give vent to panting. She tried to walk past the crowd and back to the hall, but they would not have it. They clustered about her, all thoughts of fighting any more that afternoon gone by the board. They wanted to know what the new hero was called, and how she could defeat three of Valhalla’s best champions with such seeming ease.

“The name,” she said, very precisely, “is Miss Ida.”

“Misaeda,” they told the ones in the back ranks who might not have heard. “The champion calls herself Misaeda.”

To answer the rest called for a speech, and to make a speech she needed wind. For that she needed time. So she asked the nearest huskies to kindly make a pile of handy corpses so she would have a rostrum to address them from. Then she stood back, breathing heavily, while they dragged the bodies up and heaped them, topping them off with a layer of shields that served very well as a floor. She climbed up onto it and motioned them to assemble in front of her. When everything was right, she began.

“You call yourselves heroes. Perhaps you were. You call yourselves champions. That you are not, and I’ll tell you why. You don’t live right. You gorge yourselves with rich, unbalanced foods, and dim your wits by guzzling liquor. You’re fat and flabby and you don’t care, because no matter what happens to you, you’ll be revived enough to continue with your hoggish stuffing at the next meal. You lack skill, too. Fighters, bah! You’re a lot of butchers. You have strength, bad as your present condition is, but you don’t know how to use it. I guess that covers it.”

She stopped abruptly and started to descend from her macabre rostrum. But they would not let her—just as she had planned. They wanted to know more—how to get in trim, how to fling giants about the way she did. She heard them in grim silence. Yes, she would teach them a lot of things—all but the last. That would be her secret, or at least until her control was established beyond possible challenge.

“All right,” she flashed back at them, “if you mean it, get to work! Strip off that armor. Then line up out there in as many ranks as you please, but with room around every man enough to swing his arms and body about without interfering with his neighbor.”

She waited while they stripped down to their underwear and got in gym formation, issuing the appropriate orders to correct the formation. When all was set. she started. The Swedish movements she gave them, from A to Z, demonstrating each from her high, perch, then calling off the numbers. In half an hour they were sweating profusely. At the end of the hour, nine shamefaced champs lay quietly down and quit, winded and aching in every muscle. But she went relentlessly on, until she caught sight of the Valfather walking across the field accompanied by the faithful Bragi. She allowed them to stop tor a rest, and awaited the coming of the all-highest.

“What manner of fighting is this we have today?” he asked mildly, as he came up. “I have seen strange ways of fighting in the world, but never a thing like this.”

“Oh, we’re not fighting now,” she explained, “but getting ready to fight. You see I’ve got to get the b—”—she bit off the “bums” that came so readily to her lips and substituted “heroes”—“to get the heroes in shape to fight. It may take months. They’re in awful condition now. what with lack of exercise, inadequate diet and all.”

The Valfather’s single eye bulged a bit. What this female hero was saying had the ring of madness. It was astounding. Lack of exercise? Why, his heroes had fought to extinction twice daily for ages. Inadequate diet? Why, his boys could out eat, and did, any men of comparable weight and occupation in the world. Only giants could exceed them. What was this thing Brynhild had brought up from Earth and Heimdall had passed over the bridge?

“I’ll talk to you more about it later,” she promised him. “Right now I want to let these men go, and look over the commissary arrangements.”

Paying no further heed to the Valfather, she stood up straight again and yelled for attention. The weary warriors struggled to their feet, many cramped from their momentary rest.

“Dismiss!” she said, and started to get down. But they stood staring at her. She turned back. “Dismiss, I said. It’s all over for today. Scatter. Rest. Do anything. We’ll take the next lesson right after breakfast tomorrow.”

Down on the ground, she addressed herself to the Valfather once more.

“I’d like to see the back of the house now, please. Who is the chief, cook and bottle washer?”

“Back of the house? Bottle washer? The chief cook is Andhrimnir, but we haven’t any of those other things.”

“You show me, pop,” she said, taking Bragi by the arm. “We ought to be able to give it. the once over before supper, don’t you think?”

The venerable Bragi looked startled, but he nodded. So they started back across the field. It was a winding course, for the spent warriors lay everywhere—whole for a change, but more miserable than if they had been hacked in pieces. There was only a second’s pain when an ax cleaved an arm away, but reaching for the sky for minutes at a time left after effects. But there was not a hero there but was resolved to go on doing it. They were beginning, in a formless sort of way, to hate this Misaeda, but at the outset she had aroused their admiration. Now every man of them wanted to fit himself so he could do the things she had done. And each, as he groveled and panted, looked forward to the day when he could fling people around—beginning with Misaeda.

III.

AS in many palaces and the “grand hotels” of Earth, the back of the house at Valhalla was as dismal as the recesses of an outmoded penitentiary, in sharp contrast with the gilded exterior. The kitchen was dark, gloomy and dirty, with a bloodstained earthen floor. Innumerable cobwebs hung from the undressed rafters. A huge caldron stood in the middle of the room, and in the far corner a tank of heroic dimensions. The walls were lined with racks to hold the mead-carrying horns, and the stench was terrible. The most obnoxious features of the place, however, were the pigsty and the cook himself.

Andhrimnir was a giant—and an ultra-fat one. He sat dozing on a stool six feet high, but his bulk was so great that his posture was a squat. He had nine chins and five bellies, lying fold upon fold, and his face was coarse and stupid. He was snoring stentorously as Misaeda entered.

In the pigpen—which lacked only grandstands to qualify as a bull ring, so immense was it—stood a colossal boar, surrounded by thralls. One thrall, far larger than the rest, was maneuvering before the pig with a heavy poleax. The pig was watching him anxiously with an expression of utter woe, and all the while great tears rolled out of his tiny red eyes and dripped from his snout. Misaeda thought she had never seen so miserable a creature.

“That is Saehrimnir,” explained Bragi, proudly. “It is him we eat thrice daily. He has just been magically reassembled from the remains of the dinner. When the thrall kills him, Andhrimnir will awake and thrust him into the pot. It is a very neat and economical arrangement.”

“It’s outrageous,” pronounced Misaeda, looking at the poor animal with rare compassion. “Wait until the S. P. C. A. hears about this. Why, to slaughter the same beast three times a day, day after day, for years and years… Oooooh!”

She shuddered. There was that angle, of course. But she was also thinking of such collateral issues as monotony of diet—which the drunken heroes never seemed to notice—trichinosis, a constant threat, and vitamin deficiency.

The ax fell, the pig squealed, and Misaeda plugged her ears with her fingers. All slaughtered pigs squeal, but few pigs are of elephantine proportions. Saehrimnir’s squeal might well have served as the signal for an air alert for the entire Atlantic coast of America. The cook, Andhrimnir, heard it, even through his deep slumber, and stirred. Misaeda hurried out of a side door, dragging Bragi behind her.

There Misaeda saw something that froze her into her customary stance of cool self-possession. Hundreds of weary Valkyries sat on benches that ran along the outer back wall of the palace, waiting for the next mess call. But what caught Misaeda’s eye was Brynhild and one other person. They were standing apart, Brynhild and a sly, sneaky-looking, undersized man, whispering together. At Misaeda’s sudden and unexpected appearance amongst them, they both looked up, started guiltily, then exchanged knowing glances. The little man smiled a quick, crooked smile, nodded, then disappeared abruptly—much as a light goes out. Brynhild stalked to the nearest bench and sat down, trying to appear indifferent. Misaeda knew, without being told, that the little man was Loki, the Norse god of mischief. There was trouble brewing, and it was being brewed for her. Her immediate disposition of it was a disdainful sniff.

“Now,” she said to the fatuous Bragi, “what about this mead stuff? Where does it come from, and how do they handle it?”

“Ah, yes,” said he, “the lovely mead. Follow!”

He led her past the seated rows of fagged Valkyries to the place where an open trough entered the kitchen wall. The trough was quite similar to an irrigation or mining flume, and conveyed a gurgling, sticky amber liquid that smelled to high heaven. Valhallic mead, consisting as it does of thirty percent honey, thirty percent pale ale, and forty percent alcohol, would be smelly. The legions of flies blackening the planked sides of the flume did nothing to detract from the general nauseousness of the scene. Now Misaeda understood the big tank that stood in the corner of the kitchen, and why it was relatively easy for the harassed waitresses to satisfy the Gargantuan thirst of the Valhalla warriors. Or Einheriar, as Misaeda had just learned they were collectively called.

She insisted on tracing the flume to its source, so the unwilling Bragi had to trail along. In a couple of minutes they came upon the obvious source of the myriads of flies. Just abaft the kitchen was the golden-wired corral within which the horses of the Valkyrie squadrons were kept. They may have been celestial horses, but they conformed closely in their habits to the earthly and mortal kind.

The trail led on through the golden grove, then upward. At length the gold-leaved trees gave way to green, and she knew that they were in the famous upper bow of the great tree Yggdrasil. It was a forest in itself, with many levels and ramps leading from one to another. She saw many kinds of darting and flying animals, or others placidly browsing—squirrels, eagles, ravens, owls, and stags. But the flume, led on, wide open all the way.

At last she found the source. High in the uppermost branches was a filthy platform on which stood a goat, no doubt the goat Heidrun that Skaugul had mentioned. It was a noble animal, if size is any criterion of nobility, for it matched the pig Saehrimnir in dimensions, standing some forty feet from ground to spine. It ate steadily from the leaves of the overhanging bough and its udder continually streamed the fresh-made mead into the trough that it bestrode.

“Why couldn’t that animal give milk just as well?” asked Misaeda, with pointed scorn.

“She could. She did,” said Bragi.“But who wants milk? We worked magic on her to change it. Neat, eh?”

Misaeda’s sniff, to his poetic mind, did not constitute a satisfactory answer. She was unaware of it, and if she had been aware would not have cared a farthing, but at that moment she added one more name to the list of her non-friends. Miss Simpkins had a way of getting people to do what she wanted them to do, but she lacked the art of making them like it.

“I’ve seen enough,” she announced, having finished a thoroughly disapproving survey of the placid Heidrun.

“Asgard was a dreary place,” remarked the innocent Bragi, as they left, “until we had mead. Heavens, you know, are always dull. One has to do something about it after the novelty has worn off. Think of it, I’ve been here centuries and centuries with nothing to do but sound mess call three times a day and render a ballad now and then on request!”

Misaeda’s reply was a super-sniff. Might we say a snort?

SUPPER that night was a repetition of dinner. Tons and tons of the unfortunate Saehrimnir’s flesh and thousands of gallons of the potent mead vanished. It was accompanied, as before, by millions of cubic feet of belly gases erupted by the contented Einheriar. Altogether, according to Misaeda’s lights, it was a most disgusting performance. To her further disapproval, the meal was accompanied by some very flagrant flirtations between the heroes and the willing Valkyries. It appeared that the evening meal, unlike breakfast and dinner, was to be followed by exhibitions of prowess in the field of love rather than in fighting.

“You see, my arm is all right now,” said Sigmund, who had seated himself beside her. He demonstrated.

“If it’s still there a second from now,” she told him, “I’ll tie it into a knot with the other one.”

He removed the offending arm with a hurt and baffled look. He had certainly tried his best to make this female hero feel at home—offering her a challenge and all that—but everything he did seemed to be wrong. He furrowed his handsome blond brow a moment, then thought of the obvious mot juste.

“Silly of me, wasn’t it?” asked the warrior. “One hero trying to make another. Sorry. Naturally, now that we have female heroes, we’ll have to have some masculine Valkyries to match.”

“Sir!”

And that was the extent of Misaeda’s supper conversation. Sigmund hung around for a while, but found it discouraging. When Bragi appeared on the stage for the evening’s ballad, he seized the occasion to vanish quietly in the crowd.

Misaeda got through that awful evening somehow. Then some magic was performed. The long troughs and benches disappeared as in a dream. In their places were lines of golden couches. Apparently taps was close at hand.

She picked a couch in the very center of the hall, since, being a hero, she had to sleep there with the others. But for the edification of her neighbors, she most pointedly drew a circle about it with her sandaled toe before she retired. To people steeped in the traditions of potential magic it was sufficient. She did not enlighten them as to what the purpose of the circle was, or what would happen to anyone rash enough to cross it, but the exhibition of the day had been enough for them all.

MORNING brought breakfast, and after breakfast came the forenoon of combat time. But that morning the throngs of warriors waited. Their routine had been upset. They simply didn’t know what to do. It was Misaeda who told them. Calisthenics again. And she also hinted that those who went easiest on the mead would have the best chance of sticking it out until noon. Because she meant to work them to a frazzle, and did.

All the while, the Valfather sat dejectedly on his throne, contemplating the gloomy future and the puzzling and unprecedented and unpredicted present. He was a sad and disillusioned man, godling, or what you will. He had traded an eye for all-knowledge and wisdom, and had undergone other harrowing experiences in order to make himself more fit as the leader of his people. He knew, or thought he knew, the ultimate culmination of all his efforts. And that culmination was defeat, extinction, and obliteration. Pure tragedy. Nor was there any way out. So the Norns had foretold it; so it would come to pass. It was they who had all knowledge of what had been, what was, and what was to be. Yet at no time had there been mention made of a female hero coming to Valhalla. It was that troubled him most. Had he given his eye in vain? Were the Norns completely dependable?

Only last evening Loki had come to him. He did not like or trust Loki, but what the fellow had said seemed sound advice. Loki had insinuated that perhaps this female hero who had unaccountably appeared within the walls of sacred Valhalla might be a giant in disguise. How else could one so frail fling heroes about, breaking arms and necks?

So he himself, Wotan, the All-Highest, master of runes and prophecies, had cut runes and studied them. The answer was blank. The woman was no giant, no sorceress—a simple Norse hero cut down while resisting the hated Cimbri. There was no choice left him. He had to follow the advice of the tricky Loki and seek the aid of the reluctant Norns. It was a thing they should have told him, and had not. It was his right and duty to demand an answer. So he sent Loki as the messenger. Loki was due back at any moment.

It was in this manner that things stood when Bragi tinkled his harp and sounded mess call that momentous day. It was in this manner that things stood when the strange hero, Misaeda, and her heaving and flabbergasted disciples staggered off the fighting fields into the grand mess hall of Valhalla. Not one of them, not excepting Misaeda—though she knew dirty work of some stripe was afoot—had any inkling of what was coming.

Before they could sit down. Bragi tinkled his harp and sang out the call to “attention.” The panting heroes stiffened where they stood. The tableau on the thronal dais told them something big was about to happen. Loki was there, trying to look self-effacing and unimportant, as was his wont—and Loki’s presence always meant trouble. Also the chief Valkyrie was there, Brynhild, looking extremely satisfied with herself and glowing with virtuous triumph. The Valfather was slumped in his throne chair fingering a carved bit of a stick.

After a moment he handed it to Bragi, and commanded, “Read!” Bragi took it, cleared his throat, and began.

“Hark! A message from the wise sisters:

In Hlidskialf sits Odin,

His rule is empty.

Misaeda, amongst the Einheriar,

Usurps him.

Wroth are the Dises,

Their sooth unheeded.

Signed:

Urdar, Verdandi, Skuld, the Norns.

There was a hush that was painful. “What say the Einheriar?” asked the bard.

The Einheriar exchanged a lot of side-long glances, but not one of them saw fit to say anything. They all had visions of fair hands pushing at their throats, twisting their wrists and arms, or other unorthodox contortions that would make them subject to the ridicule of their fellows. No hero cared to stick his neck out. Not one of them opened his trap. Let the gods handle it.

The Valfather stirred himself. He snapped out of his defeatist lethargy long enough to get to his feet and declare:

“The self-styled hero, Misaeda, having wormed herself into our midst and violated our hospitality, is hereby expelled from Valhalla. The masters-at-arms will take appropriate measures.”

Gunnar and Sigmund, who were the masters-at-arms, exchanged significant looks. It took no clairvoyant to read their meaning. It was simply, “How?”

Misaeda accepted the challenge. From where she stood in the center of the hall she called out in a high, clear voice:

“Fiddlesticks! I’ve got something to say about this.”

Then she stared forward, the armored men clankingly making way for her. They were keenly interested. Scarcely one of them but whose cheeks still burned and ears tingled with some sharp rebuke of the morning. They respected Misaeda, but they would gladly have seen her turned wrong side out. They loathed Loki, the trickster, but they credited him with being smart. They loved their Valfather. but knew he could be thunderous and pompous as all get out on occasion; and they also knew that Brynhild was nobody to be trifled with. They looked forward with considerable relish to what would happen when Misaeda tangled with that trio.

They had not long to wait. Misaeda was at the foot of the throne. She was mounting the dais! She was up with the big shots, where only gods and demigods dared stand!

“Listen, everybody,” she began. “I didn’t want to come to this lousy heaven of yours. I’m stuck with it. And it’s that dumb woman’s fault.” Here she flung an accusing finger at the astonished Brynhild.

“She can’t distinguish between right-thinking people and your kind. But I’m here, and I mean to make the best of it. Let the old Norns be wroth! What are we here for? To waste our lives in debauchery and stupid dueling, or to prepare for Ragnarok—”

A gasp from tens of thousands of throats in union almost sucked in the walls. Ragnarok, the unmentionable, shouted from the platform! It was hideous; it was blasphemous; it was unthinkable. All the world knew about Ragnarok and dreaded it, but never spoke of it. The ultimate fate of the world was the most hush hush thing imaginable. Nobody was supposed to know it but the Valfather, Mimir, and the Norns. And all mankind, and god-kind, and giant-kind, and dwarf and fairy-kind joined in the conspiracy. If the good and kindly old man who was their chief god chose to kid himself that only he knew the future, they would not disillusion him.

The Valfather’s lone eye bugged.

“Did you say Ragnarok, my child?” he asked anxiously. “Are you, perchance, a fourth Norn, that you know the unknowable?”

“Do I look like one of those crack-brained old women?” she countered. “Why do you have to be a Norn to know what everybody knows and has always known? This cockeyed set-up you have here is headed straight for a fall, and it’s no secret, but you sit here day after day mooning about it and grieving over what you think can’t be helped. Well, I’m not usurping anything. I’m trying to help you, that’s all. If you expect to make any showing at all at Ragnarok, we’ll have to get this bunch of bums in better condition. They are fat and flabby, and their kidneys are all shot from swilling mead … oh, my, they’re terrible!”

The Valfather’s single eye was roaming the sea of upturned, eager faces. He did not like in the least the turn the conversation had taken. Cats were being let out of the bag by droves. And, to his amazement, the assembled throng of heroes took the nasty reference to them with meek silence. If this woman kept on talking, it was hard to say what would come out next.

“Suppose we adjourn this hearing to my chambers, my dear,” suggested he, solicitously. “It must be trying to talk before so many.”

“Very well,” Misaeda snapped back, “but that rat”—indicating the fawning Loki by a contemptuous jerk of the thumb—“and that cat”—meaning the indignant Head Valkyrie—“don’t sit in. I’ve got things to tell you for your own good.”

The Valfather winced. Sometimes Frigga talked like that, too. He knew from a wealth of experience that whatever was for his own good was going to be hard to take. He sighed audibly. Women were like that, though, and you had to make the best of them.

“This way, my dear,” he said resignedly. Then, turning to Bragi, “Tell ’em to sit down and eat. We’ll put out a release later.”

IN the interview in the chambers—which were the usual barnlike rooms Misaeda had observed elsewhere in Valhalla, palatial only because of the vast areas of gilding—the ex-headmistress of the Gowanus Settlement School did not pull her punches.

“Are you going to be a sap all your life?” she began, with her customary disregard for tact. “You’re all tied up in knots in the silliest, most impractical mythology ever invented by drunken poets. And all you do about it is sit and suffer. Or else you go off the reservation entirely and squander months down in Midgard breaking up families and impairing the morals of minors. Do you think it’s right?”

She spoke with a bitter fierceness that drove him straightway into the corner. He was on the defensive from the first onset.

“Wh-wh—”

“No. Of course you don’t. You’re a decent guy—at heart. But you’re too darn gullible. You believe you’ve got to do these things because they’re in the book. Nuts! If you set yourself up as chief god in this wacky world, why don’t you work at it? Do something.”

She paused for breath, glaring at him with open disapproval. He floundered for a moment and managed a weak, “But what can I do?” when she was back at him.

“What can you do? Plenty! You swapped an eye for knowledge that everybody has. Go back and get your eye and tell old Mimir to go and jump in his own ocean. You keep fooling around on the advice of three crazy old women who are doing their best to make a monkey out of you—and succeeding. Bosh! I know as much about the future or anything else as they do. You are worrying about the giants, and the dog Garm and the wolf Fenris. Well, I ask you. What has Garm and Fenris got that is so terrible? Bad breath—halitosis, they called it in my age. Get yourself a gas mask, that’s all there is to that. And you’re worried about the dragon Nidhug that is gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil. Why don’t you kill it now, while the killing is good? Why wait until they all gang up on you? Snap these heroes out of their chronic jag, and swat the frost giants. Swat the fire giants. Send expeditions everywhere, one at a time. Then you’ll have no Ragnarok.”

“But, my dear,” protested the harassed Valfather, “you don’t understand. Ragnarok is far in the future. There is nothing we can do about it now. We have peace. Don’t you understand? If we do the things you urge, we upset the status quo. That is always bad.”

“Nuts. Excuse my frankness, but I seem to remember a gentleman hight Chamberlain. He talked like you did—of ‘peace in our time.’ There was another, somewhat before him, who said, ‘After me the deluge.’ That’s you, on both counts. I ask you again, are you going to be a dope all your life?”

The Valfather was much distressed. Nobody had ever talked to him like that—not even Frigga, in her most uninhibited moments. One of the tremendous advantages of the godhead was the immunity to unmasked opinion. His satellites had always been Yes-men, and there was no denying it—he liked it. He must get rid of this troublesome female hero, with her sharp tongue and utter lack of respect of authority. He had the fleeting idea of summoning Brynhild and having her take this Misaeda back to where she had found her and dump her in the ocean. He stammeringly mentioned it.

“Not a chance,” was Misaeda’s tart reply. “Your stupid, bungling system wished me on you, and I stick. You’ve hauled me back a couple of millennia and there is no place for me to go. But if I can’t have the Christian Heaven I’m entitled to, I’ll do what I can with this one—on a give-and-take basis. I’ll help you, you help me. Between us, we can make Valhalla a decent place to live. As for Ragnarok—that’s in the bag.”

Wotan tried to digest that. For he had never had much use for women except in a limited sense, and all she had said was rank heresy. Try as they might, the Aesir could not hope to survive Ragnarok. It was so written in the sacred runes. It had been foretold by the Norns. Mimir had confirmed it. Wotan himself knew it from the prescience he had so dearly bought. This Misaeda talked sheer sophistry. Yet she talked it with such an air of determined confidence that his own self-confidence was shaken. Perhaps in a case like this compromise was in order.

“My dear,” he said, after a lengthy communing with his own thoughts, “I have reconsidered my expulsion order. I believe you are truly a hero from Midgard. As such, I shall let you remain in Valhalla. More than that, since you appear to have practical ideas, I shall make you chief of the Einheriar. Handle them as you will—with Ragnarok in mind. But not a word of that to them, do you hear?”

“I hear,” she acknowledged grimly. The fable of the Camel in the Tent was not far from her mind. First a foot-hold, then control. What more could a sincere, ambitious girl ask? Well, a few things. And she asked for them.

“Very well,” she added. “I’ll do it. But I need a little help.”

“Ask it.”

“I want,” she began, “first of all, that when we eat this hog Saehrimnir next, that he’ll stay eaten. Get me? After that, I want herds of cattle, flocks of chickens, and some sheep. Get Mimir to furnish fish twice a week—he has plenty, and the Einheriar need variety.”

The Valfather nodded approval. But he hadn’t heard the half of it.

“I want,” she continued, “ten thousand thralls with oxen and plows to turn up the south recreation pasture. I need only the north one for my exercises and drills. After that I want it planted in vegetables. I want cabbages, spinach and potatoes. I want asparagus, lettuce, radishes and artichokes. I want onions, garlic, corn and wheat.”

“It’s a big order,” murmured the All-Highest. “Moreover, the heroes won’t eat that stuff. I know ’em.”

“They’ll eat it,” she assured him, with a stabbing glance of those steely gray eyes, “and like it. I’ll guarantee it.”

“All right,” sighed the Valfather. “Go on.”

“I want that fat cook fired … the kitchen thoroughly cleaned and painted white inside—not gold … and that mead-producing goat turned back into a normal goat—”

“But, my dear, the heroes will not drink milk—”

“They will drink milk,” affirmed Misaeda, determinedly, “But not in such quantities as they have been drinking mead. That calls for cheesemakers. Which brings up another item. Send a squadron of Valkyries down to Midgard and have them pick out a few score deserving housewives, instead of swashbuckling killers, for a change. What we need up here is homemakers—not these floozies you hire as body snatchers.”

“Floozies?” queried the Valfather, wrinkling his noble brow.

“Hussies, if you like the word better. That’s all half these Valkyries are. What goes on here after dinner at nights is simply scandalous, no less. I won’t have it.”

By then Wotan was in such a state of confusion that he could only nod acceptance. Inwardly he was cursing the Norns for not having let him in on this thing in advance and told him what to do. He was a simple, primitive war god, and not versed in the technicalities that now confronted him.

“What else?” he asked meekly.

“I guess that’s all for now,” said Misaeda, relenting. She knew just how far to push a thing on a single interview. She had learned that with countless contacts with high school board officials. Up here in Asgard she had all Eternity in which to work. What could not be done today could be done tomorrow.

The Valfather bowed her out. She marched by him primly, out onto the platform, and down the steps to the floor of the hall. The meal was over, as she well knew from the chorus of burps and the clicking of tooth picking. But she stalked to her seat, nevertheless, and sat down as if nothing out of the way had happened.

“I saved some chow for you,” whispered Sigmund, leaning over and opening his tunic. Underneath his sweaty shirt was a side of ribs, greasy and underdone, but still warm.

“Thanks,” said Misaeda, laconically, taking it and pretending to nibble. She was fed up with pork, but in her own peculiar way she was gratified. At least one of the heroic dead was showing symptoms of incipient good manners

THAT night Misaeda lay on her golden couch—within the magic ring—and thought and thought. So far, so good. In a day or so she would introduce a balanced diet; her system of calisthenics was already doing marvels. Next would come the business of teaching the defunct heroes table manners; the matter of appointing corporals and sergeants and the teaching of squads right and similar basic maneuvers. After that the Blitzkrieg tactics.

Then an errant breeze wafted to her the odor of ten thousand spent warriors lying on the weather side of her. Oh, yes. There must be showers, too, and some arrangement about laundry.

Misaeda sighed. A woman’s work is never done, she told herself for the nth time. These poor, poor men—so helpless, so goofy. It was lucky for them she had come amongst them! Tomorrow there would be much to do. She was so ecstatic in her previsions that she did not note or even hear the somnolent mutterings of the hero on the next couch.

“Ah, god,” he moaned, “Misaeda! What next?”

The Leech

Astounding Science Fiction, January 1944

THE first premonition of trouble came to Cranborne when Jim Skelly shot at him.

It is always disconcerting to be shot at unexpectedly, but especially when the shooter is a trusted employee and friend, and a crack shot as well. But as it happened, Skelly missed. Cranborne’s reflexes were too fast for him. There was also the impression that somehow Skelly managed to pull his punch at the very instant of firing.

It occurred in the morning, at the main gate of the Cranborne Labs. Skelly was on guard and Cranborne was driving in on his way to work. And then, just as Cranborne nodded good morning, he saw Skelly whip his gun out. His face was strangely contorted, like that of a man doing a set of calisthenics that taxed his strength, for it was red and twisted and registered pain and indignation rather than anger, but his arm came up nevertheless. Cranborne ducked just as the trigger was pulled, and when the bullet crashed through the windshield he rolled out of the car on the far side and gathered himself for the dash on the watchman.

By the time he rounded the rear of the car, two engineers coming to work had grabbed Skelly and disarmed him. Skelly was struggling with them, protesting it was all a mistake and he could explain everything. The pistol still spun on the ground where it fell. From then on everything was anticlimactic.

“For Pete’s sake, Jim,” demanded Cranborne in amazement, “what’s got into you? Are you drunk or crazy?”

“Crazy, I guess,” said Skelly sheepishly, as the men pinning him let his arms go and stood away. “Like those other nuts we’ve been hearing about. I swear by all that’s holy I didn’t mean to and tried not to, but to save me I couldn’t help that arm from coming up and pulling the trigger. It was like being in a dream. Something outside of me that was stronger than I was making me do it.”

Cranborne simply looked at him. Skelly’s record was spotless, and to challenge his personal loyalty was unthinkable. Twice during the war just finished he had thwarted Nazi spies in attempts to sabotage the labs, killing five in single-handed fights against the odds. And as he spoke now there could be no doubt of his sincerity. The act had been a compulsive one—motiveless, unpremeditated and irresistible. Cranborne picked up the gun and handed it to him.

“All right, Skelly,” he said. “Forget it.”

While he was parking his car alongside the small office building, Cranborne thought of the incident in connection with the wave of similar ones Skelly alluded to. He was trying to fit the latest occurrence into a pattern with the rest. Except there was no pattern. There was just a jumble of unrelated impulsive acts, mostly of a foolish nature. Their appearance was sporadic, random. and whimsical. Psychologists attributed them to post-war hysteria and said it was a compensatory letdown of inhibitions forced on the public by the war. The police, on the other hand, contended that most of the episodes were the work of practical jokers, utilizing the current press publicity as an excuse for their pranks.

Cranborne considered both theories and decided neither made sense. There was the case of the ferry captain, for example, a staid man of unblemished record. At the end of his run, instead of docking his boat in the slip, he went on down the river and out to sea, heedless of the angry protests of his unwilling passengers. It was not until a coast-guard cutter overhauled him and tore him away from the wheel by force that he desisted. Then he broke down and actually wept. He said he could not help it. Some inner force made him do it, and though he resisted with all his might every mile of the way, he simply had to carry on. Then there was the instance of the notoriously greedy moneylender who sent out notices to his debtors that they might regard their accounts as paid in full. He repented almost instantly and tried to retract, alleging he had been under some kind of alien influence at the time. And so … but there were many such cases, all more or less silly and innocuous. But the one characteristic they had in common was that the perpetrators invariably pleaded compulsion from some mysterious outer force.

Cranborne mounted the steps to his office. Cranborne Labs was a small plant, but well laid out for its work. Its work was invention. To the right lay the technical buildings, where chemists, physicists and engineers did research. To the left lay the shops, where models were built and tested. It was Cranborne and his detailer Gibson who knitted the whole together, and they held forth in a tight little building of their own, assisted only by a secretary.

BY the time Cranborne reached the door of his office he had decided to put the Skelly affair from his mind. Since an epidemic of momentary madness seemed to be abroad in the land, it was no more than to be expected that sooner or later it would reach his outfit, though admittedly the Skelly outburst was of a more dangerous nature than the others. And then he turned the knob and walked into Miss Nevers’ office, which lay outside his own.

It was full of acrid smoke, and at one end a fire of torn papers blazed. Miss Nevers knelt nearby it, surrounded by stacks of letters and carbons. The wide-open drawers of the file cases lining the walls told where they came from. The girl was sobbing spasmodically, but as she sobbed she was rending the letters into scraps and feeding the scraps to the fire. If Cranborne had been startled by what happened at the gate, his feeling now was blank amazement. For here was a case of hateful compulsion in continuous motion.

He yelled at her, and grabbed her up from the floor. She gasped once—a curiously mingled gasp of fright and relief—and collapsed in his arms, only to burst into a fit of uncontrolled weeping. He crossed the room swiftly and laid her on a couch. Then he snatched an extinguisher off the wall and went about putting out the fire. After that he opened the windows and surveyed the damage.

