It’s Such a Beautiful Day

            On April 12, 2117, the field-modulator brake-valve in the Door belonging to Mrs. Richard Hanshaw depolarized for reasons unknown. As a result, Mrs. Hanshaw’s day was completely upset and her son, Richard, Jr., first developed his strange neurosis.

            It was not the type of thing you would find listed as a neurosis in the usual textbooks and certainly young Richard behaved, in most respects, just as a well-brought-up twelve-year-old in prosperous circumstances ought to behave.

            And yet from April 12 on, Richard Hanshaw, Jr., could only with regret ever persuade himself to go through a Door.

            Of all this, on April 12, Mrs. Hanshaw had no premonition. She woke in the morning (an ordinary morning) as her mekkano slithered gently into her room, with a cup of coffee on a small tray. Mrs. Hanshaw was planning a visit to New York in the afternoon and she had several things to do first that could not quite be trusted to a mekkano, so after one or two sips, she stepped out of bed.

            The mekkano backed away, moving silently along the diamagnetic field that kept its oblong body half an inch above the floor, and moved back to the kitchen, where its simple computer was quite adequate to set the proper controls on the various kitchen appliances in order that an appropriate breakfast might be prepared.

            Mrs. Hanshaw, having bestowed the usual sentimental glance upon the cubograph of her dead husband, passed through the stages of her morning ritual with a certain contentment. She could hear her son across the hall clattering through his, but she knew she need not interfere with him. The mekkano was well adjusted to see to it, as a matter of course, that he was showered, that he had on a change of clothing, and that he would eat a nourishing breakfast. The tergo-shower she had had installed the year before made the morning wash and dry so quick and pleasant that, really, she felt certain Dickie would wash even without supervision.

            On a morning like this, when she was busy, it would certainly not be necessary for her to do more than deposit a casual peck on the boy’s cheek before he left. She heard the soft chime the mekkano sounded to indicate approaching school time and she floated down the force-lift to the lower floor (her hair-style for the day only sketchily designed, as yet) in order to perform that motherly duty.

            She found Richard standing at the door, with his text-reels and pocket projector dangling by their strap and a frown on his face.

            “Say, Mom,” he said, looking up, “I dialed the school’s co-ords but nothing happens.”

            She said, almost automatically, “Nonsense, Dickie. I never heard of such a thing.”

            “Well, you try.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw tried a number of times. Strange, the school Door was always set for general reception. She tried other co-ordinates. Her friends’ Doors might not be set for reception, but there would be a signal at least, and then she could explain.

            But nothing happened at all. The Door remained an inactive gray barrier despite all her manipulations. It was obvious that the Door was out of order --and only five months after its annual fall inspection by the company.

            She was quite angry about it.

            It would happen on a day when she had so much planned. She thought petulantly of the fact that a month earlier she had decided against installing a subsidiary Door on the ground that it was an unnecessary expense. How was she to know that Doors were getting to be so shoddy?

            She stepped to the visiphone while the anger still burned in her and said to Richard, “You just go down the road, Dickie, and use the Williamsons’ Door.”

            Ironically, in view of later developments, Richard balked. “Aw, gee, Mom, I’ll get dirty. Can’t I stay home till the Door is fixed?”

            And, as ironically, Mrs. Hanshaw insisted. With her finger on the combination board of the phone, she said, “You won’t get dirty if you put flexies on your shoes, and don’t forget to brush yourself well before you go into their house.”

            “But, golly--”

            “No back-talk, Dickie. You’ve got to be in school. Just let me see you walk out of here. And quickly, or you’ll be late.”

            The mekkano, an advanced model and very responsive, was already standing before Richard with flexies in one appendage.

            Richard pulled the transparent plastic shields over his shoes and moved down the hall with visible reluctance. “I don’t even know how to work this thing, Mom.”

            “You just push that button,” Mrs. Hanshaw called. “The red button. Where it says ‘For Emergency Use.’ And don’t dawdle. Do you want the mekkano to go along with you?”

            “Gosh, no,” he called back, morosely, “what do you think I am? A baby? Gosh!” His muttering was cut off by a slam.

            With flying fingers, Mrs. Hanshaw punched the appropriate combination on the phone board and thought of the things she intended saying to the company about this.

            Joe Bloom, a reasonable young man, who had gone through technology school with added training in force-field mechanics, was at the Hanshaw residence in less than half an hour. He was really quite competent, though Mrs. Hanshaw regarded his youth with deep suspicion.

            She opened the movable house-panel when he first signaled and her sight of him was as he stood there, brushing at himself vigorously to remove the dust of the open air. He took off his flexies and dropped them where he stood. Mrs. Hanshaw closed the house-panel against the flash of raw sunlight that had entered. She found herself irrationally hoping that the step-by-step trip from the public Door had been an unpleasant one. Or perhaps that the public Door itself had been out of order and the youth had had to lug his tools even farther than the necessary two hundred yards. She wanted the Company, or its representative at least, to suffer a bit. It would teach them what broken Doors meant.

            But he seemed cheerful and unperturbed as he said, “Good morning, ma’am. I came to see about your Door.”

            “I’m glad someone did,” said Mrs. Hanshaw, ungraciously. “My day is quite ruined.”

            “Sorry, ma’am. What seems to be the trouble?”

            “It just won’t work. Nothing at all happens when you adjust co-ords,” said Mrs. Hanshaw. “There was no warning at all. I had to send my son out to the neighbors through that--that thing.”

            She pointed to the entrance through which the repair man had come.

            He smiled and spoke out of the conscious wisdom of his own specialized training in Doors. “That’s a door, too, ma’am. You don’t give that kind a capital letter when you write it. It’s a hand-door, sort of. It used to be the only kind once.”

            “Well, at least it works. My boy’s had to go out in the dirt and germs.”

            “It’s not bad outside today, ma’am,” he said, with the connoisseur-like air of one whose profession forced him into the open nearly every day. “Sometimes it is real unpleasant. But I guess you want I should fix this here Door, ma’am, so I’ll get on with it.”

            He sat down on the floor, opened the large tool case he had brought in with him and in half a minute, by use of a point-demagnetizer, he had the control panel removed and a set of intricate vitals exposed.

            He whistled to himself as he placed the fine electrodes of the field-analyzer on numerous points, studying the shifting needles on the dials. Mrs. Hanshaw watched him, arms folded.

            Finally, he said, “Well, here’s something,” and with a deft twist, he disengaged the brake-valve.

            He tapped it with a fingernail and said, “This here brake-valve is depolarized, ma’am. There’s your whole trouble.” He ran his finger along the little pigeonholes in his tool case and lifted out a duplicate of the object he had taken from the door mechanism. “These things just go all of a sudden. Can’t predict it.”

            He put the control panel back and stood up. “It’ll work now, ma’am.”

            He punched a reference combination, blanked it, then punched another. Each time, the dull gray of the Door gave way to a deep, velvety blackness. He said, “Will you sign here, ma’am? and put down your charge number, too, please? Thank you, ma’am.”

            He punched a new combination, that of his home factory, and with a polite touch of finger to forehead, he stepped through the Door. As his body entered the blackness, it cut off sharply. Less and less of him was visible and the tip of his tool case was the last thing that showed. A second after he had passed through completely, the Door turned back to dull gray.

            Half an hour later, when Mrs. Hanshaw had finally completed her interrupted preparations and was fuming over the misfortune of the morning, the phone buzzed annoyingly and her real troubles began.

