In a Good Cause--

            In the Great Court, which stands as a patch of untouched peace among the fifty busy square miles devoted to the towering buildings that are the pulse beat of the United Worlds of the Galaxy, stands a statue.

            It stands where it can look at the stars at night. There are other statues ringing the court, but this one stands in the center and alone.

            It is not a very good statue. The face is too noble and lacks the lines of living. The brow is a shade too high, the nose a shade too symmetrical, the clothing a shade too carefully disposed. The whole bearing is by far too saintly to be true. One can suppose that the man in real life might have frowned at times, or hiccupped, but the statue seemed to insist that such imperfections were impossible.

            All this, of course, is understandable overcompensation. The man had no statues raised to him while alive, and succeeding generations, with the advantage of hindsight, felt guilty.

            The name on the pedestal reads “Richard Sayama Altmayer.” Underneath it is a short phrase and, vertically arranged, three dates. The phrase is: “In a good cause, there are no failures.” The three dates are June 17, 2755; September 5, 2788; December 32, 2800;--the years being counted in the usual manner of the period, that is, from the date of the first atomic explosion in 1945 of the ancient era.

            None of those dates represents either his birth or death. They mark neither a date of marriage or of the accomplishment of some great deed or, indeed, of anything that the inhabitants of the United Worlds can remember with pleasure and pride. Rather, they are the final expression of the feeling of guilt.

            Quite simply and plainly, they are the three dates upon which Richard Sayama Altmayer was sent to prison for his opinions.

1--June 17, 2755

            At the age of twenty-two, certainly, Dick Altmayer was fully capable of feeling fury. His hair was as yet dark brown and he had not grown the mustache which, in later years, would be so characteristic of him. His nose was, of course, thin and high-bridged, but the contours of his face were youthful. It would only be later that the growing gauntness of his cheeks would convert that nose into the prominent landmark that it now is in the minds of trillions of school children.

            Geoffrey Stock was standing in the doorway, viewing the results of his friend’s fury. His round face and cold, steady eyes were there, but he had yet to put on the first of the military uniforms in which he was to spend the rest of his life.

            He said, “Great Galaxy!”

            Altmayer looked up. “Hello, Jeff.”

            “What’s been happening, Dick? I thought your principles, pal, forbid destruction of any kind. Here’s a book-viewer that looks somewhat destroyed.” He picked up the pieces.

            Altmayer said, “I was holding the viewer when my wave-receiver came through with an official message. You know which one, too.”

            “I know. It happened to me, too. Where is it?”

            “On the floor. I tore it off the spool as soon as it belched out at me. Wait, let’s dump it down the atom chute.”

            “Hey, hold on. You can’t--”

            “Why not?”

            “Because you won’t accomplish anything. You’ll have to report.”

            “And just why?”

            “Don’t be an ass, Dick.”

            “This is a matter of principle, by Space.”

            “Oh, nuts! You can’t fight the whole planet.”

            “I don’t intend to fight the whole planet; just the few who get us into wars.”

            Stock shrugged. “That means the whole planet. That guff of yours of leaders tricking poor innocent people into fighting is just so much space-dust. Do you think that if a vote were taken the people wouldn’t be overwhelmingly in favor of fighting this fight?”

            “That means nothing, Jeff. The government has control of--”

            “The organs of propaganda. Yes, I know. I’ve listened to you often enough. But why not report, anyway?”

            Altmayer turned away.

            Stock said, “In the first place, you might not pass the physical examination.”

            “I’d pass. I’ve been in Space.”

            “That doesn’t mean anything. If the doctors let you hop a liner, that only means you don’t have a heart murmur or an aneurysm. For military duty aboard ship in Space you need much more than just that. How do you know you qualify?”

            “That’s a side issue, Jeff, and an insulting one. It’s not that I’m afraid to fight.”

            “Do you think you can stop the war this way?”

            “I wish I could,” Altmayer’s voice almost shook as he spoke. “It’s this idea I have that all mankind should be a single unit. There shouldn’t be wars or space-fleets armed only for destruction. The Galaxy stands ready to be opened to the united efforts of the human race. Instead, we have been factioned for nearly two thousand years, and we throw away all the Galaxy.”

            Stock laughed, “We’re doing all right. There are more than eighty independent planetary systems.”

            “And are we the only intelligences in the Galaxy?”

            “Oh, the Diaboli, your particular devils,” and Stock put his fists to his temples and extended the two forefingers, waggling them.

            “And yours, too, and everybody’s. They have a single government extending over more planets than all those occupied by our precious eighty independents.”

            “Sure, and their nearest planet is only fifteen hundred light years away from Earth and they can’t live on oxygen planets anyway.”

            Stock got out of his friendly mood. He said, curtly, “Look, I dropped by here to say that I was reporting for examination next week. Are you coming with me?”

            “No.”

            “You’re really determined.”

            “I’m really determined.”

            “You know you’ll accomplish nothing. There’ll be no great flame ignited on Earth. It will be no case of millions of young men being excited by your example into a no-war strike. You will simply be put in jail.”

            “Well, then, jail it is.”

            And jail it was. On June 17, 2755, of the atomic era, after a short trial in which Richard Sayama Altmayer refused to present any defense, he was sentenced to jail for the term of three years or for the duration of the war, whichever should be longer. He served a little over four years and two months, at which time the war ended in a definite though not shattering Santannian defeat. Earth gained complete control of certain disputed asteroids, various commercial advantages, and a limitation of the Santannian navy.

            The combined human losses of the war were something over two thousand ships with, of course, most of their crews, and in addition, several millions of lives due to the bombardment of planetary surfaces from space. The fleets of the two contending powers had been sufficiently strong to restrict this bombardment to the outposts of their respective systems, so that the planets of Earth and Santanni, themselves, were little affected.

            The war conclusively established Earth as the strongest single human military power.

            Geoffrey Stock fought throughout the war, seeing action more than once and remaining whole in life and limb despite that. At the end of the war he had the rank of major. He took part in the first diplomatic mission sent out by Earth to the worlds of the Diaboli, and that was the first step in his expanding role in Earth’s military and political life.

2--September 5, 2788

            They were the first Diaboli ever to have appeared on the surface of Earth itself. The projection posters and the newscasts of the Federalist party made that abundantly clear to any who were unaware of that. Over and over, they repeated the chronology of events.

            It was toward the beginning of the century that human explorers first came across the Diaboli. They were intelligent and had discovered interstellar travel independently somewhat earlier than had the humans. Already the galactic volume of their dominions was greater than that which was human-occupied.

            Regular diplomatic relationships between the Diaboli and the major human powers had begun twenty years earlier, immediately after the war between Santanni and Earth. At that time, outposts of Diaboli power were already within twenty light years of the outermost human centers. Their missions went everywhere, drawing trade treaties, obtaining concessions on unoccupied asteroids.

            And now they were on Earth itself. They were treated as equals and perhaps as more than equals by the rulers of the greatest center of human population in the Galaxy. The most damning statistic of all was the most loudly proclaimed by the Federalists. It was this: Although the number of living Diaboli was somewhat less than the total number of living humans, humanity had opened up not more than five new worlds to colonization in fifty years, while the Diaboli had begun the occupation of nearly five hundred.

            “A hundred to one against us,” cried the Federalists, “because they are one political organization and we are a hundred.” But relatively few on Earth, and fewer in the Galaxy as a whole, paid attention to the Federalists and their demands for Galactic Union.

            The crowds that lined the streets along which nearly daily the five Diaboli of the mission traveled from their specially conditioned suite in the best hotel of the city to the Secretariat of Defense were, by and large, not hostile. Most were merely curious, and more than a little revolted.

            The Diaboli were not pleasant creatures to look at. They were larger and considerably more massive than Earthmen. They had four stubby legs set close together below and two flexibly-fingered arms above. Their skin was wrinkled and naked and they wore no clothing. Their broad, scaly faces wore no expressions capable of being read by Earthmen, and from flattened regions just above each large-pupilled eye there sprang short horns. It was these last that gave the creatures their names. At first they had been called devils, and later the politer Latin equivalent.

            Each wore a pair of cylinders on its back from which flexible tubes extended to the nostrils; there they clamped on tightly. These were packed with soda-lime which absorbed the, to them, poisonous carbon dioxide from the air they breathed. Their own metabolism revolved about the reduction of sulfur and sometimes those foremost among the humans in the crowd caught a foul whiff of the hydrogen sulfide exhaled by the Diaboli.

            The leader of the Federalists was in the crowd. He stood far back where he attracted no attention from the police who had roped off the avenues and who now maintained a watchful order on the little hoppers that could be maneuvered quickly through the thickest crowd. The Federalist leader was gaunt-faced, with a thin and prominently bridged nose and straight, graying hair.

            He turned away, “I cannot bear to look at them.”

            His companion was more philosophic. He said, “No uglier in spirit, at least, than some of our handsome officials. These creatures are at least true to their own.”

            “You are sadly right. Are we entirely ready?”

            “Entirely. There won’t be one of them alive to return to his world.”

            “Good! I will remain here to give the signal.”

            The Diaboli were talking as well. This fact could not be evident to any human, no matter how close. To be sure, they could communicate by making ordinary sounds to one another but that was not their method of choice. The skin between their horns could, by the actions of muscles which differed in their construction from any known to humans, vibrate rapidly. The tiny waves which were transmitted in this manner to the air were too rapid to be heard by the human ear and too delicate to be detected by any but the most sensitive of human instrumentation. At that time, in fact, humans remained unaware of this form of communication.

            A vibration said, “Did you know that this is the planet of origin of the Two-legs?”

            “No.” There was a chorus of such no’s, and then one particular vibration said, “Do you get that from the Two-leg communications you have been studying, queer one?”

            “Because I study the communications? More of our people should do so instead of insisting so firmly on the complete worthlessness of Two-leg culture. For one thing, we are in a much better position to deal with the Two-legs if we know something about them. Their history is interesting in a horrible way. I am glad I brought myself to view their spools.”

            “And yet,” came another vibration, “from our previous contacts with Two-legs, one would be certain that they did not know their planet of origin. Certainly there is no veneration of this planet, Earth, or any memorial rites connected with it. Are you sure the information is correct?”

            “Entirely so. The lack of ritual, and the fact that this planet is by no means a shrine, is perfectly understandable in the light of Two-leg history. The Two-legs on the other worlds would scarcely concede the honor. It would somehow lower the independent dignity of their own worlds.”

            “I don’t quite understand.”

            “Neither do I, exactly, but after several days of reading I think I catch a glimmer. It would seem that, originally, when interstellar travel was first discovered by the Two-legs, they lived under a single political unit.”

            “Naturally.”

            “Not for these Two-legs. This was an unusual stage in their history and did not last. After the colonies on the various worlds grew and came to reasonable maturity, their first interest was to break away from the mother world. The first in the series of interstellar wars among these Two-legs began then.”

            “Horrible. Like cannibals.”

            “Yes, isn’t it? My digestion has been upset for days. My cud is sour. In any case, the various colonies gained independence, so that now we have the situation of which we are well aware. All of the Two-leg kingdoms, republics, aristocracies, etc., are simply tiny clots of worlds, each consisting of a dominant world and a few subsidiaries which, in turn, are forever seeking their independence or being shifted from one dominant to another. This Earth is the strongest among them and yet less than a dozen worlds owe it allegiance.”

            “Incredible that these creatures should be so blind to their own interests. Do they not have a tradition of the single government that existed when they consisted of but one world?”

            “As I said that was unusual for them. The single government had existed only a few decades. Prior to that, this very planet itself was split into a number of subplanetary political units.”

            “Never heard anything like it.” For a while, the supersonics of the various creatures interfered with one another.

            “It’s a fact. It is simply the nature of the beast.”

            And with that, they were at the Secretariat of Defense.

            The five Diaboli stood side by side along the table. They stood because their anatomy did not admit of anything that could correspond to “sitting.”

            On the other side of the table, five Earthmen stood as well. It would have been more convenient for the humans to sit but, understandably, there was no desire to make the handicap of smaller size any more pronounced than it already was. The table was a rather wide one; the widest, in fact, that could be conveniently obtained. This was out of respect for the human nose, for from the Diaboli, slightly so as they breathed, much more so when they spoke, there came the gentle and continuous drift of hydrogen sulfide. This was a difficulty rather unprecedented in diplomatic negotiations.

            Ordinarily the meetings did not last for more than half an hour, and at the end of this interval the Diaboli ended their conversations without ceremony and turned to leave. This time, however, the leave-taking was interrupted. A man entered, and the five human negotiators made way for him. He was tall, taller than any of the other Earthmen, and he wore a uniform with the ease of long usage. His face was round and his eyes cold and steady. His black hair was rather thin but as yet untouched by gray. There was an irregular blotch of scar tissue running from the point of his jaw downward past the line of his high, leather-brown collar. It might have been the result of a hand energy-ray, wielded by some forgotten human enemy in one of the five wars in which the man had been an active participant.

            “Sirs,” said the Earthman who had been chief negotiator hitherto, “may I introduce the Secretary of Defense?”

            The Diaboli were somewhat shocked and, although their expressions were in repose and inscrutable, the sound plates on their foreheads vibrated actively. Their strict sense of hierarchy was disturbed. The Secretary was only a Two-leg, but by Two-leg standards, he outranked them. They could not properly conduct official business with him.