The building was none the worse for it, for its floors and walls were concrete and its furnishings metal. But he pawed through the charred scraps of papers ruefully. They were all that was left of a voluminous correspondence with the patent office and a number of industries in relation to licenses and royalties. The inconvenience their loss would cause would be vast, and the monetary cost incalculable, for many of the papers missing were important, since they dealt with matters pending.

Meantime, Miss Nevers had gained some control of herself. Now she was wailing in self-upbraiding. She had done a hideous, an awful, an inexcusable thing, and she was going to end it all. But she couldn’t help it. Something made her—it was like being under the influence of a drug—and now she was disgraced and wanted to die.

“Now, now,” he soothed, “don’t let this get you down. It is happening all over town, and you just happened to be the next victim. No real harm has been done. There is nothing here that Gibson or I can’t replace from memory.”

“O-o-oh,” she moaned, and went off into another spasm of self denunciation. But after a little he calmed her with assurances, and told her she was obviously suffering from overwork. At length her snifflings stopped and she agreed to go away and take a short vacation. Cranborne saw her out the gate, and then summoned the janitor to finish cleaning up the mess. By the time Cranborne was ready to cross the hall to the drafting room he felt he had already done a full day’s work.

GIBSON did not acknowledge his greeting, but went ahead with what he was doing. Cranborne spoke again, but Gibson did not seem to hear him. Cranborne shot him a curious look, then perched himself silently on a stool in a corner to watch. For clearly something was wrong in here, too. Gibson’s preoccupation with what he was doing was only the first symptom that caught the eye, for he was not a fellow to lose himself completely in concentrated thought.

To begin with, the vault was open. The significance of that was that only Cranborne knew the combination, an arrangement agreed upon by common consent of the associates. The vault contained drawings for hundreds of inventions not yet released for patent or sale, economic uncertainty after the war being what it was, and their potential value ran into millions. A leak could be very costly. So, to limit responsibility, Cranborne only was to have access to the vault. And yet it was open?

How? By Gibson, obviously, since he was dragging rolls of drawings front it. But where did he get the combination? It was locked in Cranborne’s head, never having been committed to paper.

Another disturbing feature was that Gibson was examining minutely the plans for a station to transmit electric power on tight beams, one of the most jealously hoarded secrets of the Cranborne Associates. It was no secret to Gibson, of course, but what bothered Cranborne was the zombielike behavior of his chief assistant. He acted like a man in a trance, going about with an absolutely deadpan face. The only live thing about him was his eyes, which bored eagerly into the sheets before him as if they had never seen one of them before. Yet Gibson, as draftsman, had executed them all! And then, from time to time, as if to fix some detail in memory, he would snatch up a pad and sketch furiously, only to crush the sketch and hurl it into a wastebasket.

Cranborne stood it as long as he could, and then went over and shook the man.

“Hey,” he yelled, “snap out of it! Are you hypnotized, or what?”

“Huh?” said Gibson, stupidly, lookingly blankly up at him. Then, not slowly, but with startling abruptness, Gibson came alive.

His reaction was about that of a sleepwalker suddenly awakened in an unauthorized place. He started violently, passed his hand agitatedly across his eyes, blinked, and mumbled a question as to where he was. Then he sat trembling for a minute, staring helplessly at Cranborne. His eyes roamed over to the clock on the wall, and he started again.

“Two hours,” he said weakly.

Cranborne waited.

Gibson glanced at the tracings spread out on the table, then toward the yawning vault door.

“I did it,” he said simply, “but I don’t know how or why.”

“Go on,” said Cranborne grimly. “Tell me all about it. Especially how you felt.”

“How I felt?” echoed Gibson blankly. “Why, sort of numb and helpless, like I did once when a doctor gave me a heavy shot of morphine. It happened to me just after I came in. Something compelled me to go over to the vault and open the door—”

“How?”

There was a hardness in the tone.

“I don’t know how. My fingers did it. I wasn’t there, so to speak, but somewhere off in the back of my head. I don’t know what the numbers were, or anything.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I went on taking drawings out, looking at them, and putting them back again. I don’t know how many. Or which.”

There was a long, painful silence. Cranborne was frowning, and Gibson plainly scared.

“I suppose this washes me up,” said Gibson hesitantly. “I wouldn’t blame you if you thought—”

“I’m not thinking anything,” snapped Cranborne, “but I’m doing a lot of wondering. Skelly tried to kill me as I came in. Miss Nevers has just burned the patent files. Now this. It is beginning to look as if someone is out to get me, and is employing you as tools.”

“Oh, not that,” Gibson cried out in anguish, “you know—” Cranborne shook his head.

“I know all of you. And I trust you to the hilt. Still. But I believe what I just said. You are being used. How, I don’t know. Nor why. Nor by whom. But the answers to those questions are our No. I priority from now on.”

They were interrupted by the ring of the telephone. Cranborne took it. It was McKeller, their legal associate, calling from Washington.

“Say, Steve,” were McKeller’s first words, “there’s something down here with an awfully putrid smell. The patent office says no go on that new superplastic process. Some skunk has beat us to it, and that’s not the half of it.”

“Keep talking,” said Cranborne, wearily.

“I saw the drawings on file and the rest of the dope. Get this. They are exact reproductions of ours—to the umpteenth decimal point and to the comma. The only difference is that they were filed three weeks before ours.”

“By whom?” demanded Cranborne, now really upset. The superplastic idea was already as good as sold, and the price ran into six figures down and royalties without end. Cranborne Labs needed every cent, for throughout the war they had worked exclusively on war weapons, handing everything to the government gratis.

“That’s the funniest part of it,” replied McKeller. “The patentee is a guy named Joaquin Jones. Remember him?”

Cranborne cursed vigorously. He did.

“Why, that big lummox couldn’t invent a better mousetrap,” he concluded, “and anyway, I kicked him out of here five years ago. He couldn’t have stolen the idea, if that is what you mean.”

“Somebody sure did,” insisted McKeller ominously. “You had better do a little checking around where you are. There’s a leak.”

“Thanks,” said Cranborne simply, and hung up. There must be a leak, but it was no ordinary leak, he was sure of that. The entrance of Jones’ name into the picture was proof enough of that.

Joaquin Jones had come to him early in the war period, well equipped with references as to character and bearing a diploma from an outstanding scientific college. He was a good-looking, matinee-idolish sort of fellow, but much too dumb and easy going to ever make a name for himself in a high-powered organization such as Cranborne Associates. Cranborne stood him just two weeks and then let him go. It was a routine incident, and easily forgotten. But Jones could not have been a spy, for at that time the superplastic process had not been so much as thought of. Nor was it conceivable that anyone would use him as a go-between for a stolen invention. He was too inept. The last Cranborne heard of him was that he had settled down as a draftsman in a third-rate architect’s office.

“Well,” said Cranborne, turning to Gibson, “the superplastic deal is shot. Somebody stole it. And since it may be that all the other stuff we have in the vault is compromised, we’ll have to think up something new for ready money.”

“What do you mean, compromised?” asked Gibson, still tingling with embarrassment from having been found sleepwalking outside a mysteriously opened vault.

“Look,” said Cranborne, “we are high-grade adults, you and I. We can stare an unpalatable fact in the eye and admit it’s there. Somebody—and it wasn’t you or McKeller or Miss Nevers—had access to those drawings months ago, yet they were never out of the vault until the day we sent them off by registered mail to Washington. Therefore someone has been in the vault and could have seen everything. Now as you know, that vault has a very special lock of my own contrivance that has defied the best safe experts of the country. Yet you opened it this morning without knowing how, or that you were doing it. You were in a daze, under alien control. The same thing may have happened before, it may have happened to me. How are we to know? I am beginning to think we are up against something pretty uncanny. And pretty ominous. My hunch is that we are going to have to work fast from now on, if we are going to hold our own.”

“Maybe you’re right, chief. I’d let my last dollar on your intuition.”

He meant it. Cranborne was no great shakes as an engineer and less of a scientist. But he had the happy knack of being able to look at a lot of jumbled facts and see what would happen if they were hooked together in a certain unorthodox way. The business of the Cranborne Associates was to dig out bizarre facts; it was Cranborne’s job to mull over them and come out with a startling invention. Nobody could analyze his methods, least of all himself.

“All right, then,” said Cranborne, “let’s get going. Trot out those rough notes on the stereoscopic televisor and I’ll take a fling at it. I had a dream last night.”

In a few minutes the queer happenings of the morning were forgotten. Cranborne promptly immersed himself in dreamy thought, letting his mind roam as it would. Twice he started forward, then slumped back.

“Hell, Gibson,” he said, suddenly, “I don’t know what we’ve been waiting for. Grab a pencil and sketch pad. Look, it is as simple as this—”

A diagram swiftly took form.

“See. Stick a bank of omegatron tubes here, lead in your booster circuit there. Now a tripolar condenser here—”

“Oh, sure,” grinned Gibson, “I’ve got it now. And if you add this gadget to the hook-up,” and he sketched in more detail, “you kill static, cut out distortion, and can add odor sensations if you want. It’ll be a lulu.”

“Good work,” said Cranborne, and sat back to watch Gibson develop the idea.

MINUTES rolled by in silence as the sketches for the finished drawings grew. The silence was broken when Gibson broke off to look up at his chief as if expecting some sign of approval.

“Say, chief,” he cried out, appalled, “what’s wrong with you now? You look like—”

It was like a dash of ice water. Cranborne started as if pricked with a pointed electrode, for tingling thrills rippled his scalp and he felt the short hairs on his neck stiffen and rise. His muscles were cramped and his eyes felt as if they were starting from their sockets. He suddenly realized that he had been staring fixedly for unknown hours at something he had not seen except remotely. He had the weird feeling that somebody else had pushed him out of the way and was looking through his eyes.

With considerable effort he broke himself out of the rigid pose he found himself in. Then he got up and walked over to the wall, where he stood a moment with his nose pressed against the blank surface. In a moment he felt normal again, but slightly weak and dizzy, as if having just come out from under the influence of an anaesthetic.

“Something had hold of me too,” he explained to his anxious partner. “Now that I’ve experienced it myself I know my hunch is right. Either an intellect of undreamed-of power is loose in the world, bent on some purpose of its own, or—”

“Or?”

“Or that devilish thing, the spy-ray, has been invented.”

“Now we’re all nuts, chief,” laughed Gibson, but uneasily. “You worked on one once and we nearly went crazy? Remember? You said then the thing was demonstrably impossible.”

“I know. But that was because we clung to the electronic approach. That track leads nowhere. We should have tackled telepathics. What better spy-ray would you want than the ability to look into another man’s mind? It is true that you couldn’t see through concrete and steel into a closed vault, but you could transmit the impulse to your agent and make him open it for you and see what was there.”

“I don’t know,” objected Gibson. “It sounds good, but it doesn’t gibe with what we know about telepathy. Telepathy is an uncertain phenomenon. It occurs in a limited number of people, and is weak and erratic when it does. Nobody yet has been able to control it consciously. Take your hunches. They’re good, we all admit. But can you turn them off and on? No!”

Cranborne admitted grudgingly that was right.

“After all,” pursued Gibson, bucked up by his minor triumph, “what is telepathy but long-range sympathy? You won’t agree that if somebody is making us steal our own ideas for his benefit that we are in sympathy with us, would you?”

“You are splitting hairs now, Gibson. There are a lot of sympathies other than idealistic ones. Or emotional. Certain mental powers can be transmitted by those who know how, willy-nilly. It has been done, though not as scientifically as I would have liked. Do you recall back in ’43 when there was a fellow on the air who claimed he could hypnotize by radio at any distance? He had some fool theory that was the secret of Hitler’s power. Nobody took him seriously, but I think there is the germ of an idea there.”

The conversation went no further At that moment Faber, the biological research man, rushed in angry and excited. He waved a newspaper wildly.

“This burns me up!” he shouted. “Read it!”

It was the afternoon edition of the Daily Enquirer, owned and edited by one of Cranborne’s buddies, Max Hartwell. They had dinner together only the night before. But there was nothing friendly about what was printed on the first page of today’s issue. For under screaming headlines a signed editorial replaced the usual quota of news items.

THE “GREAT” INVENTOR EXPOSED!

How Brainsucker Cranborne Gets Away With It!

The text was a mass of scurrility, as venomous and libelous an attack as was ever penned. It described the Cranborne Labs as a place where bright young scientists were lured and tricked into signing away their intellectual futures, after which they were kept in a state of mental peonage. Stephen Cranborne was denounced as a ruthless exploiter, and the editorial went on to cite instances. There followed an astonishing expose of the institution, describing many of the better-known inventions and stating just who played what part, though all the patents had been issued in Cranborne’s name. There was much truth in that portion, though it was not also told that the contributors received their proportionate share of the profit. What hurt was the mass of falsehood interwoven with it. Fully half of the famous processes, the paper alleged, had been originally conceived by the greatest and least recognized figure of modern science—Joaquin Jones!”

“This is outrageous,” growled Gibson, who was reading over Cranborne’s shoulder. The last paragraph had completed with the assertion that even now the Cranborne vault was stuffed with unreleased inventions pirated long ago from the said Jones.

Cranborne stared at the sheet glumly, and his hands shook a little.

“Gentlemen.” he said, “this is bad, and I do not pretend to understand it. But what is behind it is worse. Max Hartwell would go to hell and back for me, and now he’s done this. But I know one thing, it was not his doing. He was manipulated by some malign force. But wait—”

He reached for the phone, but before his hand touched it, it rang.

“Cranborne?” came the voice. “This is Smithers of the Enquirer. I want to explain that editorial.”

“It needs it,” was Cranborne’s grim reply.

“We can’t understand what happened, but we’re doing our best to rectify it. Boys are out trying to pull in the edition, and I’m going to press with a full retraction right now. It was Hartwell who did it. He wrote the thing and stood over us until it was out and on the streets. Then he went to his office and shut himself in. He seemed to be desperately worried—”

“Never mind that,” snapped Cranborne, “put him on. I want to talk to him.”

“Sorry, sir, but I was coming to that. Five minutes ago Mr. Hartwell jumped out the window, and it’s nineteen floors down.”

“Holy Moses!” exploded Cranborne.

THERE was not the slightest doubt that a malign power was working toward his ruin, but Cranborne could not fathom the motive or the means. He had always been a square shooter and had no known enemies. His organization had proved itself proof against bribery or cunning during the war. Yet the affair of the superplastic process showed that secrets did leak, and the attacks on him by Skelly and his friend Hartwell indicated someone was out to take his life and besmirch his reputation. It called for drastic action, but first he must have information.

TWO days later Gibson rushed off to Washington with the completed plans for the new televisor. He carried with him all the other inventions formerly held in the vault, without regard to whether the market was ripe for their reception. Cranborne was insistent on making the test.

His worst fears were confirmed. Not only had all the vault inventions been patented to others, some as far back as six months before, but the new televisor had been submitted as well—the day before. A few of the patents had been issued to Joaquin Jones, the remainder to a miscellany of companies, some of which McKeller’s investigation found to be controlled or owned by the same Jones.

“I don’t get it,” frowned Cranborne. “Jones couldn’t pour sand out of a boot with the directions written on the sole.”

Yet Jones seemed to have them, and with their files destroyed there appeared little they could do about it. Cranborne was deeply troubled. He was convinced by the snatching of the televisor plans from under his own eyes that he had to deal with some form of spy-ray, and that therefore it was useless to struggle in the conventional manner. Cranborne Labs faced a crisis. The stuff held in the vault was its sole asset, and now that was stolen. Its future income depended on a stream of continuing inventions, but it looked as if those could now be lifted at their source. Worst of all, Cranborne owed a note of a hundred thousand dollars at the First National Bank. The superplastic patents would have cleaned that up and to spare. That deal was out the window.

“This is what comes of being grubbing scientists,” muttered Cranborne moodily. “We haven’t been keeping track of what goes on in the world. I am going to look up Mr. Joaquin Jones.”

It was an amazing and baffling trail. Cranborne took it up where last he had seen it—at the architect’s office where Jones had been a draftsman.

“Jones?” said the architect, with awry smile. “You bet I remember him. A good-looking brute, but dopey as they come. He falls on his feet though. After I let him out he married a beautiful girl with scads of money. I understand he’s a big shot now. Ask anyone in the financial district or city hall.”

Cranborne did, with startling results.

“He is a big shot,” confirmed Leffingwell, a broker Cranborne knew, “but don’t ask me how he got that way. He’s a stuffed shirt if I ever saw one. However, I’m told he is political boss of this city now and hands out judgeships and memberships in Congress to the right people—meaning people who will play his game. There’s no way to get at him legally. He’s czar. He has feathered his nest, too. Nobody knows how many big holding companies he owns outright, or what he controls through them. It is pretty hush-hush business. The only big job he holds in the open is at the First National. He took over the presidency of that last week.”

“It looks as if he is out to get me,” said Cranborne gloomily.

“If he is, you’re all washed up,” was the cheering answer.

There was nothing else to do but dissolve Cranborne Labs, for on his return to the office Cranborne found a letter from the bank saying the note coming due would not be extended. It was cold and curt. It was signed by Joaquin Jones.

“This persecution is directed at me,” Cranborne told the associates when they assembled. “All of us have been hit in the pocketbook, but since I am singled out for murderous attack as well it would be better for the rest of you to cut loose and fend for yourselves. I’m sorry.”

There was a hubbub of protests and offers to pass the hat and meet the note among them. But Cranborne pointed out the futility of it.

“I’m sticking,” announced Gibson, when the rest filed out. “What do we do next?”

“I am going to call on Mr. Joaquin Jones.”

JONES was in his luxurious office suite in the penthouse atop the bank building. His waiting room was crammed with important men—industrial tycoons, renowned bankers, and political leg men. Cranborne knew them from their published pictures. He expected to be kept waiting hours, if seen at all.

The contrary happened. His name had hardly gone in when the inner door opened and Jones stepped out, beaming an oily, fatuous smile.

“So glad you came,” he said heartily, “I knew you were on the way. Right this way, please.” Jiggs, president of Consolidated Traction and a daring Wall Street operator shifted himself testily in his chair and glared at Cranborne. Jiggs evidently did not like being passed over. But big, handsome, stupid-looking Jones either did not notice, or care, for he ushered his newest caller into his private office. He then waved affably to an empty chair. Cranborne did not sit down. Jones shrugged and smiled good-naturedly.

“You know, of course, that we intend to foreclose and smash your outfit,” he said calmly, “and that there is no use whatever in protesting.”

It was not a question, but a statement.

“You seem to know everything,” said Cranborne dryly.

“A man in my position has to know,” answered Jones. His face was entirely devoid of expression except for a meaningless half smile. He rattled off the words in a wooden, parrotlike manner, as if he had learned them by rote and was merely getting them out of his system. “I also know that your purpose in coming here was to size me up and find out if you could why you have been attacked.”

“That is correct.”

“Well,” he said, with a curious self-deprecatory whimper, “I have nothing against you whatever.”

“You have stolen the accumulated work of fifteen good men. You have wrecked a fine-going organization—”

“Oh, no. Please! Not I. I am only the beneficiary. It was another who did that. A man whom you made the disastrous error of underestimating. A man whom you grievously wronged. It was not the money he cared about. He wanted to teach you your place.”

Cranborne could only stare into that bland, witless face and marvel. There was neither rage nor cold arrogance. There was not even the explanatory glitter of the madman’s eye. There was nothing but a zombielike puppet mouthing words.

“Now that your back is broken and your fangs drawn,” Jones went on in the same deadpan way, “he wants you to know who did it and why. He is finished with you now and inaccessible to you, but he directed me to summon you here and remind you of the last words he spoke to you, so that you can think them over for the rest of your blighted life. The man you recklessly flouted was none other than Neville Bronson, the greatest man of all time!”

“Bronson!”

Cranborne had completely forgotten the fellow. Now the incident came back to him. He recalled with great distinctness the ugly, dwarfish little fellow, high-strung and nervous to a fault, dancing about his office and pounding on his desk. “Mark my words,” he had yelled in frenzy in that final interview, “I am going to be master of the world, and when I am you’ll bitterly regret this day. Who helps me I will befriend, who hinders me I will crush.” That was all there was to it. A disgruntled former associate with a childish grudge. A man of admitted scientific capacity, not to say genius, but one who was hopelessly vain, arrogant, and over-ambitious.

“Oh, Bronson,” repeated Cranborne, after a second. “Yes, I know the little runt. And I know his limitations. Very well, he has declared war. War it will be. And if you, Jones, get hurt in the course of it, so much the worse for you. Good day.”

Joaquin Jones chuckled. It was a normal, hearty chuckle, without a single overtone of malice in it.

“Bronson will enjoy that, I am sure,” was all he said.

CRANBORNE had a hard time getting to sleep that night. In fact, he did not sleep at all. He was thinking about that curious man, Neville Bronson. The first impulse was to think of him as a madman, but he was not mad. Neurotic, yes, but not insane. His trouble was that he was undersized, ugly and deformed. One leg was shrunken and there was the hint of a back hump, and his long pendulous nose gave him a gnomish appearance that drew giggles or aversion from women. To offset this—or perhaps to heighten the effect of it—was a keen mind that leaped all technical obstacles at a rush. The resultant was a bitter psychic conflict, the sense of intellectual superiority on the one hand and physical inadequacy on the other. It manifested itself in a quarrelsome and arrogant disposition that immediately estranged any one rash enough to try and work alongside him. It was his obnoxious personality that was the real reason for his leaving the Labs. The other associates had voted him out.

Cranborne had difficulty in recalling the exact pretext employed in dismissal. Bronson had come into his office full of fire and unquenchable energy to announce gloatingly that he had hit upon an idea that would make him master of the world. He. refused to divulge any detail of it other than to say the preliminary work would require vast sums of money. He offered to proceed with it and cut in the Lab associates as assistants, provided they furnished all the money, asked no questions, and gave him full control.

“Too vague.” Cranborne told him, “and we have more pressing things to do. We are at war. We’ll talk about this later.”

“We’ll talk about it now!” shouted Bronson venomously.

That was how Cranborne recalled Bronson—an overcompensated inferiority complex with a grievance against the world, highlighted by pointed hatred for certain individuals. Such a man might easily become a menace to civilization, as witness the career of the creature Hitler.

Cranborne pommeled his brains for fragments about the mysterious invention that was to give the mastery, but nothing came up. There was only the recollection that after Bronson’s departure they found some crumpled papers in the bottom of his locker. The recollection of those snapped Cranborne wide awake.

He rolled out of bed and turned on the light. It was near to dawn, but after a little he found what he was looking for. It was among the dusty notebooks in the bottom of the closet—books in which he had jotted down the salient aspects of all the duds and false starts he had ever worked on. He found the sheaf of folded sheets, still marked with the creases where they had been crumpled. Cranborne spread them out on the bed and looked them over.

They were on cross-section paper, and such data there was, was in the form of tremulous curves. Each of the curves was different, but their general trend was the same. Faber had examined them once and rendered the opinion that they were tracings of electrical currents in the human nervous system, such as are made in electrocardiograms and cephalagrams. Some bore cryptic notations such as, “oc,” “aud,” “cal” and there was a group marked “mot-36K” and other numerical variations.

Cranborne turned them over in his hands and scrutinized the backs carefully. He found one sheet on which there had been some pencil scribblings, now erased. In a moment he had rigged his ultraviolet lamp and was studying the paper under a glass. The words that had been erased all began with the root “psycho,” as if Bronson had been groping for a tentative title for his embryo invention. The clearest one remaining was the word “psychodet.”

“Ah,” thought Cranborne, and gazed at the word. “Psycho,” having to do with human mental processes; “det” meaning, apparently, detection. So that was the secret of Bronson’s spy-ray. But how—

Then he was on the phone, calling Faber first, Gibson next. Their sleepy voices quickly snapped to alert. Yes, they said, they were ready for anything. Neither had made other connection yet, and Gibson had a neat little laboratory in the outbuildings of his country cottage. Cranborne was welcome to use that. After which it was only a question of getting dressed, finding a taxicab, and picking up Faber on the way.

Having said only enough to arouse their interest, Cranborne thought hard about bees and flowers and the price of wheat. If he was in a fight with a mind reader, he would have to guard his mind. It was not until they had washed down Gibson’s impromptu breakfast of ham and eggs with good strong coffee that he let down the veil.

“You know about brain currents, fellows,” he said, “and that any kind of oscillating electric current sets up magnetic waves. My hunch is that Bronson has worked out a way to tune in on what we feel and think. Can you devise an umbrella of static to jam our thoughts in case he is listening in?”

“I guess so,” grinned Gibson. “Where are you going to do your thinking? In my lab?”

WITHIN the hour they had constructed a sort of electric chair, in which they sat in turns while their characteristic brain waves were recorded. Then Gibson threw together an oscillator-amplifier combination and started it humming, scrambling the field about them hopelessly.

“Let him tune in on that,” said Gibson, cheerfully, after testing it. “It covers all of us. What he’ll get is an earful of noise.”

Then Cranborne unloaded.

“We are up against a man with hatred in his heart,” he said, “and out to get us. He is clever. He knows all about neural currents, and he was a whiz at applied radionics. He did all his dirty work very cagily. He first stripped us of our secrets and put them beyond our reach, so slyly that we were unaware. As long as he worked his spy-ray discreetly we were in the dark. But his egotism got the best of him. He wanted us to know about him, and his fiendish cleverness. So he went further. Instead of being content with receiving our sensations, he started to send out motor impulses. We might also have been unaware of that, but we happen to be strong-minded folk. While he was trying to make Skelly shoot me, Skelly’s tendency was to let his arm hang and greet me in the normal way. The result was conflict. Skelly was caught off guard to the extent that Bronson succeeded to a point, but the shot missed me just the same.

“That gives us a pretty good clue as to the nature of his machine. He tunes in on our neural fields just as people do with ordinary radio. But with this difference. He not only sees and listens, but he can send. That is what we have to work out.”

“That is all very well,” remarked Faber, “but how did he do either? We worked a long time on a spy-ray and couldn’t get it to work. It wasn’t selective enough. We could pick up brain waves—millions of them, piled one on another—but we could never unsnarl them or identify them.”

“Because we never went deep enough into analysis. The human brain is constantly busy with a myriad of activities—automatic and otherwise—all utilizing current. Muscle tonus keeps up a steady roar, no matter what else is happening. A man can be eating and conversing at the same time. Note what is brought into play—olfactory and taste sensations, the sight and sound of his friend, and the intellectual interpretation of what he says. Demands are made on the memory files, and signals are sent to the blood vessels and gastric glands. It’s a forty-ring circus. When we tune in on that we have a jumble, as when you hang out a window over Times Square and hear the roar of the crowd. It tells you nothing about any individual.”

“So?”

“So we’ll take the hint left us by Bronson himself. These sketch curves. ‘Oc,’ I take it, signifies the optic nerve, ‘aud’ the auditory, and so on. We’ll leave the motor impulses out for the time being, as an unnecessary complication. If we can tune in on him as he has done on us, we can learn that with minimum effort. All right. Now suppose we rebuild our original spy-ray set—the one that flopped—but with the addition of a bank of resonators tuned to the kind of curve we want to select. We thereby filter out all the body impulses but chosen incoming main sensory nerves—sight, hearing and feeling.”

“Why feeling?”

“We might want to test texture,” said Cranborne. “Sight is often deceptive.”

They went to work immediately. The first job was left to Faber—the identification of the desired curves, each of which had its own characteristic form. He did this by means of a brain probe they threw together after hours of discussion. It was an ingenious needlelike gadget which sent out impulses for variable distances from millimeters to inches. The impulses returned boomerang fashion, but grouped according to the interference they had encountered. They could thus sound the skull and locate nerve trunks. The identification of particular ones was a matter of trial and error. Cranborne acted as guinea pig. Oscillographs told the story.

Faber touched the probe to Cranborne’s forehead and pressed the foot switch. A curve showed on the paper. Gibson jabbed a needle into the subject’s arm. “Yow,” said Cranborne, flinching. But the tracing did not vary.

“Not sensory,” cracked Gibson, lighting a firecracker behind Cranborne’s back. When it popped, Cranborne jumped again, but still not the tracing.

“Not auditory,” said Gibson, and flicked an unseen switch. A ruby lamp on the instrument board came on, then went out. The curve rose sharply, wobbled, then fell back to the norm.

“One down,” said Faber, joyfully, and took down the tracing and labeled it.

By the end of the week they had all the data they needed for the first step. There were three complete sets of curves, alike, but different.

“Like fingerprints,” observed Faber. “When we acquire a big enough library of these we can dope out a classification system. In the meantime we will have to work hit or miss.”

“Good enough for a starter,” grunted Cranborne. “Let’s get busy building our machine.”

THE finished contraption looked like a surrealistic conception of a pipe organ minus pipes. There was a triple keyboard consisting solely of stops, not keys, and there were pedals. Where the dummy pipes should have stood was a bank of indicators and tuning dials. It was an instrument both complex and simple. The operator sat on a stool before it, wearing a set of headphones without ear pieces. It merely held induction coils close to the skull bone.

“Here goes,” said Cranborne, and sat down to make the first try. He twiddled with the starting switch and waited for the machine to warm up. “Too bad the directories don’t list people by their mental wave lengths. Finding one certain man among ten millions may take time.”

That could come later. The main thing was to find out whether the psychodet spy-ray would work at all. He pulled the stop marked “optical” and grasped the tuning dial. He knew Faber’s wave length, so he tried that first, and was treated to a Faber’s-eye view of himself—the nape of his neck, with the machine as background, for Faber was standing directly behind him. So far, so good. He twisted the dial again, blinking as a kaleidoscope of passing mixed and amorphous color blinded him. Then he remembered and eased off on the pedal, cutting down the volume. Suddenly he stopped and frowned. All he saw then was a dull glowing red. He put on more power, but the effect was only to intensify the red. No detail would come out. He smiled.

“I’ve got somebody distinctly.” be said. “I think the guy’s asleep.” He pulled the auditory stop and his ears were promptly assaulted by a tremendous roar. “A shirker snoozing in the corner of a boiler shop is my guess,” he ventured, “or maybe a blind man.”

He was at once disabused. The flat red disappeared. The unknown subject’s eyes had opened. Cranborne was looking at three men sitting in a row a few feet in front of him. They were staring down at his knees, or where his knees should be. Then the eyes he had preempted turned downward in the same direction. He saw the lower half of a brief skirt and two plump silk-stocking knees protruding from under it. Two well-modeled hands promptly came into the field of vision and gave a futile tug at the inadequate skirt hem.

“I’m a girl!” said Cranborne. “Not bad-looking, either. I’m in a subway, going somewhere.”

“String along.” howled his helpers. “See what happens.”

The girl got out when the subway stopped and climbed some stairs. She turned down a side street. Cranborne seeing what she saw as she went. It gave him an eerie feeling to be drifting along that way without sensation other than sight, for he had long since cut the sound wave to save his ears. He missed the swish of wind on the cheeks and the gentle jar when her heels hit the pavement. It was spring, too, and he wondered how she felt. He yanked the “sensory” full-skin combination.

“Holy Moses!” he yelped, and promptly shoved the stop back in.

“Now what?” came the eager questions.

“Tight shoes,” Cranborne explained.

Then his subject entered an office building, and a few minutes later was at a typewriter knocking out a letter from notes. Cranborne followed the text of it shamelessly. Apparently her boss was a bookmaker or in some other occupation on the fringe of legality, for the letter was to the district attorney about some matter recently discussed. It was not the kind of letter whose publication would have done either one of them good. Cranborne had seen all he needed for the time being. He shut off the machine and whirled around.

“It works,” he said. “And it’s the most—or next to the most—hellish device man has invented so far. No wonder Bronson said he could master the world. We’ve all heard the expression ‘knowledge is power’ often enough to come to think it a cliche. Well, it’s awfully sound.”