            Miss Elizabeth Robbins was distressed. Little Dick Hanshaw had always been a good pupil. She hated to report him like this. And yet, she told herself, his actions were certainly queer. And she would talk to his mother, not to the principal.

            She slipped out to the phone during the morning study period, leaving a student in charge. She made her connection and found herself staring at Mrs. Hanshaw’s handsome and somewhat formidable head.

            Miss Robbins quailed, but it was too late to turn back. She said, diffidently, “Mrs. Hanshaw, I’m Miss Robbins.” She ended on a rising note.

            Mrs. Hanshaw looked blank, then said, “Richard’s teacher?” That, too, ended on a rising note.

            “That’s right. I called you, Mrs. Hanshaw,” Miss Robbins plunged right into it, “to tell you that Dick was quite late to school this morning.”

            “He was? But that couldn’t be. I saw him leave.”

            Miss Robbins looked astonished. She said, “You mean you saw him use the Door?”

            Mrs. Hanshaw said quickly, “Well, no. Our Door was temporarily out of order. I sent him to a neighbor and he used that Door.”

            “Are you sure?”

            “Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

            “No, no, Mrs. Hanshaw. I wasn’t implying that at all. I meant are you sure he found the way to the neighbor? He might have got lost.”

            “Ridiculous. We have the proper maps, and I’m sure Richard knows the location of every house in District A-3.” Then, with the quiet pride of one who knows what is her due, she added, “Not that he ever needs to know, of course. The co-ords are all that are necessary at any time.”

            Miss Robbins, who came from a family that had always had to economize rigidly on the use of its Doors (the price of power being what it was) and who had therefore run errands on foot until quite an advanced age, resented the pride. She said, quite clearly, “Well, I’m afraid, Mrs. Hanshaw, that Dick did not use the neighbor’s Door. He was over an hour late to school and the condition of his flexies made it quite obvious that he tramped crosscountry. They were muddy.”

            “Muddy?” Mrs. Hanshaw repeated the emphasis on the word. “What did he say? What was his excuse?”

            Miss Robbins couldn’t help but feel a little glad at the discomfiture of the other woman. She said, “He wouldn’t talk about it. Frankly, Mrs. Hanshaw, he seems ill. That’s why I called you. Perhaps you might want to have a doctor look at him.”

            “Is he running a temperature?” The mother’s voice went shrill.

            “Oh, no. I don’t mean physically ill. It’s just his attitude and the look in his eyes.” She hesitated, then said with every attempt at delicacy, “I thought perhaps a routine checkup with a psychic probe--”

            She didn’t finish. Mrs. Hanshaw, in a chilled voice and with what was as close to a snort as her breeding would permit, said, “Are you implying that Richard is neurotic?”

            “Oh, no, Mrs. Hanshaw, but--”

            “It certainly sounded so. The idea! He has always been perfectly healthy. I’ll take this up with him when he gets home. I’m sure there’s a perfectly normal explanation which he’ll give to me.”

            The connection broke abruptly, and Miss Robbins felt hurt and uncommonly foolish. After all she had only tried to help, to fulfill what she considered an obligation to her students.

            She hurried back to the classroom with a glance at the metal face of the wall clock. The study period was drawing to an end. English Composition next.

            But her mind wasn’t completely on English Composition. Automatically, she called the students to have them read selections from their literary creations. And occasionally she punched one of those selections on tape and ran it through the small vocalizer to show the students how English should be read.

            The vocalizer’s mechanical voice, as always, dripped perfection, but, again as always, lacked character. Sometimes, she wondered if it was wise to try to train the students into a speech that was divorced from individuality and geared only to a mass-average accent and intonation.

            Today, however, she had no thought for that. It was Richard Hanshaw she watched. He sat quietly in his seat, quite obviously indifferent to his surroundings. He was lost deep in himself and just not the same boy he had been. It was obvious to her that he had had some unusual experience that morning and, really, she was right to call his mother, although perhaps she ought not to have made the remark about the probe. Still it was quite the thing these days. All sorts of people get probed. There wasn’t any disgrace attached to it. Or there shouldn’t be, anyway.

            She called on Richard, finally. She had to call twice, before he responded and rose to his feet.

            The general subject assigned had been: “If you had your choice of traveling on some ancient vehicle, which would you choose, and why?” Miss Robbins tried to use the topic every semester. It was a good one because it carried a sense of history with it. It forced the youngster to think about the manner of living of people in past ages.

            She listened while Richard Hanshaw read in a low voice.

            “If I had my choice of ancient vehicles,” he said, pronouncing the “h” in vehicles, “I would choose the stratoliner. It travels slow like all vehicles but it is clean. Because it travels in the stratosphere, it must be all enclosed so that you are not likely to catch disease. You can see the stars if it is night time almost as good as in a planetarium. If you look down you can see the Earth like a map or maybe see clouds--” He went on for several hundred more words.

            She said brightly when he had finished reading, “It’s pronounced vee-ick-ulls, Richard. No ‘h.’ Accent on the first syllable. And you don’t say ‘travels slow’ or ‘see good.’ What do you say, class?”

            There was a small chorus of responses and she went on, “That’s right. Now what is the difference between an adjective and an adverb? Who can tell me?”

            And so it went. Lunch passed. Some pupils stayed to eat; some went home. Richard stayed. Miss Robbins noted that, as usually he didn’t.

            The afternoon passed, too, and then there was the final bell and the usual upsurging hum as twenty-five boys and girls rattled their belongings together and took their leisurely place in line.

            Miss Robbins clapped her hands together, “Quickly, children. Come, Zelda, take your place.”

            “I dropped my tape-punch, Miss Robbins,” shrilled the girl, defensively.

            “Well, pick it up, pick it up. Now children, be brisk, be brisk.”

            She pushed the button that slid a section of the wall into a recess and revealed the gray blankness of a large Door. It was not the usual Door that the occasional student used in going home for lunch, but an advanced model that was one of the prides of this well-to-do private school.

            In addition to its double width, it possessed a large and impressively gear-filled “automatic serial finder” which was capable of adjusting the door for a number of different co-ordinates at automatic intervals.

            At the beginning of the semester, Miss Robbins always had to spend an afternoon with the mechanic, adjusting the device for the co-ordinates of the homes of the new class. But then, thank goodness, it rarely needed attention for the remainder of the term.

            The class lined up alphabetically, first girls, then boys. The Door went velvety black and Hester Adams waved her hand and stepped through. “By-y-y--”

            The ‘bye’ was cut off in the middle, as it almost always was.

            The Door went gray, then black again, and Theresa Cantrocchi went through. Gray, black, Zelda Charlowicz. Gray, black, Patricia Coombs. Gray, black, Sara May Evans.

            The line grew smaller as the Door swallowed them one by one, depositing each in her home. Of course, an occasional mother forgot to leave the house Door on special reception at the appropriate time and then the school Door remained gray. Automatically, after a minute-long wait, the Door went on to the next combination in line and the pupil in question had to wait till it was all over, after which a phone call to the forgetful parent would set things right. This was always bad for the pupils involved, especially the sensitive ones who took seriously the implication that they were little thought of at home. Miss Robbins always tried to impress this on visiting parents, but it happened at least once every semester just the same.

            The girls were all through now. John Abramowitz stepped through and then Edwin Byrne--

            Of course, another trouble, and a more frequent one was the boy or girl who got into line out of place. They would do it despite the teacher’s sharpest watch, particularly at the beginning of the term when the proper order was less familiar to them.

            When that happened, children would be popping into the wrong houses by the half-dozen and would have to be sent back. It always meant a mixup that took minutes to straighten out and parents were invariably irate.