            The Secretary was aware of their feelings but had no choice in the matter. For at least ten minutes, their leaving must be delayed and no ordinary interruption could serve to hold back the Diaboli.

            “Sirs,” he said, “I must ask your indulgence to remain longer this time.”

            The central Diabolus replied in the nearest approach to English any Diabolus could manage. Actually, a Diabolus might be said to have two mouths. One was hinged at the outermost extremity of the jawbone and was used in eating. In this capacity, the motion of the mouth was rarely seen by human beings, since the Diaboli much preferred to eat in the company of their own kind, exclusively. A narrower mouth opening, however, perhaps two inches in width, could be used in speaking. It pursed itself open, revealing the gummy gap where a Diabolus’ missing incisors ought to have been. It remained open during speech, the necessary consonantal blockings being performed by the palate and back of the tongue. The result was hoarse and fuzzy, but understandable.

            The Diabolus said, “You will pardon us, already we suffer.” And by his forehead, he twittered unheard, “They mean to suffocate us in their vile atmosphere. We must ask for larger poison-absorbing cylinders.”

            The Secretary of Defense said, “I am in sympathy with your feelings, and yet this may be my only opportunity to speak with you. Perhaps you would do us the honor to eat with us.”

            The Earthman next the Secretary could not forbear a quick and passing frown. He scribbled rapidly on a piece of paper and passed it to the Secretary, who glanced momentarily at it.

            It read, “No. They eat sulfuretted hay. Stinks unbearably.” The Secretary crumbled the note and let it drop.

            The Diabolus said, “The honor is ours. Were we physically able to endure your strange atmosphere for so long a time, we would accept most gratefully.”

            And via forehead, he said with agitation, “They cannot expect us to eat with them and watch them consume the corpses of dead animals. My cud would never be sweet again.”

            “We respect your reasons,” said the Secretary. “Let us then transact our business now. In the negotiations that have so far proceeded, we have been unable to obtain from your government, in the persons of you, their representatives, any clear indication as to what the boundaries of your sphere of influence are in your own minds. We have presented several proposals in this matter.”

            “As far as the territories of Earth are concerned, Mr. Secretary, a definition has been given.”

            “But surely you must see that this is unsatisfactory. The boundaries of Earth and your lands are nowhere in contact. So far, you have done nothing but state this fact. While true, the mere statement is not satisfying.”

            “We do not completely understand. Would you have us discuss the boundaries between ourselves and such independent human kingdoms as that of Vega?”

            “Why, yes.”

            “That cannot be done, sir. Surely, you realize that any relations between ourselves and the sovereign realm of Vega cannot be possibly any concern of Earth. They can be discussed only with Vega.”

            “Then you will negotiate a hundred times with the hundred human world systems?”

            “It is necessary. I would point out, however, that the necessity is imposed not by us but by the nature of your human organization.”

            “Then that limits our field of discussion drastically.” The Secretary seemed abstracted. He was listening, not exactly to the Diaboli opposite, but, rather, it would seem, to something at a distance.

            And now there was a faint commotion, barely heard from outside the Secretariat. The babble of distant voices, the brisk crackle of energy-guns muted by distance to nearly nothingness, and the hurried click-clacking of police hoppers.

            The Diaboli showed no indication of hearing, nor was this simply another affectation of politeness. If their capacity for receiving supersonic sound waves was far more delicate and acute than almost anything human ingenuity had ever invented, their reception for ordinary sound waves was rather dull.

            The Diabolus was saying, “We beg leave to state our surprise. We were of the opinion that all this was known to you.”

            A man in police uniform appeared in the doorway. The Secretary turned to him -and, with the briefest of nods, the policeman departed.

            The Secretary said suddenly and briskly, “Quite. I merely wished to ascertain once again that this was the case. I trust you will be ready to resume negotiations tomorrow?”

            “Certainly, sir.”

            One by one, slowly, with a dignity befitting the heirs of the universe, the Diaboli left.

            An Earthman said, “I’m glad they refused to eat with us.”

            “I knew they couldn’t accept,” said the Secretary, thoughtfully. “They’re vegetarian. They sicken thoroughly at the very thought of eating meat. I’ve seen them eat, you know. Not many humans have. They resemble our cattle in the business of eating. They bolt their food and then stand solemnly about in circles, chewing their cuds in a great community of thought. Perhaps they intercommunicate by a method we are unaware of. The huge lower jaw rotates horizontally in a slow, grinding process--”

            The policeman had once more appeared in the doorway.

            The Secretary broke off, and called, “You have them all?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Do you have Altmayer?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Good.”

            The crowd had gathered again when the five Diaboli emerged from the Secretariat. The schedule was strict. At 3:00 p.m. each day they left their suite and spent five minutes walking to the Secretariat. At 3:35, they emerged therefrom once again and returned to their suite, the way being kept clear by the police. They marched stolidly, almost mechanically, along the broad avenue.

            Halfway in their trek there came the sounds of shouting men. To most of the crowd, the words were not clear but there was the crackle of an energy-gun and the pale blue fluorescence split the air overhead. Police wheeled, their own energy-guns drawn, hoppers springing seven feet into the air, landing delicately in the midst of groups of people, touching none of them, jumping again almost instantly. People scattered and their voices were joined to the general uproar.

            Through it all, the Diaboli, either through defective hearing or excessive dignity, continued marching as mechanically as ever.

            At the other end of the gathering, almost diametrically opposing the region of excitement, Richard Sayama Altmayer stroked his nose in a moment of satisfaction. The strict chronology of the Diaboli had made a split-second plan possible. The first diversionary disturbance was only to attract the attention of the police. It was now--

            And he fired a harmless sound pellet into the air.

            Instantly, from four directions, concussion pellets split the air. From the roofs of buildings lining the way, snipers fired.

            Each of the Diaboli, torn by the shells, shuddered and exploded as the pellets detonated within them. One by one, they toppled.

            And from nowhere, the police were at Altmayer’s side. He stared at them with some surprise.

            Gently, for in twenty years he had lost his fury and learned to be gentle, he said, “You come quickly, but even so you come too late.” He gestured in the direction of the shattered Diaboli.

            The crowd was in simple panic now. Additional squadrons of police, arriving in record time, could do nothing more than herd them off into harmless directions.

            The policeman, who now held Altmayer in a firm grip, taking the sound gun from him and inspecting him quickly for further weapons, was a captain by rank. He said, stiffly, “I think you’ve made a mistake, Mr. Altmayer. You’ll notice you’ve drawn no blood.” And he, too, waved toward where the Diaboli lay motionless.

            Altmayer turned, startled. The creatures lay there on their sides, some in pieces, tattered skin shredding away, frames distorted and bent, but the police captain was correct. There was no blood, no flesh. Altmayer’s lips, pale and stiff, moved soundlessly.

            The police captain interpreted the motion accurately enough. He said, “You are correct, sir, they are robots.”

            And from the great doors of the Secretariat of Defense the true Diaboli emerged. Clubbing policemen cleared the way, but another way, so that they need not pass the sprawled travesties of plastic and aluminum which for three minutes had played the role of living creatures.

            The police captain said, “I’ll ask you to come without trouble, Mr. Altmayer. The Secretary of Defense would like to see you.”

            “I am coming, sir.” A stunned frustration was only now beginning to overwhelm him.

            Geoffrey Stock and Richard Altmayer faced one another for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, there in the Defense Secretary’s private office. It was a rather straitlaced office: a desk, an armchair, and two additional chairs. All were a dull brown in color, the chairs being topped by brown foamite which yielded to the body enough for comfort, not enough for luxury. There was a micro-viewer on the desk and a little cabinet big enough to hold several dozen opto-spools. On the wall opposite the desk was a trimensional view of the old Dauntless, the Secretary’s first command.

            Stock said, “It is a little ridiculous meeting like this after so many years. I find I am sorry.”

            “Sorry about what, Jeff?” Altmayer tried to force a smile, “I am sorry about nothing but that you tricked me with those robots.”

            “You were not difficult to trick,” said Stock, “and it was an excellent opportunity to break your party. I’m sure it will be quite discredited after this. The pacifist tries to force war; the apostle of gentleness tries assassination.”

            “War against the true enemy,” said Altmayer sadly. “But you are right. It is a sign of desperation that this was forced on me.” --Then, “How did you know my plans?”

            “You still overestimate humanity, Dick. In any conspiracy the weakest points are the people that compose it. You had twenty-five co-conspirators. Didn’t it occur to you that at least one of them might be an informer, or even an employee of mine?”

            A dull red burned slowly on Altmayer’s high cheekbones. “Which one?” he said.

            “Sorry. We may have to use him again.”

            Altmayer sat back in his chair wearily. “What have you gained?”

            “What have you gained? You are as impractical now as on that last day I saw you; the day you decided to go to jail rather than report for induction. You haven’t changed.”

            Altmayer shook his head, “The truth doesn’t change.”

            Stock said impatiently, “If it is truth, why does it always fail? Your stay in jail accomplished nothing. The war went on. Not one life was saved. Since then, you’ve started a political party; and every cause it has backed has failed. Your conspiracy has failed. You’re nearly fifty, Dick, and what have you accomplished? Nothing.”

            Altmayer said, “And you went to war, rose to command a ship, then to a place in the Cabinet. They say you will be the next Coordinator. You’ve accomplished a great deal. Yet success and failure do not exist in themselves. Success in what? Success in working the ruin of humanity. Failure in what? In saving it? I wouldn’t change places with you. Jeff, remember this. In a good cause, there are no failures; there are only delayed successes.”

            “Even if you are executed for this day’s work?”

            “Even if I am executed. There will be someone else to carry on, and his success will be my success.”

            “How do you envisage this success? Can you really see a union of worlds, a Galactic Federation? Do you want Santanni running our affairs? Do you want a Vegan telling you what to do? Do you want Earth to decide its own destiny or to be at the mercy of any random combination of powers?”

            “We would be at their mercy no more than they would be at ours.”

            “Except that we are the richest. We would be plundered for the sake of the depressed worlds of the Sirius Sector.”

            “And pay the plunder out of what we would save in the wars that would no longer occur.”

            “Do you have answers for all questions, Dick?”

            “In twenty years we have been asked all questions, Jeff.”

            “Then answer this one. How would you force this union of yours on unwilling humanity?”

            “That is why I wanted to kill the Diaboli.” For the first time, Altmayer showed agitation. “It would mean war with them, but all humanity would unite against the common enemy. Our own political and ideological differences would fade in the face of that.”

            “You really believe that? Even when the Diaboli have never harmed us? They cannot live on our worlds. They must remain on their own worlds of sulfide atmosphere and oceans which are sodium sulfate solutions.”

            “Humanity knows better, Jeff. They are spreading from world to world like an atomic explosion. They block space-travel into regions where there are unoccupied oxygen worlds, the kind we could use. They are planning for the future; making room for uncounted future generations of Diaboli, while we are being restricted to one corner of the Galaxy, and fighting ourselves to death. In a thousand years we will be their slaves; in ten thousand we will be extinct. Oh, yes, they are the common enemy. Mankind knows that. You will find that out sooner than you think, perhaps.”

            The Secretary said, “Your party members speak a great deal of ancient Greece of the preatomic age. They tell us that the Greeks were a marvelous people, the most culturally advanced of their time, perhaps of all times. They set mankind on the road it has never yet left entirely. They had only one flaw. They could not unite. They were conquered and eventually died out. And we follow in their footsteps now, eh?”

            “You have learned your lesson well, Jeff.”

            “But have you, Dick?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Did the Greeks have no common enemy against whom they could unite?”

            Altmayer was silent.

            Stock said, “The Greeks fought Persia, their great common enemy. Was it not a fact that a good proportion of the Greek states fought on the Persian side?”

            Altmayer said finally, “Yes. Because they thought Persian victory was inevitable and they wanted to be on the winning side.”

            “Human beings haven’t changed, Dick. Why do you suppose the Diaboli are here? What is it we are discussing?”

            “I am not a member of the government.”

            “No,” said Stock, savagely, “but I am. The Vegan League has allied itself with the Diaboli.”

            “I don’t believe you. It can’t be.”

            “It can be and is. The Diaboli have agreed to supply them with five hundred ships at any time they happen to be at war with Earth. In return, Vega abandons all claims to the Nigellian star cluster. So if you had really assassinated the Diaboli, it would have been war, but with half of humanity probably fighting on the side of your so-called common enemy. We are trying to prevent that.”

            Altmayer said slowly, “I am ready for trial. Or am I to be executed without one?”

            Stock said, “You are still foolish. If we shoot you, Dick, we make a martyr. If we keep you alive and shoot only your subordinates, you will be suspected of having turned state’s evidence. As a presumed traitor, you will be quite harmless in the future.”

            And so, on September 5th, 2788, Richard Sayama Altmayer, after the briefest of secret trials, was sentenced to five years in prison. He served his full term. The year he emerged from prison, Geoffrey Stock was elected Coordinator of Earth.

3--December 21, 2800

            Simon Devoire was not at ease. He was a little man, with sandy hair and a freckled, ruddy face. He said, “I’m sorry I agreed to see you, Altmayer. It won’t do you any good. It might do me harm.”