There was no need to elaborate the idea. One had only to imagine the applications. Blackmail alone is a potent weapon, but a spy-ray’s fullest uses transcend that by far. The spy has but to listen in on directors’ meetings to find out the condition and intentions of a given company. He can then buy or sell stocks accordingly. Or land, or raw material. The inside story of what went on in a smoke-filled hotel room during a national convention would be of value to the politicians on the other side—or of another faction of the same party. The possessor of it could thereby curry favor. Money and political power is a hard combination. But those were the larger uses of the spy-ray. The more intimate, personal ones would be of still greater value to the egotistical, and also to the—shall we say?—prurient.

“The problem now is to find Bronson and smash him,” Cranborne concluded.

The how of it was not easy to find. Nobody had the same wave length, and no waves were registered. It was hard even to identify the subjects they picked up at random. By working night and day in shifts they managed to reach an immense list of known persons by their tuning numbers. But neither Jones nor Bronson was on the list. They knew where Jones hung out, but not Bronson. Outside investigation could not turn him up. He had walked out of the world’s ken the day he left Cranborne’s Labs in his magnificent huff.

“We’ll have to go deeper than sensation. We have to dig into the thought processes and the memory field.”

That was what they decided. It led to more brain probing, a necessity that was embarrassing to them all. But they framed a very curious oath of mutual respect, confidence, and advance forgiveness for any jarring thought, and they solemnly swore to it. After that they searched for each other’s seats of memory. Then they modified the psychodet by adding other tubes and stops, and resumed their hunting.

ONE fine day when Cranborne and Faber were off duty and sunbathing in the yard, a series of wild yells brought them upstanding. Gibson had hit on something. They ran in to see what.

“I’ve got Jones. Just blundered onto him,” he said, greatly excited. The two companions grabbed auxiliary headsets and listened in. It was disappointing. There was nothing to listen to. Such thoughts that came through were listless, incoherent and wandering. The man was fretting because he had to spend so much time at his desk. Off and on his mind would wander backward with relish to a steak eaten the night before, or forward in anticipation of tonight’s dinner. There were warming flashes, too, as he occasionally thought of his adorable wife. The man’s mind was not a blank, but its contents were distinctly not worthwhile. His conscious thoughts were those of any healthy moron—on the fleshy side. His perceptible memory was virtually blank. They had no way of exciting it, and it seemed he had no desire to do it of himself.

“As I suspected,” said Cranborne grimly. “He’s just a stooge, waiting for his master’s voice. Now that we’ve got him, hang on. Sooner or later we’ll learn something.”

The break came sooner than they expected. Ten minutes later there was a sharp increase in the intensity of thought, and it came through with great clarity. To sharpen their perception they had already shut off all the outside sensory channels. The thought they heard now was worded this way:

“There is a young man named Heard on his way to see me. He will arrive in ten minutes. He wants my intercession with the law to keep him out of jail. He has been directed to come and ask for it, but I shall advise him to give himself up and plead guilty, promising to see that he receives a pardon. The crime is murder—”

“Quick,” yelled Cranborne, for Gibson was still in the saddle, “pull the visual stop. I want to see.”

The field of vision was blurred at first and Cranborne had trouble untangling it. It was a double exposure. Superposed on what Jones was looking at was what someone else was seeing. The first image was a desktop, the second the operating panel of another psychodet, resembling in the main the one they were operating. Cranborne whipped a pad of paper off the table and began sketching furiously. He concentrated on what he saw, leaving it to the others to do the listening. Then, suddenly, the vision clarified to a single image, and the thought stream dropped back to its normal level. Cranborne snatched off his headgear and reached for a slide rule.

“We’ve got him!” he exulted. “Bronson himself! His own conceit has betrayed him. Look!”

They crowded around and examined his sketch. The other psychodet, being further developed than their own crude attempt, was simpler in its corresponding features. but it had added buttons and panels for sending various motor impulses, including those of thought. Their workings were not apparent, but they were plainly labeled. What had excited Cranborne was the table of code numerals. Bronson had hung them before him for convenience. It was a list of his principal stooges and victims. Joaquin Jones’ number was there, as well as Cranborne’s own and Gibson’s. But the priceless detail of the sketch was a framed item let into the operating panel, an outstanding example of the man’s colossal ego. It was a wiggly curve done in gold ink on a black mat. Under it was its tuning symbol, and the legend “Formula for Greatness.” The curve was a thought curve, having the characteristics of abstract reasoning.

“How did you come to think of it?” clamored the others, admiringly.

“The thoughts he was impressing on Jones were coming in on Jones’ wave, and they told us nothing about the whereabouts of Bronson on the band. But since we know these are two-way waves, it occurred to me that if we switched on the vision we could see past Jones and into the sender. It probably went through a scrambler at the other end, wrong side to, but it bounced back again, as I hoped. Also our waves went through Jones both ways, but since he can perceive only what Bronson wants him to perceive, he was unconscious of it. It was lucky for us Bronson has such an inflated idea of himself. Otherwise we would only have had the picture of his machine.”

The stated machine settings differed, but Cranborne had his Rosetta Stone. There were his and Gibson’s and Jones’ tuning numbers in both codes. It was a relatively easy matter to reconstruct the dialing system of the Bronson set and translate his directory into terms they could use. The most magnificent gift of all was that of Bronson’s own call. Now they had him.

“What are we going to do about Betty Nevers?” asked Faber, abruptly, once Cranborne had satisfied himself with a brief spell of gloating.

“What about her?” snapped Cranborne. He had not given the girl a thought since the day he sent her away.

“Were you concentrating on that sketch so hard you didn’t hear? She has been brutally killed. Heard did it. That is why he came to see Jones.”

“No,” said Cranborne, sitting up and looking stern. “Start at the beginning.”

“We infer that Bronson also held a grudge against both Heard and the girl. At least he prompted Heard to kill her, just as he tried to make Skelly do in your case. Heard beat her to death with a hammer. It seems they were lovers. Now Heard is going to the chair. What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know who this Heard is,” said Cranborne slowly, “but I can throw some light on the rest of it. Bronson tried hard to date Miss Nevers while he was with us. She laughed at him. and he probably hates her for it. Pique and jealousy, leavened with unlimited quantities of sadism. We’ve got to stop that beast and quickly. Never mind Jones from now on. When we pull his prop from under him his phony empire will collapse like a house of cards. Tune in on Bronson now and let’s see what his filthy mind holds.”

Delving into the black soul of Neville Bronson, proved to be a far from pleasant chore. There were times when the operator on watch gave up and quit out of sheer disgust. But they were convinced the man was sane, in a cold, calculating. inhuman way. Only a handful of his acts had been committed from pure spite. Most of them were to gain power. His craving for power was unlimited, and he knew he had the means to achieve it. He did not care a whit who got the nominal credit, so long as it was he who had the thing done his way. His looting of the Cranborne Labs was only incidentally to seek revenge, and his attempt to slay Cranborne was simply out of fear of the one intellect he regarded as possibly superior to his own.

There was an amusing sequel to that. Like himself, who lived hidden away they knew not where, Cranborne had disappeared from sight when he went to the Gibson place. Bronson’s angry curses, when he would tune in only to pick up the howl of the umbrella of static, often brought stern smiles to the faces of the watchers.

IT was one thing to be convinced of the man’s villainy and another to undo it. The three inventors knew the histories of a dozen major crimes and countless instances of badly concealed blackmail, but there was nothing they could do. By then the machinery of the law was under Bronson’s thumb, via his proxy Jones. If the lie detector is not received in honest courts, how could they expect the evidence of their psychodet to be accepted? No prosecutor would listen to it.

“We’ll have to take the law into our own hands,” said Cranborne, savagely. “I would like to see him convicted in the open, but with that machine in his hands he is invulnerable. All we know about his hideout is how it looks inside, and that he lives like a king with a single Japanese house boy to serve him. We do not even know what state he is in.”

The next step was obvious. They fished the secret from his unaware brain of how to send impulses. It was a much more complicated device than a mere receiver, and required an abundance of power. It took three months to build and test on one another. Then they were sure it would work.

“Now what?” was the question at the next council of war.

“Make him go berserk and smash his machine,” suggested Faber.

“Yeah,” agreed Gibson, “and then force him to go to the nearest police station and give himself up.”

“With the machine smashed the police would never believe him,” said Cranborne, sitting down on the stool and tuning in. The machine was still set to receive Bronson’s perceptions, and as it warmed up Cranborne’s face grew tense. The hour was near to midnight and the others were watching closely.

“Good Lord,” he gasped, and his face went white. Then it set in granite lines and his eyes hardened. Gibson and Faber did not say a word. They watched.

Suddenly they saw Cranborne’s hand go out and push in the sending switch. What thoughts he was impressing on the waves they could not know, but Cranborne’s face was iron and his eyes intent. Then he jammed the pedal down hard and locked it, and jumped up from the seat.

“Outside, all of you! I don’t know what will happen next.”

His urgency was contagious, and they hurried after him out into the starlight of the yard, and did not stop until Cranborne said they might—a hundred feet away.

“What did you do?” whispered Gibson, awed.

“I made him shove in his full sensory reception and step up his set to full power, then lock it. When he had done that. I paralyzed him where he sat.”

Cranborne mopped his brow and glanced apprehensively toward the shed.

“Yes, go on. What was he doing?”

“Eavesdropping on one of his victims, as usual. But with a difference. Tonight the cold, merciless, curious scientist is topmost in him. He is out to learn the unlearnable—something about bodily sensations never before studied. He was going to do it on low power, with due precautions. Well, he’ll learn something, all right. I’ll guarantee that.”

“Quit being so cryptic,” growled Gibson. “What are you driving at?”

“Neville Bronson,” said Cranborne slowly, “is tuned in on State Prison. There is an execution there tonight. Heard goes to the chair any minute now—”

A blare of violet light turned night into day for a split second, and circuit-breakers screamed. There was the smell of burning insulation. The psychodet was collapsing in the flaming shed. Nobody thought of calling the fire department. They did not want it. Their spy-ray had served its purpose.

“Fair enough,” Shrugged Gibson. The three turned their backs on the blaze, and walked away toward the house.

Hobo God

Astounding, September1944

1.The boss is BOSS.

2. No killin’ in the tribe.

3. No Wimmen stealin’.

4. Wimmen do wimmen’s work.

5. Men do men’s work,

—The Five Laws of Turm.

THEY were both convicts. Atkins, naturally, was in charge. He was the smart one. The other was sent along on the theory that if the Freihofer experiment was successful, a man of brawn might be needed at the other end. So Bummy Thurmon’s sentence was commuted too. Not that it mattered much to him. So long as there was food aplenty and opportunity for unlimited sleep, anything was all right by him.

Yes, Atkins was smart. Perhaps a shade too smart. For he was the third ranking scientist in a world where scientists were top dog. But it was his misfortune to be inordinately vain and ambitious, and he wanted to be first, not second or third. That was why he attempted to steal the Hammond formula, and that is how he came to kill a guard. Either offense would have spelled ruin; taken conjointly they added up to a sentence of death. Even Atkins, powerful as he was, could not escape the usual choice—the lethal chamber now, or twenty Lunar. But it was at just that point that the Freihofer rocket was adjudged ready to ride, and Atkins, being a proper scientist, barring such offenses as theft and murder, was the logical man to go.

He accepted, of course. It was death, any way one looked at it, but not so swift and humiliating as in the chamber, or yet so long and agonizing as that on the Moon. And there was the outside chance that he might even survive awhile. In exchange he was required only to promise to keep a faithful log of the pioneer voyage and try to parachute it safely to the surface of Mars.

Thurmon had less choice in the matter. His going along was the result of the arbitrary whim of a judge. Thurmon’s crime, if crime it was, was more diffuse. He was, to put it plainly, a tramp—an atavism in a world where efficiency was god. In his infancy someone had erred, or he would never have emerged from the creche. Yet there he was, congenitally stupid and allergic to work in any form. In a highly integrated society there was simply no place for him, as one harried magistrate after another found out. Their only recourse was to an ancient statute defining the misdemeanor of vagrancy, and that had been invoked just one hundred times before he came face to face with the last judge of the series. That one happened to be an adept at casuistry.

“Thurmon,” he said, “I am going to give you one more chance. How would you like to sign on on a ship where you won’t have anything to do but eat and drink and sleep?”

“That’s O. K. with me, chief,” mumbled Thurmon, “so long as there ain’t goin’ to be no rocks to pound.”

That is the way the two ill-assorted members of the Heavenly Messenger’s crew were chosen, and also explains why it was that as the projectile swept in on an ever tightening spiral into the thin atmosphere of Mars, one was at the observation port, tense and alert, and the other snoring blissfully in his bunk.

“We’re going to make it!” whispered Atkins to himself, excitedly checking the trajectory for the ten thousandth time. Then he computed swiftly the rate of fall. It was much too fast, as he had feared it would be despite his efforts at atmospheric braking. There was only one thing to do, and that quickly.

“Up you lug!” he yelled to the slumbering Thurmon, “and get on your ’chute. We’re going to jump.”

“Huh?” grunted the hobo, cocking one bleary eye. But Atkins was hustling about the chamber, grabbing up last minute items. There was a large packet already packed and ’chuted awaiting release in a special compartment aft that contained all the essentials for a long day in the desert. But Atkins was too fore-handed to rely altogether on that. It was best to have a few things on his person. So he snatched up the only gun and buckled it onto his belt. To that he added the one remaining flashlight with a live battery, a few tins of sardines, and a canteen of water. Those, added to the ample supply of compressed food pellets carried by both men, would be sufficient to give him the edge he felt he needed. For Atkins was a mere shrimp of a man while the clumsy Thurmon was on the gigantic side. Who knew how he would behave once the pinch of desert thirst assailed him?

“Jump, you bum!” ordered Atkins. flourishing the gun.

“O. K., O. K.,” growled the still sleepy Thurmon. Obeying orders was a habit with him. He never reasoned about it or questioned authority. Atkins’ push helped, too. A moment later Thurmon was on his way to the sandy waste beneath, and a split second after that Atkins was following.

The fall was reassuringly slow—slow enough for them to see the end of the rocket. It crashed against a dull brown stony escarpment some three miles away, still trailing the fouled parachute that was to bear the emergency supplies to the ground. The impact was terrific. There was a blinding blast of varicolored fire, a moment of hurtling incandescent vapors, and then all that remained was a puddle of glowing slag drooling slowly down the cliff.

Atkins saw it and cursed, but was thankful for his foresight in snatching up the gun. If things on the surface were not promising, he would add Thurmon’s pellet store to his own, Thurmon, as he saw it, was no loss in any man’s language, on trackless Mars as little as at home. But the sands were rising up to meet him, and he tugged to maneuver for an easy landing, not far from where Thurmon was already down. Atkins had already had a fairly comprehensive view of the terrain. It was exactly as imaginative writers had often pictured it—a planet of drifting reddish dunes on the plains between the high escarpment to the west and the ribbon-like lagoon stretching poleward on the east. The only hint of life was the broad green band that bordered the glistening canal. That meant vegetable life, surely. Perhaps there were also animals.

THE place they made their landfall was about halfway to the water. Some three miles one way the escarpment shimmered in the heat, it’s face pocked by a myriad of caves. In the other direction lay grass and shrubs and water, and halfway in the sky above it hung the rising sun—a midget, pallid orb compared to the fiery one on Earth.

“It’ll be bitter cold tonight,” said Atkins, as Thurmon shambled up, “and we’ll probably have to hole up in one of those caves. Meantime let’s go over to the canal and see what grows here.”

“O. K.,” grunted Thurmon. The place he was was no good at all. Just sand studded with small sharp boulders. Not a fit place to finish his nap, and nothing to eat in sight. Without protest he shuffled along behind the dapper ex-scientist, only grumbling as the hot sands burned ins feet.

About a mile farther on Atkins stopped to stare at a trail that crossed their own. It came from the southwest and consisted of numerous quasi-human footprints, all headed canal-ward. Atkins noted the long toes and the blurred places between their traces indicating hair. The great toe was like a thumb, as well, and probably was opposable.

“There are monkey creatures here,” he said to the blinking Thurmon. “That is strange.”

“Uh huh,” commented his brutish companion. Thurmon was literally a lowbrow. The thick thatch of his bullet head encircled his forehead almost to his beetling eyebrows. Below that his puffy eyes and jutting jaw surmounted a generously built, barrel-chested body.

“Your kind,” Atkins wanted to add, scowling at the gorilla-like figure. But there were too many uncertainties to provoke a showdown yet. Instead he added, “I hope they’re edible.”

“Uh huh,” agreed Thurmon, cheering appreciably. He detested pellets and dehydrated food. Never again would he fall for a judge’s smooth promise.

They resumed the trek. A mile beyond they came upon something that at first appeared to be the ruins of an ancient temple. On closer inspection it turned out to be a group of petrified tree trunks, still standing. Peeping out of some of the many hummocks of sand about were the butts of other fallen ones.

“Ah, so there were once trees here,” observed Atkins. “That accounts for the evolution of anthropoid types. Since they survive, we can, too.” And as he continued on toward the green he fell to thinking on probabilities. At worst the monkey people could be hunted for food. If they had intelligence, so much the better. It would be no trick at all for a super being such as Atkins to gain mastery over them. He made a face at the thought of being king of a tribe of simians, but consoled himself with the recollection of what it was said to be like on Luna.

A moment later he discovered there were other animals on Mars. In the first short grass they came to there were small horse-like creatures grazing, but they fled the moment they got the scent. There were rabbits of a sort that jumped up and loped away, and, in the distance a beast that resembled a pig. And then, as the grasses grew higher and coarser, they sighted their first Martians.

They were distinctly humanoid. They were tall, lanky, starved looking caricatures of men, with gaunt ribs and distended bellies, but they were no hairier than many breeds of men. Vestigial tails of some four inches in length were all that marked their recent apish extraction. The group first seen were too intent on what they were doing to notice the arrival of the off-planet strangers. They were formed in a tight circle, facing inward, yelling and jabbering excitedly. Then there was an anguished wail as their ranks broke. The object of their hunt had eluded them. A brownish animal leaped through a gap and went bounding away—a large rabbit.

“Don’t boss, you’ll scare ’em,” shouted Thurmon, but too late. Atkins already had the pistol out and was aiming it. Thurmon realized, as Atkins had, that the monkeymen had seen them and were standing in frozen wonder. But Thurmon’s antecedents were different. Having had to live by his wits as a chronic panhandler he had developed an uncanny ability to gauge people’s attitudes. Call it a sixth sense, telepathy, intuition or just plain hunch—whatever it was Thurmon had it to the nth degree. Those Martians were friendly, simple men—but simple. The proper approach was to amble up with a with a smile. Then ease in for the touch—oh, ever so little at a time. Rush ’em, and they’d hightail it for the hills.

That was exactly what happened. Atkins’ shot was a marvel for accuracy. It was the fleeing rabbit that was his target, and he hit it fair. The animal turned one despairing flip-flop in the air and lay dead. Then Atkins ran to it to retrieve it and hold it aloft for the Martians to admire. His intention was to present it to them as evidence of his superior prowess as a hunter, but by the time he turned to receive their grateful kowtows, there were no monkeymen there. They had scattered in all directions, squealing hideously.

Thurmon shook his head. They’d never get anywhere that way. Atkins was too direct.

If Atkins was disappointed, he did not show it. He laid the carcass beside the trail and went on toward the water. It would serve for their own dinner later. Meantime he stopped from time to time to examine the vegetation and the soil. Here was rich loam, and it supported a great variety of plants, indicating clearly that Mars was not too long before a comfortably habitable planet. There were clomps of grain very much like wheat, and farther on stalks of stunted com. Gnawed cobs and scattered shucks told the story. The band of Martians ahead had been foraging. Apparently they emerged from the caves in the daytime to hunt their food along the canal.

It was mid-afternoon before they came upon the main body. The trail veered northward alongside the canal, and from the trampled state of the grass Atkins deduced that the thousands of monkeymen had traversed it like a swarm of locusts, nibbling at every head of grain that was already ripe. Where they had been nothing edible was left. The tribe was evidently as ravenous as it looked. Probably the two Earthmen would have overtaken the Martians much earlier than they did except for the fact that the easy going Thurmon went on a sort of strike.

“Doggone it,” he grumbled, “my feet won’t stand no more.”

And he pulled off his shoes and waded out through the sedge to where he could bury and twiddle his burning toes in the soothing mud. Atkins swore at him and even threatened him with his gun, but Thurmon wouldn’t budge.

“You go on if you want to, I’m O. K. this way,” was all he would answer. And since Atkins had already learned on the tedious rocket voyage that Thurmon was equipped with but two speeds—slow ahead and stop—he swallowed his impatience and waited.

HOURS later the mob of Martians accepted the newcomers’ presence among them in a sort of resigned silence. Apparently the fugitives from the hunter gang had spread the news of two strange creatures, one of whom could kill at a great distance merely by emitting a flash of light and making a sharp noise. The agitated chatter of the monkeymen died as Atkins strode up to join them,

“Now, take it easy, boss.” cautioned Thurmon again. “They’ll come around all right if you don’t overplay your hand.”

But Atkins had his own ideas. He was bent on making a quick and overpowering impression. He stalked on into the densest part of the throng—a strange medley of males and females of every age from babe in arms to patriarch—to the tall, bearded one he took to be the head ape. There he made what he considered a friendly gesture. He extracted a can of sardines and deftly opened it, displaying the rows of silvery little fish. A great gasp rose from the ones nearest, and they drew back with fear in their eyes. Atkins calmly ate the contents of the can, but his act did not help at all. They marveled, but it was the marvel of fear. But they did not run. They dared not do that.

“Boss, I keep tellin’ you. Now, these people—”

“Oh, shut up,” snapped Atkins, irritably. “It doesn’t matter how they react as long as I establish my superiority.”

Thurmon shut up. He knew, but had neglected to speak of it, that these monkeys were fishermen as well as hunters. While he bathed his feet he noticed some, standing in a circle neck-deep in water, surrounding fish as they had tried to do the rabbit. They knew what fish were, and that they did not come in airless, waterless cans. What Atkins was doing smacked too much of magic, and while magic impressed the primitive mind, it also made it distrustful.

The sun was getting low, and soon the tribe began its march across the sands toward the hills, regardless of the presence of the strangers. At Atkins’ insistence Thurmon went along. It might be several hundred below by morning, Atkins pointed out, and the vegetation about was too green to burn.

The caves were the only place where they could survive. Moreover, he wanted to study the Martians’ habits through a whole day’s cycle. After that he could plan his line of attack more intelligently.

“Huh,” said Thurmon, but reluctantly plodded through the sands.

That night Atkins committed the ultimate error. The caves, as he had supposed, was where the Martians spent the cold hours. But there was no wood anywhere about, nor would it have helped if there had been, for Atkins was a nonsmoker and had not thought to provide himself with matches. So there was nothing for it but to do as the monkeymen did, huddle up in clusters for mutual warmth.

For prestige reasons, Atkins chose the head man’s cave, and therein lay his error. Since he had publicly established himself as a magician, the chief’s wives assumed him to be irresistible. Therefore, when he came amongst them for warmth, they acted according to their dim lights. They forsook their lord and master and huddled about the new. Thurmon growled a warning against it, for he sensed a rising aura of anger. But Atkins was proof against anything his moronic companion could urge. He certainly did not relish the nearness of the unwashed female Martians, but warmth he had to have for survival.

Thurmon glimpsed what followed from a distance. The cave was large, and the various families grouped themselves according to rules of their own. Thurmon, ever careful to avoid offense, selected a group of young bachelors with which to pool his calories. Consequently he was too far away from Atkins to render further counsel. At any rate, either to clinch his position as planetary miracle maker or for some lesser purpose, a little after it grew pitch dark Atkins turned on his flashlight. Its sweeping rays caught scores of monkeymen in the act of preparing for slumber, and howls of outraged privacy reverberated in the cave. They sprang at him, snarling. Then the light went out, and on its heels there came the sound of scuffling, heavy grunts and labored panting. After that there was a long and ominous silence. Then later, much later, the deep breathing of profound slumber. And that, Thurmon’s instinct told him, meant that his companion Atkins was no more. The Martians were a simple folk, and wanted no part of supermen.

THREE days later Thurmon and the tribe parted company. Their life was simply too strenuous for him. It did not make sense, even to his limited mind. The pattern of it was invariable, and not much different from that of range cattle. Never sufficiently fed, they perforce had to follow the sun on an endless trek from one end of the fertile belt to the other. They walked incessantly, consuming the scanty energy snatched from the growing plants almost as fast as they acquired it. And they dared not stop. For the cereal grasses on which they fed occurred only at random, and nowhere was there enough in any locality to keep them in food for more than a single day. The returns from their inefficient hunting and fishing methods were equally precarious, and they were burdened with the further necessity of making the three to ten mile hike twice a day to the nearest cave.

“Nuts to that,” muttered Thurmon to himself, and parted company with them amiably. For he had found that his occasional grunts conveyed to them approximately what he meant, and conversely, he could understand most of their chattering. His and their uncomplex minds had much in common—they harbored few thoughts and those of the most elemental nature. The gap between their languages was not a hard one to bridge. After they had regretfully gone on, Thurmon took stock of his situation.

“All this walking, now,” he told himself, “is plain silly. Why should a man wear himself out just to keep warm?”

He hated work, but he hated dragging his feet through yielding, hot sand more. So he hunted out a patch of clay of the right consistency and molded it into big flat bricks, working some rushes in so it would hold together better. By nightfall he had built a mud igloo that would suit nicely, and he scanned the desert margin for dry grass and twigs and found them in plenty. Being a smoker he had matches, and therefore he passed that night quite comfortably. There was just one drawback to his contentment. He had violated the primary rule of his long and parasitic life, he had done an honest day’s work!

After that he rested for three days and found life good. There was no one to tell him when to get up or what to do, or to reproach him for his idleness. It was ideal, but. It was the food that bothered him. He detested the Vitalex tablets he had to live on. They had sustenance, and after that was said all had been said. He craved a more normal diet. So he undertook to do something about it. There come another red letter day in his life—the day he lay and took thought upon his future, that portion of his life he had hitherto left to Fate. But Fate could no longer help him. Here on this comfortless planet there were no friendly back doors, nor in emergencies even a hospitable jail. If anything was to be done for him, it would have to be by himself.

It was an unwelcome thought, but the more he considered it the more inescapable he saw it to be; the upshot of his unaccustomed thinking resolved itself into a simple choice. Was he going to do it the hard way, the way the monkeymen did, or was he going to cut corners? Not the hard way, certainly. And the reflection did something to Bummy Thurmon that two score competent judges had failed to do. It stirred him to action.

There was the matter of wheat and corn, the handiest food available. Why gallivant from one pole to another trying to find a few grains here and there when it could all be grown in one spot? The answer was obvious. So the lumbering Thurmon roused himself from where he lounged and went hunting for heads of grain overlooked by the passing tribe.

He found bushels of it, but carrying it back to his hut in handfuls put a heavy burden on his feet. There were far too many trips required. He considered that, and then sat down and wove himself a basket from some reeds. It was not a great basket, but it served, and in a few days more he had his seed. After that he drove himself to more drudgery, pulling weeds and worrying the ground with a crooked stick as he had seen farmers do with iron tools. He scattered his kernels of grain on the ground and called it a season. It had been brutally trying work, but next year there would be a crop and hardly any walking involved to garner it.

Thurmon thought he had earned a winter’s rest, and started in to get it on a full-time basis. But in a few days he found the cereal diet as monotonous as the pellets. He didn’t relish his corn and wheat chewed raw as the Martians did. Moreover, he had discovered that there were plentiful quantities of beans and peas about, drying in their pods. Now, if he had some way of boiling those—

The pottery he made was something worse than primitive, but after an appalling lot of breakage he contrived a pot that stood the gaff, and his comfort increased. On good days he ranged farther afield and found more food, which he stored in additional igloos he built for the purpose. Pretty soon he could dig in for the winter and call it quits.

He heaved a great sigh of relief and settled into the crazy hammock he had contrived. It was then the Big Idea hit him.

“If this is good for me,” he asked himself, “why ain’t it better for them monks?”

All afternoon he rocked lazily and examined that question. Surely those poor benighted Mars creatures didn’t enjoy endless hiking any more than he did, and it was a cinch that none of them ever had enough to eat in his life. And they never could be sure, either, that the next day’s hike would bring enough food. Wouldn’t they be glad to swap their labor for less work, more food, and security? He scratched himself and chuckled.

“Sure they would!”

It was a radical concept. He, Bummy Thurmon, the shame and reproach of the civilized world, seriously contemplating work in the abstract! Now he saw that it was necessary, even dignified. That is, if someone else did it. It was an interesting idea. He now viewed work from an altogether new angle. He was looking down on it, as it were, not up at it. He was the prospective employer, not the poor sucker being hooked.

The Thurmon who hit the ball fairly early the next morning was a temporarily changed man. He saw now that to induce the monkeymen to stay he would have to have something immediate to offer. He had never given thought to the thing called capital spelled with a big C, bur dimly he perceived its necessity. So he cleared more ground and planted more seed so that he would have enough to share.

When the seed ran out he discovered there were still other things lacking for his comfort. Meat, for one. That led to more work at first, but a little later it turned to sport. He built rabbit traps, and one fine day it occurred to him that if he could weave a basket he could also weave a seine. So he made one and then some more, and waded out into the slime to set fish traps.

In a little while there was more fish and game than he could eat. He split and dried the surplus and experimented with smoking some. What emerged from his processing would never have passed a terrestrial market inspector, but for his undiscriminating palate it was good enough. And as the slightly saline waters of the canal receded for the winter, he found desposits of salt in flat places. Those he harvested and put away. The richest haul of the bleak winter months came the day a pig walked into one of his snares. The pork was a wonderful addition to his table, but better yet, when he skimmed the boilings he found he had lard. Thereafter he could fry things.

IT must not be supposed that Thurmon worked hard all the time. Far from it. There were days on end when he backslid and just slept. Nor did he ever cease to bewail his hard fate and curse the smooth-talking judge that had consigned him to it. But he buoyed himself up with hope—hope that he could sell his share-work notion to the simple-minded Martian people. After all, they were used to work, and he had solved their most pressing problem—food and shelter.

The day the vanguard of the great tribe showed up, he met them a little beyond the northern boundary of his plantations. They were scrawnier and hungrier than ever, evidence that the pickings up above were not good, so he met them with a broad grin and truly magnificent hospitality. He had with him a pair of baskets brimming with corn and wheat. And while they ate the stuff ravenously he conveyed to them by grunts and gestures how it came to be that he had so much and what they could do to merit the same. He explained also what he meant by a house, and the useful “sunweed” he had discovered which would keep it warm.

It was no tremendous surprise to Thurmon that the majority of the tribe viewed his offer with skepticism. People were like that. The older ones shook their heads. It was too radical an innovation in their way of life. Moreover, legends were already growing up concerning the two strange aliens who had emerged from the desert, and about what befell the one who dealt openly in magic. They preferred the safer course, and so went on, carefully skirting Thurmon’s plantings and taking what wild grain there was between him and the desert.

The next day the conservative members of the tribe continued their migration to the south. They dared not fall behind their schedule a single day, for the grain ripened with the sun, and the sun awaited no man’s convenience, much less on the outcome of wild experiments. But a half a hundred of the young and daring elected to stay and share. What with their wives and babes and the additional score or so of young bachelors, Thurmon was hard put to find places for them. In the end he divided them into two groups, one to settle beyond his borders to the north, the other to the south, and he fed them while they built their houses. It was agreed that for the advance of food for the first pioneer year, they would also work his own fields.

In this way was born Mars’ first community, and Thurmon’s second winter was much easier than the one before. Nevertheless, he had to stay awake day times much more than he liked. Until his apish farmers had learned their tasks, there was much supervisory work to do. But next year, Thurmon assured himself, he could commence to live the life of Reilly. This year’s graduates could instruct next year’s converts. Meantime new problems were arising daily, and they required decision by him whom the Martians regarded as a superman. First off, there was the question of who did what and when?