            Miss Robbins was suddenly aware that the line had stopped. She spoke sharply to the boy at the head of the line.

            “Step through, Samuel. What are you waiting for?”

            Samuel Jones raised a complacent countenance and said, “It’s not my combination, Miss Robbins.”

            “Well, whose is it?” She looked impatiently down the line of five remaining boys. Who was out of place?

            “It’s Dick Hanshaw’s, Miss Robbins.”

            “Where is he?”

            Another boy answered, with the rather repulsive tone of self-righteousness all children automatically assume in reporting the deviations of their friends to elders in authority, “He went through the fire door, Miss Robbins.”

            “What?”

            The schoolroom Door had passed on to another combination and Samuel Jones passed through. One by one, the rest followed.

            Miss Robbins was alone in the classroom. She stepped to the fire door. It was a small affair, manually operated, and hidden behind a bend in the wall so that it would not break up the uniform structure of the room.

            She opened it a crack. It was there as a means of escape from the building in case of fire, a device which was enforced by an anachronistic law that did not take into account the modern methods of automatic fire-fighting that all public buildings used. There was nothing outside, but the--outside The sunlight was harsh and a dusty wind was blowing.

            Miss Robbins closed the door. She was glad she had called Mrs. Hanshaw. She had done her duty. More than ever, it was obvious that something was wrong with Richard. She suppressed the impulse to phone again.

            Mrs. Hanshaw did not go to New York that day. She remained home in a mixture of anxiety and an irrational anger, the latter directed against the impudent Miss Robbins.

            Some fifteen minutes before school’s end, her anxiety drove her to the Door. Last year she had had it equipped with an automatic device which activated it to the school’s co-ordinates at five of three and kept it so, barring manual adjustment, until Richard arrived.

            Her eyes were fixed on the Door’s dismal gray (why couldn’t an inactive force-field be any other color, something more lively and cheerful?) and waited. Her hands felt cold as she squeezed them together.

            The Door turned black at the precise second but nothing happened. The minutes passed and Richard was late. Then quite late. Then very late.

            It was a quarter of four and she was distracted. Normally, she would have phoned the school, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t. Not after that teacher had deliberately cast doubts on Richard’s mental well-being. How could she?

            Mrs. Hanshaw moved about restlessly, lighting a cigarette with fumbling fingers, then smudging it out. Could it be something quite normal? Could Richard be staying after school for some reason? Surely he would have told her in advance. A gleam of light struck her; he knew she was planning to go to New York and might not be back till late in the evening--

            No, he would surely have told her. Why fool herself?

            Her pride was breaking. She would have to call the school, or even (she closed her eyes and teardrops squeezed through between the lashes) the police.

            And when she opened her eyes, Richard stood before her, eyes on the ground and his whole bearing that of someone waiting for a blow to fall.

            “Hello, Mom.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw’s anxiety transmuted itself instantly (in a manner known only to mothers) into anger. “Where have you been, Richard?”

            And then, before she could go further into the refrain concerning careless, unthinking sons and broken-hearted mothers, she took note of his appearance in greater detail, and gasped in utter horror.

            She said, “You’ve been in the open.”

            Her son looked down at his dusty shoes (minus flexies), at the dirt marks that streaked his lower arms and at the small, but definite tear in his shirt. He said, “Gosh, Mom, I just thought I’d--” and he faded out.

            She said, “Was there anything wrong with the school Door?”

            “No, Mom.”

            “Do you realize I’ve been worried sick about you?” She waited vainly for an answer. “Well, I’ll talk to you afterward, young man. First, you’re taking a bath, and every stitch of your clothing is being thrown out. Mekkano!”

            But the mekkano had already reacted properly to the phrase “taking a bath” and was off to the bathroom in its silent glide.

            “You take your shoes off right here,” said Mrs. Hanshaw, “then march after mekkano.”

            Richard did as he was told with a resignation that placed him beyond futile protest.

            Mrs. Hanshaw picked up the soiled shoes between thumb and forefinger and dropped them down the disposal chute which hummed in faint dismay at the unexpected load. She dusted her hands carefully on a tissue which she allowed to float down the chute after the shoes.

            She did not join Richard at dinner but let him eat in the worse-than-lack-of-company of the mekkano. This, she thought, would be an active sign of her displeasure and would do more than any amount of scolding or punishment to make him realize that he had done wrong. Richard, she frequently told herself, was a sensitive boy.

            But she went up to see him at bedtime.

            She smiled at him and spoke softly. She thought that would be the best way. After all, he had been punished already.

            She said, “What happened today, Dickie-boy?” She had called him that when he was a baby and just the sound of the name softened her nearly to tears.

            But he only looked away and his voice was stubborn and cold. “I just don’t like to go through those dam Doors, Mom.”

            “But why ever not?”

            He shuffled his hands over the filmy sheet (fresh, clean, antiseptic and, of course, disposable after each use) and said, “I just don’t like them.”

            “But then how do you expect to go to school, Dickie?”

            “I’ll get up early,” he mumbled.

            “But there’s nothing wrong with Doors.”

            “Don’t like ‘em.” He never once looked up at her.

            She said, despairingly, “Oh, well, you have a good sleep and tomorrow morning you’ll feel much better.”

            She kissed him and left the room, automatically passing her hand through the photo-cell beam and in that manner dimming the room-lights.

            But she had trouble sleeping herself that night. Why should Dickie dislike Doors so suddenly? They had never bothered him before. To be sure, the Door had broken down in the morning but that should make him appreciate them all the more.

            Dickie was behaving so unreasonably.

            Unreasonably? That reminded her of Miss Robbins and her diagnosis and Mrs. Hanshaw’s soft jaw set in the darkness and privacy of her bedroom. Nonsense! The boy was upset and a night’s sleep was all the therapy he needed.

            But the next morning when she arose, her son was not in the house. The mekkano could not speak but it could answer questions with gestures of its appendages equivalent to a yes or no, and it did not take Mrs. Hanshaw more than half a minute to ascertain that the boy had arisen thirty minutes earlier than usual, skimped his shower, and darted out of the house.

            But not by way of the Door.

            Out the other way--through the door. Small “d.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw’s visiphone signaled genteelly at 3:10 p.m. that day. Mrs. Hanshaw guessed the caller and having activated the receiver, saw that she had guessed correctly. A quick glance in the mirror to see that she was properly calm after a day of abstracted concern and worry and then she keyed in her own transmission.

            “Yes, Miss Robbins,” she said coldly.

            Richard’s teacher was a bit breathless. She said, “Mrs. Hanshaw, Richard has deliberately left through the fire door although I told him to use the regular Door. I do not know where he went.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw said, carefully, “He left to come home.”

            Miss Robbins looked dismayed. “Do you approve of this?”

            Pale-faced, Mrs. Hanshaw set about putting the teacher in her place. “I don’t think it is up to you to criticize. If my son does not choose to use the Door, it is his affair and mine. I don’t think there is any school ruling that would force him to use the Door, is there?” Her bearing quite plainly intimated that if there were she would see to it that it was changed.

            Miss Robbins flushed and had time for one quick remark before contact was broken. She said, “I’d have him probed. I really would.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw remained standing before the quartzinium plate, staring blindly at its blank face. Her sense of family placed her for a few moments quite firmly on Richard’s side. Why did he have to use the Door if he chose not to? And then she settled down to wait and pride battled the gnawing anxiety that something after all was wrong with Richard.

            He came home with a look of defiance on his face, but his mother, with a strenuous effort at self-control, met him as though nothing were out of the ordinary.