            Altmayer said, “I am an old man. I won’t hurt you.” And he was indeed a very old man somehow. The turn of the century found his years at two thirds of a century, but he was older than that, older inside and older outside. His clothes were too big for him, as if he were shrinking away inside them. Only his nose had not aged; it was still the thin, aristocratic, high-beaked Altmayer nose.

            Devoire said, “It’s not you I’m afraid of.”

            “Why not? Perhaps you think I betrayed the men of “88.”

            “No, of course not. No man of sense believes that you did. But the days of the Federalists are over, Altmayer.”

            Altmayer tried to smile. He felt a little hungry; he hadn’t eaten that day --no time for food. Was the day of the Federalists over? It might seem so to others. The movement had died on a wave of ridicule. A conspiracy that fails, a “lost cause,” is often romantic. It is remembered and draws adherents for generations, if the loss is at least a dignified one. But to shoot at living creatures and find the mark to be robots; to be outmaneuvered and outfoxed; to be made ridiculous--that is deadly. It is deadlier than treason, wrong, and sin. Not many had believed Altmayer had bargained for his life by betraying his associates, but the universal laughter killed Federalism as effectively as though they had.

            But Altmayer had remained stolidly stubborn under it all. He said, “The day of the Federalists will never be over, while the human race lives.”

            “Words,” said Devoire impatiently. “They meant more to me when I was younger. I am a little tired now.”

            “Simon, I need access to the subetheric system.”

            Devoire’s face hardened. He said, “And you thought of me. I’m sorry, Altmayer, but I can’t let you use my broadcasts for your own purposes.”

            “You were a Federalist once.”

            “Don’t rely on that,” said Devoire. “That’s in the past. Now I am-- nothing. I am a Devoirist, I suppose. I want to live.”

            “Even if it is under the feet of the Diaboli? Do you want to live when they are willing; die when they are ready?”

            “Words!”

            “Do you approve of the all-Galactic conference?”

            Devoire reddened past his usual pink level. He gave the sudden impression of a man with too much blood for his body. He said smolderingly, “Well, why not? What does it matter how we go about establishing the Federation of Man? If you’re still a Federalist, what have you to object to in a united humanity?”

            “United under the Diaboli?”

            “What’s the difference? Humanity can’t unite by itself. Let us be driven to it, as long as the fact is accomplished. I am sick of it all, Altmayer, sick of all our stupid history. I’m tired of trying to be an idealist with nothing to be idealistic over. Human beings are human beings and that’s the nasty part of it. Maybe we’ve got to be whipped into line. If so, I’m perfectly willing to let the Diaboli do the whipping.”

            Altmayer said gently, “You’re very foolish, Devoire. It won’t be a real union, you know that. The Diaboli called this conference so that they might act as umpires on all current interhuman disputes to their own advantage, and remain the supreme court of judgment over us hereafter. You know they have no intention of establishing a real central human government. It will only be a sort of interlocking directorate; each human government will conduct its own affairs as before and pull in various directions as before. It is simply that we will grow accustomed to running to the Diaboli with our little problems.”

            “How do you know that will be the result?”

            “Do you seriously think any other result is possible?”

            Devoire chewed at his lower lip, “Maybe not!”

            “Then see through a pane of glass, Simon. Any true independence we now have will be lost.”

            “A lot of good this independence has ever done us. --Besides, what’s the use? We can’t stop this thing. Coordinator Stock is probably no keener on the conference than you are, but that doesn’t help him. If Earth doesn’t attend, the union will be formed without us, and then we will face war with the rest of humanity and the Diaboli. And that goes for any other government that wants to back out.”

            “What if all the governments back out? Wouldn’t the conference break up completely?”

            “Have you ever known all the human governments to do anything together? You never learn, Altmayer.”

            “There are new facts involved.”

            “Such as? I know I am foolish for asking, but go ahead.”

            Altmayer said, “For twenty years most of the Galaxy has been shut to human ships. You know that. None of us has the slightest notion of what goes on within the Diaboli sphere of influence. And yet some human colonies exist within that sphere.”

            “So?”

            “So occasionally, human beings escape into the small portion of the Galaxy that remains human and free. The government of Earth receives reports; reports which they don’t dare make public. But not all officials of the government can stand the cowardice involved in such actions forever. One of them has been to see me. I can’t tell you which one, of course-- So I have documents, Devoire; official, reliable, and true.”

            Devoire shrugged, “About what?” He turned the desk chronometer rather ostentatiously so that Altmayer could see its gleaming metal face on which the red, glowing figures stood out sharply. They read 22:31, and even as it was turned, the 1 faded and the new glow of a 2 appeared.

            Altmayer said, “There is a planet called by its colonists Chu Hsi. It did not have a large population; two million, perhaps. Fifteen years ago the Diaboli occupied worlds on various sides of it; and in all those fifteen years, no human ship ever landed on the planet. Last year the Diaboli themselves landed. They brought with them huge freight ships filled with sodium sulfate and bacterial cultures that are native to their own worlds.”

            “What? --You can’t make me believe it.”

            “Try,” said Altmayer, ironically. “It is not difficult. Sodium sulfate will dissolve in the oceans of any world. In a sulfate ocean, their bacteria will grow, multiply, and produce hydrogen sulfide in tremendous quantities which will fill the oceans and the atmosphere. They can then introduce their plants and animals and eventually themselves. Another planet will be suitable for Diaboli life--and unsuitable for any human. It would take time, surely, but the Diaboli have time. They are a united people and . . .”

            “Now, look,” Devoire waved his hand in disgust, “that just doesn’t hold water. The Diaboli have more worlds than they know what to do with.”

            “For their present purposes, yes, but the Diaboli are creatures that look toward the future. Their birth rate is high and eventually they will fill the Galaxy. And how much better off they would be if they were the only intelligence in the universe.”

            “But it’s impossible on purely physical grounds. Do you know how many millions of tons of sodium sulfate it would take to fill up the oceans to their requirements?”

            “Obviously a planetary supply.”

            “Well, then, do you suppose they would strip one of their own worlds to create a new one? Where is the gain?”

            “Simon, Simon, there are millions of planets in the Galaxy which through atmospheric conditions, temperature, or gravity are forever uninhabitable either to humans or to Diaboli. Many of these are quite adequately rich in sulfur.”

            Devoire considered, “What about the human beings on the planet?”

            “On Chu Hsi? Euthanasia--except for the few who escaped in time. Painless I suppose. The Diaboli are not needlessly cruel, merely efficient.”

            Altmayer waited. Devoire’s fist clenched and unclenched.

            Altmayer said, “Publish this news. Spread it out on the interstellar subetheric web. Broadcast the documents to the reception centers on the various worlds. You can do it, and when you do, the all-Galactic conference will fall apart.”

            Devoire’s chair tilted forward. He stood up. “Where’s your proof?”

            “Will you do it?”

            “I want to see your proof.”

            Altmayer smiled, “Come with me.”

            They were waiting for him when he came back to the furnished room he was living in. He didn’t notice them at first. He was completely unaware of the small vehicle that followed him at a slow pace and a prudent distance. He walked with his head bent, calculating the length of time it would take for Devoire to put the information through the reaches of space; how long it would take for the receiving stations on Vega and Santanni and Centaurus to blast out the news; how long it would take to spread it over the entire Galaxy. And in this way he passed, unheeding, between the two plain-clothes men who flanked the entrance of the rooming house.

            It was only when he opened the door to his own room that he stopped and turned to leave but the plain-clothes men were behind him now. He made no attempt at violent escape. He entered the room instead and sat down, feeling so old. He thought feverishly. I need only hold them off an hour and ten minutes.

            The man who occupied the darkness reached up and flicked the switch that allowed the wall lights to operate. In the soft wall glow, the man’s round face and balding gray-fringed head were startlingly clear.

            Altmayer said gently, “I am honored with a visit by the Coordinator himself.”

            And Stock said, “We are old friends, you and I, Dick. We meet every once in a while.”

            Altmayer did not answer.

            Stock said, “You have certain government papers in your possession, Dick.”

            Altmayer said, “If you think so, Jeff, you’ll have to find them.”

            Stock rose wearily to his feet. “No heroics, Dick. Let me tell you what those papers contained. They were circumstantial reports of the sulfation of the planet, Chu Hsi. Isn’t that true?”

            Altmayer looked at the clock.

            Stock said, “If you are planning to delay us, to angle us as though we were fish, you will be disappointed. We know where you’ve been, we know Devoire has the papers, we know exactly what he’s planning to do with them.”

            Altmayer stiffened. The thin parchment of his cheeks trembled. He said, “How long have you known?”

            “As long as you have, Dick. You are a very predictable man. It is the very reason we decided to use you. Do you suppose the Recorder would really come to see you as he did, without our knowledge?”

            “I don’t understand.”

            Stock said, “The Government of Earth, Dick, is not anxious that the all-Galactic conference be continued. However, we are not Federalists; we know humanity for what it is. What do you suppose would happen if the rest of the Galaxy discovered that the Diaboli were in the process of changing a salt-oxygen world into a sulfate-sulfide one?

            “No, don’t answer. You are Dick Altmayer and I’m sure you’d tell me that with one fiery burst of indignation, they’d abandon the conference, join together in a loving and brotherly union, throw themselves at the Diaboli, and overwhelm them.”

            Stock paused such a long time that for a moment it might have seemed he would say no more. Then he continued in half a whisper, “Nonsense. The other worlds would say that the Government of Earth for purposes of its own had initiated a fraud, had forged documents in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the conference. The Diaboli would deny everything, and most of the human worlds would find it to their interests to believe the denial. They would concentrate on the iniquities of Earth and forget about the iniquities of the Diaboli. So you see, we could sponsor no such expose.”

            Altmayer felt drained, futile. “Then you will stop Devoire. It is always that you are so sure of failure beforehand; that you believe the worst of your fellow man--”

            “Wait! I said nothing of stopping Devoire. I said only that the government could not sponsor such an expose and we will not. But the expose will take place just the same, except that afterward we will arrest Devoire and yourself and denounce the whole thing as vehemently as will the Diaboli. The whole affair would then be changed. The Government of Earth will have dissociated itself from the claims. It will then seem to the rest of the human government that for our own selfish purposes we are trying to hide the actions of the Diaboli, that we have, perhaps, a special understanding with them. They will fear that special understanding and unite against us. But then to be against us will mean that they are also against the Diaboli. They will insist on believing the expose to be the truth, the documents to be real--and the conference will break up.”

            “It will mean war again,” said Altmayer hopelessly, “and not against the real enemy. It will mean fighting among the humans and a victory all the greater for the Diaboli when it is all over.”

            “No war,” said Stock. “No government will attack Earth with the Diaboli on our side. The other governments will merely draw away from us and grind a permanent anti-Diaboli bias into their propaganda. Later, if there should be war between ourselves and the Diaboli, the other governments will at least remain neutral.”

            He looks very old, thought Altmayer. We are all old, dying men. Aloud, he said, “Why would you expect the Diaboli to back Earth? You may fool the rest of mankind by pretending to attempt suppression of the facts concerning the planet Chu Hsi, but you won’t fool the Diaboli. They won’t for a moment believe Earth to be sincere in its claim that it believes the documents to be forgeries.”

            “Ah, but they will.” Geoffrey Stock stood up, “You see, the documents are forgeries. The Diaboli may be planning sulfation of planets in the future, but to our knowledge, they have not tried it yet.”

            On December 21, 2800, Richard Sayama Altmayer entered prison for the third and last time. There was no trial, no definite sentence, and scarcely a real imprisonment in the literal sense of the word. His movements were confined and only a few officials were allowed to communicate with him, but otherwise his comforts were looked to assiduously. He had no access to news, of course, so that he was not aware that in the second year of this third imprisonment of his, the war between Earth and the Diaboli opened with the surprise attack near Sirius by an Earth squadron upon certain ships of the Diaboli navy.

            In 2802, Geoffrey Stock came to visit Altmayer in his confinement. Altmayer rose in surprise to greet him.

            “You’re looking well, Dick,” Stock said.

            He himself was not. His complexion had grayed. He still wore his naval captain’s uniform, but his body stooped slightly within it. He was to die within the year, a fact of which he was not completely unaware. It did not bother him much. He thought repeatedly, I have lived the years I’ve had to live.

            Altmayer, who looked the older of the two, had yet more than nine years to live. He said, “An unexpected pleasure, Jeff, but this time you can’t have come to imprison me. I’m in prison already.”

            “I’ve come to set you free, if you would like.”

            “For what purpose, Jeff? Surely you have a purpose? A clever way of using me?”

            Stock’s smile was merely a momentary twitch. He said, “A way of using you, truly, but this time you will approve. . . . We are at war.”

            “With whom?” Altmayer was startled.

            “With the Diaboli. We have been at war for six months.”

            Altmayer brought his hands together, thin fingers interlacing nervously, “I’ve heard nothing of this.”

            “I know.” The Coordinator clasped his hands behind his back and was distantly surprised to find that they were trembling. He said, “It’s been a long journey for the two of us, Dick. We’ve had the same goal, you and I-- No, let me speak. I’ve often wanted to explain my point of view to you, but you would never have understood. You weren’t the kind of man to understand, until I had the results for you. --I was twenty-five when I first visited a Diaboli world, Dick. I knew then it was either they or we.”