Thurmon found himself issuing decrees. It was women who drew the chores of basket and net weaving, pottery making, and the tending of fires. It was the children who scoured the desert rim for the dry stuff needed to feed the voracious “sunweed.” As to the men, their lot was to gather seed, weed, plant and plow, and rob the traps and nets. And having set the watches, so to speak, Thurmon attempted to retire for the winter.

It was not to be. Not yet. He had to teach basketry and cookery, and eventually how to grind meal. None of his inventions were of a high order—they arose simply from things he missed and remembered vaguely how they might be provided. But they were hailed with enthusiasm by the tribe which he now captained. His production of a sling, for one, enabled the killing of animals too wary to be enticed into the traps. And having acquired an abundance of carcasses, it occurred to him that the skins—previously gnawed for what food value they had and thrown away—could be made into garments for the cold time. But that suggestion inevitably evoked the question how? The solution cost weary Thurmon many hours of brow-knitting, but in time he popped out with the answer. He had patched his own clothes and sewed on buttons, but here was neither needle nor thread, nor a needle he contributed the prong of his belt buckle, for threads lie unraveled the guide lines of the ’chutes. And then a bright young monkeywoman took his notion a step further. She found the secondary uses of small bones, and how to twist weed fibers into cord.

A rare rainfall led to another chain of inventions. Thurmon’s pioneer shack washed partially away, and he demanded that it be rebuilt of stone. There were stones aplenty in the desert, but their transport was the barrier. So the stoneboat was invented. It required the labor of many Martians to pull it, to the neglect of other chores. It was natural, therefore, that Thurmon should remember horses, and he told them how to catch colts.

EVERY year more recruits were obtained, and the passing migratory tribes dwindled. Every year brains developed as hand skills were acquired. Less and less did Thurmon-—or the Great Turm, as the Martians called him, since they were unable to master complicated syllables—have to do. A generation of eager, grateful young monkeymen took over the supervisory jobs, coining to their venerated but slothful master only when troubled by problems too weighty for solution by themselves. Slothful Thurmon rarely stirred from the palace they built him save to move to another even grander. Not since the third summer of his coming had he permitted his dozes to be interrupted. But on days when he was naturally wakeful, he would hold court and scatter the pearls of his wisdom before his attentive lieutenants. Entirely without intent or awareness, he had hit upon the formula of great leadership. He delegated.

Were the pony-drawn stoneboats and grain drags too slow? “Hm-m-m,” Turm would say, and close his eyes in thought. “Lemmie see. lemme see.” And after a long trance he would come out with a suggestion.

“Now wheels, if we could make ’em,” he would say, “would do the trick. A wheel goes somethin’ like this—” and he would sketch out the basic idea of the wheels, or the lever, or the wedge, or whatever was worrying them, and leave the rest to them. They listened and went and performed. Or when they failed and brought back their sorry attempts for approval, he would criticize. But Thurmon discouraged that sort of thing, and he dredged his memory for things people used to say to him. Many of those cliches proved invaluable to his government. “God helps those who help themselves,” he would say, to prod, them into a solution beyond his own dull powers, and they would accept that contritely, and go out resolved to be more worthy.

The Martians labored long and hard, and it paid them. But their needs were steadily increasing, the more so because of the mounting’ demands of their lord and master. An unusual flood brought floating logs to them, indicating to Thurmon that somewhere on Mars was a forest. He told them in general how to build a raft. Later they crossed the canal and found the woods and brought back timber, whereupon Thurmon demanded furniture, and described it. To them it was one more revelation granted them out of Turm’s vast knowledge of the wonderland from which he had come. So, under his direction, they learned to make axes from the flints of the hill caves, and later arrowheads for the marvelous machine, the bow. On marched progress.

One day, the wind being in the wrong direction, the question of sanitation intruded itself upon Thurmon’s unwilling mind. There was no comfort in his palace and something had to be done, A man in his position shouldn’t have to—That was when the first drainage ditch was dug. The logical follow-up to that were more ditches—but for irrigation. The disposal of the dirt dug up brought other ideas, and that is how the roads and paths came to be crowned. A special class of young Martians came into existence, a class that in another world would have been called engineers. It is true they knew no mathematics, but they learned a lot that could be done with dirt, and also timber and stone.

Thurmon’s craving for ease grew as more luxuries were supplied. It became tedious for him to hold court to hear the petitions brought by delegations from the distant villages. He delegated still more power, appointing local headmen and giving them authority in his name. He was instituting government, but he did not look at it that way. He was only ridding himself of bothersome detail.

IT was many years after that before Turms contented life drew to its close. Headmen from all the villages stood hushed before his cushy bed, while tearful concubines gazed out from behind the slats of their secluded quarters. The great man was mortal, after all, and was about to leave them.

“Not so bad … Mars ain’t so bad!” Turin murmured as he composed himself for that last, interminable nap from which no devoted worshiper would rouse him. “That judge wasn’t lying as much as he thought. ‘Plenty of grub, lots of sleep,’ he said, ‘and nuthin’ to do.’ Yep. It come out that way. But it wasn’t easy goin’. I had to work one year. I had to work like hell.”

It was spoken much too low to hear. The palace scribe—for Turm had taught a few the elements of writing—bent over to catch the famous man’s last words.

“Yeah,” said Thurmon audibly. “I had to come millions ’n’ millions of miles to find it out. Hard work pays—”

The scratching of the scribe’s stylus drowned out the last whispered phrase, “—but not too much of it!”

FROM atop the great basaltic pyramid in the heart of Azoth the colossal image of Turm smiles its benediction on the metropolis of Mars. Turm, the wish and patient one, stands unique among the gods created by primitive man. Not a god of carnage and thunder he, but one of peace and industry. Especially industry. For were not his last words “Hard work pays”? Where else in the history of mankind did a race have such a leader? What other race compressed within a single generation the evolutionary program of ages? The answer is nowhere. Great was Turm, founder of a civilization!

Blind Man’s Buff

Astounding Science Fiction, October 1944

THE bright dot had grown to a disk days before, now it was a dazzling silvery sphere, looming straight ahead. Lorimer, the assistant umpire, sat in the radio booth dozing, his headphone strapped on. Hartley made a few last adjustments to his adored Maggy—the instrument with the X-ray eye—and then walked over to where Travis sat staring into the visiscreen.

“The big money sure ganged up on us,” remarked Hartley, surveying the outside scene as reflected before them.

“They’ve got numbers, if that is what you mean,” said Travis, with a grim chuckle, “but I’m not so sure about the brains. The Farrington-Driscoll combine always did do their dirty work statistically. They’re doing it now. Most of those poor devils you see out there won’t be alive this time tomorrow. Driscoll’s game is as simple as the Rule of Three. The mortality of ships trying to land on Venus is roughly a hundred to one. Ergo! He sends a hundred and some odd ships. His competitors—like you and me and old Buck Turner—are playing singletons. All of us combined, if we were combined—which we are not—haven’t a ghost of a show along with his bird dogs.”

“Unless we’re smarter,” amended Hartley.

“Yes,” grunted Travis.

Other ships were to the right and left of them, abreast but curving downward in a great circle that closed forty miles below their keel.

The formation centered on the lone cruiser that carried the chief umpire and which followed the base course between the Earth and the planet of their destination. Shortly they would arrive at the point ten diameters distant from Venus, and that was where the take-off would be. After that it would be a free-for-all scramble for the honor—and untold riches—of being the first man down.

Most of the ships carried the yellow-and-blue markings of the newly formed Venusian Land Development Co., the Farrington-Driscoll enterprise. Buck Turner’s rusty old tub floated somewhere on the far side of the circle. Nearby were two crazily converted yachts manned by adventure-struck college kids. A quadrant away there were several other independent entries, all of an impractical nature. One was a man who fondly held the theory that the only way to tear away the deadly veil of Venus was to take actual soundings with wire drags and then drop kite balloons with moorings. His idea was to plant buoys, so to speak, to mark the more dangerous crags. Another was a fellow who claimed to be an expert meteorologist, and whose ship was fitted with bins containing colored flours. By dumping those on the Venusian cirrus he hoped to make stains whose motions he could study. By charting the general circulation of the upper air and noting the presence of updrafts and eddies, he hoped to deduce the locations of the hazards below.

Travis and Hartley’s own hope was pinned on magnar—the Maggy, as they preferred to call it—a squat machine that embodied all the virtues of super-radar plus, but inverted. Where old-style radio used oscillating electric currents to generate magnetic waves, magnar operated on reverse principles. Surges of magnetrons set up electric strains which reacted from the surroundings. The results were incomparably more satisfactory than with standard electronic equipment since it was penetrative and analytic as well. But marvelous as the instrument was in its tests under terrestrial conditions, its behavior on Venus was yet to be ascertained. Curious magnetic phenomena had been observed there, due probably to the proximity to the fierce radiation of the sun. Auroras were encountered at all latitudes, and there was known to be a low belt practically opaque to all but long waves. But for better or for worse, they intended to depend on their device to get them safely down, and for the later complying with the strict rules laid down by the Bureau of Genomics in the staking out of their claim.

A gong struck warningly, and Lorimer came to life.

“It’s the standby signal,” he said, and cut in the loudspeaker.

“All ships, attention,” boomed the voice of the chief umpire. “In five minutes we will arrive at the take-off point. See that you are not ahead of the station or you will be disqualified. Everyone listen carefully while I refresh you on the rules. Ships will go in with open mikes, so that I can keep track of your whereabouts. Upon making your planet-fall you are to ground your ship where it may be, leaving the assistant umpire on board for communication purposes. Set up a radio beacon at once so that if necessary I can visit you to check up. After that you are free to explore the territory about you.”

There was a pause for acknowledgments up to that point. Travis nodded. He knew the rules.

“After your reconnaissance,” went on the voice from the cruiser, “you should then stake out your claims. Vague descriptions, wooden stakes, blazes on trees, or loosely piled stone cairns wall not do. There was too much litigation arising from the careless early surveying of Mars. Good topographic maps must be submitted, tracts described by metes and bounds, and the corners tied to salient landmarks. If possible, the survey should be tied to the planetary grid. In cases of conflict, title will be awarded to the most accurately mapped claim.”

“Imagine that!” sniffed Hartley. “Expecting good topography in a dense fog. It’s a good thing we have the Maggy.”

Travis was silent. He was wondering how those clauses happened to be in the conditions. Could it be that Driscoll had a hand in it, knowing their meaninglessness but having devised some way to beat the game? For the term planetary grid implied either a previous triangulation survey or the establishment of circles of latitude and longitude, a manifest impossibility in view of the record. Perhaps Driscoll meant to perform such a survey. He had an army of men, and was known to have taken aboard a great quantity of infrared equipment. Given time and men enough, Venus could be triangulated, using heat detectors and directional walkie-talkies. It was a disturbing thought.

“Ten seconds to go,” warned the cruiser, after which came the long buzz.

“Hop to it, and good luck,” were the umpire’s final words.

THE screen was no longer jet-black with the bright silver ball in its center. It was half-and-half silver and black, the velvety star-spangled sky covering the upper part, and the dazzling shell of Venus the lower. The dividing line had been a strongly curving arc—a segment of the upper limb of the planet. But it had flattened little by little until it showed no curvature. It was a straight line—a horizon. What lay below appeared to be an endless, featureless field of snowy white, flat as a floor. It looked like snow, but it was not. It was an expanse of spicules of ice, the frozen upper cirrus that marked the boundary between the stratosphere and the zone of cloud and fog. Travis shifted the controls. He took the ship off its tangent and put it into gently curving “level” flight. The altimeter stood steady now. Its reading was twelve kilometers.

They had not hurried. At the signal “GO” some of Driscoll’s bird dogs had, as well as the enthusiasts among the other entrants, all wanted to be the first in, as the bursts of violent fire from their reserve tubes showed. But as they fanned out, each toward the assigned section of the Venusian perimeter, Travis hung back. There was no rush. Most of the early birds would die, if history was any guide, and he did not choose to be among them. He saw that Driscoll cagily hung back too, and the strategy of it was plain. The foxy financier would wait to see which of his scouts survived, then follow in on his beam. If none survived—well, he could write the expedition off and go home again. There would always be another time.

“What do you hear?” snapped Travis, addressing Larimer, who cringed in the radio booth listening through headphones to the other ships. The man’s face was white and his eyes large and glazed, and at times he shuddered violently.

“I … it is a shambles down there,” he said, licking his lips. “They’re crashing right and left. You hear ’em reporting, then all of a sudden there’s a scream … something about a pinnacle looming up in the mist … or else no sound but a burst of static … oh, sir, don’t you think we’d better turn back?”

“We’re not as crazy as we look,” said Travis grimly. “But we’re not turning tail yet.”

He made other adjustments to the ship. Much of the momentum had been braked down by air resistance. Now only one tube was jetting, and that at just a trickle to maintain steerageway. Travis pulled the levers that extruded the vessel’s stubby wings and stabilizer fins. From here in the ship would have to be handled as a glider, but with ample reserve power at the throttle.

“Warm up the Maggy,” he said, “and start shooting.”

Hartley turned on the magnetoscope. That was an attachment that converted distances and bearings into light rays. Magnetronic tubes did the trick, throwing the resultant visual image onto a concave screen on the far side of the compartment. For a moment the screen showed nothing but haze, but as fog dissolves and pictures emerge from behind it, the haze melted. What was revealed was truly amazing.

The layer of frozen cirrus vanished. Several miles below its level there suddenly appeared what seemed to be an azure sea sprinkled with scattered rocky islets, arranged in long, twisting chains. But it was like no ocean man had ever looked upon. Its surface appeared hard and glistening, as if of ice, but that illusion of rigidity rose and fell in mighty pulses, now covering, again revealing more of the rough crags that jutted through it. There was a mirage-like quality about the whole scene, for nowhere did any of the islets show shores or beaches, though their jagged outlines expanded and contracted in phase with the heave of the strange crystalline sea.

“That must be your ionosphere,” ventured Travis, squinting at the astonishing vista. “That is the phenomenon that distorts radio beams, though it seems to stop ours cold. But at least we are able to define it sharply. That is some help.”

“Go down as close as you can and see what it does,” suggested Hartley. “Maybe the angle of incidence has something to do with it. Maybe it will recede or vanish.”

“Right-o,” said Travis, and nosed the ship over into a dive.

INEXORABLY the gleaming surface seemed to rise up to meet them. It did not give an iota, or fade. It was an absolute thing. The magnetoscope version may have been pure illusion, but what met their eyes appeared hard and unyielding. If Travis maintained his angle of dive, it could be but a matter of minutes until the ship would be put to the acid test. It would either crash against reality or else plunge through—what?

“Stop! Don’t go on down. Please don’t!” wailed Lorimer. Unnoticed he had stolen over and was staring wildly at the screen. “It’s suicide, I tell you.”

Travis eased off on the controls and halfway flattened out.

“What do you mean?” he asked, roughly.

Lorimer was thoroughly frightened. Trembling and whimpering he blurted out what he had been overhearing on the intership. Most of the other entrants were gone—all the independents and scores of Driscoll’s ships. Many shattered themselves against hidden crags, a few reported themselves stuck in morasses that were about to engulf them. A number of the Driscoll vessels had mutinied and turned tail. Only one was down safely, and he was complaining to Driscoll and the umpire of his plight. He was being tossed about on a turbulent ocean and shipping water with every giant wave, for his altimeter had been at fault and he cracked his plates on striking. Venus was living up to her deadly reputation.

Lorhner never finished his piteous narration. He caught another glimpse of the pseudo-sea over Travis’ shoulder. It was now but a matter of yards away and impact was at hand. Lorimer uttered a little moan and keeled over in a dead faint. Travis shot the slumped figure a contemptuous glance and flicked a lever.

“Shall I try the chute stunt?” asked Hartley, cheerfully, as Travis pulled the ship into a saving climb.

Travis shook his head.

“Too risky. I had rather we stick together. What about supersonic frequencies. Can you tune the Maggy to those? I doubt if anyone ever thought of using them for soundings.”

“I can try,” said Hartley, and proceeded to alter the magnostat setting. He was not sorry to hear the parachute alternative was out, since it had been a forlorn hope at best. One of them was to jump overboard with the automatic beacon, trusting to luck that he fell near a place where the ship could land. If radio failed there was still hope of sending up messages tied to soundage ballonets. But snaring those, or even seeing them in the upper air would be a tough task for a fast-moving vessel.

The sonic soundings did work. The Maggy was not geared to convert that data to vision, but Hartley could interpret the echoes.

“That string of islands to the right,” he said, “terminates in a sheer cliff. What I get from beyond it is very faint and much delayed. I think the precipice is a high escarpment or else the near wall of an immensely wide canyon. Try it there.”

“Here goes,” said Travis, grimly, and started the hazardous plunge.

THE passing through the mysterious ionosphere was an impressive moment. They winced in spite of themselves at what looked like imminent deadly impact. Then the magnetoscope faded into a blur of milky blue, matching the formless haze of swirling mists that still showed on the standard visiscreen. The terrible uncertainty lasted for a second, and then the picture cleared again, this time with the strangely oscillating azure surface vaulting close overhead. Stretched out below them was a magnificent vista—incredibly weird, but as open to their gaze as any bird’s-eye view ever obtained on Earth. Magnar had pierced the veil of the promised land. Venus was theirs!

The terrain was a magnificent jumble of Earth forms. The sierra that formed the crenellated top of the escarpment was lost above the ionosphere, but all else was there for the seeing. Steep talus slopes at the foot of the mighty cliff led down to what on a normal planet would have been a plain. But this plain was broken by scores of volcanic cones, many of which were shrouded in a curious pall of dirty brown—probably volcanic ash turned to falling mud by the ever present moisture. Elsewhere there were badly tilted plateaus and solitary mesas, between which meandered great rivers. Far away and to the right lay the sea. It was a real sea this time, and dappled with islands, great and small, many surrounded by reef-inclosed lagoons. The borderline between the sea and land was a vague marshy area where the rivers lost their identity in a maze of tortuous bayous, deltas and lagoons. Over all, wherever the ground was fairly level, there were vast forests of incredibly high trees.

Travis cruised along with his eye peeled for the best place to land, for once they were down they would have to leave the ship and proceed as best they might in the amphibious crawler in the hold. Suddenly he caught sight of a curious arrangement of naked stones near the crest of one of the tilted plateaus.

“That’s a funny outcropping,” he began, “it looks for all the world like—”

The rest of the sentence died on his lips, for Lorimer came suddenly to life. The man was crazed with fear. He dashed across the room, screaming in hysterical frenzy.

“I won’t let myself be murdered,” he howled. “You are not going through with this madness!”

Travis and Hartley hurled themselves at him, but Hartley’s flying tackle and Travis’ vicious uppercut landed too late. The damage was done. Lorimer slumped back into unconsciousness, but it was by the eerie light reflected from the still glowing visiscreen. Everything else was dark. The magnetoscope was dead. Lorimer’s wildly clawing hands had managed to yank half the switches on the panel open. The emergency lights slowly blinked on, but meter pointers still oscillated wildly, especially those having to do with the magnetic circuits. The abrupt interruption of the current had set up magnetronic eddies that would not die down for minutes.

“Get the supersonics going again if you can,” said Travis between his teeth, “but it looks as if I’ll have to land this baby blind.”

He cursed fervently, trying to recall all the varied detail of the topography he had been studying. But there was no time for reasoned action. The altimeter reading stood at a bare kilometer, and was dropping fast. Before he could get the vessel under control it lurched heavily to the crackle of snapping branches and the scraping of tree tops along the underside of the hull. The lurch turned into a bucking forward fall punctuated by many jolts and bumps. For a moment the ship seemed to tear itself clear, but only to go into free fall. There was the briefest sickening instant of thudding impact, and their voyage was ended. With a squishy thud and a lazy roll, the ship came to rest. Travis and Hartley sat up in the respective corners into which they had been pitched and listened. To their ears came the steady lapping of water alongside their keel and the patter of raindrops on the roof.

“So this is Venus!” said Hartley, wryly.

“Uh-huh,” grunted Travis, hauling himself to his feet. “So it seems. Better get the beacon set up. I’ll take stock.”

“DISMAL place,” was Hartley’s comment. He was gluey mud to his midriff, having just climbed track into the entry port. Back of him was a curtain of hot rain that splashed to the ground only to rise instantly in clouds of steamy vapor. Dimly seen below was the crawler, itself mired to the hubs of the half-track rotors. Gurgling rivulets of water ran past it toward a larger stream they could hear roaring in the background. Vision stopped five yards away. Beyond that was only uncanny yellowish light, of equally mild intensity in every direction. Sogginess, and a dispiriting sort of amber semi-light was the keynote of Venus.

“What’s the lay?” asked Travis. A distinctly chastened Lorimer peered over his shoulder.

“Trees, mostly. Unbelievable trees,” said Hartley. “The California redwoods would be saplings here. If it’s organics they want, we’ve got ’em. Shade doesn’t seem to mean anything here with the light evenly diffused the way it is, because between the big trees there are all sorts of others, some with fruits like melons. And underneath everything is giant brush. Gosh. The going is plenty tough. I’m glad we don’t have to survey this planet inch by inch.”

“We’d better get going with the Maggy, then,” said Travis. “Lorimer helped me set it up. All we need now is the pantos and your expert assistance.”

Hartley washed the worst of the mud off him and then followed Travis up the ladder that led to the dome hatch. The instrument rested on the flatter part of the roof, shielded from the downpour by a hastily stretched tarpaulin. By it stood the box that was to receive the scale relief map the Maggy was to construct. It was a three-sided, open-topped affair, made of plates of transparent synthetic crystal. Travis fastened the pantograph’s arms to lugs extending out of the magnar’s side, and attached the quills at their tips. When he finished the rigging, the pantos extended out into the receiving box.

“We’d be sunk without our Maggy,” said Travis, gazing at the veil of water that poured down on all sides. “Driscoll’s men brought along a flock of infrared equipment and bolometers, but even with those they will find surveying this country a tough job. What the—”

The ship groaned and trembled beneath them, and they were shaken until their teeth rattled. They had to cling on the swaying stanchions to keep from being tossed off the ship. But the earthquake, though severe, did not last long. It died out in a series of shuddering tremors and then there was quiet again—the watery quiet of splashing rain and gurgling ravines.

“Log the time of that,” Travis called down the hatch to Lorimer.

“Ready to ride,” announced Hartley, promptly putting the earthquake out of his mind and going back to the machine. “Let’s make this first try accurate. They’ll be more likely to accept the later abbreviated ones if we show them all our paces. I’ll start with the underlying igneous rocks and fill in above as I go. Use black for that.”

Travis filled the panto quills with a tarry substance that when exuded hardened quickly into a dark glass. That was the symbol that stood for granite in their code. He had other plastics for the other rocks—dark red for sandstone, olive green for shale, a dirty yellow for limestone, and so on. Hartley cut in the juice.

It took the Maggy an hour to lay the foundation for their work. The weaving pantos worked in and out in an ever widening arc as directed by the operator, squirting the colored plastics onto those laid before. Where volcanic necks intervened—and there were many—Hartley stepped up the current so as to force the reluctant radiation through, since when it was set to be reflected by basalt it would bounce back from the nearer surface. It took skill and understanding, but in the end they were well pleased with the result.

What stood in their box was the skeleton of what was to be a diorama of their surroundings—so far just the naked land on which they rested. One could walk around the crystal box and see just how far down the basic magma lay, and how the stratified rocks above were twisted, folded, and faulted. It was the geologist’s dream come true.

If they had been interested in ores, they would have had only to adjust the radiation to the proper setting and delineated it neatly in any special color they chose. As it was, in case of challenge, a simple drill rig could verify their claim in a short time.

Hartley stopped long enough to have a smoke, though the sodden tobacco did not draw well. Then he changed his tuning slightly and ran in the mantle of soil and mud that clothed the bedrock. Toward the sea the alluvial muck was quite deep.

“Say,” said Travis, “we have to put up with the ship’s shadow, but what is that thing up there?”

He pointed to a narrow pointed, irregular wedge lying sidewise on the model’s surface. It was a wedge of emptiness, in which nothing had registered. Except for its queer shape, it was the counterpart of the conical hollow in the very center of the model. That was the shadow cast vertically downward by the hull of the ship itself, since no amount of power would push the magnetrons through that thickness of alloy steel. Hence the pantos could only build an irregular empty cone topped off by the cigar-shaped upper contours of the vessel.

Hartley scrutinized the wedge of vacancy.

“It may be thrown by a moraine. Who knows, they may have had glaciers here once upon a time. Put tire black pigment in and I’ll test for granite.”

The result he got was surprising.

“That’s a funny thing,” frowned Travis. “No action of ice or water ever left detritus like that, and I can’t think of any normal upheaval that would cause it.”

The cause of the shadow was granite, but in a form most unnatural. Far away from any known outcropping, it lay there in thin slabs. In the scale model they were of paper thinness, meaning that actually they were less than a yard thick. They were about ten times wider and occurred in all lengths up to several hundred yards. Not only did the slabs exist contrary to all known laws of granite cleavage, but their disposition was unorthodox. They lay roughly end to end, though by no means continuously since in spots there were wide vacancies. The pattern was that of a circuitous line that sometimes wound around low hills and at others went straight over them.

“What do you make of it?” asked Hartley. “The remnants of an old wall, perhaps, overthrown by an earthquake?”

“Too thin for a wall,” shrugged Travis, “but let it go just now. When we extend the survey we will have to go up that way and then we’ll take a look. Let’s get on with the rest of the topography now. The light is getting dimmer and this rain is chilly.”

HARTLEY put the Maggy to defining water, and the irregularities of the Venusian surface swiftly filled with clear plastic. Ravines turned into streams and saucer-like depressions into lakes. It was necessary for them to know the depths of the water hazards before they set out later in the crawler. And then, after shifting the quills, the pantos began sketching in the vegetable matter, reporting only what was composed of cellulose. The forests took shape, but not as clusters of individual trees. The scale was too small for that. They came out as masses of greenish glass or as a thin glaze where only grasses were.

“Hey,” exclaimed Travis, pointing. “What’s that there—another shadow?”

A clean V-shaped vacancy had been left by the moving arms—a tapering semi-conical tunnel through the tree mass where it intersected it, and barrenness beyond. It was far too regular to have occurred in nature.

The appearance of it puzzled Hartley, for it terminated where it met the face of a mesa he had run in earlier. That would indicate that the unseen obstruction was softer than the sedimentary rocks but harder than wood. Hartley twisted a dial. The shadow persisted. He twisted other dials and stepped up the power. Nothing went through. Whatever it was was exceedingly hard.

“A ship!” said Travis, as the outlines of it suddenly began to grow under the weaving pantos. It was a cigar-shaped affair, and beside it were a pair of flat objects of the same material. Its lines were familiar. It was Driscoll’s Pathfinder, and the two other objects were his crawlers. Their steel effectively masked what lay beyond them.

“It must have just landed,” said Hartley. “It couldn’t have been there before or I couldn’t have shown the mesa complete.”

“He used our beam to come in on, the skunk,” said Travis, huskily, and wheeled toward the hatch. “What are you going to do?”

“Call up the chief umpire and protest.”

The umpire answered soothingly. “Now, now, Mr. Travis—there is no need of distressing yourself. Venus is big. Tremendously big. There’s room enough for both of you. I would suggest that you make contact and reach an agreement. One of you go one way, the other the other. After all, Mr. Driscoll has suffered terrific losses in ships and men and you can afford to be generous. As for that, there is nothing in the rules to cover a conflict of this sort. Later you may take your complaint to the courts, but it is beyond my jurisdiction. Moreover, no part of Venus belongs to you yet—not until you have made an adequate survey.”

“But we have,” insisted Travis, raging. “My partner and I have developed an instrument that maps in total darkness, or through solid barriers for that matter. It is by means of that we discovered this trespasser. I demand—”

“Ridiculous,” said the umpire, crisply. “My assistants have reported conditions down there. You are overruled.”

The click of the severed connection left Travis in a state of sputtering fury. The umpire’s stupid action was not final, of course. A display of the map would show his error. But Driscoll’s intrusion was not only not sportsmanlike, it had an ominous quality. For he had power and the cunning to exploit every technicality. It would have been bad enough to have him on the other side of the planet, for sooner or later they were bound to meet. But to enter into conflict at the very outset was bad. Very bad.

Travis strode to the safe and took out the rules. He scanned them, fuming, but in the end had to concede that the umpire was partly right. The rules were silent on the point. Everything hinged on the quality of the survey made. The best mapped claim would win, regardless of priority. Travis relaxed a little. In that field the Maggy should win hands down over the clumsy bolometric methods Driscoll would probably employ. Hartley agreed with him in deciding to ignore Driscoll for the time being, and carry on.

“TOMORROW,” Travis declared that night, as the three of them were at supper, “we will stow the topographic map in the hold, dismantle the Maggy, and move on to the far edge of what we’ve already done and add another sheet from there. Lorimer will have to stay here to maintain outside communications. We’ll keep in touch with him by means of our walkie-talkies.”

Lorimer nodded agreement, when Travis suddenly sat bolt upright.

“Psst! Do you hear what I hear?”

Outside was the rush and hiss of the rain that never stopped falling, but over it was a louder sound—the rumble and grating of heavy gears and the burbling of an exhaust pipe half submerged in slime. A crawler was coming. Then they heard a hail, faint and unintelligible. The crawler noises grew louder, then ceased. Someone was rapping on the hull.

“In the ship there—ship, ahoy!” came the hail again, Travis rose scowling and spat viciously. The voice was Driscoll’s.

Under the distress clauses of the interplanetary code, he could not be denied entrance, but Travis’ greeting when he opened the lock was frosty.

“I can’t keep you out,” he said, “but your gorillas stay in the crawler.”

He closed the door in the faces of the four strong-arm men that Driscoll carried with him whenever he visited one of the outplanets.

“Now what do you want?”

“I?” laughed Driscoll, with easy politeness. “Why, nothing for myself. I wanted to see if you were all right, that’s all. This is a beastly place, you know.”

“You know we are all right,” said Travis, sternly. “You followed down on our beam and have doubtless been eavesdropping ever since. Quit beating about the bush and come to the point.”

Driscoll raised an eyebrow in mild surprise.

“Your hostility amazes me. However, I did have another purpose in coming. My assistant umpire carelessly came off without a sufficient supply of report forms. He asked me to obtain some from your man.”

Travis silently indicated Lorimer, who rose and went to his booth. Travis and Hartley looked on with steely eyes as Driscoll followed. Nothing apparently passed between them except the pad of government forms, but there was justification in being profoundly suspicious of anything Driscoll did. Driscoll pocketed the forms and uttered profuse thanks all around, but just as he was about to leave he added,

“As I am here, we may as well discuss our future relations, since it seems we are the only two to get through.”

“Now it comes out,” said Travis, with a curl of the lip. “Let’s have it.”

The two partners listened stonily as the financier unreeled his come-on talk. Venus, he said suavely, was too vast a field to be exploited on a shoestring … skyports must be established and immense amounts of capital devoted to transportation alone … the orderly development of the immense resources would require an army of technicians and astronomical amounts of specialized equipment. Simple pioneers could not cope with the problem. They simply cluttered up the field and impeded others.

“All right,” snapped Travis. “So we impede. That is our right.”

Driscoll was not upset. “Look at the history of all such undertakings,” he suggested, patiently. When did a pioneer ever cash in on his potentialities? Wouldn’t it be better to accept the honor of having paved the way and then retire gracefully to easier fields? Would a million valors tempt them? Each, that is? No? Five million? Ten? Ten million valors was a lot of money. How much then? There need be no cutthroat race to stake out land. They could become partners in the big company by virtue of the transfer of their rights. Blocks of stock could be had in addition to the cash. Why not see the light?

“You’re keeping us up,” yawned Travis elaborately. “We’ve had a hard day. Good night.”

Driscoll never dropped the mask of buttery smoothness, but as he bowed himself out there was an ominous glint in his eye.