            For weeks, she followed that policy. It’s nothing, she told herself. It’s a vagary. He’ll grow out of it.

            It grew into an almost normal state of affairs. Then, too, every once in a while, perhaps three days in a row, she would come down to breakfast to find Richard waiting sullenly at the Door, then using it when school time came. She always refrained from commenting on the matter.

            Always, when he did that, and especially when he followed it up by arriving home via the Door, her heart grew warm and she thought, “Well, it’s over.” But always with the passing of one day, two or three, he would return like an addict to his drug and drift silently out by the door--small “d”--before she woke.

            And each time she thought despairingly of psychiatrists and probes, and each time the vision of Miss Robbins’ low-bred satisfaction at (possibly) learning of it, stopped her, although she was scarcely aware that that was the true motive.

            Meanwhile, she lived with it and made the best of it. The mekkano was instructed to wait at the door--small “d”--with a Tergo kit and a change of clothing. Richard washed and changed without resistance. His underthings, socks and flexies were disposable in any case, and Mrs. Hanshaw bore uncomplainingly the expense of daily disposal of shirts. Trousers she finally allowed to go a week before disposal on condition of rigorous nightly cleansing.

            One day she suggested that Richard accompany her on a trip to New York. It was more a vague desire to keep him in sight than part of any purposeful plan. He did not object. He was even happy. He stepped right through the Door, unconcerned. He didn’t hesitate. He even lacked the look of resentment he wore on those mornings he used the Door to go to school.

            Mrs. Hanshaw rejoiced. This could be a way of weaning him back into Door usage, and she racked her ingenuity for excuses to make trips with Richard. She even raised her power bill to quite unheard-of heights by suggesting, and going through with, a trip to Canton for the day in order to witness a Chinese festival.

            That was on a Sunday, and the next morning Richard marched directly to the hole in the wall he always used. Mrs. Hanshaw, having wakened particularly early, witnessed that. For once, badgered past endurance, she called after him plaintively, “Why not the Door, Dickie?”

            He said, briefly, “It’s all right for Canton,” and stepped out of the house.

            So that plan ended in failure. And then, one day, Richard came home soaking wet. The mekkano hovered above him uncertainly and Mrs. Hanshaw, just returned from a four-hour visit with her sister in Iowa, cried, “Richard Hanshaw!”

            He said, hang-dog fashion, “It started raining. All of a sudden, it started raining.”

            For a moment, the word didn’t register with her. Her own school days and her studies of geography were twenty years in the past. And then she remembered and caught the vision of water pouring recklessly and endlessly down from the sky--a mad cascade of water with no tap to turn off, no button to push, no contact to break.

            She said, “And you stayed out in it?”

            He said, “Well, gee, Mom, I came home fast as I could. I didn’t know it was going to rain.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw had nothing to say. She was appalled and the sensation filled her too full for words to find a place.

            Two days later, Richard found himself with a running nose, and a dry, scratchy throat. Mrs. Hanshaw had to admit that the virus of disease had found a lodging in her house, as though it were a miserable hovel of the Iron Age.

            It was over that that her stubbornness and pride broke and she admitted to herself that, after all, Richard had to have psychiatric help.

            Mrs. Hanshaw chose a psychiatrist with care. Her first impulse was to find one at a distance. For a while, she considered stepping directly into the San Francisco Medical Center and choosing one at random.

            And then it occurred to her that by doing that she would become merely an anonymous consultant. She would have no way of obtaining any greater consideration for herself than would be forthcoming to any public-Door user of the city slums. Now if she remained in her own community, her word would carry weight--

            She consulted the district map. It was one of that excellent series prepared by Doors, Inc., and distributed free of charge to their clients. Mrs. Hanshaw couldn’t quite suppress that little thrill of civic pride as she unfolded the map. It wasn’t a fine-print directory of Door co-ordinates only. It was an actual map, with each house carefully located.

            And why not? District A-3 was a name of moment in the world, a badge of aristocracy. It was the first community on the planet to have been established on a completely Doored basis. The first, the largest, the wealthiest, the best-known. It needed no factories, no stores. It didn’t even need roads. Each house was a little secluded castle, the Door of which had entry anywhere the world over where other Doors existed.

            Carefully, she followed down the keyed listing of the five thousand families of District A-3. She knew it included several psychiatrists. The learned professions were well represented in A-3.

            Doctor Hamilton Sloane was the second name she arrived at and her finger lingered upon the map. His office was scarcely two miles from the Hanshaw residence. She liked his name. The fact that he lived in A-3 was evidence of worth. And he was a neighbor, practically a neighbor. He would understand that it was a matter of urgency--and confidential.

            Firmly, she put in a call to his office to make an appointment.

            Doctor Hamilton Sloane was a comparatively young man, not quite forty. He was of good family and he had indeed heard of Mrs. Hanshaw.

            He listened to her quietly and then said, “And this all began with the Door breakdown.”

            “That’s right, Doctor.”

            “Does he show any fear of the Doors?”

            “Of course not. What an idea!” She was plainly startled.

            “It’s possible, Mrs. Hanshaw, it’s possible. After all, when you stop to think of how a Door works it is rather a frightening thing, really. You step into a Door, and for an instant your atoms are converted into field-energies, transmitted to another part of space and reconverted into matter. For that instant you’re not alive.”

            “I’m sure no one thinks of such things.”

            “But your son may. He witnessed the breakdown of the Door. He may be saying to himself, ‘What if the Door breaks down just as I’m half-way through?’“

            “But that’s nonsense. He still uses the Door. He’s even been to Canton with me; Canton, China. And as I told you, he uses it for school about once or twice a week.”

            “Freely? Cheerfully?”

            “Well,” said Mrs. Hanshaw, reluctantly, “he does seem a bit put out by it. But really, Doctor, there isn’t much use talking about it, is there? If you would do a quick probe, see where the trouble was,” and she finished on a bright note, “why, that would be all. I’m sure it’s quite a minor thing.”

            Dr. Sloane signed. He detested the word “probe” and there was scarcely any word he heard oftener.

            “Mrs. Hanshaw,” he said patiently, “there is no such thing as a quick probe. Now I know the mag-strips are full of it and it’s a rage in some circles, but it’s much overrated.”

            “Are you serious?”

            “Quite. The probe is very complicated and the theory is that it traces mental circuits. You see, the cells of the brains are interconnected in a large variety of ways. Some of those interconnected paths are more used than others. They represent habits of thought, both conscious and unconscious. Theory has it that these paths in any given brain can be used to diagnose mental ills early and with certainty.”

            “Well, then?”

            “But subjection to the probe is quite a fearful thing, especially to a child. It’s a traumatic experience. It takes over an hour. And even then, the results must be sent to the Central Psychoanalytical Bureau for analysis, and that could take weeks. And on top of all that, Mrs. Hanshaw, there are many psychiatrists who think the theory of probe-analyses to be most uncertain.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw compressed her lips. “You mean nothing can be done.”

            Dr. Sloane smiled. “Not at all. There were psychiatrists for centuries before there were probes. I suggest that you let me talk to the boy.”

            “Talk to him? Is that all?”

            “I’ll come to you for background information when necessary, but the essential thing, I think, is to talk to the boy.”

            “Really, Dr. Sloane, I doubt if he’ll discuss the matter with you. He won’t talk to me about it and I’m his mother.”

            “That often happens,” the psychiatrist assured her. “A child will sometimes talk more readily to a stranger. In any case, I cannot take the case otherwise.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw rose, not at all pleased. “When can you come, Doctor?”