            “I said so,” whispered Altmayer, “from the first.”

            “Merely saying so was not enough. You wanted to force the human governments to unite against them and that notion was politically unrealistic and completely impossible. It wasn’t even desirable. Humans are not Diaboli. Among the Diaboli individual consciousness is low, almost nonexistent. Ours is almost overpowering. They have no such thing as politics; we have nothing else. They can never disagree, can have nothing but a single government. We can never agree; if we had a single island to live on, we would split it in three.

            “But our very disagreements are our strength! Your Federalist party used to speak of ancient Greece a great deal once. Do you remember? But your people always missed the point. To be sure, Greece could never unite and was therefore ultimately conquered. But even in her state of disunion, she defeated the gigantic Persian Empire. Why?

            “I would like to point out that the Greek city-states over centuries had fought with one another. They were forced to specialize in things military to an extent far beyond the Persians. Even the Persians themselves realized that, and in the last century of their imperial existence, Greek mercenaries formed the most valued parts of their armies.

            “The same might be said of the small nation-states of preatomic Europe, which in centuries of fighting had advanced their military arts to the point where they could overcome and hold for two hundred years the comparatively gigantic empires of Asia.

            “So it is with us. The Diaboli, with vast extents of galactic space, have never fought a war. Their military machine is massive, but untried. In fifty years, only such advances have been made by them as they have been able to copy from the various human navies. Humanity, on the other hand, has competed ferociously in warfare, Each government has raced to keep ahead of its neighbors in military science. They’ve had to! It was our own disunion that made the terrible race for survival necessary, so that in the end almost any one of us was a match for all the Diaboli, provided only that none of us would fight on their side in a general war.

            “It was toward the prevention of such a development that all of Earth’s diplomacy has been aimed. Until it was certain that in a war between Earth and the Diaboli, the rest of humanity would be at least neutral, there could be no war, and no union of human governments could be allowed, since the race for military perfection must continue. Once we were sure of neutrality, through the hoax that broke up the conference two years ago, we sought the war, and now we have it.”

            Altmayer, through all this, might have been frozen. It was a long time before he could say anything.

            Finally, “What if the Diaboli are victorious after all?”

            Stock said, “They aren’t. Two weeks ago, the main fleets joined action and theirs was annihilated with practically no loss to ourselves, although we were greatly outnumbered. We might have been fighting unarmed ships. We had stronger weapons of greater range and more accurate sighting. We had three times their effective speed since we had antiacceleration devices which they lacked. Since the battle a dozen of the other human governments have decided to join the winning side and have declared war on the Diaboli. Yesterday the Diaboli requested that negotiations for an armistice be opened. The war is practically over; and henceforward the Diaboli will be confined to their original planets with only such future expansions as we permit.”

            Altmayer murmured incoherently.

            Stock said, “And now union becomes necessary. After the defeat of Persia by the Greek city-states, they were ruined because of their continued wars among themselves, so that first Macedon and then Rome conquered them. After Europe colonized the Americas, cut up Africa, and conquered Asia, a series of continued European wars led to European ruin.

            “Disunion until conquest; union thereafter! But now union is easy. Let one subdivision succeed by itself and the rest will clamor to become part of that success. The ancient writer, Toynbee, first pointed out this difference between what he called a ‘dominant minority’ and a ‘creative minority.’

            “We are a creative minority now. In an almost spontaneous gesture, various human governments have suggested the formation of a United Worlds organization. Over seventy governments are willing to attend the first sessions in order to draw up a Charter of Federation. The others will join later, I am sure. We would like you to be one of the delegates from Earth, Dick.”

            Altmayer found his eyes flooding, “I--I don’t understand your purpose. Is this all true?”

            “It is all exactly as I say. You were a voice in the wilderness, Dick, crying for union. Your words will carry much weight. What did you once say: ‘In a good cause, there are no failures.’ “

            “No!” said Altmayer, with sudden energy. “It seems your cause was the good one.”

            Stock’s face was hard and devoid of emotion, “You were always a misunderstander of human nature, Dick. When the United Worlds is a reality and when generations of men and women look back to these days of war through their centuries of unbroken peace, they will have forgotten the purpose of my methods. To them they will represent war and death. Your calls for union, your idealism, will be remembered forever.”

            He turned away and Altmayer barely caught his last words: “And when they build their statues, they will build none for me.”

            In the Great Court, which stands as a patch of untouched peace among the fifty busy square miles devoted to the towering buildings that are the pulse beat of the United Worlds of the Galaxy, stands a statue . . .

---

Easily the most frequently asked question put to any writer of science fiction stories is: “Where do you get your ideas?”

            I imagine the person who asks the question is sure that there is some mysterious kind of inspiration that can only be produced by odd and possibly illicit means, or that the writer goes through an eldritch ritual that may even involve calling up the devil.

            But the answer is only, “You can get an idea from anything if you are willing to think hard enough and long enough.”

            That long-and-hard bit seems to disillusion people. Their admiration for you drops precipitously and you get the feeling you have exposed yourself as an imposter. After all, if long-and-hard is all it takes, anyone can do it.

            Strange, then, that so few do. Anyway, my wife once broke down and asked me that question even though she knows I dislike having it asked. We had moved to the Boston area in 1949, when I took my position with Boston University School of Medicine, and periodically we made a train trip back to New York to visit our respective families.

            Once, on one of those train trips, perhaps out of boredom, she asked The Question. I said, “From anything. I can probably get one out of this train trip, if I try.”

            “Go ahead,” she said, naturally enough. So I thought hard and told her the story of a train trip which, when I got back home, I typed up in permanent form and called “What If--.”

            The story is unusual for me in another respect, too. I am not strong on romance in my stories. Why that should be, I will leave to the parlor psychoanalyst. I merely state the fact.

            Sometimes, I do have women in my stories. On rare occasions, as in “Hostess,” the woman is even the protagonist. But even then romance is a minor factor, if it appears at all.

            In “What If--,” however, the story is all romance. Each time I think of that, the fact startles me. I believe it is the only one of my many stories that is all serious (as opposed to ribald) romance. Heavens!

            First appearance--Fantastic, Summer 1952. Copyright, 1952, by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

What If--

            Norman and Liwy were late, naturally, since catching a train is always a matter of last-minute delays, so they had to take the only available seat in the coach. It was the one toward the front; the one with nothing before it but the seat that faced wrong way, with its back hard against the front partition. While Norman heaved the suitcase onto the rack, Liwy found herself chafing a little.

            If a couple took the wrong-way seat before them, they would be staring self-consciously into each others’ faces all the hours it would take to reach New York; or else, which was scarcely better, they would have to erect synthetic barriers of newspaper. Still, there was no use in taking a chance on there being another unoccupied double seat elsewhere in the train.

            Norman didn’t seem to mind, and that was a little disappointing to Liwy. Usually they held their moods in common. That, Norman claimed, was why he remained sure that he had married the right girl.

            He would say, “We fit each other, Liwy, and that’s the key fact. When you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle and one piece fits another, that’s it. There are no other possibilities, and of course there are no other girls.”

            And she would laugh and say, “If you hadn’t been on the streetcar that day, you would probably never have met me. What would you have done then?”

            “Stayed a bachelor. Naturally. Besides, I would have met you through Georgette another day.”

            “It wouldn’t have been the same.”

            “Sure it would.”

            “No, it wouldn’t. Besides, Georgette would never have introduced me. She was interested in you herself, and she’s the type who knows better than to create a possible rival.”

            “What nonsense.”

            Livvy asked her favorite question: “Norman, what if you had been one minute later at the streetcar corner and had taken the next car? What do you suppose would have happened?”

            “And what if fish had wings and all of them flew to the top of the mountains? What would we have to eat on Fridays then?”

            But they had caught the streetcar, and fish didn’t have wings, so that now they had been married five years and ate fish on Fridays. And because they had been married five years, they were going to celebrate by spending a week in New York.

            Then she remembered the present problem. “I wish we could have found some other seat.”

            Norman said, “Sure. So do I. But no one has taken it yet, so we’ll have relative privacy as far as Providence, anyway.”

            Livvy was unconsoled, and felt herself justified when a plump little man walked down the central aisle of the coach. Now, where had he come from? The train was halfway between Boston and Providence, and if he had had a seat, why hadn’t he kept it? She took out her vanity and considered her reflection. She had a theory that if she ignored the little man, he would pass by. So she concentrated on her light-brown hair which, in the rush of catching the train, had become disarranged just a little; at her blue eyes, and at her little mouth with the plump lips which Norman said looked like a permanent kiss.

            Not bad, she thought.

            Then she looked up, and the little man was in the seat opposite. He caught her eye and grinned widely. A series of lines curled about the edges of his smile. He lifted his hat hastily and put it down beside him on top of the little black box he had been carrying. A circle of white hair instantly sprang up stiffly about the large bald spot that made the center of his skull a desert.

            She could not help smiling back a little, but then she caught sight of the black box again and the smile faded. She yanked at Norman’s elbow.

            Norman looked up from his newspaper. He had startlingly dark eyebrows that almost met above the bridge of his nose, giving him a formidable first appearance. But they and the dark eyes beneath bent upon her now with only the usual look of pleased and somewhat amused affection.

            He said, “What’s up?” He did not look at the plump little man opposite.

            Livvy did her best to indicate what she saw by a little unobtrusive gesture of her hand and head. But the little man was watching and she felt a fool, since Norman simply stared at her blankly.

            Finally she pulled him closer and whispered, “Don’t you see what’s printed on his box?”

            She looked again as she said it, and there was no mistake. It was not very prominent, but the light caught it slantingly and it was a slightly more glistening area on a black background. In flowing script it said, “What If.”

            The little man was smiling again. He nodded his head rapidly and pointed to the words and then to himself several times over.

            Norman said in an aside, “Must be his name.”

            Liwy replied, “Oh, how could that be anybody’s name?”

            Norman put his paper aside. “I’ll show you.” He leaned over and said, “Mr. If?”

            The little man looked at him eagerly.

            “Do you have the time, Mr. If?”

            The little man took out a large watch from his vest pocket and displayed the dial.

            “Thank you, Mr. If,” said Norman. And again in a whisper, “See, Liwy.”

            He would have returned to his paper, but the little man was opening his box and raising a finger periodically as he did so, to enforce their attention. It was just a slab of frosted glass that he removed--about six by nine inches in length and width and perhaps an inch thick. It had beveled edges, rounded corners, and was completely featureless. Then he took out a little wire stand on which the glass slab fitted comfortably. He rested the combination on his knees and looked proudly at them.

            Liwy said, with sudden excitement, “Heavens, Norman, it’s a picture of some sort.”

            Norman bent close. Then he looked at the little man. “What’s this? A new kind of television?”

            The little man shook his head, and Liwy said, “No, Norman, it’s us.”

            “What?”

            “Don’t you see? That’s the streetcar we met on. There you are in the back seat wearing that old fedora I threw away three years ago. And that’s Georgette and myself getting on. The fat lady’s in the way. Now! Can’t you see us?”

            He muttered, “It’s some sort of illusion.”

            “But you see it too, don’t you? That’s why he calls this ‘What If.’ It will show us what if. What if the streetcar hadn’t swerved . . .”

            She was sure of it. She was very excited and very sure of it. As she looked at the picture in the glass slab, the late afternoon sunshine grew dimmer and the inchoate chatter of the passengers around and behind them began fading.

            How she remembered that day. Norman knew Georgette and had been about to surrender his seat to her when the car swerved and threw Liwy into his lap. It was such a ridiculously corny situation, but it had worked. She had been so embarrassed that he was forced first into gallantry and then into conversation. An introduction from Georgette was not even necessary. By the time they got off the streetcar, he knew where she worked.

            She could still remember Georgette glowering at her, sulkily forcing a smile when they themselves separated. Georgette said, “Norman seems to like you.”

            Livvy replied, “Oh, don’t be silly! He was just being polite. But he is nice-looking, isn’t he?”

            It was only six months after that that they married.

            And now here was that same streetcar again, with Norman and herself and Georgette. As she thought that, the smooth train noises, the rapid clack-clack of the wheels, vanished completely. Instead, she was in the swaying confines of the streetcar. She had just boarded it with Georgette at the previous stop.

            Liwy shifted weight with the swaying of the streetcar, as did forty others, sitting and standing, all to the same monotonous and rather ridiculous rhythm. She said, “Somebody’s motioning at you, Georgette. Do you know him?”

            “At me?” Georgette directed a deliberately casual glance over her shoulder. Her artificially long eyelashes flickered. She said, “I know him a little. What do you suppose he wants?”

            “Let’s find out,” said Livvy. She felt pleased and a little wicked.

            Georgette had a well-known habit of hoarding her male acquaintances, and it was rather fun to annoy her this way. And besides, this one seemed quite . . . interesting.

            She snaked past the line of standees, and Georgette followed without enthusiasm. It was just as Livvy arrived opposite the young man’s seat that the streetcar lurched heavily as it rounded a curve. Liwy snatched desperately in the direction of the straps. Her fingertips caught and she held on. It was a long moment before she could breathe. For some reason, it had seemed that there were no straps close enough to be reached. Somehow, she felt that by all the laws of nature she should have fallen.