“I never make an offer but once,” he said.

“Fair enough,” said Travis, and twisted the dogs home with a bang.

IT was the earthquake that woke them up. It came in the middle of the night, just eleven hours after the shock of the afternoon. The din in the ship was terrific as every loose article banged against its neighbor. The dim standing lights flickered on and off and the bunks pitched wildly.

“We’d better get topside and check on the Maggy,” said Hartley, blinking. “Rouse Lorimer to give us a hand.”

But Lorimer was not in bis bunk. They found him on the roof plate, since they wasted no time getting up there when they saw the hatch was open. It was Travis who was first up. He climbed through the hatch and stepped outside the shaft of light that stabbed upward into the misty haze of night. The beam from his sweeping torch fell upon no magnar or diorama, though the stanchions still stood swaying under the tarpaulin. The ruptured power lead still snaked across the slightly curving dome, but it terminated in a frayed end a yard away. There was nothing but a startled man in night clothes squinting into the flashlight’s rays.

“I … I came up to secure the equipment you left here,” stammered Lorimer. “I … it’s not here!”

“We see it isn’t,” said Travis, grimly. He cast his light down onto the hull plates. They were beaded with moisture and streaked with rivulets, but a wide, glistening smear showed where something heavy had slid over.

“We’ll have to allow for these earthquakes hereafter. They may be tidal,” he said. His voice was harsh, but he held it rigidly even. There was no hint of reproach or dismay. “It’s too dark to assess the damage now. Let’s go back to bed.”

Down below. Hartley cautiously closed the door of their room behind them.

“You took it calmly.”

“Why not?” asked Travis, wearily. “The rat pushed them over, of course, but there isn’t a vestige of proof. The earthquake might have done it, you know. But it serves to tip us off to what to expect.”

“Like?”

“That Driscoll’s preparations for surveying this accursed fogbound land are not so hot … that Lorimer is by now on his payroll, and probably tipped him off to the excellent performance of the Maggy … that umpire up in the stratosphere is probably not his creature after all, but just a dope. Otherwise Driscoll wouldn’t have slogged over here through the mud to make us those fancy offers. I knew then that he was afraid of us, but I didn’t expect him to act so quickly. He was slick about it, too. Our evidence is nothing but surmise that would be laughed out of any court in the world.”

“Then you think we’re licked?” Travis gave a short, hard laugh.

“After we dig the Maggy out of the muck in the morning I’ll tell you more. There’s no use worrying about it now.”

Neither one of them went to sleep at once. For Travis’ part he felt a sense of relief that the first blow was struck. It was outright warfare now, even if veiled. It served to remove inhibitions. Neither Travis nor Hartley had come to Venus inspired by greed. Their motives were otherwise—a compound of scientific curiosity; pride in their miracle-working machine; and to some extent the love of adventure. Vaguely behind it all there was the sober conviction that the human race must have new frontiers or stifle. They needed money, to be sure, as did everyone, but only in reasonable quantities. Yet, Driscoll’s avarice was such that he was attempting to defraud them of even that. Very well. The only retaliation the land shark could appreciate would be in kind. His lies and sabotage must be countered with blows where they hurt—in the pocketbook. Travis considered that angle dreamily, and then dropped off to sleep.

The severity of their loss did not become apparent until well after the dim, slow-creeping dawn. They found the fragments of the diorama deep in the slush beside the ship. It was broken into three big chunks and marred with jagged cracks. Glumly Hartley fished the pieces out and washed them off. But except for a few chips irretrievably lost, it could be fitted together and cemented back into a serviceable map. The Maggy that lay under it was different—it was beyond salvage.

It must have fallen first and then received the impact of the heavy mass of glass. Its unique tubes and delicate coils were hopelessly smashed. There were spare parts on board to make good some of the damage, but to fully restore the instrument meant a trip back to Earth. That they could not afford to do. Departure now would forfeit all they had gained.

“We’re sunk,” said Hartley, gloomily.

“You’re never sunk until you admit you are,” reminded Travis, grimly. “We still have the helios and the bolos, and a few other tricks up our sleeve.”

“Like?”

“I’ve got a hunch I want to play. We’ll talk about that later.”

They carried the topographic model inside and repaired it. Then they took photographs of it and locked it away in the hold. The Maggy they sadly consigned to a vacant bin. The advantage it gave them was gone. From then on they would have to explore Venus the hard way.

“Pile our stuff into the crawler, Hartley, and warm the motor up.”

Then Travis called the chief umpire by radio. He spoke with restraint, but he was firm in his demands. The umpire had certain duties and he should perform them. The stratosphere was not the place. He should bring his ship down to the surface and park it between the two contestants. Travis went on to report Lorimer’s panic on the flight down, and his subsequent “carelessness” in tumbling their equipment overboard while ostensibly trying to secure it. He wanted Lorimer’s immediate replacement, and a guard for the ship, for he intended leaving it to carry out the required field work. He did not propose to submit tamely to being stabbed in the back while he was gone, and concluded by reminding the umpire what happened to some negligent officials after the scandals on Mars. The umpire sputtered indignantly but said he would come on down.

AN hour later Travis and Hartley piloted the slithering, splashing crawler away. Travis grinned at recalling the umpire’s reaction when they showed him the map. The fellow had been honest in the belief that they could not possibly have accomplished so much in so brief a time. In other respects he was simply a run-of-the-mine civil servant, more afraid of violating the letter of his instructions than any other thing, he was weak and not too bright, but he was not venal. They could go off into the fog and leave him behind as a buffer with a fair degree of confidence, for before leaving they had seen that he sent through to Earth a complete report of progress to date.

“I still don’t get what you’re driving at,” said Hartley, peering into the dirty yellow mist that had replaced the rain. He was steering. His chart was a photo of the model, his compass a gyro set to an arbitrary base line called “pseudo-north.” He ducked one of the numerous ponds and got back on the course. It led straight to the nearest part of the curious winding granite slab formation.

“You will,” said Travis cheerfully. He was less depressed by the crippling of the Maggy than his partner. “You thought those pieces of granite were the remnants of a wall. Maybe, but my theory is that they are what is left of a road. Our own ancients built some pretty good roads. It could be that this planet is inhabited, or was. If so, and that long line of broken slabs is a road, all we have to do is follow where it leads and maybe we’ll bump into something that will help us.”

“Yes, but I still don’t see—” objected Hartley, still puzzled, but he had to pull up suddenly. They had been plowing through the gigantic grasses that rose in clumps to untold heights above them, but for a few moments the visibility happened to be amazingly good. There were instants when they could see all of fifty feet. And there before them lay one of the old slabs.

It was canted sharply and riven by stalks of the bamboo-like growth that had upset it, but it was obvious that Travis’ guess had hit the mark. Despite the slimy moss that clung to the flat, tilted surface, they could not miss the two deep grooves—distinct, parallel furrows, the marks left on a hard road by generations of shod cartwheels. The distance between the treads was just short of six feet, indicating that whatever vehicles had made them were not dissimilar in size to those used by men.

“This does it,” said Travis, triumphantly. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Do you remember when Lorimer went crazy on the trip down and cut our lights? We were studying some funny rock shades on the top of a plateau. It looked like the ruins of a town to me. If so, it can’t be far from here. In any event, a road always runs from somewhere to somewhere else. Turn right and let’s see where this one takes us.”

They drove on. Often they lost the road, but for awhile the map set them straight again. As Hartley manipulated the crawler’s heavy wheel, Travis unloaded some of his views.

“We are required to make a survey. One look around shows how tough that is. Astronomical observations or triangulation as done on Earth are out of the question. We work in a medium that is worse than dark. That means we will have to triangulate by heat beacons, picked up by bolometer or radar or supersonics, all crude methods. A heat source is necessarily large, not a pinpoint-like light. Radio is fuzzy in definition except where metal is the target. Supersonics are entirely unreliable in an atmosphere as humid as this. Now that the Maggy is on the blink it’s a case of doing the best we can, and that best has to be better than Driscoll’s.”

“Well?” said Hartley, sheering to avoid a monster geyser that loomed up ahead. It was one of a row that was spouting boiling water thunderously into an already saturated air. The crawler slumped over into a quagmire and then had to wait other minutes while one of the recurrent earthquakes shook itself out. Simultaneously the thudding roar of a distant crater vomiting into action boomed in their ears.

“What a planet,” gritted Hartley, hanging on to the bucking wheel. “When you do survey it what have you got? I bet whole gobs of this topography comes and goes over-night.”

“Not improbable,” said Travis, unperturbed. “Which makes it all the more desirable that we establish ourselves geographically—by latitude and longitude—if it could be done. Since that is tough we are left with a bolo survey. How good that will be will depend a lot on how good our base line is. Back there in the jungle where we were, and Driscoll is, it would take a year just to cut out one through those big trees. You would still have to mark the end of the line with a well-defined monument. Now cities are a lot more distinctive than trees or lakes or mountain peaks, and if we can find a few there, we have our corners ready made. Not only that, but cities promise other rewards—caches of ancient treasure, if the cities are as dead as the condition of this road seems to indicate they are.”

Hartley nodded his agreement. By then they had progressed to the place where they were about to run off their Maggy built map.

“Just keep following the road,” said Travis.

They continued to climb. After a bit the bamboo growth was less dense. It was also less gigantic, and the humid air was cooler, too, indicating a gain in altitude. The steamy vapor of the forest was replaced by the cold, swirling mists of the plateau. It was better going, and even seeing, in every way.

“Here we are,” said Hartley, swerving to a stop as a rift in the fog showed what lay ahead, “and the dump is as dead as Babylon, from the looks of it,”

Wreathed in trailers of clinging mist a high, crenelated wall stood athwart the road, pierced by a single, towered gate. To the left a part of it had been overthrown and tumbled forward into what may have been a moat, and chunks of rubble half filled the lower part of the gate. But Hartley surveyed it briefly and then slid in the crawler’s gears. The clumsy vehicle grumbled, and then started to climb. In a moment it was through the relative gloom beneath the dark arch of the gate and clattering out into the streets of the dead city.

“Why, this town is half buried—like old Pompeii,” exclaimed Travis, pointing. On either side there were rows of buildings, their lower floors submerged and with a mixture of mud and rubble masking the sills of the upper windows. “Its city walls have helped to hold the muck in or the rains should have washed it out long ago. No telling what we’ll find when we go to digging.”

They went on with their exploration. It was a fairly extensive town with many buildings of massive masonry, but it had been a dead city for a very, very long time. In the heart of it they came upon a great open square out of which protruded the upper portion of a sort of pyramid.

The pyramid was a six-sided affair, and curiously truncated. Slimy moss covered most of it, but they found handholds in crevices and managed to climb to the top. In that slanting surface they found a circular hole about a foot across, the only visible entrance, but when they crouched down and peered into it with sweeping flashlights they saw only a cavernous room half filled with stinking rain water.

“Well,” said Travis, brightening and straightening up. “It looks as if we had something. Call up the umps on the walkie-talkie and tell him we have established our advanced base, but nothing more. Get it?”

THE days that followed were ones of intensive exploration. They broke into the upper stories of the buried houses and dug out the volcanic ash and mud that filled them. They found bolted doors that had to be forced, but beyond them they discovered passages leading to the nether parts of the house where the doomed Venusians had fled in fright when extinction came upon them.

Considering the prevalence of moisture, what they found was in a surprisingly good state of preservation. The original catastrophe must have been accompanied by dry heat, for the remains of the Venus creatures had desiccated to mummified cadavers easy to study. They were remarkably anthropoid, differing from man chiefly in that they were taller and more slender and also had six digits to the hand and foot. Beside them were an abundance of artifacts of every description, including weapons and armor. The armor was of incredible richness in many cases, being of gold and silver damascene inlay in hard steel, the whole crusted with gems of rare fire and color. In a single day the boys found wealth enough to satisfy the greediest.

Travis shortly left the work of cataloguing the archeological finds to Hartley. It was imperative, now that they had come upon this antique city, that they stake out a claim that would stand up against any machination of the Driscoll crowd. Therefore he set up his instruments and began the patient accumulation of recorded data.

The diffusion of light and heat was practically perfect, and the unaided eye had but the vaguest notion where the sun rose or set or the path it followed. But the helio was an instrument of rare delicacy and Travis felt he could find the sun within an accuracy of a degree or two. The bolometer readings were less satisfactory, since the greatest heat recorded was in midafternoon, but between them he was able to roughly know when it was apparent noon and more or less what the altitude of the sun was. The time of sunrise and sunset was indefinite, in the absence of knowledge as to what the horizons were, so he could not say what was the length of the actual day. But the noon to noon intervals, and the regularity of the tidal earthquakes gave him the length of the mean day. Venus revolved about its axis once in every twenty-two hours and a few minutes.

It was a triumph, of a sort.

“The latitude here is about sixty-five degrees,” he told Hartley, jubilantly.

“Yeh. What about the longitude?”

“Zero—a hundred—anything I want to call it,” grinned Travis. “Longitude is arbitrary. The first maps at home used the westernmost of the Azores for the kickoff point, thinking the world began there. Later the Americans used Washington, the French Paris, and so on until they got together on Greenwich. It doesn’t matter really. The guy that states it first and hollers loudest wins.”

But Travis’ elation was short-lived. His figures were rough, but they had a clear trend. Every noon’s altitude was greater than on the day before. Venus’ axis was also tilted to the ecliptic. She had seasons. The sun was climbing in the sky, which meant it was spring. Travis groaned. He might have expected it, but it was a shock. He would have to track that elusive area of light for a full Venusian year—two-hundred and twenty-five terrestrial days—to establish the full curve. And it would take another year or two on top of that to make sure he was right. It was too long. Driscoll would beat him to the gun with an inferior survey. Once the deeds were passed the jig would be up.

He frowned as he considered another difficulty. He would win over topography with astronomical latitude, given time, but at that his latitude was fuzzy. Within a degree or so was not good enough.

It left a probable error of up to a hundred miles. He was wasting time. He had better drop this nonsense and tackle the slow but surer way of piecemeal triangulation. It was when he broke that news to Hartley that Hartley brought better news to him.

“Say,” he said, “today I found this picture in the cellar of a house. We ought to break into that pyramid.”

He produced a thin sheet of bronze on which was engraved a view of the central square. The lines were very fine, as if etched, and they depicted the great plaza as it must have looked in its days of glory. The massive pyramid dominated the picture, and throngs of people swarmed in the square, holding their hands up in apparent supplication. A group of what were probably priests stood on the sloping platform made by the truncation, looking down on the masses below. It was apparently the day of some great festival, but the significant feature was that it showed a large portal leading into the pyramid at the level of the street. Its wide doors were open, and men and women were streaming into it.

Travis studied the etching. The great door was delineated as being on the face of the pyramid immediately below the lowest side of the truncation, a great help.

“Well,” he said, “this tells where to dig. Let’s get going.”

DIGGING In the heavy, compact mud was hard going, but luckily it was not far. They hastened the work by rigging up a scraper and used the crawler for a drag. In the end they also had to employ the clumsy vehicle to batter in the heavy bronze leaves of the door, for they were securely fastened from within. Then the doors crashed inward and the crawler lunged through into the dim interior. They stopped and turned on its spotlight.

“It’s a temple, not a tomb,” pronounced Hartley.

If was a huge cubical room, bare of all furnishing except a high altar reached by a flight of wide steps. Above the altar rose a pylon on whose face was a glittering sunburst, evidently of pure gold and richly set with jewels. About the altar stood a few vases, and on the floor lay the smashed remnants of others. From them spilled mounds of gems of all colors that sparkled brilliantly under the beam of light.

Travis swung the light around and swept the walls. On either side of the pylon were two huge embossed characters of the Venusian language, and around the entire room ran a wide frieze covered with ornamentation of interlaced hexagons and duodecagons. Every square foot of the walls underneath was given to elaborate mosaics. The theme of most were battles, confirming the opinion already reached that the Venusians were a warlike people. One big picture represented a ceremony which might have been a coronation. The most revealing of all was the last they came to.

It was done in dark-blue glazed tiles, and spangled with diamonds set in tiny silver rayed settings. Across it ran a wavy line of narrow gold ribbon, the highest point of which was adorned with a replica of the sun symbol.

“As I live and breathe,” shouted Travis. “A map of the sky, I hope whoever laid out that sun track was an astronomer, not an artist,” and he hastily rigged his camera.

It took hours to give the pyramid a thorough search. By means of winding stairs behind the pylon they came to upper levels, each being smaller than the one below. Most were the living quarters of the priests, and there were some dark cells for the sacrificial prisoners. Some day archeologists would translate the hieroglyphics and learn what those about to die had scribbled on the walls. There were other caches of treasure, too, but the greatest of all was the library. Here they found many scrolls, most of which were still in tubes sealed with wax. The majority were unintelligible, but they took away for study all that furnished clues in the way of illustrations and diagrams.

The topmost level was barred by another bronze door that defied all their efforts. In the end they had to get dynamite from the crawler and plant a charge. It was well they took ample cover on the floor below, for the aftermath of the explosion was unexpected. A freshet of trapped water came tumbling down the stairs and spread out on the floors of the rooms below. After a little it shrank to a dribble, and they climbed the slick, weedy steps to see the ultimate compartment.

Here they found another pylon and sunburst, though mossy from the clammed up water, presiding over a flat stone altar faintly illuminated by the light that shone through the hole overhead. Travis cast his flash about. Clinging algae showed the high watermark overhead. In the corners of the room were some strange instruments deeply incrusted with damp verdigris. They proved to be astrolabes, octants and transits of bizarre design, and one was fitted with a rude crystalline lens.

Travis and Hartley stood for a long time in sober thought, sizing up the place and trying to visualize the rites that had been conducted there.

“I think I’m beginning to get this,” said Travis, suddenly. “It’s clear enough these people were sunworshipers. This is a combined temple and observatory. The Egyptians did something of the kind, and so did the Aztecs. My hunch is that hole is set so that at the summer solstice—and no other time—the sun would shine in here and illuminate this altar. What blood orgies followed then don’t concern us now. The thing is that we have a check on my own orientation—that truncation up there must face south, and, if I can dope out just where that ray hit the altar, I’ll have a verification of the altitude of the sun on that day. It’s not all I need, but it is a help.”

“The climate must have been a lot different in the old days,” said Hartley, peering up through the gloom at the small, blurry spot of light.

“Of course it was. Vulcanism is the answer. For awhile this planet was stable, and then another era of mountain building set in. The scrap of geology we got from the Maggy showed us what the last upheavals have done. But it wasn’t only earthquakes and eruptions that did the Venusians in. Extreme volcanic activity heaves a lot of water into the air. Our own ones do. They get it from the core of the Earth where it is still held in solution in the general mass. The Venusians were losing cities fast and their skies were getting thicker. So the smarter ones of them got together and tried to escape. There must have been a very few advanced enough to conceive of spaceships—the Venusian Leonardo da Vincis, ahead of their time—but we know they managed it, and with a little better luck their race might have survived.”

“All right,” agreed Hartley. “But how does that help us?”

“We’ve got a swell observatory here—for Venus. The sun climbs higher every day. I’ll keep checking it from the outside and you set up some equipment here. If your instruments register with mine the day it hits the solstice, my theory is proved. This will be the key point—longitude zero and whatever we find the latitude to be. Then we’ll move on to another city and get another set of figures. It won’t he long before we’ve whipped this thing.”

THAT night they opened a bottle of their medical brandy and had a celebration. Then Hartley remembered that he hadn’t made his routine report of the day. They didn’t want well-meaning rescue parties come fumbling their way. He made the usual report that they were O.K. but finding the going slow.

“Ask how Driscoll is doing,” prompted Travis, taking another swig.

“Not so good,” said Hartley when he clicked off. “For us, that is. Umps says that he recalled the ships that got cold feet and deserted him, claiming that since they had not yet actually reached Earth they were “still part of his expedition, So now he has scores of more parties out. Umps says he has taken in hundreds of square miles of territory on the other side of ours. They’re even talking of sending for more gangs to start clearing a landing field.”

“That’s bad,” growled Travis. He wouldn’t have grudged it to any other man, but with Driscoll it was different. Calling in extra help was hitting below the belt. “Did he mention finding any cities?”

“Nope, but he said that Driscoll looked pretty cocky. He’s probably playing it cagey like we are.”

“Uh, huh,” grunted Travis. It wasn’t good news. There were plenty of smart men on Driscoll’s payroll, and there was no copyright on unraveling antique mysteries.

THE summer solstice occurred two days later, but it took several days, more to make sure, for the sun declined too imperceptibly to make certain of it with their crude tools. Travis spent the time poring over the documents unearthed in the sacerdotal library and the photostats of those dug up in Persia. The hieroglyphics were quite beyond him except for the numerals. They stopped him for awhile until he angrily noticed that he had persistently overlooked the fact that there were twelve characters employed and not the usual ten.

“Of course,” he declared sourly, “people with six fingers and toes would have a duodecimal based numerical system. I should have guessed it from their ornament, the shape of the pyramids, and all.”

After that it did not take long to unravel the simpler computations left by the ancients, but in the absence of explanatory texts they remained incomprehensible operations in arithmetic.

Hartley broke open another scroll and unwound it on their makeshift desk.

“Say—” he shouted.

“A map!” exclaimed Travis, jumping to him. Then his hopes sank. It was a map, but of what? There was no shorelines or rivers or mountain ranges, nor was it another star map. It partook of the qualities of both. Sprinkled over it was a myriad of little black sunbursts, some smaller, some larger, and they were connected by a network of lines jagged as conventional lightning streaks. Each of the tiny symbols bore a pair of hieroglyphic characters, evidently the name of the place or thing, but he could not read them. Over all there was a light rectangular grid with numerals in line script at their ends. Four of the horizontal lines were heavier than the others, and between the middle pair and in the center of the map were two double sunbursts done in gold leaf—one just beneath the upper line, one just above the lower.

They puzzled over the map for hours. Travis got out his code table of numerical values and ran in the translation of the figures. The vertical lines were marked with figures running up to three digits, the values being from zero to 999 on the duodecimal scale—just one short of the cube of the base. The horizontal lines had no number higher than 499 on the same scale. But all the values were consecutive, the horizontal series running from the top down, the vertical ones from right to left. The extreme upper and lower parts of the map were otherwise blank.

“It is a dead ringer for a Mercator projection,” insisted Hartley.

“I know … wait!” Travis came suddenly out of his gloom into life, then laughed. “This shows what a fixed idea can do to you. We keep thinking in terms of three-hundred and sixty degrees to the circle. These people had a simpler system. They had one thousand seven hundred twenty-eight degrees to the full circle—the cube of twelve! Now it makes sense.”

He snatched open a drawer and yanked out the photos they had taken inside the pyramid temple. One was the picture of the giant pylon above the main lower altar. He grabbed a pair of reading glasses and gave one to Hartley.

“See if we can match those characters anywhere. They may stand for the temple or the town. My hunch is that it will be in the middle latitudes, so you take the upper half and I’ll take the lower.”

IN a little while Hartley let out a yelp. He found a matching pair. And a relentless search for the next half hour showed there was not another spot on the map with the same markings. That indicated that each of the small sunbursts stood for a pyramid, and the ragged lines between were probably the connecting highways. What they had was an ecclesiastical map of Venus.

There was much more to do before Travis was satisfied. He ran and dug out the measurements of the upper sacrificial chamber. He had all along suspected that the slope of the truncated roof was such as to be normal to the midsummer rays. It was twenty-one degrees from the horizontal, hie deducted that value from the observed maximum altitude of the sun, sixty-seven. The answer was forty-six. That wasn’t what the figures on the map showed, but the Venusian scheme was different. Latitude according to their convention ran from pole to pole, not from the equator both ways. Travis did some fast subtracting and converting from the tiny Venusian degrees to the fat terrestrial ones. The answer was cheering. It came out to forty-six.

“It’s in the bag now,” chuckled Travis. “Now it all clears up. These golden double sunbursts denote the happy land—the Twice Blest, so to speak. They get sun in the zenith twice a year inside the tropics, so the priests could have twice as many bloody parties. My money says that the temples there will he flat-topped, too. Way up here they had to tilt the top to let the sun in on the one day a year it did come, and the angle gets worse the closer you get to the poles. Up above the arctic circles there are days they don’t have sun at all, so the temples are few and far between. But now that we have the key, what are we waiting for? Let’s get going.”

“Where to? The ship?”

“Not yet. We’ll stop by at the next town and do a little double-check.”

WITHOUT the map it would have been easy to have missed the place altogether. It lay in a shallow valley and all that showed above the reedy mud was a sloping piece of flat rock that might easily have passed for an outcropping of bedrock. They unplugged the solar hole of its muck and dropped a suction hose into the sacrificial chamber of the buried pyramid. The crawler’s pump was set to work and soon the dark water was gushing out. The boys ate their lunch, and then went to work with crowbars to enlarge the hole. It was unnecessary to blast their way to the great hall far down in the base. The upper room was also adorned with the temple’s designating characters. They scraped the slime off them and compared them with the map. They tallied.

When they were up in the crawler again and sheltered from the rain that had now grown from a steady, miserable drizzle to a roaring torrent, they sat through another spine-wrenching earthquake. They had time to think and appraise the magnitude of the fortune that had befallen them.

“This means that we own this whole doggoned planet?” asked Hartley, a little awestruck.

Travis nodded.

“Hands down.”

“But what are we going to do with it? I wouldn’t live here if they gave it to me.”

“I dunno. Kick Driscoll out and give it to the poor, I guess.”

He grinned.

“I wouldn’t live here either.”

Lilies Of Life

Astounding Science Fiction, February 1945

THE test tube dropped to the floor with a crash. A wisp of acrid fume trailed up from it.

Parks, ignoring it and gripping the edge of the table, moaned, “Something’s happened to my schedule—this isn’t due for an hour yet—”

He broke off, shivering.

Maxwell looked sharply at him from where he sat, and then glanced at the clock. It was only two.

Three o’clock was when their next shots were due. But there was no doubt that Parks was working himself into a seizure. Already his hands were twitching and jumping convulsively, and the telltale tics of the deadly Venusian swamp jitters were commencing to go to work. Parks’ face was no longer his own, but a travesty of a human countenance—a wildly leering, alternately staring and squinting mask of agony.

Maxwell rose and pushed back his chair with a sigh. If Parks was going that way, so soon would he. Unhurriedly he walked to the medicine cabinet and took out two shiny syringes. He filled them both from their supply of ampules. Paracobrine was not much good, but it was the best men knew. Then he laid them by the “wailing wall”—an iron railing firmly secured to heavy stanchions—and went to where the now whimpering Parks huddled on his stool.

“Come on, old man,” he said gently, “let’s get it over with.”

Parks allowed himself to be led to the place and long practice did the rest. By the time Maxwell had the needle in and the plunger thrust home Parks was gripping the rail as if he meant to squeeze it flat. Maxwell took a deep breath. It was his turn. He rolled up his sleeve and forced the amber liquid into his own veins.

For five interminable minutes the two men clung there, writhing and sobbing as the fiery stuff coursed through their bodies—molten iron, searing acid, soul-destroying agony.

And then it passed. Fingers relaxed their deathlike hold, muscles untensed, and their gasping again became breathing.

“I … won’t … go … through … this … again—” began Parks through clenched teeth, “I—”

“Oh, yes you will,” said Maxwell grimly “We always say that … everybody says it … but still we go on. You know the alternatives, don’t you?”

“I know them,” said Parks, dully. Without paracobrine the jitters became a permanent condition, not a recurrent one, and one that ended necessarily in madness. The other course was the rope, or the jump from a high place, or a swifter poison.

“All right, let’s get back to work then. What was in that tube?”

“Experiment eleven-o-four. It doesn’t matter now. I used the last of the snooker bark. We haven’t the stuff to duplicate it with. Not unless Hoskins smuggles in another supply.”

“Forget it then. Let’s have a look in the ward. Maybe eleven-o-three did the trick.”

Parks followed silently, gradually pulling himself back into his normal self. Next time he would know to advance the clock. Paracobrine was no fun, but it was less hard to take in a calm mood than after the attack had begun.

The ward brought the usual disappointment. The monkey in the victim cage was gibbering hideously in his last convulsions. Within a minute it would be as dead as the limp piles of inoculated guinea pigs in the pens beyond. The last try at the formula had not worked. Two thirds of the human race would have to go on suffering for awhile, for a better answer to the swamp jitters than paracobrine was not yet.

Maxwell looked at the other cages. There were still some monkeys and guinea pigs, and there were a few other combinations yet to try. Men in vital research must be resilient. A thousand or so failures was nothing. It is a part of the business.

“I think,” he started to say, “that we had best—”

“I’ll get the door,” Parks interrupted, as a discreet tapping broke in on them. “Sounds like Hoskins.”

It was Hoskins, Hoskins the interplanetary smuggler. He carried a heavy satchel and wore a sour grin.

“Bad news, fellows,” he said, setting down his bag. “No more stuff out of Venus from now on. They’ve trebled the off-planet patrol and tightened up on port inspection. Tony was pinched, and his ship and the stuff for you with it. They threw him in the clink, of course, and burned the cargo. That means you won’t get any more snooker bark, or gizzle bugs, twangi-twangi melons or any other of that stuff. Shan Dhee has chucked his job, which leaves me without a buyer. I’m going out of business. Sorry.”

“There’s nothing for us?” asked Parks, aghast. He clung fiercely to his theory that the specific for the jitters would be found only in some organic product of Venus, where the disease originated. It would be there, if anywhere, that the virus’ natural enemies would have evolved. But lately other Venusian maladies had been turning up and the quarantine authorities must have ordered a stricter embargo. Without smuggled organics, his and Maxwell’s hands would be tied.

“I’ve got this stuff,” said Hoskins, opening the bag. “It’s not the sort you usually order, but I happen to have it on hand and want to close it out. It’s loot Shan Dhee got out of a Tombov temple he once robbed. It ought to go to a museum, but the stuff’s hot and they ask too many questions. Could you use it?”

He dug into the bag and came up with a figurine. It was a piece of the curious coffee-colored semi-jade regarded as a sacred stone by the savage Tombovs, and, considered as Tombov work, was extraordinarily finely executed. Its subject was a rotund, jolly old Tombov godlet, sitting comfortably on a throne with his pudgy hands clasped across his belly. About his neck hung a rope of what appeared to be large pearls, and he was crowned with a chaplet of swamp lilies. Lily plants grew all about the throne, and there the jade had been cunningly colored green by the application of a kind of lacquer—the pale-yellow lilies being similarly tinted.

“Shan Dhee says it is the Tombov God of Health, and the temple was the big one in Angra Swamp where the Angra tribes hold their orgies.”

“Ugh!” shuddered Parks. Those who had seen them reported the Tombov ritual was not a pretty thing to watch. “No, it’s no good to us.”

“I don’t know,” said Maxwell, slowly. “God of Health, you say? Mmm. Come to think of it, most Tombovs are immune to the jitters, or were until our pioneers went there. Maybe we ought to study it. How much?”

“Nothing, to you,” said Hoskins. “You’ve been good customers. Take it for cumshaw. But I’ll have to ask money for these.”

He dug again into the bag and came out with a double handful of beautiful, iridescent spherelets. They were each about the size of a golf ball, and looked for all the world like so many soap bubbles—thin, fragile, and shimmering. Yet when Maxwell examined one he found it to be exceedingly hard, though almost weightless, and it appeared to be made of the toughest imaginable crystal.

“What are they?”

“Gems, I guess,” shrugged Hoskins. “They came out of the temple, too. Shan Dhee said they hung around the neck of the big idol like a necklace—roped together with wisps of grass. See, the little idol wears a replica of it.”

Maxwell considered the jewels, frowning. Hoskins added that the price would be a thousand for the lot. That was a lot of money, but what was money to men doomed to a lingering, fearful death? The baubles were somehow linked to the Tombov health rites, and the wild Tombov—though a filthy beast—was notoriously healthy. It was only the civilized ones who withered and died. It was doubtful that the gems themselves had any therapeutic value, but they came out of a temple. Therefore they were symbolic of something or other, a possible clue to the real secret.