            “What about this coming Saturday? The boy won’t be in school. Will you be busy?”

            “We will be ready.”

            She made a dignified exit. Dr. Sloane accompanied her through the small reception room to his office Door and waited while she punched the coordinates of her house. He watched her pass through. She became a half-woman, a quarter-woman, an isolated elbow and foot, a nothing.

            It was frightening.

            Did a Door ever break down during passage, leaving half a body here and half there? He had never heard of such a case, but he imagined it could happen.

            He returned to his desk and looked up the time of his next appointment. It was obvious to him that Mrs. Hanshaw was annoyed and disappointed at not having arranged for a psychic probe treatment.

            Why, for God’s sake? Why should a thing like the probe, an obvious piece of quackery in his own opinion, get such a hold on the general public? It must be part of this general trend toward machines. Anything man can do, machines can do better. Machines! More machines! Machines for anything and everything! O temporal O mores!

            Oh, hell!

            His resentment of the probe was beginning to bother him. Was it a fear of technological unemployment, a basic insecurity on his part, a mecha-nophobia, if that was the word--

            He made a mental note to discuss this with his own analyst.

            Dr. Sloane had to feel his way. The boy wasn’t a patient who had come to him, more or less anxious to talk, more or less anxious to be helped.

            Under the circumstances it would have been best to keep his first meeting with Richard short and noncommittal. It would have been sufficient merely to establish himself as something less than a total stranger. The next time he would be someone Richard had seen before. The time after he would be an acquaintance, and after that a friend of the family.

            Unfortunately, Mrs. Hanshaw was not likely to accept a long-drawn-out process. She would go searching for a probe and, of course, she would find it.

            And harm the boy. He was certain of that.

            It was for that reason he felt he must sacrifice a little of the proper caution and risk a small crisis.

            An uncomfortable ten minutes had passed when he decided he must try. Mrs. Hanshaw was smiling in a rather rigid way, eyeing him narrowly, as though she expected verbal magic from him. Richard wriggled in his seat, unresponsive to Dr. Sloane’s tentative comments, overcome with boredom and unable not to show it.

            Dr. Sloane said, with casual suddenness, “Would you like to take a walk with me, Richard?”

            The boy’s eyes widened and he stopped wriggling. He looked directly at Dr. Sloane. “A walk, sir?”

            “I mean, outside.”

            “Do you go--outside?”

            “Sometimes. When I feel like it.”

            Richard was on his feet, holding down a squirming eagerness. “I didn’t think anyone did.”

            “I do. And I like company.”

            The boy sat down, uncertainly. “Mom?--”

            Mrs. Hanshaw had stiffened in her seat, her compressed lips radiating horror, but she managed to say, “Why certainly, Dickie. But watch yourself.”

            And she managed a quick and baleful glare at Dr. Sloane.

            In one respect, Dr. Sloane had lied. He did not go outside “sometimes.” He hadn’t been in the open since early college days. True, he had been athletically inclined (still was to some extent) but in his time the indoor ultra-violet chambers, swimming pools and tennis courts had flourished. For those with the price, they were much more satisfactory than the outdoor equivalents, open to the elements as they were, could possibly be. There was no occasion to go outside.

            So there was a crawling sensation about his skin when he felt wind touch it, and he put down his flexied shoes on bare grass with a gingerly movement.

            “Hey, look at that.” Richard was quite different now, laughing, his reserve broken down.

            Dr. Sloane had time only to catch a flash of blue that ended in a tree. Leaves rustled and he lost it.

            “What was it?”

            “A bird,” said Richard. “A blue kind of bird.”

            Dr. Sloane looked about him in amazement. The Hanshaw residence was on a rise of ground, and he could see for miles. The area was only lightly wooded and between clumps of trees, grass gleamed brightly in the sunlight.

            Colors set in deeper green made red and yellow patterns. They were flowers. From the books he had viewed in the course of his lifetime and from the old video shows, he had learned enough so that all this had an eerie sort of familiarity.

            And yet the grass was so trim, the flowers so patterned. Dimly, he realized he had been expecting something wilder. He said, “Who takes care of all this?”

            Richard shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe the mekkanos do it.”

            “Mekkanos?”

            “There’s loads of them around. Sometimes they got a sort of atomic knife they hold near the ground. It cuts the grass. And they’re always fooling around with the flowers and things. There’s one of them over there.”

            It was a small object, half a mile away. Its metal skin cast back highlights as it moved slowly over the gleaming meadow, engaged in some sort of activity that Dr. Sloane could not identify.

            Dr. Sloane was astonished. Here it was a perverse sort of estheticism, a kind of conspicuous consumption--

            “What’s that?” he asked suddenly.

            Richard looked. He said, “That’s a house. Belongs to the Froehlichs. Coordinates, A-3, 23, 461. That little pointy building over there is the public Door.”

            Dr. Sloane was staring at the house. Was that what it looked like from the outside? Somehow he had imagined something much more cubic, and taller.

            “Come along,” shouted Richard, running ahead.

            Dr. Sloane followed more sedately. “Do you know all the houses about here?”

            “Just about.”

            “Where is A-23, 26, 475?” It was his own house, of course.

            Richard looked about. “Let’s see. Oh, sure, I know where it is--you see that water there?”

            “Water?” Dr. Sloane made out a line of silver curving across the green.

            “Sure. Real water. Just sort of running over rocks and things. It keeps running all the time. You can get across it if you step on the rocks. It’s called a river.”

            More like a creek, thought Dr. Sloane. He had studied geography, of course, but what passed for the subject these days was really economic and cultural geography. Physical geography was almost an extinct science except among specialists. Still, he knew what rivers and creeks were, in a theoretical sort of way.

            Richard was still talking. “Well, just past the river, over that hill with the big clump of trees and down the other side a way is A-23, 26, 475. It’s a light green house with a white roof.”

            “It is?” Dr. Sloane was genuinely astonished. He hadn’t known it was green.

            Some small animal disturbed the grass in its anxiety to avoid the oncoming feet. Richard looked after it and shrugged. “You can’t catch them. I tried.”

            A butterfly flitted past, a wavering bit of yellow. Dr. Sloane’s eyes followed it.

            There was a low hum that lay over the fields, interspersed with an occasional harsh, calling sound, a rattle, a twittering, a chatter that rose, then fell. As his ear accustomed itself to listening, Dr. Sloane heard a thousand sounds, and none were man-made.

            A shadow fell upon the scene, advancing toward him, covering him. It was suddenly cooler and he looked upward, startled.

            Richard said, “It’s just a cloud. It’ll go away in a minute--looka these flowers. They’re the kind that smell.”

            They were several hundred yards from the Hanshaw residence. The cloud passed and the sun shone once more. Dr. Sloane looked back and was appalled at the distance they had covered. If they moved out of sight of the house and if Richard ran off, would he be able to find his way back?

            He pushed the thought away impatiently and looked out toward the line of water (nearer now) and past it to where his own house must be. He thought wonderingly: Light green?

            He said, “You must be quite an explorer.”

            Richard said, with a shy pride, “When I go to school and come back, I always try to use a different route and see new things.”

            “But you don’t go outside every morning, do you? Sometimes you use the Doors, I imagine.”

            “Oh, sure.”

            “Why is that, Richard?” Somehow, Dr. Sloane felt there might be significance in that point.

            But Richard quashed him. With his eyebrows up and a look of astonishment on his face, he said, “Well, gosh, some mornings it rains and I have to use the Door. I hate that, but what can you do? About two-weeks ago, I got caught in the rain and I--” he looked about him automatically, and his voice sank to a whisper “--caught a cold, and wasn’t Mom upset, though.”