            The young man did not look at her. He was smiling at Georgette and rising from his seat. He had astonishing eyebrows that gave him a rather competent and self-confident appearance. Liwy decided that she definitely liked him.

            Georgette was saying, “Oh no, don’t bother. We’re getting off in about two stops.”

            They did. Livvy said, “I thought we were going to Sach’s.”

            “We are. There’s just something I remember having to attend to here. It won’t take but a minute.”

            “Next stop, Providence!” the loud-speakers were blaring. The train was slowing and the world of the past had shrunk itself into the glass slab once more. The little man was still smiling at them.

            Liwy turned to Norman. She felt a little frightened. “Were you through all that, too?”

            He said, “What happened to the time? We can’t be reaching Providence yet?” He looked at his watch. “I guess we are.” Then, to Liwy, “You didn’t fall that time.”

            “Then you did see it?” She frowned. “Now, that’s like Georgette. I’m sure there was no reason to get off the streetcar except to prevent my meeting you. How long had you known Georgette before then, Norman?”

            “Not very long. Just enough to be able to recognize her at sight and to feel that I ought to offer her my seat.”

            Liwy curled her lip.

            Norman grinned, “You can’t be jealous of a might-have-been, kid. Besides, what difference would it have made? I’d have been sufficiently interested in you to work out a way of meeting you.”

            “You didn’t even look at me.”

            “I hardly had the chance.”

            “Then how would you have met me?”

            “Some way. I don’t know how. But you’ll admit this is a rather foolish argument we’re having.”

            They were leaving Providence. Liwy felt a trouble in her mind. The little man had been following their whispered conversation, with only the loss of his smile to show that he understood. She said to him, “Can you show us more?”

            Norman interrupted, “Wait now, Liwy. What are you going to try to do?”

            She said, “I want to see our wedding day. What it would have been if I had caught the strap.”

            Norman was visibly annoyed. “Now, that’s not fair. We might not have been married on the same day, you know.”

            But she said, “Can you show it to me, Mr. If?” and the little man nodded.

            The slab of glass was coming alive again, glowing a little. Then the light collected and condensed into figures. A tiny sound of organ music was in Liwy’s ears without there actually being sound.

            Norman said with relief, “Well, there I am. That’s our wedding. Are you satisfied?”

            The train sounds were disappearing again, and the last thing Liwy heard was her own voice saying, “Yes, there you are. But where am I?”

            Liwy was well back in the pews. For a while she had not expected to attend at all. In the past months she had drifted further and further away from Georgette, without quite knowing why. She had heard of her engagement only through a mutual friend, and, of course, it was to Norman. She remembered very clearly that day, six months before, when she had first seen him on the streetcar. It was the time Georgette had so quickly snatched her out of sight. She had met him since on several occasions, but each time Georgette was with him, standing between.

            Well, she had no cause for resentment; the man was certainly none of hers. Georgette, she thought, looked more beautiful than she really was. And he was very handsome indeed.

            She felt sad and rather empty, as though something had gone wrong-- something that she could not quite outline in her mind. Georgette had moved up the aisle without seeming to see her, but earlier she had caught his eyes and smiled at him. Liwy thought he had smiled in return.

            She heard the words distantly as they drifted back to her, “I now pronounce you--”

            The noise of the train was back. A woman swayed down the aisle, herding a little boy back to their seats. There were intermittent bursts of girlish laughter from a set of four teenage girls halfway down the coach. A conductor hurried past on some mysterious errand.

            Liwy was frozenly aware of it all.

            She sat there, staring straight ahead, while the trees outside blended into a fuzzy, furious green and the telephone poles galloped past.

            She said, “It was she you married.”

            He stared at her for a moment and then one side of his mouth quirked a little. He said lightly, “I didn’t really, Olivia. You’re still my wife, you know. Just think about it for a few minutes.”

            She turned to him. “Yes, you married me--because I fell in your lap. If I hadn’t, you would have married Georgette. If she hadn’t wanted you, you would have married someone else. You would have married anybody. So much for your jigsaw-puzzle pieces.”

            Norman said very slowly, “Well--I’ll--be--darned!” He put both hands to his head and smoothed down the straight hair over his ears where it had a tendency to tuft up. For the moment it gave him the appearance of trying to hold his head together. He said, “Now, look here, Liwy, you’re making a silly fuss over a stupid magician’s trick. You can’t blame me for something I haven’t done.”

            “You would have done it.”

            “How do you know?”

            “You’ve seen it.”

            “I’ve seen a ridiculous piece of--of hypnotism, I suppose.” His voice suddenly raised itself into anger. He turned to the little man opposite. “Off with you, Mr. If, or whatever your name is. Get out of here. We don’t want you. Get out before I throw your little trick out the window and you after it.”

            Liwy yanked at his elbow. “Stop it. Stop it! You’re in a crowded train.”

            The little man shrank back into the comer of the seat as far as he could go and held his little black bag behind him. Norman looked at him, then at Liwy, then at the elderly lady across the way who was regarding him with patent disapproval.

            He turned pink and bit back a pungent remark. They rode in frozen silence to and through New London.

            Fifteen minutes past New London, Norman said, “Liwy!”

            She said nothing. She was looking out the window but saw nothing but the glass.

            He said again, “Liwy! Liwy! Answer me!”

            She said dully, “What do you want?”

            He said, “Look, this is all nonsense. I don’t know how the fellow does it, but even granting it’s legitimate, you’re not being fair. Why stop where you did? Suppose I had married Georgette, do you suppose you would have stayed single? For all I know, you were already married at the time of my supposed wedding. Maybe that’s why I married Georgette.”

            “I wasn’t married.”

            “How do you know?”

            “I would have been able to tell. I knew what my own thoughts were.”

            “Then you would have been married within the next year.”

            Liwy grew angrier. The fact that a sane remnant within her clamored at the unreason of her anger did not soothe her. It irritated her further, instead. She said, “And if I did, it would be no business of yours, certainly.”

            “Of course it wouldn’t. But it would make the point that in the world of reality we can’t be held responsible for the ‘what ifs.’ “

            Liwy’s nostrils flared. She said nothing.

            Norman said, “Look! You remember the big New Year’s celebration at Winnie’s place year before last?”

            “I certainly do. You spilled a keg of alcohol all over me.”

            “That’s beside the point, and besides, it was only a cocktail shaker’s worth. What I’m trying to say is that Winnie is just about your best friend and had been long before you married me.”

            “What of it?”

            “Georgette was a good friend of hers too, wasn’t she?”

            “Yes.”

            “All right, then. You and Georgette would have gone to the party regardless of which one of you I had married. I would have had nothing to do with it. Let him show us the party as it would have been if I had married Georgette, and I’ll bet you’d be there with either your fiancé or your husband.”

            Liwy hesitated. She felt honestly afraid of just that.

            He said, “Are you afraid to take the chance?”

            And that, of course, decided her. She turned on him furiously. “No, I’m not! And I hope I am married. There’s no reason I should pine for you. What’s more, I’d like to see what happens when you spill the shaker all over

            Georgette. She’ll fill both your ears for you, and in public, too. I know her. Maybe you’ll see a certain difference in the jigsaw pieces then.” She faced forward and crossed her arms angrily and firmly across her chest.

            Norman looked across at the little man, but there was no need to say anything. The glass slab was on his lap already. The sun slanted in from the west, and the white foam of hair that topped his head was edged with pink.

            Norman said tensely, “Ready?”

            Liwy nodded and let the noise of the train slide away again.

            Liwy stood, a little flushed with recent cold, in the doorway. She had just removed her coat, with its sprinkling of snow, and her bare arms were still rebelling at the touch of open air.

            She answered the shouts that greeted her with “Happy New Years” of her own, raising her voice to make herself heard over the squealing of the radio. Georgette’s shrill tones were almost the first thing she heard upon entering, and now she steered toward her. She hadn’t seen Georgette, or Norman, in weeks.

            Georgette lifted an eyebrow, a mannerism she had lately cultivated, and said, “Isn’t anyone with you, Olivia?” Her eyes swept the immediate surroundings and then returned to Liwy.

            Liwy said indifferently, “I think Dick will be around later. There was something or other he had to do first.” She felt as indifferent as she sounded.

            Georgette smiled tightly. “Well, Norman’s here. That ought to keep you from being lonely, dear. At least, it’s turned out that way before.”

            And as she said so, Norman sauntered in from the kitchen. He had a cocktail shaker in his hand, and the rattling of ice cubes castanetted his words. “Line up, you rioting revelers, and get a mixture that will really revel your riots-- Why, Liwy!”

            He walked toward her, grinning his welcome, “Where’ve you been keeping yourself? I haven’t seen you in twenty years, seems like. What’s the matter? Doesn’t Dick want anyone else to see you?”

            “Fill my glass, Norman,” said Georgette sharply.

            “Right away,” he said, not looking at her. “Do you want one too, Liwy? I’ll get you a glass.” He turned, and everything happened at once.

            Liwy cried, “Watch out!” She saw it coming, even had a vague feeling that all this had happened before, but it played itself out inexorably. His heel caught the edge of the carpet; he lurched, tried to right himself, and lost the cocktail shaker. It seemed to jump out of his hands, and a pint of ice-cold liquor drenched Liwy from shoulder to hem.

            She stood there, gasping. The noises muted about her, and for a few intolerable moments she made futile brushing gestures at her gown, while Norman kept repeating, “Damnation!” in rising tones.

            Georgette said coolly, “It’s too bad, Liwy. Just one of those things. I imagine the dress can’t be very expensive.”

            Liwy turned and ran. She was in the bedroom, which was at least empty and relatively quiet. By the light of the fringe-shaded lamp on the dresser, she poked among the coats on the bed, looking for her own.

            Norman had come in behind her. “Look, Liwy, don’t pay any attention to what she said. I’m really devilishly sorry. I’ll pay--”

            “That’s all right. It wasn’t your fault.” She blinked rapidly and didn’t look at him. “I’ll just go home and change.”

            “Are you coming back?”

            “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

            “Look, Liwy . . .” His warm fingers were on her shoulders--

            Liwy felt a queer tearing sensation deep inside her, as though she were ripping away from clinging cobwebs and--

            --and the train noises were back.

            Something did go wrong with the time when she was in there--in the slab. It was deep twilight now. The train lights were on. But it didn’t matter. She seemed to be recovering from the wrench inside her.

            Norman was rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “What happened?”

            Liwy said, “It just ended. Suddenly.”

            Norman said uneasily, “You know, we’ll be putting into New Haven soon.” He looked at his watch and shook his head.

            Liwy said wonderingly, “You spilled it on me.”

            “Well, so I did in real life.”

            “But in real life I was your wife. You ought to have spilled it on Georgette this time. Isn’t that queer?” But she was thinking of Norman pursuing her; his hands on her shoulders. . . .

            She looked up at him and said with warm satisfaction, “I wasn’t married.”

            “No, you weren’t. But was that Dick Reinhardt you were going around with?”

            “Yes.”

            “You weren’t planning to marry him, were you, Liwy?”

            “Jealous, Norman?”

            Norman looked confused. “Of that? Of a slab of glass? Of course not.”

            “I don’t think I would have married him.”

            Norman said, “You know, I wish it hadn’t ended when it did. There was something that was about to happen, I think.” He stopped, then added slowly, “It was as though I would rather have done it to anybody else in the room.”

            “Even to Georgette.”

            “I wasn’t giving two thoughts to Georgette. You don’t believe me, I suppose.”

            “Maybe I do.” She looked up at him. “I’ve been silly, Norman. Let’s-- let’s live our real life. Let’s not play with all the things that just might have been.”

            But he caught her hands. “No, Liwy. One last time. Let’s see what we would have been doing right now, Liwy! This very minute! If I had married Georgette.”

            Liwy was a little frightened. “Let’s not, Norman.” She was thinking of his eyes, smiling hungrily at her as he held the shaker, while Georgette stood beside her, unregarded. She didn’t want to know what happened afterward. She just wanted this life now, this good life.

            New Haven came and went.

            Norman said again, “I want to try, Liwy.”

            She said, “If you want to, Norman.” She decided fiercely that it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would matter. Her hands reached out and encircled his arm. She held it tightly, and while she held it she thought: “Nothing in the make-believe can take him from me.”

            Norman said to the little man, “Set ‘em up again.”

            In the yellow light the process seemed to be slower. Gently the frosted slab cleared, like clouds being torn apart and dispersed by an unfelt wind.

            Norman was saying, “There’s something wrong. That’s just the two of us, exactly as we are now.”

            He was right. Two little figures were sitting in a train on the seats which were farthest toward the front. The field was enlarging now--they were merging into it. Norman’s voice was distant and fading.

            “It’s the same train,” he was saying. “The window in back is cracked just as--”

            Liwy was blindingly happy. She said, “I wish we were in New York.”

            He said, “It will be less than an hour, darling.” Then he said, “I’m going to kiss you.” He made a movement, as though he were about to begin.

            “Not here! Oh, Norman, people are looking.”

            Norman drew back. He said, “We should have taken a taxi.”