Maxwell hauled a drawer open and swept the glistening spheres into it.

“Make out a check, Parks. I’m going to play a hunch.”

PARKS, still dazed from his premature seizure, nodded dumbly. And after Hoskins had gone, they took out the spheres again and huddled over them. Then they divided up the work and went at it.

Tests were applied, with results that were largely negative. The iridescent balls were acid-proof, shatter-proof, and exceedingly hard. But Maxwell managed to saw one in half, and found it empty, though as the saw first bit through the thin shell there was a sharp hissing as trapped inner gases escaped into the room. Parks was quick to catch a sample of the foul-smelling stuff, only to be baffled by the analysis. The organic gases of Venus have most complex molecular structures.

“Hey,” yelled Maxwell, a little later, taking his eye away from the microscope. “I have some of that sawdust here. It isn’t crystalline at all. It’s definitely a cellular structure. These balls are certainly not minerals, but they are not plant or animal tissue either—not as we know them. They’re just—”

“Just Venusian,” Parks completed for him, sighing. Anything that lived on Venus was a headache to the investigator. There was no perceptible borderline between flora and fauna, and there were times when both encroached into the mineral zone. Venusian life cycles made those of such devious transformations as the human tapeworm on Earth seem as bleakly simple as the reproductive processes of the amoeba. Parks knew of, to name just one, a sort of aquatic ant that was fertilized by clinging to the skin of eels, and which then crawled ashore and laid its eggs, the eggs subsequently growing up into masses of moss. Weird, featherless birds ate that moss and developed intestinal parasites. Those, upon deserting their host, became crawling ants, sprouted wings, and then took off for the ocean. It was merely the usual Venusian complicated symbiotic set-up; the ants being somehow necessary to the survival of the eels, and in their later forms to the birds, both as food and as digestive enzymes. Scientists who attempted to follow through lost themselves in a maze of yet other ramifications.

Maxwell and Parks stared at one another.

“There’s only one thing to do,” said Maxwell. “Hoskins can’t bring any more stuff to us, we’ll have to go to it. I want to know why wild Tombovs don’t have jitters, and why lilies are sacred to them, and what these things are. We’re going to Venus.”

THEIR arrival at Port Angra was not a cheerful occasion. Their arms and legs were puffed and aching from scores of prophylactic shots. Moreover, they had to sign away most of their civil rights. Despite all precautions, white men rarely could remain more than three months on Venus without picking up one or more virulent infections, any of which would prevent his ever returning to sanitary Earth. People therefore went there at their own risk, absolving the government and all others concerned in advance.

There was also nothing reassuring about their fellow passengers. A few were desperate scientists like themselves, stragglers in the procession that had been going by for years. Others were missionaries, gone to relieve brothers whose three months were about up. For similar reasons there were relief quarantine enforcement officers along, and representatives of the Radioactive Syndicate, come to take their turn at keeping the uranium mines going. Most regarded their assignments with unalloyed distaste.

They came down in the inevitable sticky, yellow, hot mist, and landed in a clearing made in a lush jungle. Awaiting them was a pathetic sight—rows and rows of grounded palanquins wearing the weathered and mildewing white and red insignia of the Red Cross. In litters lay the men they were coming to relieve, mere wrecks of what they had been a few short weeks before. For not a few of them their coming to the port was no more than a hopeless gesture. Whether they were accepted for the passage home would depend upon the doctors.

“This is some place,” growled Parks.

“When the jitters hit you again,” reminded Maxwell grimly, “it won’t matter. Any place you happen to be in will be that.”

He studied the ranks of tamed Tombovs standing patiently beside the grounded chairs. They were the bearers, the helots of this hole. They stood gaunt and shivering, for they were sick men too, sicker even than the whites. It was thought profitable to keep Earthmen alive by periodic doses of paracobrine, but a waste of good drugs when it came to natives. The swamps were full of them, and the promise of tobacco—the one non-native commodity valued by the savages—always filled up the ranks again. As Maxwell looked, one of the chair bearers jerked into violent convulsions and fell writhing and howling to the muddy ground. No one noticed. It was too routine. Tomorrow, maybe, the scavengers would attend to it.

The Tombov was remarkably humanoid, grotesquely so, more so than the great apes of Earth. The salient difference was in the feet, huge splayed pedals that served as mudshoes, distributing the body weight over a larger area so that the Tombov could walk safely on the thin crust that topped the viscous mire of the swamplands. They were ducklike feet, mostly membrane spread between long tapering toes.

The port captain came up and called litters for the new arrivals, one each for the men, and additional ones for their equipment. Then he barked out an order in the harsh Tombov tongue and the bearers picked up their loads and went on splashing away.

Despite the poor visibility, Maxwell found it an interesting ride. There was a feeling of luxuriousness in being carried along over impossibly sloppy ground on the bare shoulders of a half dozen jogging slaves. And he was interested and at the same time appalled at the riot of vegetation he glimpsed on all sides. There was an infinitude of species of every kind of living thing, an overwhelming field for scientific study. With human mortality rates what they were, man would probably never know much about Venusian life forms. For the animals, if they were animals, that peered out from time to time, were as weird and incredible as the fantastic flowering lianas, smoking bushes, and trees that gave off metallic, cracked-bell clanking sounds.

His momentary sense of well being abruptly departed from him as their caravan hove into a clearing and trotted past a low mud wall. Over the group of buildings beyond the wall flew the drab banner of the U. M.—United Missions. He saw the corrals into which newly arrived Tombovs were being herded, preparatory to their being “processed” for the slave market. For since Earthmen could not work and survive in that vile climate, they had to have natives as the beasts of burden. It was natives who dug the uranium, who did the building, and the hauling. And heathen Tombovs would not do. They were too intractable.

Maxwell thought cynically on the conversion statistics, of the thousands run through the salvation mills each year. It was not basically an evangelical proposition. It was an economic necessity. For all Earthmen, whatever their faith, agreed on one point—the Tombov in the raw was a lazy, lascivious, irresponsible rascal. The wild native was a chronic liar, a congenital thief, and what displeased him he was prone to kill out of hand, and his means of doing it were rarely nice. He saw no point in working, for natural food was on every hand. He was tough; therefore physical punishment meant nothing. His philosophy was virtually nil, so he was deaf to abstract appeal. In short, to be useful, he had to be Christianized.

A TURN of the road put the mission behind, and its hateful appendage—the labor mart. Ahead were the first straggling huts of Agra. They passed the inevitable dispensary, with its white-coated attendants and wailing wall. Then they stopped at a low building beyond whose sign read:

Bureau of Research Co-Ordination.

The doctor in charge was a haggard, sallow man with woebegone eyes. His hopeless expression did not change while Maxwell was outlining his theory. When he stopped the doctor shook his head.

“A chimera,” he said, “a waste of work. Others have come to Venus with the notion that it was something the Tombovs ate or drank that made them immune to jitters. Every item of their diet has been analyzed many times, even the foul fen air they breathe. The results were always negative. Nor is there any appreciable difference between Tombov blood types and ours, or their vitamin reaction. We think now that the so-called Tombov immunity is due to nothing more mysterious than natural selection. The ones now in the swamps are descendants of those who simply could not be killed by the disease, and therefore have great resistance.”

“Nonsense,” said Maxwell, nettled by the negativeness of the man. “What becomes of their natural resistance when they are converted? Baptism has no effects on anti-bodies. Did it ever occur to you that there may be something they do at their secret rites which makes the difference?”

“Religion,” said the doctor, stiffly, “is a subject I never discuss, and the less said about the abominable rites of the swamp savages the better. I assure you, sir, if you knew the Tombov as well as we here do—”

Maxwell snorted and turned away.

“Let’s go, Parks. It’s the ‘old China hand’ story all over again. When a scientist lets himself be blinded by prejudice he isn’t a scientist any more.”

At the dispensary they asked the whereabouts of Hoskins’ former scout, Shan Dhee. According to Hoskins, Shan Dhee was a convert who backslid after living with the whites awhile and turned native again. It was because he promptly contracted the jitters and had sense enough to run away. The result of being apostate from both camps was that he became a sort of pariah, tolerated, but distrusted by both races. Yet he served well as a go-between because he was the one heathen Tombov who knew the ways of Earthmen and spoke their language, though Hoskins warned it would be in a variety of code.

“Shan Dhee?” said the interne, lifting an eyebrow in surprise that a respectable person should inquire about one so shifty and disreputable. “Why, in jail, probably. If not, you’ll find him hanging around one of the dives down at the Edge, loaded to the gills with zankra. Take my advice and have a patrolman go along, if you have to see him. When a convert goes bad, he’s bad.”

“Oh, we’ll manage,” said Maxwell. The anti-Tombov prejudice seemed well distributed. He was still inclined to rely on Hoskins’ recommendation.

THE zankra joint was not a savory place. It was dark and dirty, and very, very smelly. Its patrons,  white men who couldn’t stand the gaff and had been barred from going home by reason of their condition, lay all about on dirty mats. They were dead to the world, even if their muscles did occasionally knot up in spasmodic twitchings. This was the way they chose to ease their doom—they had gone the zankra route. For zankra, though not a cure for anything, brought blissful anaesthesia, being as it was a natural elixir—a blend of protomezyl alcohol and a number of potent alkaloids. It was cheap, too, since the gourds of which it was the juice could be had for a copper coin or so. A gourd of it was just being broached as Maxwell and Parks walked in. They saw a native squat by the door and jab a hole in the fruit so he could insert a sucking quill.

“We’re Mr. Hoskins’ friends,” Maxwell said to him. “Where can we find Shan Dhee?”

The Tombov studied him shiftily. There was some hesitation, and then, “Me Shan Dhee.”

Maxwell had also been studying him. He was gratified to note that the fellow seemed to be magnificently healthy. There was none of the residual tremor that persists even after paracobrine shots. Yet Shan Dhee’s shoulders and arms bore mute testimony that he had been a jitters’ victim at one time. They were covered with the scars of self-inflicted bites, usually a sure sign of an untreated case. The scars were very old, and confirmed in a way what Maxwell wanted to believe. The man had evidently been cured—a thing believed to be impossible. But how? By his reversion to his former pagan practices?

Shan Dhee turned out to be a poor subject. It was bad enough that he spoke the barbarous pidgin brought by the first missionaries, but he was also suspicious, stubborn, and evasive. By Maxwell’s questions Shan Dhee at once divined that Maxwell knew that he had once robbed a temple, and he knew that if other Tombovs ever found that out he was sure to die horribly.

“No know what lily flower good for,” he would say, averting his eyes. “Tombov no eat. Tombov wear. Lily flower no good Earthfellow. Kankilona come out of lily flower. Earthfellow kankilona no like. Earthfellow priestfellow say kankilona horres … horrendous monster. Earthfellow priestfellow wantchee kill all kankilona. Kankilona die, Tombov die. Die no good for Tombov. More better Earthfellow no see kankilona.”

That was that. No amount of questioning could elucidate more. They had to guess at what sort of “horrendous monster” a kankilona might be. On Venus it could be anything from an ambulatory fly-trap to a firebreathing dragon. All that was clear was that there was a relation between the lilies and the monsters, that the missionaries did not approve of them, and that the monsters were somehow necessary to Tombov well being.

Questions as to the iridescent, gas-filled spheres brought little that was comprehensible, though much later it did come to have meaning. Shan Dhee tried desperately to duck the question, for evidently he had lied about them to Hoskins.

“Littily shiny balls no gems,” he confessed at last. “Littily shiny ball no good at all. Littily shiny ball one day pretty … six, eight day more … no more littily shiny ball. All gone. Maybeso littily shiny ball papa-papa-fellow kankilona.”

“He’s lying,” said Parks. “We’ve got eighteen of ’em at home in our vault. We studied ’em a lot longer than a week, and none of them vanished. I’d call ’em pretty permanent.”

Shan Dhee refused to amplify. Maxwell noted the hinted link to the mysterious kankilona, but let it go and went straight to the purpose of his call. Would Shan Dhee fix it so they could attend a Tombov orgy?

Shan Dhee’s reaction was close to terror. Tombov temples were strictly tabu to Earthmen at all times. They were even tabu to Tombovs, including the priesthood, except during the days of actual festival. The Tombovs would hardly dare slaughter the Earthmen if they were found desecrating the place—the Tombovs had learned that hard lesson long before—but what they would do to Shan Dhee was too dreadful to think about. Shan Dhee would steal, smuggle, even murder for them—if tobacco enough was to be had—but not that.

“Don’t Tombov priests like tobacco, too?” Maxwell asked, softly.

It was a lucky question. It rang the bell. Shan Dhee reconsidered. He sipped his zankra and made calculations on his fingers. In the end he yielded.

“Maybeso can do,” he admitted, uneasily, “Maybeso Tombov priestfellow letchee Shan Dhee hidum Earthfellow godhouse-side, but priestfellow no likee Earthfellow in Tombov godhouse. Earthfellow no likee see Tombov eatchee kankilona. Earthfellow get sick. Earthfellow pukum. Earthfellow get mad. Earthfellow smashee Tombov godhouse. Earthfellow in godhouse no good. More better Earthfellow hidee outside.”

Both investigators promised faithfully they would watch unseen. They would be the soul of discretion. And they would pay any reasonable price. They were not scoffers or reformers. They wanted only to know the secret of Tombov health. Shan Dhee relaxed. He even grinned a crooked grin.

“Tombov priestfellow more better Earthfellow priestfellow. Tombov wan tehee long life nozv, swamp-side. Tombov no wantchee long life bimebye, Heavenside. Heavenside no good. Too far. Swampside more better.”

Parks and Maxwell smiled. After all, they couldn’t blame the poor devil. How could the warped missionary doctrine preached them be any solace for hard labor and suffering? Better good health now, and let them take their chances on Heaven. So they argued no further, but totted up the quantities of tobacco Chan Dhee said would be required.

IT took three weeks of dreary slogging over slimy mud, sometimes proceeding by dugout canoe, before they came to the place of the Festival of Long Life. Shan Dhee showed them the markers that set off the sacred areas. Until they were removed three days later it was forbidden for ordinary Tombovs to pass them. But Shan Dhee shot the clumsy craft ahead. His coming had been arranged. He directed the canoe on past the tripods of saplings with their warning plumed skulls. The sluggish lagoon narrowed. Presently they came in between two lily fields. Shan Dhee explained that there were only a few places where such lilies grew and that the penalty for taking one off holy ground was death.

Maxwell studied the plants with interest, but saw little to distinguish them from the Terran variety except their great size and yellow color. And then he was startled to see monstrous hairy creatures crawling around among them. For a long time he got only glimpses, and then he saw one entire. It was a sort of giant tarantula—a horror of mottled silky hair hanging from a bulbous, palpitating body as large as a basketball. There seemed to be a score of arching legs, each hairy and clawed at the tip. There were ugly, knifelike fangs, too, from which a greenish poison drooled. A cluster of luminous eyes were set above them, glaring venomously in shifting reds and violets.

“Kankilona,” said Shan Dhee.

Parks shuddered. It was upsetting even to look on one. Had Shan Dhee said that the Tombovs ate them?

The lagoon shoaled and narrowed. In a moment Shan Dhee drove the dugout nose up onto a muddy bank. It was the island hummock of the temple grounds. They climbed out and dragged the canoe into the underbrush and hid it under broad leaves. Then they gathered up their baggage and went up onto the hummock.

It was a glade surrounded by heavy cypress, and under the trees were hundreds of little huts. In the distance stood the temple, an astonishing structure of gray stone, astonishing because the nearest solid ground was more than a hundred miles away. Only stubborn devotion could have carried those massive stones to where they were. But the temple’s great portal was closed and barred. The whole place was deserted.

Shan Dhee disregarded everything until he could build their biding place. It was a two-roomed hut he made for them, considerably apart from any other. As a tolerated outcast Shan Dhee said he was permitted to attend the festival, but he must keep his distance from the truly faithful. As it happened, his status was most convenient, for the two Earthmen could be in the rear, watching the show through peepholes, while Shan Dhee sat stolidly in the doorway, sure that no wild Tombov would venture near an untouchable. Shan Dhee said they could see all there was to see from there until the night of the culmination of the revels. By then the Tombovs would be blind drunk and would not notice if they were being spied on from the darkness outside the temple door.

Maxwell and Parks laid out their gear. There were their food pellets and their store of tobacco twists that must be given to the priests. There was also their scientific paraphernalia—beakers and test tubes and reaction chemicals, and their all-purpose spectrographic camera. But the most essential item was their supply of precious paracobrine, for Parks was slipping fast, and needed shots at hourly intervals. They stowed that safely, and settled down to wait.

The subsequent week was not especially instructive, nor was it entertaining. During the first days the Tombovs began straggling in, filthy with swamp mud encrusted on them. They brought their women and children with them, and a tremendous number of zankra gourds. Each family settled into its own hut, and then proceeded to the tribal reunion. The affair was much like barbaric gatherings anywhere in the Solar System—attended by the monotonous banging on tom-toms; by wild, uninhibited dancing; by gorgings with food and drink. There were scenes of reckless drunkenness, but until the beginning of the fifth day it was essentially a social gathering. It was not until the fifth day that the priests showed up.

The activities thereafter took on a different tinge. No longer did the Tombov braves lie around in drunken stupor until midafternoon. They were put to work. And their women were put to work.

They went out into the swamp, paddling along on their splayed, webbed feet. The men carried curious nets made of twisted small liana. The boys trailed them, bearing roomy cages made of a sort of wicker. For the women’s part, their job seemed to be the gathering of lilies. They stripped the plants methodically, taking blooms and leaves alike, leaving little more than pulpy stubble behind. It was not until evening came and the men came back that Maxwell knew what they had gone for. They returned triumphantly with scores upon scores of captured kankilonas, the trapped arachnids ululating horribly in protest at their restricted movement. The priests opened the temple doors long enough to receive the spiders, and then closed them again.

THAT went on for three days more, but as the swamps were stripped of their leafy covering and crawling monsters, Maxwell made an astounding discovery. For a few minutes one day the sun came through—a rarity on cloudy Venus—and as it did a miracle seemed to happen. The dull mudflats became beds of scintillating fire. What he had bought from Hoskins as jewels lay thick everywhere. They were as numerous as the dead leaves of fall. Then the clouds took over again and the glow died.

“What do you make of it?” asked Parks, who was looking on in wonder. “Could they be lily seed?”

“Hardly.” said Maxwell. “They are too light and airy. Seeds have to sink into the soil to germinate. Those things won’t even sink in water.”

At last the final day of the festival came. Men and women dressed themselves in gala garments made from lilies. There were chaplets and leis, garlands and leafy headdresses. And they were drinking zankra in colossal doses. All afternoon there was unrestrained dancing; and toward dark the drunken choruses became a bedlam of hideous howling. Then the temple doors were thrown open wide, and torches lit inside.

“Pretty soon you Hoskins friend-fellow see kankilona feast,” remarked Shan Dhee. He looked worried, as if repenting the deal. “No letchee priestfellow catchee looksee.” he warned. Maxwell and Parks repeated their promise.

It was near midnight when they decided the worshipers were so drunk that nothing would matter. Maxwell and Parks stole out of their hut and across the glade, being careful not to step on the many Tombovs who had already passed out. They stopped close to the great door and looked in. The orgy was at its height. They saw now how the feast was conducted. Two acolytes would bind up a squirming kankilona. stripped of its legs. The high priest would receive it, and then defang it with two swift jerks. The slimy fangs he would hurl into a basket at the foot of the chief idol; the carcass he would throw to the yelling celebrants. There would be a scramble for it, then a howl of disappointment as the unlucky ones watched the favored sink his teeth into the soft venom sac of the mangled tarantula.

Parks gripped Maxwell’s arms.

“I … I’ve got to go back to the hut,” he gasped.

“What’s the matter?” asked Maxwell sharply. “Can’t you take it? We’re not squeamish missionaries.”

“T-that’s not it. I forgot my shot. See how I’m jumping? But you stick around. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

Maxwell let him go. It was routine, more or less, and he did not want to miss any unexpected feature of the rites before him. He watched Parks disappear into the dark, and then started to turn his gaze back at the orgies.

He did not complete the movement. A surprisingly strong arm encircled him, and a husky knee entwined and gripped his. He knew from the wide flat foot that it was a Tombov that assailed him. Then there was a mocking voice in his ear—it was Shan Dhee’s voice, and Shan Dhee was crazy drunk. His breath stank of zankra, and worse.

“Earthfellow wantchee long life, huh?” he taunted. “Okeh, okeh. Earthfellow catchee long life. Earthfellow catchee kankilona juice.”

Maxwell felt himself being bent irresistibly backward to the peals of the maddened Tombov’s maniacal laughter. A disgusting gob of hairy, mushy something was slapped down on his face. He could not get his breath. He struggled and tried to cry out. It was what Shan Dhee wanted him to do. His teeth broke the tender membrane of the kankilona’s venom sac. There was a gush of indescribably nauseating oily stuff. It stung his cheeks and shoulders. Maxwell felt utterly defiled and ashamed. He wanted to die then and there. And then something happened to him.

In one swift instant all the nausea and revulsion was swept away. In its place there was heavenly exhilaration, an exaltation that exceeded any ecstasy he had ever known. He was no longer a sick man; would never be one again. He was strong, well—a champion among champions. Life was wonderful. It had to be expressed. Maxwell cut loose with a war whoop that shook the glade. Then things went madly round and round. Lights flared up and faded. The howling within the temple died, dwindling into an infinitude of distance. After that Maxwell did not remember.

HE awoke in what he thought must be the gray dawn of the morning after. He was lying face down in the muck outside the temple door. He lay very still for a moment, wondering when the inescapable headache would begin to rack him, for after the heady intoxication he now faintly remembered, it was unthinkable that there would not be one—and a super one at that. But there was no headache.

There was no foul taste in the mouth. Maxwell had to admit he felt fine, which, under the circumstances, was humiliating. He wondered if he was altogether sane. He started to get up, gingerly, expecting to find himself full of Charlie Horses. There weren’t any. He was fit as a fiddle. He quit worrying and arose briskly, but promptly regretted it. His head thumped into something, and there was a crash. He stood amazed and aghast at what fell. It was three long sticks of wood lashed together and tied with a bunch of plumes. A skull lay grinning at him from the wreckage. During the night someone had erected that dire symbol over him—the warning that he was tabu—under a curse!

Maxwell shot a glance at the temple. Its doors were closed and barred. It was that way also in the glade. The huts were empty, the celebrants gone. The festival was over. Now everything was tabu. Maxwell’s wrist watch said it was late afternoon. He had slept more than the night.

Then his heart jumped as he belatedly remembered Parks. Parks said he would come back. Where was he? Had Shan Dhee assaulted him, too? Maxwell looked around, but there was no sign of him. He started off across the glade in great bounding strides.

Before the hut he was brought to an abrupt stop. Another tabu tripod stood there. But there was more besides: On a stake nearby there was the grinning newly severed head of a Tombov, and scattered about the foot of the stake were freshly picked bones—near human bones. The head was Shan Dhee’s head. It meant that Shan Dhee had transgressed somehow, and Shan Dhee had paid the penalty. It was ominous. Maxwell feared to think of what he might find inside.

What was inside was bad enough. Both rooms were a shambles of smashed possessions. Most of the scientific equipment was hopelessly ruined, and food pellets were mixed indiscriminately with spilled chemicals. Every scrap of the tobacco was gone. But far worse, the whole interior reeked of paracobrine. Shattered ampules and broken syringes explained that readily enough. The looters, Nazi-like, had destroyed what they did not value themselves.

At the moment none of that bothered Maxwell overmuch. It was Parks he wanted to find. And find him he did, half hidden beneath a pile of torn clothes. Maxwell uncovered him and knelt beside him, staring at him in bitter dejection. He felt like a murderer, for Parks had never been keen about this wild goose expedition. It was Maxwell who insisted on playing the hunch. Now Parks’ tense face had a deathly pallor, and the few weak tremors were eloquent of the complete exhaustion that must follow a night and day of uncontrolled convulsions. Parks had been late for his shot, and must have fallen, out of control. Maxwell should have foreseen that, and returned with him. Now it was too late. There was no more paracobrine. By morning Parks would be dead.

Maxwell sat for minutes, torturing himself. Then, of a sudden, a great light dawned on him. Why, he himself had missed at least two shots, and he felt fine! Unbelieving, he stretched out his arm. There was not so much as the hint of a tremor. What … why—

In another instant Maxwell was outside, ransacking abandoned huts. In a little while it would be deep twilight, and he had no time to lose. In the third hut he found a kankilona net. In another a broken cage, which he speedily repaired. Then he set off for the swamp’s edge.

Maxwell quickly discovered that catching wily kankilonas alive was work that required men in gangs. The first several he spotted eluded him. The fourth one squared off and circled, warily fighting back. Maxwell was in no mood to quibble. Did kankilona venom lose its potency when the spider died? He couldn’t know. But he knew he had to have some—of any strength—and quickly. He hurled his knife into the monster and watched it die. Then, lacking any kind of container, he tore off part of his shirt and dipped it into the ebbing poison. He ran back to Parks with that.

“Open your mouth, old man,” he coaxed, but there was no response. Maxwell pried the jaws apart and blocked them. Then, drop by drop, he wrung nauseous oil out of the rag. Parks winced and tried to avert his head, but he was too weak. He gulped the stuff down, perforce.

Maxwell fed it all, then waited.

The reaction was mercifully quick. Within seconds Parks’ almost imperceptible breathing deepened, and his absent pulse returned. Slowly the iron-set neck muscles softened, the face relaxed, and there was a show of warming pink. In a little while Parks was sleeping peacefully. Maxwell examined him carefully from head to foot. There were no tremors. Not any. Maxwell heaved a big sigh of relief. Then he lit a torch. He had to do something about retrieving those food pellets.

MIRACULOUS as the new-found remedy was, Parks’ convalescence was slow. Either because he was so far gone in the beginning, or because the venom was not strictly fresh. His complete recovery was a matter of weeks, not hours or days, and in that time Maxwell had the opportunity to observe many things.

He kept a sharp watch on the swamp. He wanted to see what happened to the crystalline spheres, which Shan Dhee had said would vanish after awhile. He put on mudshoes and gathered a few and stored them in the hut. Then he maintained a vigil at the hummock’s edge.

Nothing whatever happened for almost a week, and when it did happen, it happened at night. It was by the purest chance that Maxwell couldn’t go to sleep, and walked out into the glade for more air. It was then he saw the shimmering violet light that seemed to pervade the entire swamp area. It was as if the mudflats were a bed of smoldering anthracite, dimly lit by flickering bluish flame. Maxwell went back to the hut for the torch and mudshoes. Then he investigated.

What he discovered was a horde of sluggish crawlers, creatures not too distantly related to the queer Australian platypus. Many were feeding noisily on the lily stubble, but most just lay, as if entranced, staring at the crystalline spherelets. It was the light of their violet eyes that furnished the illumination, a fact that did not astonish Maxwell. The majority of Venusian fauna had luminous eyes. What did bowl him over was what the light did to the shimmering balls. They shrank, and shrank. They dwindled to mere pellets, hard, and relatively heavy. Then they were no more. There were only bubbles to mark the spot where they had sunk into the mire. Maxwell pocketed several of the shrunken balls just before they disappeared.

The next day he dissected one. it was now obviously a seed, perhaps a lily seed. It was one more curious example of the deviousness of Nature. Apparently in its first state it was infertile, and therefore of a shape and weight which would keep it on the marsh surface. Then, perhaps by symbiotic impulse, the platypus creatures were attracted to it, gazed upon it with their violet rays, and somehow fertilized it. Whereupon it planted itself by gravity.

Maxwell followed through on that theory. That night he went into the swamp differently armed. He carried a bundle of dry sticks, and the spectrographic camera. He recorded the exact composition of the violet light, and noted the time it was applied. Then he marked a number of the bubbly places with his sticks. If lilies came up there, the spheres were lily seeds.

The next day he reversed his camera, making it a projector. He duplicated the platyputian light and shed it on the crystalline balls he had retrieved first. They did shrink into seed. He had at least one bit of positive proof. Then he planted them at a marked spot.

SLOWLY Parks improved. For several days Maxwell sought and found more spiders, but each day they grew scarcer. There came a day when there were none at all. The festival apparently had been timed to coincide with their greatest density. When would the new crop of them come, and from where? Maxwell thought on that, and began the study of the small pile of carcasses piled outside the hut. He hoped to learn something about the reproduction methods of the kankilona.

All but one of his dissections were negative. In that one he found an object that definitely jolted him. It was obviously an egg. But the kankilona egg was one of those crystalline balls! He now had one more link in its life cycle. He would have to wait for the rest of it to develop.

He had to wait for another reason. Parks was gaining, but he would not be able to travel under his own steam for some time to come. On the way back they would not have the assistance of Shan Dhee. Maxwell wondered whether the angry priests had left them the canoe. He dashed off worriedly to investigate.

The dugout was safe where they had left it. Maxwell eased it into the water and tried it out. And while he was learning the trick of handling it, he paddled it a way down the lagoon. He backed water vigorously as he neared the tripod tabu signs that marked the boundary of the lily reservation. Just beyond there was an encampment of Tombov braves. It was a troubling discovery.

But a moment later he was a little bit relieved. A Tombov had spotted him just as he sighted them, and for a long minute both men stared at each other. Other Tombovs got up and looked, stolidly inexpressive. They made no outcry or hostile gesture, and as Maxwell turned the dugout about and headed back toward the temple clearing, the savages sat down again, as if the incident was closed.

It was Parks who guessed the purpose of the outpost. He was strong enough to talk, then, and was following Maxwell’s theories with great interest.

“This kankilona business is the Tombov’s big secret. They know by now how selfish the Earthman is, and how ruthlessly and wastefully he exploits. They don’t want to kill us—if they had, they would have done it the night they left. But they are not going to let us get back to Angra with a live spider, or its egg, or any other thing they value. If we leave here alive, it will have to be barehanded.”

“I get it,” said Maxwell, gloomily. “They know, as you and I do, that if our race learned about spider venom, swarms of humans would invade these swamps and exterminate the genus in a single season. There just aren’t enough kankilona. They would go the way of the bison and the dodo. And then we would be in a fix.”

“Right,” agreed Parks. “What we ought to do of course, is analyze that poison and see what ingredient makes it work. But our stuff is smashed. If we can’t take back a specimen of it, all this has gone for nothing.”

“We’ll see,” said Maxwell.

Meantime lily plants were sprouting where the ball-seeds had sunk. Soon the plants would be maturing. Then it would be time for another festival. They wanted to leave before that came, and they had to leave for a still more urgent reason. If they did not get back to Angra soon, their stay would overstretch the six-months time limit. Nothing would convince stupid quarantine officials that they weren’t crawling with every variety of Venusian virus.

The first lilies were well in bloom the day they climbed into the dug-out for the trip back. Maxwell shunted the canoe over close to a stand of the flowers, and plucked one. It was a very curious blossom, lacking either stamen or pistil. It was a sexless plant. But he observed a fatty swelling in one of the lush petals. He slit it open and laid bare a small tumor. He cut into that. Dozens of tiny black objects scuttered out, like ants from a disturbed hill. They were baby kankilona!

“Well, that’s that,” said Maxwell, dropping the torn lily into the lagoon. “Now we have the whole story. Lilies beget spiders, spiders lay eggs, friend platypus comes along and the egg becomes a lily seed. That is where we came in.”

“And,” supplemented Parks, “kankilonas are health-giving, so after they have laid their eggs, the Tombovs come and eat them. The so-called temple jewels, I suppose, are simply a reserve seed crop in case of a drought.”

“Drought on Venus,” laughed Maxwell. “You’re crazy.” But he got the idea.