            Dr. Sloane sighed. “Shall we go back now?”

            There was a quick disappointment on Richard’s face. “Aw, what for?”

            “You remind me that your mother must be waiting for us.”

            “I guess so.” The boy turned reluctantly.

            They walked slowly back. Richard was saying, chattily, “I wrote a composition at school once about how if I could go on some ancient vehicle” (he pronounced it with exaggerated care) “I’d go in a stratoliner and look at stars and clouds and things. Oh, boy, I was sure nuts.”

            “You’d pick something else now?”

            “You bet. I’d go in an aut’m’bile, real slow. Then I’d see everything there was.”

            Mrs. Hanshaw seemed troubled, uncertain. “You don’t think it’s abnormal, then, Doctor?”

            “Unusual, perhaps, but not abnormal. He likes the outside.”

            “But how can he? It’s so dirty, so unpleasant.”

            “That’s a matter of individual taste. A hundred years ago our ancestors were all outside most of the time. Even today, I dare say there are a million Africans who have never seen a Door.”

            “But Richard’s always been taught to behave himself the way a decent person in District A-3 is supposed to behave,” said Mrs. Hanshaw, fiercely. “Not like an African or--or an ancestor.”

            “That may be part of the trouble, Mrs. Hanshaw. He feels this urge to go outside and yet he feels it to be wrong. He’s ashamed to talk about it to you or to his teacher. It forces him into sullen retreat and it could eventually be dangerous.”

            “Then how can we persuade him to stop?”

            Dr. Sloane said, “Don’t try. Channel the activity instead. The day your Door broke down, he was forced outside, found he liked it, and that set a pattern. He used the trip to school and back as an excuse to repeat that first exciting experience. Now suppose you agree to let him out of the house for two hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Suppose he gets it through his head that after all he can go outside without necessarily having to go anywhere in the process. Don’t you think he’ll be willing to use the Door to go to school and back thereafter? And don’t you think that will stop the trouble he’s now having with his teacher and probably with his fellow-pupils?”

            “But then will matters remain so? Must they? Won’t he ever be normal again?”

            Dr. Sloane rose to his feet. “Mrs. Hanshaw, he’s as normal as need be right now. Right now, he’s tasting the joys of the forbidden. If you cooperate with him, show that you don’t disapprove, it will lose some of its attraction right there. Then, as he grows older, he will become more aware of the expectations and demands of society. He will learn to conform. After all, there is a little of the rebel in all of us, but it generally dies down as we grow old and tired. Unless, that is, it is unreasonably suppressed and allowed to build up pressure. Don’t do that. Richard will be all right.”

            He walked to the Door.

            Mrs. Hanshaw said, “And you don’t think a probe will be necessary, Doctor?”

            He turned and said vehemently, “No, definitely not! There is nothing about the boy that requires it. Understand? Nothing.”

            His fingers hesitated an inch from the combination board and the expression on his face grew lowering.

            “What’s the matter, Dr. Sloane?” asked Mrs. Hanshaw.

            But he didn’t hear her because he was thinking of the Door and the psychic probe and all the rising, choking tide of machinery. There is a little of the rebel in all of us, he thought.

            So he said in a soft voice, as his hand fell away from the board and his feet turned away from the Door, “You know, it’s such a beautiful day that I think I’ll walk.”

---

Surprises work both ways, I explained in my introduction to “Nightfall” that its success had been completely unexpected. Well, in the case of “Strikebreaker,” I thought I had a blockbuster. It seemed to me to be fresh and original; I felt it contained a stirring sociological theme, with lots of meaning, and with considerable pathos. Yet, as nearly as I can make out, it dropped silently into the sea of audience reaction without as much as marking out a single circular ripple on its surface.

            But I can be stubborn about such things. If I like a story, I like it, and I include it here to give the audience a second chance.

            This is one of those stories where I can remember the exact occasion that put it into my mind. It involved one of my periodic trips to New York which have, more and more, become a kind of highlight to my life. They are the only occasions on which I can stop writing for as much as three or four days at a time without feeling either guilty or restless.

            Naturally, anything that would tend to interfere with one of my trips would ruffle my otherwise imperturbable sang-froid. Actually, I would throw a fit. It was bad enough when something enormous would get in my way--a hurricane or a blizzard, for instance. But a subway strike? And not of all the subway employees, but only a few key men, say thirty-five. They would stall the entire subway system and, with that, the entire city. And if the strike came to pass, I could scarcely venture into a stalled city.

            “Where will this all end?” I apostrophized the heavens in my best tragical manner, one fist raised high and the other clenched in my hair. “ A mere handful of men can paralyze an entire megalopolis. Where will it end?”

            My gesture remained frozen as, in thought, I carried the situation to its logical extreme. I carefully unhooked the gesture, went upstairs, and wrote “Strikebreaker.”

            The happy ending is that the threatened strike did not come to pass, and I went to New York.

            One more point about this story. It represents my personal record for stupid title changes. The editor of the magazine in which this story first appeared was Robert W. Lowndes, as sweet and as erudite a man as I have ever known. He had nothing to do with it. Some idiot in the higher echelons decided to call the story “Male Strikebreaker.”

            Why “Male”? What possible addition to the sense of the title can be made by that adjective? What illumination? What improvement? Heavens, I can understand (though not approve) a ridiculous title change which the publisher felt would imply something salacious and thus increase sales, but the modified title doesn’t even do that.

            Oh, well--I’ll just change it back.

            First appearance--The Original Science Fiction Stories, January 1957, under the title “Male Strikebreaker.” Copyright, 1956, by Columbia Publications, Inc.

Strikebreaker

            Elvis Blei rubbed his plump hands and said, “Self-containment is the word.” He smiled uneasily as he helped Steven Lamorak of Earth to a light. There was uneasiness all over his smooth face with its small wide-set eyes.

            Lamorak puffed smoke appreciatively and crossed his lanky legs.

            His hair was powdered with gray and he had a large and powerful jawbone. “Home grown?” he asked, staring critically at the cigarette. He tried to hide his own disturbance at the other’s tension.

            “Quite,” said Blei.

            “I wonder,” said Lamorak, “that you have room on your small world for such luxuries.”

            (Lamorak thought of his first view of Elsevere from the spaceship visiplate. It was a jagged, airless planetoid, some hundred miles in diameter --just a dust-gray rough-hewn rock, glimmering dully in the light of its sun, 200,000,000 miles distant. It was the only object more than a mile in diameter that circled that sun, and now men had burrowed into that miniature world and constructed a society in it. And he himself, as a sociologist, had come to study the world and see how humanity had made itself fit into that queerly specialized niche.)

            Blei’s polite fixed smile expanded a hair. He said, “We are not a small world, Dr. Lamorak; you judge us by two-dimensional standards. The surface area of Elsevere is only three quarters that of the State of New York, but that’s irrelevant. Remember, we can occupy, if we wish, the entire interior of Elsevere. A sphere of 50 miles radius has a volume of well over half a million cubic miles. If all of Elsevere were occupied by levels 50 feet apart, the total surface area within the planetoid would be 56,000,000 square miles, and that is equal to the total land area of Earth. And none of these square miles, Doctor, would be unproductive.”

            Lamorak said, “Good Lord,” and stared blankly for a moment. “Yes, of course you’re right. Strange I never thought of it that way. But then, Elsevere is the only thoroughly exploited planetoid world in the Galaxy; the rest of us simply can’t get away from thinking of two-dimensional surfaces, as you pointed out. Well, I’m more than ever glad that your Council has been so cooperative as to give me a free hand in this investigation of mine.”