            “From Boston to New York?”

            “Sure. The privacy would have been worth it.”

            She laughed. “You’re funny when you try to act ardent.”

            “It isn’t an act.” His voice was suddenly a little somber. “It’s not just an hour, you know. I feel as though I’ve been waiting five years.”

            “I do, too.”

            “Why couldn’t I have met you first? It was such a waste.”

            “Poor Georgette,” Liwy sighed.

            Norman moved impatiently. “Don’t be sorry for her, Liwy. We never really made a go of it. She was glad to get rid of me.”

            “I know that. That’s why I say ‘Poor Georgette.’ I’m just sorry for her for not being able to appreciate what she had.”

            “Well, see to it that you do,” he said. “See to it that you’re immensely appreciative, infinitely appreciative--or more than that, see that you’re at least half as appreciative as I am of what I’ve got.”

            “Or else you’ll divorce me, too?”

            “Over my dead body,” said Norman.

            Liwy said, “It’s all so strange. I keep thinking; ‘What if you hadn’t spilt the cocktails on me that time at the party?’ You wouldn’t have followed me out; you wouldn’t have told me; I wouldn’t have known. It would have been so different . . . everything.”

            “Nonsense. It would have been just the same. It would have all happened another time.”

            “I wonder,” said Liwy softly.

            Train noises merged into train noises. City lights flickered outside, and the atmosphere of New York was about them. The coach was astir with travelers dividing the baggage among themselves.

            Liwy was an island in the turmoil until Norman shook her.

            She looked at him and said, “The jigsaw pieces fit after all.”

            He said, “Yes.”

            She put a hand on his. “But it wasn’t good, just the same. I was very wrong. I thought that because we had each other, we should have all the possible each others. But all the possibles are none of our business. The real is enough. Do you know what I mean?”

            He nodded.

            She said, “There are millions of other what ifs. I don’t want to know what happened in any of them. I’ll never say ‘What if again.”

            Norman said, “Relax, dear. Here’s your coat.” And he reached for the suitcases.

            Liwy said with sudden sharpness, “Where’s Mr. If?”

            Norman turned slowly to the empty seat that faced them. Together they scanned the rest of the coach.

            “Maybe,” Norman said, “he went into the next coach.”

            “But why? Besides, he wouldn’t leave his hat.” And she bent to pick it up.

            Norman said, “What hat?”

            And Liwy stopped her fingers hovering over nothingness. She said, “It was here--I almost touched it.” She straightened and said, “Oh, Norman, what if--”

            Norman put a finger on her mouth. “Darling . . .”

            She said, “I’m sorry. Here, let me help you with the suitcases.”

            The train dived into the tunnel beneath Park Avenue, and the noise of the wheels rose to a roar.

---

As long as I mentioned the parlor psychoanalyst in the introduction to “What If--,” I may as well go on to those fellows who analyze stories in Freudian fashion.

            Given a Freudian cast of mind and sufficient ingenuity, it is possible, I think, to translate any collection of words (rational, irrational, or nonsensical) into sexual symbolism, and then prate learnedly about the writer’s unconscious.

            I have said this before and I’ll say it again. I don’t know what is in my unconscious mind and I don’t care. I don’t even know for sure that I have one.

            I am told that the contents of one’s unconscious may so distort his personality that he can only straighten out by a close study of those hidden mental factors under the guidance of an analyst.

            Maybe so, but the only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write. Perhaps if I vacuumed my mentality and got rid of the compulsion, I could spend more time sleeping in the sun and playing golf, or whatever it is that people do who have nothing better to do.

            But I don’t want to, thank you. I know all about my compulsion and I like it and intend to keep it. Someone else can have my ticket for sleeping in the sun and playing golf.

            So I hope no one ever has the impulse to psychoanalyze my stories and come to me with a complete explanation of my compulsions and hangups and neuroses and expect me to be tearfully grateful. I’m not in the market. Nor am I interested in the hidden meanings of my stories. If you find them, keep them.

            Which brings me to “Sally.” It is well known that the average American male loves his car with a pseudosexual passion, and who am I to be un-American?

            Anyone reading “Sally” can sense that I feel strongly attracted to the heroine of the story and that this probably reflects something of my own life. Toward the end of the story, in fact, Sally does something which will allow the amateur Freudian a field day. (Oh, find it for yourself; it won’t be hard.) The sexual symbolism is blatant and the parlor psychoanalyst can chuckle himself to death with what he win be sure exists in my unconscious mind.

            Except that he will be quite wrong, because none of that was put in by my unconscious mind. It was all carefully and deliberately inserted by my conscious mind, because I wanted to.

            First appearance--Fantastic, May-June, 1953. Copyright, 1953, by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

Sally

            Sally was coming down the lake road, so I waved to her and called her by name. I always liked to see Sally. I liked all of them, you understand, but Sally’s the prettiest one of the lot. There just isn’t any question about it.

            She moved a little faster when I waved to her. Nothing undignified. She was never that. She moved just enough faster to show that she was glad to see me, too.

            I turned to the man standing beside me. “That’s Sally,” I said.

            He smiled at me and nodded.

            Mrs. Hester had brought him in. She said, “This is Mr. Gellhorn, Jake. You remember he sent you the letter asking for an appointment.”

            That was just talk, really. I have a million things to do around the Farm, and one thing I just can’t waste my time on is mail. That’s why I have Mrs. Hester around. She lives pretty close by, she’s good at attending to foolishness without running to me about it, and most of all, she likes Sally and the rest. Some people don’t.

            “Glad to see you, Mr. Gellhorn,” I said.

            “Raymond f. Gellhorn,” he said, and gave me his hand, which I shook and gave back.

            He was a largish fellow, half a head taller than I and wider, too. He was about half my age, thirtyish. He had black hair, plastered down slick, with a part in the middle, and a thin mustache, very neatly trimmed. His jawbones got big under his ears and made him look as if he had a slight case of mumps. On video he’d be a natural to play the villain, so I assumed he was a nice fellow. It goes to show that video can’t be wrong all the time.

            “I’m Jacob Folkers,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

            He grinned. It was a big, wide, white-toothed grin. “You can tell me a little about your Farm here, if you don’t mind.”

            I heard Sally coming up behind me and I put out my hand. She slid right into it and the feel of the hard, glossy enamel of her fender was warm in my palm.

            “A nice automatobile,” said Gellhorn.

            That’s one way of putting it. Sally was a 2045 convertible with a Hennis-Carleton positronic motor and an Armat chassis. She had the cleanest, finest lines I’ve ever seen on any model, bar none. For five years, she’d been my favorite, and I’d put everything into her I could dream up. In all that time, there’d never been a human being behind her wheel.

            Not once.

            “Sally,” I said, patting her gently, “meet Mr. Gellhorn.”

            Sally’s cylinder-purr keyed up a little. I listened carefully for any knocking. Lately, I’d been hearing motor-knock in almost all the cars and changing the gasoline hadn’t done a bit of good. Sally was as smooth as her paint job this time, however.

            “Do you have names for all your cars?” asked Gellhorn.

            He sounded amused, and Mrs. Hester doesn’t like people to sound as though they were making fun of the Farm. She said, sharply, “Certainly. The cars have real personalities, don’t they, Jake? The sedans are all males and the convertibles are females.”

            Gellhorn was smiling again. “And do you keep them in separate garages, ma’am?”

            Mrs. Hester glared at him.

            Gellhorn said to me, “And now I wonder if I can talk to you alone, Mr. Folkers?”

            “That depends,” I said. “Are you a reporter?”

            “No, sir. I’m a sales agent. Any talk we have is not for publication. I assure you I am interested in strict privacy.”

            “Let’s walk down the road a bit. There’s a bench we can use.”

            We started down. Mrs. Hester walked away. Sally nudged along after us.

            I said, “You don’t mind if Sally comes along, do you?”

            “Not at all. She can’t repeat what we say, can she?” He laughed at his own joke, reached over and rubbed Sally’s grille.

            Sally raced her motor and Gellhorn’s hand drew away quickly.

            “She’s not used to strangers,” I explained.

            “We sat down on the bench under the big oak tree where we could look across the small lake to the private speedway. It was the warm part of the day and the cars were out in force, at least thirty of them. Even at this distance I could see that Jeremiah was pulling his usual stunt of sneaking up behind some staid older model, then putting on a jerk of speed and yowling past with deliberately squealing brakes. Two weeks before he had crowded old Angus off the asphalt altogether, and I had turned off his motor for two days.

            It didn’t help though, I’m afraid, and it looks as though there’s nothing to be done about it. Jeremiah is a sports model to begin with and that kind is awfully hot-headed.

            “Well, Mr. Gellhorn,” I said. “Could you tell me why you want the information?”

            But he was just looking around. He said, “This is an amazing place, Mr. Folkers.”

            “I wish you’d call me Jake. Everyone does.”

            “All right, Jake. How many cars do you have here?”

            “Fifty-one. We get one or two new ones every year. One year we got five. We haven’t lost one yet. They’re all in perfect running order. We even have a ‘15 model Mat-O-Mot in working order. One of the original automatics. It was the first car here.”

            Good old Matthew. He stayed in the garage most of the day now, but then he was the granddaddy of all positronic-motored cars. Those were the days when blind war veterans, paraplegics and heads of state were the only ones who drove automatics. But Samson Harridge was my boss and he was rich enough to be able to get one. I was his chauffeur at the time.

            The thought makes me feel old. I can remember when there wasn’t an automobile in the world with brains enough to find its own way home. I chauffeured dead lumps of machines that needed a man’s hand at their controls every minute. Every year machines like that used to kill tens of thousands of people.

            The automatics fixed that. A positronic brain can react much faster than a human one, of course, and it paid people to keep hands off the controls. You got in, punched your destination and let it go its own way.

            We take it for granted now, but I remember when the first laws came out forcing the old machines off the highways and limiting travel to automatics. Lord, what a fuss. They called it everything from communism to fascism, but it emptied the highways and stopped the killing, and still more people get around more easily the new way.

            Of course, the automatics were ten to a hundred times as expensive as the hand-driven ones, and there weren’t many that could afford a private vehicle. The industry specialized in turning out omnibus-automatics. You could always call a company and have one stop at your door in a matter of minutes and take you where you wanted to go. Usually, you had to drive with others who were going your way, but what’s wrong with that?

            Samson Harridge had a private car though, and I went to him the minute it arrived. The car wasn’t Matthew to me then. I didn’t know it was going to be the dean of the Farm some day. I only knew it was taking my job away and I hated it.

            I said, “You won’t be needing me any more, Mr. Harridge?”

            He said, “What are you dithering about, Jake? You don’t think I’ll trust myself to a contraption like that, do you? You stay right at the controls.”

            I said, “But it works by itself, Mr. Harridge. It scans the road, reacts properly to obstacles, humans, and other cars, and remembers routes to travel.”

            “So they say. So they say. Just the same, you’re sitting right behind the wheel in case anything goes wrong.”

            Funny how you can get to like a car. In no time I was calling it Matthew and was spending all my time keeping it polished and humming. A positronic brain stays in condition best when it’s got control of its chassis at all times, which means it’s worth keeping the gas tank filled so that the motor can turn over slowly day and night. After a while, it got so I could tell by the sound of the motor how Matthew felt.

            In his own way, Harridge grew fond of Matthew, too. He had no one else to like. He’d divorced or outlived three wives and outlived five children and three grandchildren. So when he died, maybe it wasn’t surprising that he had his estate converted into a Farm for Retired Automobiles, with me in charge and Matthew the first member of a distinguished line.

            It’s turned out to be my life. I never got married. You can’t get married and still tend to automatics the way you should.

            The newspapers thought it was funny, but after a while they stopped joking about it. Some things you can’t joke about. Maybe you’ve never been able to afford an automatic and maybe you never will, either, but take it from me, you get to love them. They’re hard-working and affectionate. It takes a man with no heart to mistreat one or to see one mistreated.

            It got so that after a man had an automatic for a while, he would make provisions for having it left to the Farm, if he didn’t have an heir he could rely on to give it good care.

            I explained that to Gellhorn.

            He said, “Fifty-one cars! That represents a lot of money.”

            “Fifty thousand minimum per automatic, original investment,” I said. “They’re worth a lot more now. I’ve done things for them.”

            “It must take a lot of money to keep up the Farm.”

            “You’re right there. The Farm’s a non-profit organization, which gives us a break on taxes and, of course, new automatics that come in usually have trust funds attached. Still, costs are always going up. I have to keep the place landscaped; I keep laying down new asphalt and keeping the old in repair; there’s gasoline, oil, repairs, and new gadgets. It adds up.”

            “And you’ve spent a long time at it.”

            “I sure have, Mr. Gellhorn. Thirty-three years.”

            “You don’t seem to be getting much out of it yourself.”

            “I don’t? You surprise me, Mr. Gellhorn. I’ve got Sally and fifty others. Look at her.”

            I was grinning. I couldn’t help it. Sally was so clean, it almost hurt. Some insect must have died on her windshield or one speck of dust too many had landed, so she was going to work. A little tube protruded and spurted Tergosol over the glass. It spread quickly over the silicone surface film and squeejees snapped into place instantly, passing over the windshield and forcing the. water into the little channel that led it, dripping, down to the ground. Not a speck of water got onto her glistening apple-green hood. Squeejee and detergent tube snapped back into place and disappeared.