AT the edge of the lily swamp the Tombovs looked them over. They were grave and silent, and offered no violence, but they were thorough. Their search of the boat revealed no contraband. A surly chieftain waved in the general direction of Angra. Maxwell dipped his paddle in and thrust the dugout ahead.

“It’s tough,” remarked Parks, regretfully, “but at least you and I are cured. On another trip we may have better luck.”

“We’re not cured,” said Maxwell, grimly. “Our cases are arrested, that’s all. The Tombovs do this twice a year, you know. But we have succeeded better than you know. The proof of it is here.” He tapped the note book where he had noted the spectrum of the platypus gaze.

“At home,” he said, “we have a lot of kankilona eggs, and we know how to activate them. We can start in a properly humidified hothouse for our first few batches. After that we’ll expand. The world need never know that what they’re taking is a distillation of kankilona poison. They’ll probably label it Nixijit, or something cute like that.”

“Oh, well,” said Parks, irrelevantly, “I suppose the Congo Valley won’t be so bad.”

“Nothing is ever as bad as it seems,” said Maxwell.

A month later he made the same observation in a different form. They were on the home bound liner, and were among the few well enough to sit up and enjoy the lounge. A pest of a missionary came over and dropped into a seat beside him.

“It’s great to be getting back to God’s footstool,” he wheezed. “What a cross I’ve had to bear working with those beastly Tombovs. Ugh! A race of brutes, steeped in the vilest superstitions and practicing the most abominable rites. Our own primitives had some horrible customs, but the Tombov culture hasn’t a single redeeming feature.”

“Oh,” said Maxwell, screwing up one eye and smiling faintly, “I wouldn’t say that.”

Death By Proxy

Startling Stories, Spring 1945

PERHAPS it was the oppressive darkness, which impelled Cliff Howard to get up and draw back the curtains. For a moment he stood looking out over the moon lighted, blacked-out capital, then stretched out again on the leather couch in the office.

It had been his hope to get in at least a few hours’ sleep before morning. His plans for the marvelous QQ-gun had been completed late that night and he wanted to be as cleared eyed as possible when he presented it in the morning to the General Staff. But a vague restlessness, almost an uneasiness, had thwarted him and sleep would not come.

Beyond the locked and bolted office door he could hear the tread of the sentries ceaselessly pacing their posts in the brilliantly lit corridor. Within, the details of the darkened office, now illuminated by the beams of the moon, pouring through the securely locked window, stood out distinctly to his gloom-accustomed eyes.

There, in the opposite corner, stood the clothes rack on which his major’s blouse hung, a symbol of rank which meant little to him. He was, primarily, a scientist. His glance shifted to the broad desk where lay his drawings and descriptive letter, ghostily white in the moonlight.

What would not Hitler’s generals give for a peep at them! But it was not likely they would get the desired peep. This War Department annex was too well guarded.

Hawyard took off his shoes, and relaxed again on the couch. He must have another try at sleep. Then, abruptly, he sat up, startled by he knew not what.

Wasn’t that the slow breathing of another man, the squeak of slightly moved furniture?

From his dark corner beside the window, Hayward stared into the gloom that enveloped most of the office. Reason told him no one else could be in the room, yet a sixth sense insisted there was.

Suddenly, unmistably, he saw the intruder. A man of good height, was standing in the far corner. Startled and amazed, hardly able to credit his eyesight, Hayward sat up and stared.

The man moved forward and stepped into the band of moonlight. He drew back the chair as if It belonged to him, and calmly sat down at the desk. Reaching out, he pulled the drawings to him.

Now clearly visible in the pale light, Hayward could see that the intruder was hatless and wore his hair in a crisp Prussian pompadour. It was at this moment the prowler produced the flashlight and cast its pencll-like beam onto the ray gun drawings. There was a swift intake of his breath as he comprehended the nature of what lay before him.

Hayward had seen enough. With elaborate caution, he eased himself off the couch, thankful for the quietness of his unshod feet. Then catlike he sprang and caught the intruder in an iron grip. The chair overturned, spilling them both in the deep shadow beyond the desk. Hayward loosened one hand and smashed a blow into his adversary’s face. There was a grunt and a muffled curse in what sounded like German. Tightening his clench, Hayward tried for a headlock. And then—his hands were empty!

Incredulous, he lashed out about him savagely, amazed that the man had slipped out of his grasp. But the man had vanished! Hayward was alone in the room. With a growl he sprang to his feet, found the wall switch and snapped on the bright lights.

Hayward stood blinking, staring in disbelief around him. There stood the desk, the Couch, and the clothes-tree but the mysterious prowler had indeed disappeared. Only the overturned chair and the crumpled rug were evidences of what had happened. But Hayward was positive he had neither slept nor dreamed. His right hand, still tingling from the blow he had struck, attested the reality of the incident.

He strode to the door and examined its fastenings. The spring lock was on, and the inner bolt was shot. No man could have passed through that door and bolted it behind him. Nevertheless Hayward opened the door and saw the three sentries stationed there. They told him no one else had been in the hall. All were trustworthy men.

Hayward shut the door and inspected the fastened window. Dust lay in its cracks and the burglar alarm was intact and in good order. After searching the room minutely, once more, he gave it up, smiling crookedly. He was being absurd. It was, of course, a dream. A realistic dream, no more.

Then he saw the alien flashlight lying under the desk on the floor!

ON THE afternoon of the day following this incident, Hayward paid a visit to the office of the Senior Security Officer. Messengers were coming and going. The SSO talked, from time to time, over the telephone.

“Frankly, I think you’re working too hard,” said the Security Officer. “Call everything off for awhile, get sick leave, and go to one of our sanitariums for a good rest. You’re having hallucinations, that’s all.”

“But the fingerprints, the flashlight, the photos, the description, and the black eye,” insisted Hayward, aghast at the man’s scepticism. “You can’t laugh those off.”

“I can’t laugh off three thousand miles, either,” said the SSO. “I admit your identification seems perfect. This, this—what’s his name?”

“Ernst Haeckel.”

“Ernst Haeckel may possess the miraculous ability to be in two places at once, but I don’t believe it. And you’ll have a tough time making a jury believe it. And don’t forget you’ll have to convince a jury’s he’s a spy and a traitor.”

“I’m not forgetting,” said Hayward sourly. He stared down at the heap of documents in his lap.

To his mind they were sufficient evidence. On top lay the report of the Bureau of Identification. They had found fingerprints on the flashlight, two more of the same on the desk top, and a smudge on the chair. The prints were identical with those of one Ernst Haeckel, formerly registered as an enemy alien, but since naturalized. Hayward glanced at the card.

Haeckel, Ernst. Born Germany, 1908. First entered U. S. 1933. Visited Germany annually until 1938, not since. Occupation: college professor, teacher of physics, writer of technical books, lecturer. Now head of Physics Department, Pottsdown Polytechnic College, Pottsdown, California. Stands well in profession and has good reputation. No known connection with German-American Bund or other subversive organization.

A photograph had been taken that very morning in California and radioed to Washington. It showed the man with whom Hayward had fought. Most significantly this picture disclosed the man had a bruised and swollen eye, and a slight cut on the cheek.

Hayward doubled up his fist and regarded the scuffed knuckles thoughtfully. Not many hours earlier that fist had thudded into the eye of someone who was the double of this man and who had the same whorls and loops on his fingertips.

“This is the man who broke into my office last night,” said Hayward doggedly, slapping the documents on the desk. “I knocked him over, and socked him.”

“And then he vanished!” The SSO burst into a loud laugh. Hayward found it peculiarly irritating. “My dear fellow, you are overwrought.”

“Don’t ‘my dear fellow’ me,” growled Hayward testily. “Shoot me the rest of the stuff your operatives have uncovered and we’ll call it a day. What I do about it after that will be my business.”

“Very well,” said the SSO, picking up a memorandum pad. His thoughts were obvious. He would humor Hayward and get rid of him. After that he would wash his hands of the silly case.

“To begin with,” proceeded the Security Officer, “you must bear in mind the difference between here and the West Coast. Your alleged encounter took place shortly after two o’clock, which would be a few minutes past eleven last night, California time. The moment the fingerprint identification report was received, we got our western operatives on long distance and they went at once to Pottsdown Polytech to investigate.

“Dr. Ernst Haeckel was found and questioned. So were other persons. Last night Haeckel was seen twice by two instructors who were grading student notebooks in a room opposite to his laborartory. They state he entered his laboratory, which he uses for conducting experiments at quarter of eleven. They heard the whir of a machine he has built there. At about ten minutes past eleven it suddenly stopped and Haeckel came out, looking rather agitated. He hurried down the Hall without dropping in to say the customary good night. Both professors agree Haeckel’s manner was furtive, but attribute it to the fact that he had just had an accident and did not want to be seen with a bruised face.”

“Hah!” snorted Hayward.

The SSO showed annoyance. “Please! Haeckel admits freely he was out of sight from eleven to eleven ten, but ridicules the possibility of making a round trip to Washington in ten minutes. And he says he misplaced the flashlight some months ago and supposes it must have fallen into criminal hands. As to the black eye, he accounts for that by the laboratory accident.”

CLIFF HAYWARD could not repress a frown at this information.

“Hmph,” he remarked. “How come an enemy alien has a secret laboratory in times like these?”

“He obtained permission to conduct psychic research. His experiments have nothing to do with military matters. Dr. Haeckel is the world’s foremost specialist in Psychoscopics.”

“Psycho-what?” exploded Hayward, sitting bolt upright. “What kind of

pishposh

is that? I hold a Ph. D. in physics, and I never heard of any such branch of science.”

“It has to do with—er—psychomorphosis, or something like that,” said the SSO lamely. “Spectral materialization and that sort of thing. A variety of spiritualistic activity, so to speak.”

“Bosh!” commented Hayward, rising in disgust. “Well, I’m going to take your advice. I’m applying for indefinite leave. That airtight alibi is too much for me.”

“I think you’re wise,” said the SSO, blandly. He missed the biting sarcasm of Hayward’s words.

Cliff Hayward did not make undue haste in leaving Washington. He was now convinced that Ernst Haeckel was an international spy and the man who had entered his room. He was also certain he was dealing with a dangerously clever opponent. Hayward’s own procedure, therefore, was circuitous. By discreet inquiry he learned a number of things. More than one government agency reported that many of their plans and decisions were known to the enemy almost as soon as they were made. Yet pains-taking investigation had failed to reveal the source of the leaks.

Technically speaking, Hayward had no case against Haeckel whatever. Circumstantial evidence was nullified by the manifest impossibility of his having been on the scene of the crime at the times of their occurrence. Moreover, motive could only be inferred. There was nothing to show Haeckel had conveyed information to the enemy. No court in the land would entertain charges without proof.

Hayward spent a few days at the Congressional Library, learning about Haeckel’s Theory of Phychoscopics. For jerkwater Pottsdown Polytech, bucked up over having a celebrated foreign scientist on its faculty, had published all his papers on the subject.

Hayward often felt impelled to hold his nose while digging through the treatises, so outrageously bad they were, yet he found them absorbing reading. Despite his ejaculations of “Poppycock” and “Rubbish,” he plowed on, growing surer than ever he was dealing, not with mistaken science or the pseudo-science of a charlatan, but a clever smokescreen to cover an ominous activity.

In the end he gathered up the pamphlets and turned them back to the librarian. They bore the titles, “An Analysis of Multidimensional Phantasmal Structure,” “The Psychoscopic Approach to Psychomorphism,” and “The Fundamentals of the Psychoscopic Theory.” It was the last and seemingly most profound that disgusted Hayward most.

Psychoscopy, as nearly as he could make out, was a weird hodge-podge of telepathy and clairvoyance, seasoned with spiritualism and pure hokum. By using ESP as the connecting link, Haeckel had managed to tie up his fantastic theory to the neo-Einsteinian doctrine of the interrelation of time, space and gravity. Leaving out the many pages of meaningles mathematic symbols, it all added up to the claim that Haeckel could project himself through space and occupy at will the “soul” of any disembodied entity.

“A nice out, if he can do it,” growled Hayward, thinking of how impossible it would be to convict a ghost of crime. “I don’t believe it but I’m flitting out to California by the next plane, for a look.”

On the plane west he tried to unsnarl his tangled hunches. Of one thing he was positive. It had been no ghost his knuckles had struck, but Ernst Haeckel. Haytoard racked his memory regarding space-time warps and such other legerdemain of modern physics. But no science could account for what had happened. These questions were still plaguing him when his taxi rolled up to the main building of Polytechnic.

“Yes, Dr. Haeckel is here and will be glad to answer questions,” he was told by the Registrar. “You should come tonight at ten when he has his regular public seance.”

“He has public showings?”

“Oh, yes. He’s been holding them for the last four days. Hereafter, he expects to give demonstrations regularly. Lately he perfected his technique.”

“I see,” said Haeckel. He believed Haeckel had become alarmed at the close squeak of the week before, and had arranged to establish ironclad alibis. Hayward’s curiosity reached fever pitch. Heretofore the man had done his space-jumping from behind closed doors, but his arranging for witnesses indicated that he could indeed be in two places at once. If so, the open spaces would certify, since he was here, he could not have been elsewhere, despite any momentary glimpse or fleeting contact such as Hayward had received. It made the problem vastly more difficult, too intricate for existing legal procedure. Hayward would have to solve the man’s method, and then deal with him outside the law. It promised to be tricky business.

LATER in the evening he returned to the Physics Building for the lecture. Haeckel’s laboratory was about thirty feet square, carpeted in black plush, with the walls painted a dead black and brightly illuminated. The “psychoscope” stood in the middle of the room. A semi-circular row of seats faced a stool that was the only piece of furniture in the other half of the room. A number of well dressed men were already seated in the chairs, but Hayward stood for a moment, sizing up the details of the strange machine.

The machine consisted of three huge oval lenses, each as high as a man, ranged one behind the other on a stand. Between each pair stood a giant vacuum tube, and atop the end lenses were helical coils which served as antennae. Hayward recalled the description in the pamphlets. The inner antenna was supposed to pick up the operator’s “soul,” push it through the first lens, and on to the last, where it emerged to mingle with the “lost soul” somewhere in the great outside. The tubes furnished the power for the operation, converting the operator’s “psychic energy” to “electro-magnetic-gravitational quanta” in tune with the sought for alien spirit. So ran the mumbo-jumbo.

Hayward seated himself and looked at the magazine the usher had handed him, an issue of “True Phantom Tales.” One of the articles was marked in blue pencil. It concerned a maniac who had been lynched in a nearby town. According to legends, his ghost still haunted the dark lanes of the village, jumping out from behind bushes and yelling “Boo!” at pedestrians.

Hayward got no further than this. A stir among the persons about him caused him to lift his head. The eminent Dr. Ernst Haeckel had entered, the room.

Hayward could not repress a start. The brusk Prussian who strode into the room and glared about him was the identical man who had invaded his office. There could be no mistake about that. After favoring the spectators with a curt nod, Haeckel walked over to the machine, adjusted several dials, picked up what appeared to be a portable control pad, and seated himself on the stool. Then he sat back with a bored air to await the introductory remarks. A bewhiskered gentleman, obviously one of the faculty, got up and began talking in a drier-than-dust voice.

He described the machine. But the thing which interested Hayward was the assertion the machine could only be used by Haeckel personally, since it was “especially attuned to his psyche and therefore ineffective or dangerous in other hands.” At length the professor cleared his throat and delivered himself of the business of the evening.

“Tonight,” he said, “Dr. Haeckel will resume his studies of the Maniac Ghost of Mossdale, as he did last evening. Newcomers have been furnished with an account of the ghost’s habits. You all know we have in Mossdale tonight a committee of psychic research workers who will check on what the doctor reports. Later they will convey to us their findings. On another night you who are here may go into the field and see the ghost in action. What we are demonstrating here is that machine-controlled telepathy is a reality.

“One more word. It must be understood that Dr. Haeckel acts solely in the capacity of an observer and a reporter. He is in no way responsible for the existence or actions of the spectre of Mossdale. I thank you.”

Hayward expected the lights to be dimmed but this was not done. Haeckel merely punched a button and the tubes began to glow and make a small purring sound. Everyone watched Haeckel, who simply stared ahead, saying nothing. Hayward noted down the time.

“He is testing receptivity,” whispered the announcer. “Sh-h-h.”

The test took the better part of a half hour. Then Haeckel clicked more switches and resumed his glassy stare, and again Hayward noted the time.

“We’re in Mossdale now,” said the announcer. Presently Haeckel began to speak in a dead, flat voice.

“I am in the shack where they killed me,” Haeckel droned. “I take shape. I step out into the night. There are men hiding behind the trees, watching me, and they do not appear to be afraid. Aha, I will fool them! I will vanish. Ha, I have vanished.”

Now, there was a considerable pause. “Now I am a block farther on and there is no one in sight,” went on Haeckel. “Oh, it is the servant girl that works for Mrs. Simons. I lie in wait. She comes. I spring out and shriek at her, and she runs, terrified. Ha ha, ha!”

That went on for a while longer, with variations. Later Haeckel fell silent, twiddled with his dials, and continued to sit.

“He is regaining his own personality,” murmured the professor in charge of Ceremonies. “It is quite a shock to enter an alien personality. He is fatigued. Be quiet.”

Presently Haeckel came to with a jerk and snapped off the current. He bowed stiffly to the audience and stalked out of the room. Then a loud-speaker was cut in and the master-of-ceremonies let the witnesses listen in on the phone call from Mossdale. It was the chairman of the investigating committee reporting. He confirmed the materialization of the ghost, and its quick disappearance. No one had seen him clearly. But they added, citizens had reported the apparition to the police. The Simons maid had collapsed from shock. That was the end of the message.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” said the professor, dismissing the crowd.

Hayward walked back to his hotel. He felt slightly dazed. He could not fathom Haeckel’s purpose. When Hayward reached his room, he went to bed, more mystified than ever.

AT BREAKFAST next morning he came upon an item in the paper that aroused his suspicions afresh. It was an AP item under the Washington date line. The paragraph read:

Between one and two this morning a watchman in the State Department fired a shot at a man engaged in rifling the desk of one of the under-secretaries, but failed to hit him. The prowler vanished just as the watchman was pulling the trigger. The watchman was rushed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, for observation.

“Hmm,” murmured Hayward, taking out his notes. Between ten and eleven, local time, was when Haeckel was “testing.” Could he have used the interval to make a flying psychic trip to Washington? If so, he had admirable control of his emotions. The only movement Hayward had noticed during the seance was the occasional lifting of Haeckel’s foot.

“Foot!” Hayward jumped as the thought hit him. Why, of course. The actual current control was a foot switch concealed beneath the carpet. In the Mossdale sequence Haeckel had evaded the physchic research committee by lifting his foot to cut off the current. Thus Hayward had found one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle. However Haeckel managed his cross-country projections, it was clear that he had them under control at all times. Let his pseudo-self be endangered and he could instantly extricate himself by breaking the connection. When he had seen the watchman about to fire, he saved himself by lifting his toe.

As Hayward ate eggs, he digested his newest hunch. He decided the middle part of the seance was staged to provide an alibi. The test period gave time for a spying expedition. The third and last phase, the so-called “rest period,” allowed Haeckel an opportunity for reporting to his employer. If space meant nothing to the psychoscope, why could he not jump as readily to the Chancellory in Berlin as to Mossdale or Washington? Small wonder the FBI had failed to find suspicious connections! Nothing tangible existed.

Hayward attended two more seances. No startling event happened, which was not astonishing as it was not likely that Haeckel’s astral double would be surprised in the act of spying on every occasion. So Hayward speculated about what would have occurred if the watchman’s bullet had hit before the specter vanished. Would Haeckel have dropped dead on the stool? Probably. For when Hayward had walloped the spectral counterpart, Haeckel, in California, blossomed forth with the shiner. Hayward decided to take a little trip to Mossdale.

AT MOSSDALE, the next afternoon, Hayward interviewed the town policeman. He was a big, outspoken man named Timothy Trigg.

“Spook, my eye,” exclaimed Trigg belligerently. “Alonzo Snood has been dead these ten years, and he’s never stirred in his grave until them dotty long-haired spook hunters started foolin’ around. Forget it. Don’t pay no attention. I been walkin’ the street around here at all hours and I know.”

“But what about the Simons’ maid?” asked Howard. “Something scared her.”

“Just a fool, pretendin’ to be a ghost. Let me lay hands on him and I’ll break every bone in his body! I won’t arrest him, not me!”

“You’re a man after my own heart, Trigg,” said Hayward. “Listen to this.”

Hayward talked to Trigg for an hour, telling him much of what he suspected. He felt that the honest constable was a man to be trusted. Trigg nodded and made a few suggestions of his own. Then they planned their strategy for that night and parted.

It was Hayward who saw the ghost first, at about half past ten. Trigg had told him that the so-called apparitions occurred only in the darkest spots, so Hayward had hidden himself in a hedge alongside the darkest path he could find. There was a street light a block away, too far off to lighten the path beside which he waited. He turned his back on the light expecting Haeckel would come from the opposite or dark direction. But It did not develop that way.

What Hayward heard first was the crunch of feet on gravel. Since it hardly seemed likely a materialized astral body would have weight, he twisted his head, expecting to see some belated Mossdale citizen approaching. Then he received the surprise of his life. The man who was advancing could be seen only in silhouette, but he looked solid enough, and remarkably like Haeckel. Yet when he came squarely between Hayward and the street light, the concealed watcher gasped. The light showed through his body!

Astonishment swept over Hayward.

How could a phantom be solid enough to have demonstrable weight, yet gossamer enough to transmit light? It was true that the light appeared dimmer and slightly blurred when viewed through the specter, but it shone through nevertheless. But Hayward had no time to unravel the mystery, for the astral Haeckel was abreast of him and passing. Hayward gathered himself for the spring, then leaped.

He struck from behind, reaching this time with both hands for the throat. What his fingers found was solid, despite its transparency, and he tightened them with all his might. The “ghost” made strangling sounds and writhed in his grasp.

And then, as in Washington, the specter vanished. Hayward tumbled forward on his face, clutching nothingness. He hit the ground hard, rolled over and sat up grinning. A swift glance at his watch told him the time. It was 10:52. He concluded, and concluded rightly, that the haunting was over for the day. He hurried to the small station house, left open for him by Trigg, who was in ambush at another spot. The moment he got there he telephoned Pottsdown, a person-to-person call from the chairman of the Psychic Research Committee to Dr. Haeckel. Presently the reply came back. It was not from Herr Doktor, but from Pottsdown central.

“Dr. Haeckel has been taken ill,” said the voice sweetly. “Will anyone else do?”

“Ill? Is he too ill to talk ? It is important.”

“Sorry. He can’t talk just now. He has a bad attack of coughing.”

Hayward hung up.

“He ought to cough,” he muttered, “after the way I squeezed his windpipe. I must look for finger bruises on his throat tomorrow.”

When Trigg came, Hayward told him what had occurred.

“He’ll come again, Trigg. Sooner or later you’ll get a crack at him. Remember this, unless you knock him out instantly, he’ll vanish. The only way I know of to bring him down for keeps is to hit him with a baseball bat. And,” he added grimly, “If it don’t work, try shooting.”

“I’ll do that,” promised Trigg. “There’s no law against taking potshots at ghosts.”

It was a week after that, despite nightly seances, before the constable, Trigg, got in his lick with the club. That night Hayward was in the laboratory. When the blow was struck in distant Mossdale, Dr. Haeckel’s jaw dropped and his face went lax. The next instant he toppled off his stool, and as he toppled the current went off. Haeckel was only stunned momentarily, for by the time the excited onlookers reached him, he was scrambling to his feet. He took off his headset, rubbed the back of his head, and murmured something about having used too strong a current. The witnesses went back to their chairs. Haeckel looked at them uncertainly, as if willing to call it a night, but at the sight of their expectant eagerness, he reseated himself, altered the dials, and started the machine again.

“He is going to brazen it out,” thought Hayward, in grudging admiration. “Not everyone would go back for more after being laid out with a baseball bat.”

Haeckel resumed his monologue. Hayward noted he had put himself in an altogether different spot in Mossdale. Haeckel’s astral self roamed on, met two frightened pedestrians and roused their fears by laughing at them horribly. Then he said he had entered a little lane near the haunted shack wherein he dwelt in daytime. At that point the seance came to an abrupt and dramatic end.

Haeckel, as always, was wearing light-colored clothing, and gazing into the lens with his usual deadpan expression, when suddenly his face was contorted with pain. Simultaneously a bright red stain spread over the breast of his snowy shirt. With a shriek, he fell forward on his face. Instantly spectators dashed to his aid. One was a doctor. Another a sprightly young girl reporter from one of the news services who rushed up and started to take copious notes.

“Everybody stay as you are,” called out the doctor after a swift examination. “This man has been shot. This must be investigated. I’m taking him to the X-ray room.”

Everyone sat uneasily after the doctor and patient had gone, each regarding his neighbor with suspicion. Which of them had fired the shot? And how?

Presently the doctor came back. He wore a puzzled expression.

“I would have sworn that was a gunshot wound,” he said. “The entrance hole is characteristic, and the clavicle is splintered, but there is no hole of exit, and no bullet inside. It is inconceivable that a bullet would go in a half inch and then cease to exist. It must have been an old wound which reopened.”

Talking excitedly, the guests began to leave. Hayward rushed to a phone.

“It’s no good, Mr. Hayward,” came Trigg’s voice over the wire. “I waylaid that feller and knocked him cold, but he disappeared. I connected all right, and—well, he just wasn’t there. Then I thinks he’ll pop up near the haunted house, so I go there. Pretty soon I see him coming. That time I used my gun. I never took more careful aim. I hit him all right, ’cause I saw him fall, but when I ran over to him there was nothing on the ground but a spot of blood about as big as my hand. Cussed if I don’t believe he is a ghost.”

“Keep your shirt on, Trigg,” advised Hayward. “You did fine. But we’ll have to lay off until we find something better.”

After hanging up, Hayward concluded that Haeckel actually could be in two places at the same time, yet not be all at two places at once, only half and half. And then the true explanation hit him. That was it! At certain periods Haeckel was transferring himself back and forth with bewildering rapidity. That was why his projected image was transparent. He was in and out, first there and then not there, like the blade of a whirling electric fan, which creates an illusion like a brass disk, even to the glint of the headlight, yet which can be seen through.

Immediately Hayward asked himself why the Haeckel in the laboratory had not also appeared transparent? The answer was simple. Haeckel looked solid for the reason that he dressed in pale clothes and sat under bright lights against a dead background. One could not see through him any more than he could through the gauze backdrops of theatres, when the backstage is dark and the footlights on.

This discovery galvanized Hayward into activity. During his stay in Pottsdown he had made friends with several of the instructors. Now he hunted up one, a reliable man named Merriam, who shared Hayward’s distrust and dislike of Dr. Haeckel. Hayward found Merriam willing to assist.

It took them several days and it cost Hayward a ten dollar tip to the janitor, but by the time the next seance came due they were ready for their test. During the next seance Haeckel did not send his astral self to Mossdale, explaining he had exhausted the possibilities of that hamlet, but to another place, in Arizona, where the ghost of an old prospector was said to roam. The change of the field of operation did not bother Hayward greatly, for on this night he was only interested in the laboratory end.

“Oh, boy, now I’ve got something,” breathed Hayward, sighting through the instrument he had constructed in the adjoining room. Peeping through the stroboscope, while Haeckel was still “testing,” Merriam and he had ample time to study Haeckel’s appearance. Once they had their instrument synchronized, the Prussian looked solid and normal. But another adjustment of the stroboscope showed only an empty stool. The Dr. Haeckel the witnesses thought they were looking at was only there half the time, flickering on and off like the pictures on a movie screen, but giving an illusion of solidity.

LATER that night, Hayward made a grim decision. He had no qualms about being an executioner, but he shrank from murder. Yet Haeckel had to go. His machine was too dangerous to the existence of the nation. In this situation Hayward could not go to the authorities, for it was impossible to prove where Haeckel went in the periods when he was not talking. That might be aboard one of our flagships at sea, listening in on vital orders, or in the council chambers of the Axis chiefs, reporting what he had heard. He was an enemy with power to do unlimited damage, and must be eliminated before any other valuable information was stolen. Yet he could not be attacked directly.

Hayward visited Mossdale. Trigg’s face lighted up as he heard the plan. If Hayward would pay traveling expenses, he would be glad to go to Arizona and take on the phantom prospector for the final round.

When did he start?

“Now,” said Hayward, and shook Trigg’s hand.

Thus Hayward was ready for that last and fatal seance. It started off in the routine way, with Haeckel chanting out the scene as he saw it in the sunbaked gully known as Pozo Diablo, except that it was then midnight and a full moon was directly overhead. His control, the old prospector, it developed, had been savagely tortured and killed by Indians, and his ghost haunted the spot to this day.

“I am walking down the arroyo,” came Haeckel’s monotonous voice. “I am wary, for the accursed redskins may be lurking behind boulders. I turn into the Escondida—I— I—ugh!”

Haeckel screamed shrilly and clutched at his heart with both hands. Then he fell off the stool backwards, tearing all connections loose as he dropped. He writhed for a moment and lay still. The spectators rushed to him.

Hayward was among the first to arrive. He ripped open Haeckel’s shirt. There was nothing to see. But the doctor was alongside and he tore the cotton garment entirely off. All that was visible was a small piece of wood protruding from the back with a few drops of blood oozing out beside it. There were no other marks, yet Dr. Haeckel was dead.

An amazing autopsy followed. Just below the sternum the doctor found and picked out a pencil thin piece of wood about a half inch long. How it got there was a mystery. There was nothing beneath. But inside the right ventricle of the heart was found another such piece, and the posterior wall of the heart was punctured. A third bit of cylindrical wood was wedged between two ribs near the spine, piercing the skin of the back. The doctor threw up his hands.

“I’ll never report this,” he announced. “I have a reputation to consider. I’m calling it heart failure due to the presence of foreign matter in the ventricle.”

Hayward and Merriam walked away.

“What happened?” asked Merriam. “I don’t get it.”

Hayward considered carefully how to phrase his answer.

“I do not know exactly how it was that Haeckel projected himself through the machine or how he managed to make his double perform various acts. We only know he did it. It amused him to play the ghost, and that’s always a dangerous thing to do. Once before some victim shot at him, for we saw the bullet hole.”

“Yes,” admitted Merriam. “But it didn’t go through, and there was no bullet.”

“Don’t forget how the image here and the image there oscillated back and forth through the machine,” Hayward reminded him. “To shoot either one of them was like shooting at the props of a plane in flight. A bullet might shatter a blade by chance, but it is more likely to miss. You would have better luck by throwing a slow moving object like a rock, or better still, poke a crowbar through. Then it would be there long enough to register. That is the only sure way of striking something that flickers on and off.”

“I understand,” said Merriam. “But what about those little broken sticks?”

“Parts of an arrow,” explained Hayward. “The rest of the fragments must be lying in the Arizona arroyo. The other segments went through when Haeckel wasn’t there.”

“I see,” said Merriam, comprehending at last. “Who could have shot him, do you suppose?”

“An Indian, I guess,” said Hayward “Probably a good Indian!”

Bricks For Brains

Astounding Science Fiction, April 1945

WHEN next an Armadian ship came to Terra it was a gala day. This time it hove into sight escorted by a guard of honor; not harried and hounded by Terrestrian cruisers pecking futilely away at it out of their dread of the unknown. Now the world knew that the Armadian intentions were not hostile. They merely wanted that portion of the Solar System which Earthmen could not use themselves, and by way of recompense had sent an ambassador with a generous offer. If the Earth cruisers would quit attacking the Armadians engaged in mining the Red Spot on Jupiter and cede that planet and Saturn, the Terrestrians would be granted reciprocal rights in the Armadians’ own bailiwick—the vast family of planets that swam about the sun Gol. It was this successful envoy whom the latest Armadian ship had come to pick up.