            Blei nodded convulsively at that.

            Lamorak frowned slightly and thought: He acts for all the world as though he wished I had not come. Something’s wrong.

            Blei said, “Of course, you understand that we are actually much smaller than we could be; only minor portions of Elsevere have as yet been hollowed out and occupied. Nor are we particularly anxious to expand, except very slowly. To a certain extent we are limited by the capacity of our pseudogravity engines and Solar energy converters.”

            “I understand. But tell me, Councillor Blei--as a matter of personal curiosity, and not because it is of prime importance to my project--could I view some of your farming and herding levels first? I am fascinated by the thought of fields of wheat and herds of cattle inside a planetoid.”

            “You’ll find the cattle small by your standards, Doctor, and we don’t have much wheat. We grow yeast to a much greater extent. But there will be some wheat to show you. Some cotton and tobacco, too. Even fruit trees.”

            “Wonderful. As you say, self-containment. You recirculate everything, I imagine.”

            Lamorak’s sharp eyes did not miss the fact that this last remark twinged Blei. The Elseverian’s eyes narrowed to slits that hid his expression.

            He said, “We must recirculate, yes. Air, water, food, minerals--everything that is used up--must be restored to its original state; waste products are reconverted to raw materials. All that is needed is energy, and we have enough of that. We don’t manage with one hundred percent efficiency, of course; there is a certain seepage. We import a small amount of water each year; and if our needs grow, we may have to import some coal and oxygen.”

            Lamorak said, “When can we start our tour, Councillor Blei?”

            Blei’s smile lost some of its negligible warmth. “As soon as we can, Doctor. There are some routine matters that must be arranged.”

            Lamorak nodded, and having finished his cigarette, stubbed it out.

            Routine matters? There was none of this hesitancy during the preliminary correspondence. Elsevere had seemed proud that its unique planetoid existence had attracted the attention of the Galaxy.

            He said, “I realize I would be a disturbing influence in” a tightly-knit society,” and watched grimly as Blei leaped at the explanation and made it his own.

            “Yes,” said Blei, “we feel marked off from the rest of the Galaxy. We have our own customs. Each individual Elseverian fits into a comfortable niche. The appearance of a stranger without fixed caste is unsettling.”

            “The caste system does involve a certain inflexibility.”

            “Granted,” said Blei quickly; “but there is also a certain self-assurance. We have firm rules of intermarriage and rigid inheritance of occupation. Each man, woman and child knows his place, accepts it, and is accepted in it; we have virtually no neurosis or mental illness.”

            “And are there no misfits?” asked Lamorak.

            Blei shaped his mouth as though to say no, then clamped it suddenly shut, biting the word into silence; a frown deepened on his forehead. He said, at length, “I will arrange for the tour, Doctor. Meanwhile, I imagine you would welcome a chance to freshen up and to sleep.”

            They rose together and left the room, Blei politely motioning the Earthman to precede him out the door.

            Lamorak felt oppressed by the vague feeling of crisis that had pervaded his discussion with Blei.

            The newspaper reinforced that feeling. He read it carefully before getting into bed, with what was at first merely a clinical interest. It was an eight-page tabloid of synthetic paper. Cue quarter of its items consisted of “personals”: births, marriages, deaths, record quotas, expanding habitable volume (not area! three dimensions!). The remainder included scholarly essays, educational material, and fiction. Of news, in the sense to which Lamorak was accustomed, there was virtually nothing.

            One item only could be so considered and that was chilling in its incompleteness.

            It said, under a small headline: demands unchanged: There has been no change in his attitude of yesterday. The Chief Councillor, after a second interview, announced that his demands remain completely unreasonable and cannot be met under any circumstances.

            Then, in parentheses, and in different type, there was the statement: The editors of this paper agree that Elsevere cannot and will not jump to his whistle, come what may.

            Lamorak read it over three times. His attitude. His demands. His whistle.

            Whose?

            He slept uneasily, that night.

            He had no time for newspapers in the days that followed; but spasmodically, the matter returned to his thoughts.

            Blei, who remained his guide and companion for most of the tour, grew ever more withdrawn.

            On the third day (quite artificially clock-set in an Earthlike twenty-four hour pattern), Blei stopped at one point, and said, “Now this level is devoted entirely to chemical industries. That section is not important--”

            But he turned away a shade too rapidly, and Lamorak seized his arm. “What are the products of that section?”

            “Fertilizers. Certain organics,” said Blei stiffly.

            Lamorak held him back, looking for what sight Blei might be evading. His gaze swept over the close-by horizons of lined rock and the buildings squeezed and layered between the levels.

            Lamorak said, “Isn’t that a private residence there?”

            Blei did not look in the indicated direction.

            Lamorak said, “I think that’s the largest one I’ve seen yet. Why is it here on a factory level?” That alone made it noteworthy. He had already seen that the levels on Elsevere were divided rigidly among the residential, the agricultural and the industrial.

            He looked back and called, “Councillor Blei!”

            The Councillor was walking away and Lamorak pursued him with hasty steps. “Is there something wrong, sir?”

            Blei muttered, “I am rude, I know. I am sorry. There are matters that prey on my mind--” He kept up his rapid pace.

            “Concerning his demands.”

            Blei came to a full halt. “What do you know about that?”

            “No more than I’ve said. I read that much in the newspaper.”

            Blei muttered something to himself.

            Lamorak said, “Ragusnik? What’s that?”

            Blei sighed heavily. “I suppose you ought to be told. It’s humiliating, deeply embarrassing. The Council thought that matters would certainly be arranged shortly and that your visit need not be interfered with, that you need not know or be concerned. But it is almost a week now. I don’t know what will happen and, appearances notwithstanding, it might be best for you to leave. No reason for an Outworlder to risk death.”

            The Earthman smiled incredulously. “Risk death? In this little world, so peaceful and busy. I can’t believe it.”

            The Elseverian councillor said, “I can explain. I think it best I should.” He turned his head away. “As I told you, everything on Elsevere must recirculate. You understand that.”

            “Yes.”

            “That includes--uh, human wastes.”

            “I assumed so,” said Lamorak.

            “Water is reclaimed from it by distillation and absorption. What remains is converted into fertilizer for yeast use; some of it is used as a source of fine organics and other by-products. These factories you see are devoted to this.”

            “Well?” Lamorak had experienced a certain difficulty in the drinking of water when he first landed on Elsevere, because he had been realistic enough to know what it must be reclaimed from; but he had conquered the feeling easily enough. Even on Earth, water was reclaimed by natural processes from all sorts of unpalatable substances.

            Blei, with increasing difficulty, said, “Igor Ragusnik is the man who is in charge of the industrial processes immediately involving the wastes. The position has been in his family since Elsevere was first colonized. One of the original settlers was Mikhail Ragusnik and he--he--”

            “Was in charge of waste reclamation.”

            “Yes. Now that residence you singled out is the Ragusnik residence; it is the best and most elaborate on the planetoid. Ragusnik gets many privileges the rest of us do not have; but, after all--” Passion entered the Councillor’s voice with great suddenness, “we cannot speak to him.”

            “What?”

            “He demands full social equality. He wants his children to mingle with ours, and our wives to visit-- Oh!” It was a groan of utter disgust.

            Lamorak thought of the newspaper item that could not even bring itself to mention Ragusnik’s name in print, or to say anything specific about his demands. He said, “I take it he’s an outcast because of his job.”