            Gellhorn said, “I never saw an automatic do that.”

            “I guess not,” I said. “I fixed that up specially on our cars. They’re clean. They’re always scrubbing their glass. They like it. I’ve even got Sally fixed up with wax jets. She polishes herself every night till you can see your face in any part of her and shave by it. If I can scrape up the money, I’d be putting it on the rest of the girls. Convertibles are very vain.”

            “I can tell you how to scrape up the money, if that interests you.”

            “That always does. How?”

            “Isn’t it obvious, fake? Any of your cars is worth fifty thousand minimum, you said. I’ll bet most of them top six figures.”

            “So?”

            “Ever think of selling a few?”

            I shook my head. “You don’t realize it, I guess, Mr. Gellhorn, but I can’t sell any of these. They belong to the Farm, not to me.”

            “The money would go to the Farm.”

            “The incorporation papers of the Farm provide that the cars receive perpetual care. They can’t be sold.”

            “What about the motors, then?”

            “I don’t understand you.”

            Gellhorn shifted position and his voice got confidential. “Look here, Jake, let me explain the situation. There’s a big market for private automatics if they could only be made cheaply enough. Right?”

            “That’s no secret.”

            “And ninety-five per cent of the cost is the motor. Right? Now, I know where we can get a supply of bodies. I also know where we can sell automatics at a good price--twenty or thirty thousand for the cheaper models, maybe fifty or sixty for the better ones. All I need are the motors. You see the solution?”

            “I don’t, Mr. Gellhorn.” I did, but I wanted him to spell it out.

            “It’s right here. You’ve got fifty-one of them. You’re an expert automatobile mechanic, Jake. You must be. You could unhook a motor and place it in another car so that no one would know the difference.”

            “It wouldn’t be exactly ethical.”

            “You wouldn’t be harming the cars. You’d be doing them a favor. Use your older cars. Use that old Mat-O-Mot.”

            “Well, now, wait a while, Mr. Gellhorn. The motors and bodies aren’t two separate items. They’re a single unit. Those motors are used to their own bodies. They wouldn’t be happy in another car.”

            “All right, that’s a point. That’s a very good point, Jake. It would be like taking your mind and putting it in someone else’s skull. Right? You don’t think you would like that?”

            “I don’t think I would. No.”

            “But what if I took your mind and put it into the body of a young athlete. What about that, Jake? You’re not a youngster anymore. If you had the chance, wouldn’t you enjoy being twenty again? That’s what I’m offering some of your positronic motors. They’ll be put into new ‘57 bodies. The latest construction.”

            I laughed. “That doesn’t make much sense, Mr. Gellhorn. Some of our cars may be old, but they’re well-cared for. Nobody drives them. They’re allowed their own way. They’re retired, Mr. Gellhorn. I wouldn’t want a twenty-year-old body if it meant I had to dig ditches for the rest of my new life and never have enough to eat.... What do you think, Sally?”

            Sally’s two doors opened and then shut with a cushioned slam.

            “What that?” said Gellhorn.

            “That’s the way Sally laughs.”

            Gellhorn forced a smile. I guess he thought I was making a bad joke. He said, “Talk sense, Jake. Cars are made to be driven. They’re probably not happy if you don’t drive them.”

            I said, “Sally hasn’t been driven in five years. She looks happy to me.”

            “I wonder.”

            He got up and walked toward Sally slowly. “Hi, Sally, how’d you like a drive?”

            Sally’s motor revved up. She backed away.

            “Don’t push her, Mr. Gellhorn,” I said. “She’s liable to be a little skittish.”

            Two sedans were about a hundred yards up the road. They had stopped. Maybe, in their own way, they were watching. I didn’t bother about them. I had my eyes on Sally, and I kept them there.

            Gellhorn said, “Steady now, Sally.” He lunged out and seized the door handle. It didn’t budge, of course.

            He said, “It opened a minute ago.”

            I said, “Automatic lock. She’s got a sense of privacy, Sally has.”

            He let go, then said, slowly and deliberately, “A car with a sense of privacy shouldn’t go around with its top down.”

            He stepped back three or four paces, then quickly, so quickly I couldn’t take a step to stop him, he ran forward and vaulted into the car. He caught Sally completely by surprise, because as he came down, he shut off the ignition before she could lock it in place.

            For the first time in five years, Sally’s motor was dead.

            I think I yelled, but Gellhorn had the switch on “Manual” and locked that in place, too. He kicked the motor into action. Sally was alive again but she had no freedom of action.

            He started up the road. The sedans were still there. They turned and drifted away, not very quickly.  I suppose it was all a puzzle to them.

            One was Giuseppe, from the Milan factories, and the other was Stephen. They were always together. They were both new at the Farm, but they’d been here long enough to know that our cars just didn’t have drivers.

            Gellhorn went straight on, and when the sedans finally got it through their heads that Sally wasn’t going to slow down, that she couldn’t slow down, it was too late for anything but desperate measures.

            They broke for it, one to each side, and Sally raced between them like a streak. Steve crashed through the lakeside fence and rolled to a halt on the grass and mud not six inches from the water’s edge.  Giuseppe bumped along the land side of the road to a shaken halt.

            I had Steve back on the highway and was trying to find out what harm, if any, the fence had done him, when Gellhorn came back.

            Gellhorn opened Sally’s door and stepped out. Leaning back, he shut off the ignition a second time.

            “There,” he said. “I think I did her a lot of good.”

            I held my temper. “Why did you dash through the sedans? There was no reason for that.”

            “I kept expecting them to turn out.”

            “They did. One went through a fence.”

            “I’m sorry, Jake,” he said. “I thought they’d move more quickly. You know how it is. I’ve been in lots of buses, but I’ve only been in a private automatic two or three times in my life, and this is the first time I ever drove one. That just shows you, Jake. It got me, driving one, and I’m pretty hard-boiled. I tell you, we don’t have to go more than twenty per cent below list price to reach a good market, and it would be ninety per cent profit.”

            “Which we would split?”

            “Fifty-fifty. And I take all the risks, remember.”

            “All right. I listened to you. Now you listen to me.” I raised my voice because I was just too mad to be polite anymore. “When you turn off Sally’s motor, you hurt her. How would you like to be kicked unconscious? That’s what you do to Sally, when you turn her off.”

            “You’re exaggerating, Jake. The automatobuses get turned off every night.”

            “Sure, that’s why I want none of my boys or girls in your fancy ‘57 bodies, where I won’t know what treatment they’ll get. Buses need major repairs in their positronic circuits every couple of years. Old Matthew hasn’t had his circuits touched in twenty years. What can you offer him compared with that?”

            “Well, you’re excited now. Suppose you think over my proposition when you’ve cooled down and get in touch with me.”

            “I’ve thought it over all I want to. If I ever see you again, I’ll call the police.”

            His mouth got hard and ugly. He said, “Just a minute, old-timer.”

            I said, “Just a minute, you. This is private property and I’m ordering you off.”

            He shrugged. “Well, then, goodbye.”

            I said, “Mrs. Hester will see you off the property. Make that goodbye permanent.”

            But it wasn’t permanent. I saw him again two days later. Two and a half days, rather, because it was about noon when I saw him first and a little after midnight when I saw him again.

            I sat up in bed when he turned the light on, blinking blindly till I made out what was happening. Once I could see, it didn’t take much explaining. In fact, it took none at all. He had a gun in his right fist, the nasty little needle barrel just visible between two fingers. I knew that all he had to do was to increase the pressure of his hand and I would be torn apart., He said, “Put on your clothes, Jake.”

            I didn’t move. I just watched him.

            He said, “Look, Jake, I know the situation. I visited you two days ago, remember. You have no guards on this place, no electrified fences, no warning signals. Nothing.”

            I said, “I don’t need any. Meanwhile there’s nothing to stop you from leaving, Mr. Gellhorn. I would if I were you. This place can be very dangerous.”

            He laughed a little. “It is, for anyone on the wrong side of a fist gun.”

            “I see it,” I said. “I know you’ve got one.”

            “Then get a move on. My men are waiting.”

            “No, sir, Mr. Gellhorn. Not unless you tell me what you want, and probably not then.”

            “I made you a proposition day before yesterday.”

            “The answer’s still no.”

            “There’s more to the proposition now. I’ve come here with some men and an automatobus. You have your chance to come with me and disconnect twenty-five of the positronic motors. I don’t care which twenty-five you choose. We’ll load them on the bus and take them away. Once they’re disposed of, I’ll see to it that you get your fair share of the money.”

            “I have your word on that, I suppose.”

            He didn’t act as if he thought I was being sarcastic. He said, “You have.”

            I said, “No.”

            “If you insist on saying no, we’ll go about it in our own way. I’ll disconnect the motors myself, only I’ll disconnect all fifty-one. Every one of them.”

            “It isn’t easy to disconnect positronic motors, Mr. Gellhorn. Are you a robotics expert? Even if you are, you know, these motors have been modified by me.”

            “I know that, Jake. And to be truthful, I’m not an expert. I may ruin quite a few motors trying to get them out. That’s why I’ll have to work over all fifty-one if you don’t cooperate. You see, I may only end up with twenty-five when I’m through. The first few I’ll tackle will probably suffer the most. Till I get the hang of it, you see. And if I go it myself, I think I’ll put Sally first in line.”

            I said, “I can’t believe you’re serious, Mr. Gellhorn.”

            He said, “I’m serious, Jake.” He let it all dribble in. “If you want to help, you can keep Sally. Otherwise, she’s liable to be hurt very badly. Sorry.”

            I said, “I’ll come with you, but I’ll give you one more warning. You’ll be in trouble, Mr. Gellhorn.”

            He thought that was very funny. He was laughing very quietly as we went down the stairs together.

            There was an automatobus waiting outside the driveway to the garage apartments. The shadows of three men waited beside it, and their flash beams went on as we approached.

            Gellhorn said in a low voice, “I’ve got the old fellow. Come on. Move the truck up the drive and let’s get started.”

            One of the others leaned in and punched the proper instructions on the control panel. We moved up the driveway with the bus following submissively.

            “It won’t go inside the garage,” I said. “The door won’t take it. We don’t have buses here. Only private cars.”

            “All right,” said Gellhorn. “Pull it over onto the grass and keep it out of sight.”

            I could hear the thrumming of the cars when we were still ten yards from the garage.

            Usually they quieted down if I entered the garage. This time they didn’t. I think they knew that strangers were about, and once the faces of Gellhorn and the others were visible they got noisier. Each motor was a warm rumble, and each motor was knocking irregularly until the place rattled.

            The lights went up automatically as we stepped inside. Gellhorn didn’t seem bothered by the car noise, but the three men with him looked surprised and uncomfortable. They had the look of the hired thug about them, a look that was not compounded of physical features so much as of a certain wariness of eye and hangdogness of face. I knew the type and I wasn’t worried.

            One of them said, “Damn it, they’re burning gas.”

             “My cars always do,” I replied stiffly.

            “Not tonight,” said Gellhorn. “Turn them off.”

            “It’s not that easy, Mr. Gellhorn,” I said.

            “Get started!” he said.

            I stood there. He had his fist gun pointed at me steadily. I said, “I told you, Mr. Gellhom, that my cars have been well-treated while they’ve been at the Farm. They’re used to being treated that way, and they resent anything else.”

            “You have one minute,” he said. “Lecture me some other time.”

            “I’m trying to explain something. I’m trying to explain that my cars can understand what I say to them. A positronic motor will learn to do that with time and patience. My cars have learned. Sally understood your proposition two days ago. You’ll remember she laughed when I asked her opinion. She also knows what you did to her and so do the two sedans you scattered. And the rest know what to do about trespassers in general.”

            “Look, you crazy old fool--”

            “All I have to say is--” I raised my voice. “Get them!”

            One of the men turned pasty and yelled, but his voice was drowned completely in the sound of fifty-one horns turned loose at once. They held their notes, and within the four walls of the garage the echoes rose to a wild, metallic call. Two cars rolled forward, not hurriedly, but with no possible mistake as to their target. Two cars fell in line behind the first two. All the cars were stirring in their separate stalls.

            The thugs stared, then backed.

            I shouted, “Don’t get up against a wall.”

            Apparently, they had that instinctive thought themselves. They rushed madly for the door of the garage.

            At the door one of Gellhorn’s men turned, brought up a fist gun of his own. The needle pellet tore a thin, blue flash toward the first car. The car was Giuseppe.

            A thin line of paint peeled up Giuseppe’s hood, and the right half of his windshield crazed and splintered but did not break through.

            The men were out the door, running, and two by two the cars crunched out after them into the night, their horns calling the charge.

            I kept my hand on Gellhorn’s elbow, but I don’t think he could have moved in any case. His lips were trembling.

            I said, “That’s why I don’t need electrified fences or guards. My property protects itself.”

            Gellhorn’s eyes swiveled back and forth in fascination as, pair by pair, they whizzed by. He said, “They’re killers!”

            “Don’t be silly. They won’t kill your men.”

            “They’re killers!”