Ellwood, chief of the Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence, better known simply as the boss bimmy, watched the proceedings with interest. He saw how cleverly the incoming ship maneuvered itself alongside the grounded wreck of the ambassadorial vessel. For the first visitor was a partial wreck, having been fatally holed by a zealous cruiser captain unaware of the peaceful mission on which it was bent. And Ellwood watched how deftly the alien monsters managed the transfer of their imprisoned ambassador from his refuge in the as yet intact control room. Pholor, for that was the name finally given by him, was about to go, bearing with him the perpetual treaty of amity and commerce which he and Ellwood so laboriously had contrived to negotiate. And then, to the roar of saluting batteries and amongst a display of flags, the alien ship was off—to bear back to Armadia the strange news. Two races, each detestable monsters in the other’s eyes, had found common ground.

Ellwood turned away. He disregarded the flow of oratory still coming from the temporary platform where the political bigwigs were holding forth. it was his own infinite patience and sympathetic understanding that had made communication with these outside creatures possible, but those qualities were essential to the proper doing of his job. He took no credit for them and expected none. After all, his role had been that of a mere interpreter. The ultimate decision had to rest with the Council.

He strode off toward the laboratory building. Already the posters were up proclaiming the millennium was at hand. Shortly, thanks to the wisdom of the Powers That Be, new and fairer worlds would be open to settlement. Pioneering expeditions were in preparation. In a few brief years congested, tired old Mother Earth would see her chicks begin emigrating to far off Golia, where virgin planets were. No longer were the mysterious alien ships to be dreaded. No longer would conservationists have to worry about the approaching exhaustion of the last mineral deposits. No longer would the population-control men quail at the sight of the latest census figures. On New Eden, as the unseen promised planet was already being called, such problems would not exist.

Ellwood’s mind was not on those by-products of his efforts. They were in the hands of others. He still had work to do right where he was. His gang knew that too, for Darnhurst was waiting for him in his office.

“All right, fella, hop to it,” said Ellwood, sensing the unspoken question, and getting at once to the point. “Let the politicians spout. Our job is only half done. Round up your men and go on into that control room and find out what all the gadgets are for. Pholor gave us the ship for whatever we could learn from it.”

“Dynamic or static study, chief?”

“Both—in that order. But I warn you. You’ll have to take precautions. Working conditions in there are not nice. It’s hot—a thousand Fahrenheit, about. It’s filled with stinking, poisonous gases at hellish pressures. And the grav plates are still putting out 3-Gs. You’ll need to rig yourselves like I did or you’ll pass out in nothing flat. But aside from that, the rest of it ought to be duck soup. Nothing was damaged in there.”

“Yes, sir,” grinned Darnhurst, and began punching call buttons on the order board.

After he left, Ellwood went down the hall to where Gonzales was working. As he passed the cadaver of the Armadian they had held back from dissection he paused a moment for a closer inspection of it. He was thankful that the Armadians appeared to have no respect for their dead, for Pholor had never intimated that he would like to carry away the bodies of the three killed by the hasty cruiser. This one would be an invaluable addition to the Bureau’s museum.

As he regarded the sprawling remains of the—well, Thing—he could not fail to appreciate the horror the sight of it would inspire in the normal human being. There was no denying that the instinctive reaction would be revulsion. For it was grotesque, ugly—incredible. It lay there, an inert mass now, of armored sections from which sprouted strange appendages. It was as if some madman had dreamed up in a moment of a delirium a beast compounded in part of rhinoceri, octopuses, and armadillos, and ranged the segments in rows caterpillar fashion. For each plated segment rested on an elephantine monopod, and atop them were either nests of wide-ranging retractable tentacles, or else sets of weirdly shaped horns arranged as pentodes, triodes and diodes.

Ellwood wondered whether the psychomeds had made further progress while he had been engaged with Pholor. There were mysteries as yet unsolved. The Armadian was mouthless, eyeless, noseless, and earless. It had no alimentary tract. It subsisted on the vile mixture of ammonia-dominated air. It breathed through gills located beneath the segmental plates. It hunched itself around clumsily on its monopodial feet. It tended the intricate machinery of its ship with its many tentacles, each of which ended in some tool-like terminal of horny growth. Some were capable of grasping, others cutting, punching, or exerting pressure. The body mechanics of the monsters, granting their queer metabolism, was fairly well understood. It was the nervous system that was baffling.

Perception came to an Armadian through his horns. Under their plates was a tangled mess of wire-like nerves, actuated by the radioactive salts abundant in their body fluids. Somehow they generated a queer sort of what can only be called organic radiation, similar to but different from ordinary radio waves or any other in the band of electro-magnetic phenomena. They radiated those waves on a variety of frequencies from the antennae horns, and in turn interpreted their environment as they rebounded. Ellwood knew that much, and accepted it. What bothered him was that nowhere in the creature’s structure was there anything analogous to a brain. There were only clotted ganglia arranged haphazardly throughout. Some were motor controlling, others sensorily interpretive. And there ended their capacity so far as any human knew.

ELLWOOD shrugged and walked on into Gonzales’ room. His assistant was hunched over a microscope intent on something in its field while his fingers played incessantly on the buttons of a small testing box. Meter needles quivered as oscillating currents surged back and forth. But at Ellwood’s footfall Gonzales sat back and flicked off the juice.

“What luck?” asked Ellwood.

“Still looking for a brain. They just haven’t any, that’s all. It’s a screwy thing to say, but that is the way it is.”

“Humph,” frowned Ellwood. “It doesn’t fit. They have memory, for they have been coming here at intervals for fifty years, and after the first visit confined their attentions to Jupiter, knowing the inner planets were unsuitable for them. They also remembered our many futile attacks on them. That is why they wanted to reach an understanding.”

“That may he,” shrugged Gonzales, “but now that you bring it up, how much memory does a young salmon have when she first goes to spawn? Yet she unerringly finds the proper place, though no fish is heavily endowed with thinking matter. No, I have examined this stuff over and over. There is no seat of reason. There are only reflexes. Highly intricates ones, yes, but reflexes.”

Ellwood picked up a handful of the shredded stuff on the table. It was the remnants of an involved lump of nerve ganglia.

“Shoot amps enough into that,” went on Gonzales, “and follow through, and it comes to life. In its essence it is a sort of radar. But it reports. It doesn’t think. And it is the biggest and the most complicated of all the Armadian ganglia. Armadians do what they do like a bird builds her nest or a cobra spits venom—by a sort of super instinct. You needn’t tell me that because they have space-spanning power ships jammed with crazy machinery that they have to be reasoning beings. I can’t find any histological evidence to support the view. What they do is largely automatic.”

“Nonsense,” said Ellwood, a little testily, recalling the fine spirit displayed by Pholor. “They do reason, as was evidenced by Pholor’s coming here at grave risk to himself. He wanted us to stop our senseless attacks on his ships, and at the same time realized we would expect some inducement. There you have not only memory, but foresight and logic. I even got a clear impression that the Armadians have what we call a sense of honor.”

“The sense of honor,” said Gonzales, dryly, “waits on the future to be proved. As to memory, foresight, and logic I merely suggest to you the well-known phenomenon known as symbiosis. Is the three-way partnership reputed to prevail among owls, prairie dogs and rattle-snakes; the result of logically arrived at treaties? Or the relations between sharks and pilot fishes? Or those between ants and aphids? In their queer way these Armadians appreciate that we are no threat to them, though something of a bother. Who knows? Perhaps elsewhere in the galaxy they have experimented with cooperation and found that it pays better than strife. They sensed the same possibilities here and reacted. To me it is no more mysterious than, that.”

“I don’t know,” said Ell wood slowly. “Pholor showed me—through his marvelous telepathic power—their high civilization, their immense heavy industries, their knowledge of atomics. I can’t believe it is just instinct.”

Gonzales laughed, for he saw the chief was shaken, despite his stand.

“Consider the lowly ant, boss. With lots less on the ball it has managed a pretty intricate social order too, and one that has lasted down through eons of perpetual adaptation by the rest of us so-called higher beings. Who are we to be scornful? Where are the dinosaurs today? Or Babylon, Rome, or a score of other perfected civilizations? The ant is a pragmatic creature. He found what worked, and stuck to it, dumbly if you please, but the ant endures, Yet we, vain with our sharp critical ability and ever itching to move on to loftier heights, tear down as fast as we build. If history means anything at all, it is that man is doomed by his own restless intellect to a succession of cycles. We go up, we go down, we get nowhere. That is what reasoning and your precious logic does for you.”

It was Ellwood’s turn to grin. Gonzales was a fellow with a philosophy all his own. This sort of thing could go on all afternoon. Ell wood was just about to break off and go when an annunciator began howling. Darnhurst was paging him.

“Yes, Darnhurst?”

“Better come down to the ship, chief. We’ve run into trouble in bunches.”

Darnhurst did not exaggerate. Ellwood went, and he saw.

“No,” he said, “this won’t do. You’ve got to do it the hard way.”

A HARD way it was. One exasperating week of mankilling work followed another; the season waned and its successor came in before the bimmy gang satisfied its exacting chief that all had been learned about the Armadian spaceship. Where Darnhurst fell down in the beginning was in trying to ameliorate the conditions under which they must work. It proved to be impossible except for one detail. They found they could cut the artificial gravity down from 3-Gs to Earth normal. Every other effort at comfort failed.

The first had been the withdrawal of the noxious superheated Armadian gases and the substitution of air. At once hot metals that had never been exposed to the element before began oxidizing at an alarming rate. Unless oxygen was kept away there shortly would be no machines to study. So the ammonia-ethane-phosgene combination went back in. Nor was it possible to reduce its temperature. It was discovered that the lubricants favored most by the Armadians were metals such as tin and lead. At temperatures tolerable to the bimmies these congealed and the machines froze. In like manner it was learned that pressures had to be maintained. Many of the Armadian valves were controlled by barystats which operated as the pressures rose or fell about the mean, and that mean was high. When pressures were allowed to fall appreciably some of the stats began to swell, two of them bursting and spewing mercury vapor into the room.

Those were preliminary discoveries. Then a week after the beginning Darnhurst put in a hurry call for a dozen more men.

“Why so many?” asked Ellwood. “You have eight of our best.”

“Chief,” said Darnhurst wearily, “an Armadian is like an old-fashioned pipe-organ player. When he works on his instrument he uses everything he’s got—both hands, both feet, both eyes and both ears. Well, that’s the way these Armadian machines are set up. Those babies have twenty tentacles with an over-all spread of around forty feet and the one that used to operate that ammonia purifying gadget used every one of them all the time. It takes a lot of men scattered all over the ship to take his place.”

“I see,” said Ellwood, and O.K.’d the chit for the extra men. He also visited the ship the next day to see them in action. Darnhurst was putting the purifier through its paces.

“You, over there,” he called through his helmet phone. “That thing you’ve got the jack against is a regulator for the methane flow just before it enters the mixer. When the monsters wanted less of the stuff they just got hold of it and squeezed, see? O.K., squeeze now while Jim and Freddie work those things across the room.”

“I need a heavier jack,” panted the man after a brief exertion. “Wow, what a grip those animals must have!”

The experience with the purifier was typical. The machine controls roamed like climbing vines all over the walls and overhead. The simplest operating adjustments often required simultaneous action at widely separated points. Mechanically speaking the vessel was a surrealistic dream.

But there came a day when the dynamic study was completed, and it was permissible to cool the ship off and drain the foul atmosphere. After that the relieved bimmies proceeded to dismantle the parts and examine them in detail. What they discovered amazed them.

“This is getting me down,” said Darnhurst at one of the conferences. “The principles behind these machines are simply wonderful—far in advance of much of our own science. The material is marvelous—alloys that are tailor-made. The workmanship—well, it’s just beautiful. The stuff could be sold as jewelry. Yet the allover design stinks. There is no other word for it.”

“That’s what happens,” drawled Gonzales, “when brainless creatures go in for invention. I keep telling you they think with their reflexes.”

“We won’t start that again,” ruled Ellwood. “What we do next is redesign the whole show, and we’ll do it in duplicate. One ship will be strictly up to Armadian specifications, but simplified. The other will be for our use, using the principles we have discovered but substituting air for ammonia, and so on. Get going.”

IT took months more to build the two vessels. Ellwood immersed himself deeply in the collateral problems, turning all other routine over to assistants. From time to time rumors drifted to the lab of the hubbub in the world at large, but they made little impression. A new program had been formulated known as the Ten Year Plan, and all the industry of Earth was a beehive of activity. Space transports were being laid down on a colossal scale to be in readiness for the day when the waves of emigration would begin. Population control experts roamed the five continents selecting the favored ones who were to make up the first billion. The talk was all about New Eden and the paradise that was to be there. But Elwood and his bimmy gang stuck to their knitting. It was an age of specialties, and they had their own row to hoe.

At last came the day when the two ships were ready for their trials. The human edition was a beauty, slicker and faster than anything known, and as handy as a bicycle. It embodies the best features of Armadian science and construction, coupled with the best of Terrestrian design. The Golian version was an equally good ship—for an Armadian—and the most startling feature of it was its apparent emptiness. The complicated controls had been reduced drastically and made largely automatic. Where twenty operations had been required before now only one was needed—a jab at a stud or the flick of a switch. Bulk had been cut to one quarter. There was now room for additional auxiliaries that Ellwood assumed had been crowded out before. He had a few built and added.

It was well his work came to completion when it did. The day the ships’ name plates were affixed there came an urgent message from the director general.

“How long will it take you to get out to New Eden?” he inquired anxiously over the telecom.

“A month I’d say. There are a lot of parsecs in between.”

“You are leaving at once,” said the director. “Take any ship you please, but get going. We are getting disturbing messages from the Relocation Committee out there.”

“Trouble with the Armadians?”

“That’s what I want to find out,” snapped the director. “That fellow Crawford is too vague. All we know is that he keeps saying the Ten Year Plan is unworkable.”

“I’m practically on my way,” replied Ellwood, and snicked off the connection.

FROM afar the Golian System presented a gorgeous spectacle. About a blazing sun swam forty mighty planets and a number of lesser ones. Armadia was one, and Trusch, and Ukor, and Linh, the last two being ringed like Saturn. Great Trusch, four times the size of Jupiter, carried along with her a system of her own, a myriad of varicolored satellites. And finally there was New Eden and the five other lesser orbs allotted to the men of Earth. They were bluish, and also had moons, those pertaining to New Eden numbering three.

Ellwood headed his new ship toward his planetfall, the Golite, its Armadian counterpart, trailing behind under remote control. Twice stubby nosed Armadian scout cruisers zipped by, looking him over, but except for the agreed upon exchange of recognition signals had nothing to say. And then Ellwood was spirally down into the clean atmosphere of fair New Eden.

He circled the planet twice in order to see it whole. It had not been misrepresented. It was well watered, but there were no vast wastes of ocean as the Pacific. Nor were there sprawling continents covering a hemisphere. It was an oceanic planet studded with many large islands, each with its rich lowland plains and its cool plateaus. There were rivers and lakes and islets galore, but no deserts, and the polar caps were small. Ellwood crossed the island known as Valhalla, and after that Paradise, flying low. He saw sky fields being prepared, and the tents of surveyors who were laying out the future cities. And then he was over New Eden proper, where the planetary capital was to be. He spotted the temporary barracks and the flagstaff that marked the place of administration, and landed in a field nearby after first guiding the Golite to its berth.

As he stepped out into the open he knew that this was heaven. The very first breath was exhilarating, and his quick step took on some of the characteristics of a prance. For oddly, though the gravity was a trifle less than that on Earth, the oxygen content of the air was a little richer. The combination, together with the crisp, cool air, made him feel a new being altogether—at once strong and full of vigor, yet light and airy as a sprite. But his exuberation was soon to be dampened. In Crawford he found a dispirited man.

The executive chairman of the Relocation Committee wiped the gloom off his face only long enough to offer a perfunctory greeting, and then dejectedly waved Ellwood to chair.

“I’m told you’re a whiz as a trouble shooter,” said Crawford, glumly. “You’d have to be. We’re getting nowhere fast here.”

Ellwood waited, but Crawford was staring out the window.

“Don’t the Armadians co-operate?”

“Oh, bother the Armadians,” said Crawford, irritably. “How would I know? Yammer, yammer, yammer. Then they run away. Those codes you wrote into the treaty just don’t work. Or something. Gibberish is what they send, and then they seem to get angry. We can’t make ’em out, and the young fellows I send to Neutralia are afraid of them. We haven’t a soul there now.”

“Neutralia?”

“Yes—the medium-sized planet they set aside for our two legations. It isn’t comfortable there for either one of us, but our envoys can live under domes and confer.”

Ellwood felt a letdown. He was astonished that the code he and Pholor worked out had failed, so he pressed the point.

“Oh, some messages got through, though badly garbled,” admitted

Crawford, “but their demands are impossible. They say you promised commerce and they want to begin. But what demands! They can’t use our lumber or plastics or textiles; they would go up in a puff in their temperatures. All they want is metals.”

“Well?”

“It’s the quantities,” sighed Crawford. “They think in terms of millions. They offer a cubic mile or so of gold, or anything else they have lots of, but here’s what they want in exchange … lemme find the memo … oh, half a million tons of tungsten, ditto iridium, ditto uranium bricks, and so on. There just isn’t that much stuff; not anywhere. And anyway, we’re still in the pioneering stage here, which as you will see is bad enough without complicating it with the crazy demands of the Armadians.

Ellwood did not break the soggy silence that followed.

“The real trouble is at home,” resumed Crawford, finally. “They have a bunch of dreamy optimists in charge and out of it comes the Ten Year Plan. I’m the guy that has to carry out this end of it. It’s impossible, that’s all.”

“That word,” said Ellwood, cheerfully, “is not familiar to me. In our labs we frown on it. I prefer ‘tough’ myself.”

“Listen,” snorted Crawford, “and then repeat that.”

Elwood listened, unsympathetically at first, for he had sized up the man before him as a prime defeatist. But as Crawford dismally unfolded his tale Ellwood’s respect for him rose. The fellow was holding the heavy end of the stick.

“The catch is,” concluded Crawford, “that they want a perfect civilization set up before the first batch of colonists arrive. That entails plenty, because the emphasis is on the ‘perfect.’ There are to be no slums—ever. The cities are to be ready to move into when the immigrants arrive, which same goes for all the accessories—mining, agriculture, industry, transportation and research. All those facilities have to be exactly balanced as well. And my committee has to do it with what we’ve got without help from home, and be finished in time.

“Very well, so much for the program. The preliminary work is largely done, as I have an army of engineers to help me. But let’s list the needs, and check off what we’ve done in this first two years.

“First of all we had to know what we had to work with, which means surveys. Our geodicists have mapped the place and sounded the oceans. Our geologists have a picture of the subterrane for ten miles down, and I can tell you this planet has everything—coal, oil, metals, what you will, with reserves for centuries. The crop experts have planted experimental farms and know what to expect from the soil. The planet is fertile. The transportation sharks are doping out the highway, seaway and skyway routes and have begun laying out terminals. Our astronomers—”

Crawford broke off and smiled a doleful smile.

“Say,” he said wryly, “can you imagine having to dope out a strange solar system lousy with planets and moons and comets in less than two years? We haven’t completed our first circuit of Gol yet, but they have a calendar. Or a tentative one. We also now possess what are laughingly called tide tables, but with three moons to contend with they are going to have to be revised.”

“I think you have done remarkably well,” commented Ellwood.

“So far, perhaps. It is the next step where the shoe pinches. Pretty soon we’ll have to start construction, but what with? Cities to house a billion people call for a lot of bricks and steel, not to mention the heavy machinery for industry. I yell for material and the Council comes back and says I have everything here, use it.”

“I see,” grinned Ellwood. “Smelt your own ore and roll your own steel from what’s here.”

“Yes. But what do I sink the first shaft with, or drill the first oil well? They won’t send me ore stamps or drill rigs because Earth industry is working two hundred percent capacity building spaceships. A billion people take a lot of transport even if you do spread ’em out over the last five years of the Plan. So they say it’s my problem. I’ve got the egg—produce the chicken. Wangle what you need from the Armadians.”

Again he smiled wanly. “Except,” he added, “it isn’t as easy as that. To hatch your egg you have to set a hen on it.”

It was a curious dilemma, and no fault of Crawford’s. The authors of the Ten Year Plan had been over optimistic. If a billion persons and their baggage were to be shipped across the galaxy in the last five years of it, every ounce of Terrestrian production would have to be devoted to ship construction in the meantime. No help for New Eden could be expected from Earth. Yet for all its rich resources, the new planet was stymied for lack of machines. Once the ball of production was started rolling, trade was possible with nearby Armadia. Until then Crawford was in much the position of a hungry man on a raft laden with canned goods but without an opener.

“I think I’ll take a run over to Neutralia and ask them to send for Pholor,” announced Ellwood.

“You won’t get far there,” said Crawford, dismally. “The monsters seem to be sore about something. Anyway, what have you got to offer?”

“Brains,” was Ellwood’s cryptic response.

HE parked his two ships beside the cluster of ambassadorial domes and waited for Pholor to come. In those few days he had time to think the problem through. There were several ticklish aspects.

Ellwood shrewdly suspected that the reason the other envoys failed was due to their mutual distrust of types so alien. The human envoys insisted on using radio code for conversation, and the nature of the waves was such as to jar the delicate nerves of the heavy-world creatures. On the other hand, it was a good deal to expect of an ordinary man that he would willingly surrender his mind to the semihypnotic telepathic control of a beast as bizarre and repellant as an Armadian. Moreover, the compromise done in which they conferred was uncomfortable to both parties. Elwood would leap that hurdle by going straight into the Armadian dome, for he had brought his special armor and heavy chair with him. He knew that thus shielded he could stand the Armadian environment, and he had already gone through the brain-searing ordeal of becoming neurally attuned to Pholor’s mentality.

He was much less sure of his bargaining position. From one of the men who had attempted intercourse with the Armadian emissaries he learned a little of what was behind the present impasse. The ammonia breathers also had something analogous to the Ten Year Plan, and their ambitions far outreached their capacity to produce. They were in as big a hurry to develop Saturn and Jupiter as the Council was to colonize New Eden. Therefore, it was imports of hard metals they wanted now in exchange for an equal tonnage of gold which was plentiful with them but of little use. Ellwood’s informant also said he was given to understand that there was a good deal of dissatisfaction with Pholor’s treaty. Armadian hot-heads were declaring that it would have been better to exterminate the Terrestrians and have done with it, rather than pay for planets they could have had for the taking. To cede still others close to home was an outrage.

Besides this bad start, Ellwood was growingly aware of still another difficulty he was going to have to face. He had taken upon himself the task of talking Pholor out of the very thing he wanted—immense quantities of structural material and heavy machines—in exchange for nothing more tangible than ideas. He foresaw that the negotiations were likely to he tricky; a good salesman does not show all his hand at once. But in human intercourse a man is not compelled to reveal more than he chooses. In full psychic communion it was going to be hard to keep the hole card face down.

Ellwood devised a neural scanner, utilizing principles he had learned from the dissection of the dead Armadians. Then he pitted himself against it, setting up thought blocks and comparing them with the resultant records. The first results were disappointing. His efforts to hold back certain thoughts served only to emphasize them. But by the time Pholor arrived Ellwood had hit upon a system. He imagined in advance every conceivable question that might be put to him, and then thought out his answers. Those he keyed with appropriate cues, committed them to memory, and then deliberately trained himself to forget them. It called for the most strenuous mental effort, but in the end he felt relatively safe. Whatever he was to say was now buried deep in his subconscious mind, locked away until the appropriate question should recall it to the field of awareness.

Ellwood and Pholor met in the latter’s embassy. The reunion was cordial enough, for the two disparate creatures had deep respect for each other, but Ellwood was quick to sense a new coldness. Pholor was not going to be as genially receptive as in their previous dealings.

“Observe,” smiled Ellwood, easily, “the present I have brought you.”

He directed Pholor’s perceptions toward the little Golite, the bimmy designed ship for Armadian use. It lay within easy range of the Armadian’s radarlike senses, and from where he sprawled on the dome floor he could examine it with his neural tentacles, fingering first one bit of Earth designed equipment and another. Ellwood followed his reactions with intense interest.

The initial response was quite different from what he was expecting. It was wholly negative. There was neither admiration nor delight, but a sort of baffled wonder. And then the wonder swiftly degenerated into a mixture of suspicion and distaste.

“What trick is this?” Pholor’s sharp thought snapped over. “What controls these paltry toy machines? Except for a few buttons there is no place to lay a tentacle. What you have brought and call a present is a mockery. It is useless. It looks dangerous. Is this what you have to trade?”

It was like a dash of ice water. The superb design done by his experts was wholly lost on the stumpy, plated monster. Ellwood felt already that Pholor’s mind was quitting the ship, having dismissed it as of no possible value. Desperately he summoned his most persuasive thoughts. He brought Pholor back mentally to the control room and went over each of the machines, explaining why the changes had been made. Why, in the interests of efficiency, they had to be made. Pholor remained unimpressed, but was finally persuaded to enter the ship.

The original Armadian design had been ridiculously complicated; the human version was a gem of compactness. One machine was the master barystat. It registered the prevailing gravitic influences and automatically adjusted every other machine. It maintained the inside gravity at 3-Gs, regardless of the nature of what was outside. It regulated the repulsors, so that they would develop just what power was needed to lift from any planet. It reported masses of all sizes in the vicinity and actuated the meteor deflectors. A single stud controlled it. It was either off or on. There was also a computer, which not only worked out from given co-ordinates the optimum trajectory between two points, but took care of deviations caused by stray bodies met in space. There were compressors and purifiers, all much simplified.

The control board was like none in human use. There were no dials, no name plates, no meters, no warning lights or buzzers. Armadians did not need them, being without sight or hearing. Through their curious means of perception they knew what current surged through a given circuit at a particular moment, and could appraise the fluctuating magnetic and electric fields. On the Golite’s panel there was a single master button that would turn everything on or off at once, and there was a single cutout for each auxiliary.

“Here,” transmitted Ellwood, punching in co-ordinates on the computer, “I’m laying out a triangular course—we will circumnavigate Gol itself, angling off to come back in from behind Trusch. Once I set this it will take care of everything. Now I press the take-off button.”

He felt Pholor’s thoughts upon him, stolidly non-committal. Then, as the ship soared away, there was a wave of distinct fear. Pholor was undergoing all the agonies of a backseat driver. Where normally his tentacles would be darting yards across the room to adjust this or tinker with that, there was nothing now to do. The automatics were doing it. The jangled tentacles twitched and coiled spasmodically. Pholor was not happy.

Then he grew calmer. At first it was a sort of resignation, but gradually he began to observe that the barystats, bolomoters and other data takers were still feeding their machines and the machines were responding nicely to every trifling variation. Yet Ellwood had not touched the panel since the start-off.

“It works,” came an awed thought from Pholor, a reluctant thought and one not fully believed in. “I can’t understand it.”

Ellwood tried to explain. Pholor tried hard to understand. Neither succeeded. They were already around Gol and on the second leg when Ellwood gave up in sheer exhaustion. He laid back in his heavy chair and tried to conjure up another approach.

He knew by then that Gonzales was right. Armadians did not think. They reacted. The results of trial and error they could recognize, abstract principles befuddled them. Their science was strictly empirical; there was nothing analytical about it. Instinct, intuition and blind groping explained their seeming culture. Automatic controls were beyond Pholor’s comprehension. Where there is no capacity for logic there can be no concept of efficiency. Improvement to an Armadian meant building more and bigger models of what he had already found to work. Ellwood resolved to take a drastically different tack.

“Among my people,” he sent, “when we find something that works but do not know why, we call it magic, and accept it. It is a very potent principle. This is a magic ship. Yet having it, you can remodel every ship you own. The savings in metal and the gain in space will be enormous. In exchange, we expect you to deliver to us one half the savings.”

“Your magic is good,” agreed Pholor after a time, “and I will take your present and be thankful. It will serve to placate those of my kind who are denouncing the treaty. But they will never consent to exporting the savings. We need every ton.”

Ellwood was dismayed. He floundered for a moment and then came up with yet another idea. Spatial motive power was only one form of machinery.

“Take me on a mental tour again of all your industrial plants.”

Pholor assented, and instantly Ellwood was launched again on a weird voyage to strange, big planets, traveling by proxy through the wide ranging perceptions of the other. As in a dream he inspected machines in mighty shops where the crushing drag of gravity would be fatal to a man in the flesh. What he saw confirmed his suppositions. All were as crudely designed as the stuff in the envoy’s ship. Redesign would result in untold savings.

“Now show me your mines,” asked Ellwood.

Here was a real surprise. Armadian mines were surface strip mines, and remarkably few in number. Ellwood was puzzled for a moment as to why planets larger in bulk than the sum of all Earth-controlled ones should have such meager ore supplies. And then he hit upon a double-barreled explanation. First, the large planet’s heavy masses held back more of the lighter elements which the lesser planets tended to lose into space. Their surfaces therefore would run more to rock and less to iron. But the real key was in the Armadian mental habits. Not being a contemplative race they were not likely to ever develop a theory of geology. It would not occur to them that there were buried ore deposits, and had not looked for them.

“I have seen enough,” announced Ellwood. “Let’s get back to the dome.”

Before he left he bore with him a codicil to the treaty. It gave all he asked and more.

“WHAT luck?” asked Crawford, gloomily, as Ellwood strode into his office. There was no hope in his expression.

“It’s in the bag,” grinned Ellwood. “You’ll get your stuff when and where you want it, delivered jobside. It’ll be prefabricated, too.”

“What! No, don’t kid me. It’s no joking matter.”

“I mean it.”

“All right,” Crawford simply could not cheer up. “What’s the catch?”

“What do you pay? Not too much. You assign me at once a couple of hundred of your smartest engineers and model makers, with shops and foundries to work in. I could use a geologist or so, too. I want our neocosmic radiant geoprobes rebuilt for Armadian use.”

“I don’t get it,” said Crawford. “We can’t send men onto Armadia and Trusch. They’d die.”

“We aren’t. We just send along their brain throbs. It is going to work this way—Armadia will shortly ship us specimens of all their machines. We redesign them and ship the models back. Blue-prints and specifications won’t do. They’d burn up. We will send them the geoprobes so they can uncover subsurface deposits they never dreamed were there. And along with it we send samples of the girders and trusses and forges you want so they can get busy on manufacture.”

“But,” objected Crawford, “they insist on payment in metal. We haven’t any.”

“Oh, yes we have. Billions of potential tons of it in savings as they retool, not to speak of what is still in the ground. And it has already been delivered by me. We get back half.”

“You’re either delirious,” said Crawford, staring at him, “or you’ve been pulling magic—”

“Magic,” said Ellwood, grinning still wider, “is just what I used. I turned brains into bricks, and a fair swap is no robbery.”

Editor’s Note

THE stories and articles in this anthology were compiled from copies of the magazines in which they were first published. The principle source being https://archive.org. One story, Blind Allley, was found elsewhere on the internet, in the form of a very poor pdf.

All the stories have been proofread and formatted uniformly.

The cover was based on the one used for Weird Tales, March 1941; which featured Jameson’s tale of The Man Who Loved Planks.

Gunner54, 2020.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Meet The Author

Eviction By Isotherm

Seaward

Mill Of The Gods

Catalyst Poison

Prospectors of Space

In His Own Image

4½B Eros

The Man Who Loved Planks

Article: Does a Tree Ever Die?

Dead End

Article: Space-War Strategy

Even The Angels

You Can’t Win

Soup King

The Superlous Phantom

Article: Dispersion

“If You’re Smart—”

The Old Ones Hear

Fighters Never Quit

The Goddess’ Legacy

Article: Vulcan — Ice King

Sand

Article: God’s Footstool

Blind Alley

Heaven Is What You Make It

I.

II.

III.

The Leech

Hobo God

Blind Man’s Buff

Lilies Of Life

Death By Proxy

Bricks For Brains

Editor’s Note