            “They’ll just give your men a lesson. My cars have been specially trained for cross-country pursuit for just such an occasion; I think what your men will get will be worse than an outright quick kill. Have you ever been chased by an automatobile?”

            Gellhorn didn’t answer.

            I went on. I didn’t want him to miss a thing. “They’ll be shadows going no faster than your men, chasing them here, blocking them there, blaring at them, dashing at them, missing with a screech of brake and a thunder of motor. They’ll keep it up till your men drop, out of breath and half-dead, waiting for the wheels to crunch over their breaking bones. The cars won’t do that. They’ll turn away. You can bet, though, that your men will never return here in their lives. Not for all the money you or ten like you could give them. Listen--”

            I tightened my hold on his elbow. He strained to hear.

            I said, “Don’t you hear car doors slamming?”

            It was faint and distant, but unmistakable.

            I said, “They’re laughing. They’re enjoying themselves.”

            His face crumpled with rage. He lifted his hand. He was still holding his fist gun.

            I said, “I wouldn’t. One automatocar is still with us.”

            I don’t think he had noticed Sally till then. She had moved up so quietly. Though her right front fender nearly touched me, I couldn’t hear her motor. She might have been holding her breath.

            Gellhorn yelled.

            I said, “She won’t touch you, as long as I’m with you. But if you kill me.... You know, Sally doesn’t like you.”

            Gellhorn turned the gun in Sally’s direction.

            “Her motor is shielded,” I said, “and before you could ever squeeze the gun a second time she would be on top of you.”

            “All right, then,” he yelled, and suddenly my arm was bent behind my back and twisted so I could hardly stand. He held me between Sally and himself, and his pressure didn’t let up. “Back out with me and don’t try to break loose, old-timer, or I’ll tear your arm out of its socket.”

            I had to move. Sally nudged along with us, worried, uncertain what to do. I tried to say something to her and couldn’t. I could only clench my teeth and moan.

            Gellhorn’s automatobus was still standing outside the garage. I was forced in. Gellhorn jumped in after me, locking the doors.

            He said, “All right, now. We’ll talk sense.”

            I was rubbing my arm, trying to get life back into it, and even as I did I was automatically and without any conscious effort studying the control board of the bus.

            I said, “This is a rebuilt job.”

            “So?” he said caustically. “It’s a sample of my work. I picked up a discarded chassis, found a brain I could use and spliced me a private bus. What of it?”

            I tore at the repair panel, forcing it aside.

            He said, “What the hell. Get away from that.” The side of his palm came down numbingly on my left shoulder.

            I struggled with him. “I don’t want to do this bus any harm. What kind of a person do you think I am? I just want to take a look at some of the motor connections.”

            It didn’t take much of a look. I was boiling when I turned to him. I said, “You’re a hound and a bastard. You had no right installing this motor yourself. Why didn’t you get a robotics man?”

            He said, “Do I look crazy?”

            “Even if it was a stolen motor, you had no right to treat it so. I wouldn’t treat a man the way you treated that motor. Solder, tape, and pinch clamps! It’s brutal!”

            “It works, doesn’t it?”

            “Sure it works, but it must be hell for the bus. You could live with migraine headaches and acute arthritis, but it wouldn’t be much of a life. This car is suffering.”

            “Shut up!” For a moment he glanced out the window at Sally, who had rolled up as close to the bus as she could. He made sure the doors and windows were locked.

            He said, “We’re getting out of here now, before the other cars come back. We’ll stay away.”

            “How will that help you?”

            “Your cars will run out of gas someday, won’t they? You haven’t got them fixed up so they can tank up on their own, have you? We’ll come back and finish the job.”

            “They’ll be looking for me,” I said. “Mrs. Hester will call the police.”

            He was past reasoning with. He just punched the bus in gear. It lurched forward. Sally followed.

            He giggled. “What can she do if you’re here with me?”

            Sally seemed to realize that, too. She picked up speed, passed us and was gone. Gellhorn opened the window next to him and spat through the opening.

            The bus lumbered on over the dark road, its motor rattling unevenly. Gellhorn dimmed the periphery light until the phosphorescent green stripe down the middle of the highway, sparkling in the moonlight, was all that kept us out of the trees. There was virtually no traffic. Two cars passed ours, going the other way, and there was none at all on our side of the highway, either before or behind.

            I heard the door-slamming first. Quick and sharp in the silence, first on the right and then on the left Gellhorn’s hands quivered as he punched savagely for increased speed. A beam of light shot out from among a scrub of trees, blinding us; Another beam plunged at us from behind the guard rails on the other side. At a crossover, four hundred yards ahead, there was sque-e-e-e-e as a car darted across our path.

            “Sally went for the rest,” I said. “I think you’re surrounded.”

            “So what? What can they do?”

            He hunched over the controls, peering through the windshield.

            “And don’t you try anything, old-timer,” he muttered.

            I couldn’t. I was bone-weary; my left arm was on fire. The motor sounds gathered and grew closer. I could hear the motors missing in odd patterns; suddenly it seemed to me that my cars were speaking to one another.

            A medley of horns came from behind. I turned and Gellhom looked quickly into the rear-view mirror. A dozen cars were following in both lanes.

            Gellhorn yelled and laughed madly.

            I cried, “Stop! Stop the car!”

            Because not a quarter of a mile ahead, plainly visible in the light beams of two sedans on the roadside was Sally, her trim body plunked square across the road. Two cars shot into the opposite lane to our left, keeping perfect time with us and preventing Gellhom from turning out.

            But he had no intention of turning out. He put his finger on the full-speed-ahead button and kept it there.

            He said, “There’ll be no bluffing here. This bus outweighs her five to one, old-timer, and we’ll just push her off the road like a dead kitten.”

            I knew he could. The bus was on manual and his finger was on the button. I knew he would.

            I lowered the window, and stuck my head out. “Sally,” I screamed. “Get out of the way. Sally!”

            It was drowned out in the agonized squeal of maltreated brakebands. I felt myself thrown forward and heard Gellhorn’s breath puff out of his body.

            I said, “What happened?” It was a foolish question. We had stopped. That was what had happened. Sally and the bus were five feet apart. With five times her weight tearing down on her, she had not budged. The guts of her.

            Gellhorn yanked at the Manual toggle switch. “It’s got to,” he kept muttering. “It’s got to.”

            I said, “Not the way you hooked up the motor, expert. Any of the circuits could cross over.”

            He looked at me with a tearing anger and growled deep in his throat. His hair was matted over his forehead. He lifted his fist.

            “That’s all the advice out of you there’ll ever be, old-timer.”

            And I knew the needle gun was about to fire.

            I pressed back against the bus door, watching the fist come up, and when the door opened I went over backward and out, hitting the ground with a thud. I heard the door slam closed again.

            I got to my knees and looked up in time to see Gellhorn struggle uselessly with the closing window, then aim his fist-gun quickly through the glass. He never fired. The bus got under way with a tremendous roar, and Gellhorn lurched backward.

            Sally wasn’t in the way any longer, and I watched the bus’s rear lights flicker away down the highway.

            I was exhausted. I sat down right there, right on the highway, and put my head down in my crossed arms, trying to catch my breath.

            I heard a car stop gently at my side. When I looked up, it was Sally. Slowly--lovingly, you might say--her front door opened.

            No one had driven Sally for five years--except Gellhorn, of course--and I know how valuable such freedom was to a car. I appreciated the gesture, but I said, “Thanks, Sally, but I’ll take one of the newer cars.”

            I got up and turned away, but skillfully and neatly as a pirouette, she wheeled before me again. I couldn’t hurt her feelings. I got in. Her front seat had the fine, fresh scent of an automatobile that kept itself spotlessly clean. I lay down across it, thankfully, and with even, silent, and rapid efficiency, my boys and girls brought me home.

            Mrs. Hester brought me the copy of the radio transcript the next evening with great excitement.

            “It’s Mr. Gellhorn,” she said. “The man who came to see you.”

            “What about him?”

            I dreaded her answer.

            “They found him dead,” she said. “Imagine that. Just lying dead in a ditch.”, “It might be a stranger altogether,” I mumbled.

            “Raymond J. Gellhorn,” she said, sharply. “There can’t be two, can there? The description fits, too. Lord, what a way to die! They found tire marks on his arms and body. Imagine! I’m glad it turned out to be a bus; otherwise they might have come poking around here.”

            “Did it happen near here?” I asked, anxiously.

            “No... Near Cooksville. But, goodness, read about it yourself if you-- What happened to Giuseppe?”

            I welcomed the diversion. Giuseppe was waiting patiently for me to complete the repaint job. His windshield had been replaced.

            After she left, I snatched up the transcript. There was no doubt about it. The doctor reported he had been running and was in a state of totally spent exhaustion. I wondered for how many miles the bus had played with him before the final lunge. The transcript had no notion of anything like that, of course.

            They had located the bus and identified it by the tire tracks. The police had it and were trying to trace its ownership.

            There was an editorial in the transcript about it. It had been the first traffic fatality in the state for that year and the paper warned strenuously against manual driving after night.

            There was no mention of Gellhorn’s three thugs and for that, at least, I was grateful. None of our cars had been seduced by the pleasure of the chase into killing.

            That was all. I let the paper drop. Gellhorn had been a criminal. His treatment of the bus had been brutal. There was no question in my mind he deserved death. But still I felt a bit queasy over the manner of it.

            A month has passed now and I can’t get it out of my mind.

            My cars talk to one another. I have no doubt about it anymore. It’s as though they’ve gained confidence; as though they’re not bothering to keep it secret anymore. Their engines rattle and knock continuously.

            And they don’t talk among themselves only. They talk to the cars and buses that come into the Farm on business. How long have they been doing that?

            They must be understood, too. Gellhorn’s bus understood them, for all it hadn’t been on the grounds more than an hour. I can close my eyes and bring back that dash along the highway, with our cars flanking the bus on either side, clacking their motors at it till it understood, stopped, let me out, and ran off with Gellhorn.

            Did my cars tell him to kill Gellhorn? Or was that his idea?

            Can cars have such ideas? The motor designers say no. But they mean under ordinary conditions. Have they foreseen everything!’

            Cars get ill-used, you know.

            Some of them enter the Farm and observe. They get told things. They find out that cars exist whose motors are never stopped, whom no one ever drives, whose every need is supplied.

            Then maybe they go out and tell others. Maybe the word is spreading quickly. Maybe they’re going to think that the Farm way should be the way all over the world. They don’t understand. You couldn’t expect them to understand about legacies and the whims of rich men.

            There are millions of automatobiles on Earth, tens of millions. If the thought gets rooted in them that they’re slaves; that they should do something about it... If they begin to think the way Gellhorn’s bus did....

            Maybe it won’t be till after my time. And then they’ll have to keep a few of us to take care of them, won’t they? They wouldn’t kill us all.

            And maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn’t understand about how someone would have to care for them. Maybe they won’t wait.

            Every morning I wake up and think, Maybe today....

            I don’t get as much pleasure out of my cars as I used to. Lately, I notice that I’m even beginning to avoid Sally.

---

In late 1949, a new magazine appeared on the newsstands: The Magazine of Fantasy. By the second issue it had expanded its name to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and it is universally known by the initials F & SF .

            I found F & SF daunting at first. It stressed style, it seemed to me, even more than idea, and I wasn’t at all sure that I could manage style, or that I even knew what style might be. It was only a few months ago, indeed, that a reviewer, referring to me in her review of one of my books, said, “He is no stylist.” I wrote at once to ask what a stylist was, but she never answered, so it looks as though I’ll never find out.

            As it happened, though, Anthony Boucher, the co-editor of the magazine, wrote me a letter after the appearance of “Hostess”--the first communication on record between us. In “Hostess,” I had spoken of “the paler emotional surges of the late thirties,” and Tony wrote in mild expostulation, having himself just turned forty at the time. (I had just turned thirty.) He told me that I had a delightful surprise ahead of me, and he was entirely right.

            This initiated a pleasant correspondence and I lost some of my fear of F & SF. I thought I would try a story that stressed style but since I didn’t (either then or now) know what style was, or how one went about getting it, I hadn’t the faintest idea whether I had succeeded or not. I guess I did, though, for it was “Flies” I wrote and Mr. Boucher accepted and published it.

            I had no way of telling it at the time, but this began what turned out to be the happiest of all my associations with science fiction magazines. I have no complaints about Astounding, Galaxy, or any of the rest, heaven knows, but F & SF has become something special to me, and it is only honest of me to say so.

            By the way, if anyone thinks I am so arrogant that I can never accept any editorial correction, he is quite wrong. I don’t enjoy editorial correction (no writer does) but I accept it quite often. (This, actually, is intended for my brother, who is a newspaper editor and who seems to think that a11 writers are fiendishly antieditor out of sheer malevolent stupidity.)

            Anyway, here is my example of how sweetly compliant I can be. When I first wrote “Flies,” I named it “King Lear, IV, i, 36-37.” Mr. Boucher wrote me, somewhat in horror, and asked if I insisted on the title, because nobody would look it up and it would be meaningless.

            I thought it over and decided he was right and renamed the story “Flies.” After you read the story, however, you’re welcome to look it up. You’ll find out what started the train of thought that ended in this particular story.

            First appearance--The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1953. Copyright, 1953, by Fantasy House, Inc.