            “Naturally. Human wastes and--” words failed Blei. After a pause, he said more quietly, “As an Earthman, I suppose you don’t understand.”

            “As a sociologist, I think I do.” Lamorak thought of the Untouchables in ancient India, the ones who handled corpses. He thought of the position of swineherds in ancient Judea.

            He went on, “I gather Elsevere will not give in to those demands.”

            “Never,” said Blei, energetically. “Never.”

            “And so?”

            “Ragusnik has threatened to cease operations.”

            “Go on strike, in other words.”

            “Yes.”

            “Would that be serious?”

            “We have enough food and water to last quite a while; reclamation is not essential in that sense. But the wastes would accumulate; they would infect the planetoid. After generations of careful disease control, we have low natural resistance to germ diseases. Once an epidemic started--and one would--we would drop by the hundred.”

            “Is Ragusnik aware of this?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            “Do you think he is likely to go through with his threat, then?”

            “He is mad. He has already stopped working; there has been no waste reclamation since the day before you landed.” Blei’s bulbous nose sniffed at the air as though it already caught the whiff of excrement.

            Lamorak sniffed mechanically at that, but smelled nothing.

            Blei said, “So you see why it might be wise for you to leave. We are humiliated, of course, to have to suggest it.”

            But Lamorak said, “Wait; not just yet. Good Lord, this is a matter of great interest to me professionally. May I speak to the Ragusnik?”

            “On no account,” said Blei, alarmed.

            “But I would like to understand the situation. The sociological conditions here are unique and not to be duplicated elsewhere. In the name of science--”

            “How do you mean, speak? Would image-reception do?”

            “Yes.”

            “I will ask the Council,” muttered Blei.

            They sat about Lamorak uneasily, their austere and dignified expressions badly marred with anxiety. Blei, seated in the midst of them, studiously avoided the Earthman’s eyes.

            The Chief Councillor, gray-haired, his face harshly wrinkled, his neck scrawny, said in a soft voice, “If in any way you can persuade him, sir, out of your own convictions, we will welcome that. In no case, however, are you to imply that we will, in any way, yield.”

            A gauzy curtain fell between the Council and Lamorak. He could make out the individual councillors still, but now he turned sharply toward the receiver before him. It glowed to life.

            A head appeared in it, in natural color and with great realism. A strong dark head, with massive chin faintly stubbled, and thick, red lips set into a firm horizontal line.

            The image said, suspiciously, “Who are you?”

            Lamorak said, “My name is Steven Lamorak; I am an Earthman.”

            “An Outworlder?”

            “That’s right. I am visiting Elsevere. You are Ragusnik?”

            “Igor Ragusnik, at your service,” said the image, mockingly. “Except that there is no service and will be none until my family and I are treated like human beings.”

            Lamorak said, “Do you realize the danger that Elsevere is in? The possibility of epidemic disease?”

            “In twenty-four hours, the situation can be made normal, if they allow me humanity. The situation is theirs to correct.”

            “You sound like an educated man, Ragusnik.”

            “So?”

            “I am told you’re denied of no material comforts. You are housed and clothed and fed better than anyone on Elsevere. Your children are the best educated.”

            “Granted. But all by servo-mechanism. And motherless girl-babies are sent us to care for until they grow to be our wives. And they die young for loneliness. Why?” There was sudden passion in his voice. “Why must we live in isolation as if we were all monsters, unfit for human beings to be near? Aren’t we human beings like others, with the same needs and desires and feelings. Don’t we perform an honorable and useful function--?”

            There was a rustling of sighs from behind Lamorak. Ragusnik heard it, and raised his voice. “I see you of the Council behind there. Answer me: Isn’t it an honorable and useful function? It is your waste made into food for you. Is the man who purifies corruption worse than the man who produces it?--Listen, Councillors, I will not give in. Let all of Elsevere die of disease --including myself and my son, if necessary--but I will not give in. My family will be better dead of disease, than living as now.”

            Lamorak interrupted. “You’ve led this life since birth, haven’t you?”

            “And if I have?”

            “Surely you’re used to it.”

            “Never. Resigned, perhaps. My father was resigned, and I was resigned for a while; but I have watched my son, my only son, with no other little boy to play with. My brother and I had each other, but my son will never have anyone, and I am no longer resigned. I am through with Elsevere and through with talking.”

            The receiver went dead.

            The Chief Councillor’s face had paled to an aged yellow. He and Blei were the only ones of the group left with Lamorak. The Chief Councillor said, “The man is deranged; I do not know how to force him.”

            He had a glass of wine at his side; as he lifted it to his lips, he spilled a few drops that stained his white trousers with purple splotches.

            Lamorak said, “Are his demands so unreasonable? Why can’t he be accepted into society?”

            There was momentary rage in Blei’s eyes. “A dealer in excrement.” Then he shrugged. “You are from Earth.”

            Incongruously, Lamorak thought of another unacceptable, one of the numerous classic creations of the medieval cartoonist, Al Capp. The variously-named “inside man at the skonk works.”

            He said, “Does Ragusnik really deal with excrement? I mean, is there physical contact? Surely, it is all handled by automatic machinery.”

            “Of course,” said the Chief Councillor.

            “Then exactly what is Ragusnik’s function?”

            “He manually adjusts the various controls that assure the proper functioning of the machinery. He shifts units to allow repairs to be made; he alters functional rates with the time of day; he varies end production with demand.” He added sadly, “If we had the space to make the machinery ten times as complex, all this could be done automatically; but that would be such needless waste.”

            “But even so,” insisted Lamorak, “all Ragusnik does he does simply by pressing buttons or closing contacts or things like that.”

            “Yes.”

            “Then his work is no different from any Elseverian’s.”

            Blei said, stiffly, “You don’t understand.”

            “And for that you will risk the death of your children?”

            “We have no other choice,” said Blei. There was enough agony in his voice to assure Lamorak that the situation was torture for him, but that he had no other choice indeed.

            Lamorak shrugged in disgust. “Then break the strike. Force him.”

            “How?” said the Chief Councillor. “Who would touch him or go near him? And if we kill him by blasting from a distance, how will that help us?”

            Lamorak said, thoughtfully, “Would you know how to run his machinery?”

            The Chief Councillor came to his feet. “I?” he howled.

            “I don’t mean you,” cried Lamorak at once. “I used the pronoun in its indefinite sense. Could someone learn how to handle Ragusnik’s machinery?”

            Slowly, the passion drained out of the Chief Councillor. “It is in the handbooks, I am certain--though I assure you I have never concerned myself with it.”

            “Then couldn’t someone learn the procedure and substitute for Ragusnik until the man gives in?”

            Blei said, “Who would agree to do such a thing? Not I, under any circumstances.”

            Lamorak thought fleetingly of Earthly taboos that might be almost as strong. He thought of cannibalism, incest, a pious man cursing God. He said, “But you must have made provision for vacancy in the Ragusnik job. Suppose he died.”

            “Then his son would automatically succeed to his job, or his nearest other relative,” said Blei.

            “What if he had no adult relatives? What if all his family died at once?”

            “That has never happened; it will never happen.”

            The Chief Councillor added, “If there were danger of it, we might, perhaps, place a baby or two with the Ragusniks and have it raised to the profession.”

            “Ah. And how would you choose that baby?”

            “From among children of mothers who died in childbirth, as we choose the future Ragusnik bride.”

            “Then choose a substitute Ragusnik now, by lot,” said Lamorak.

            The Chief Councillor said, “No! Impossible! How can you suggest that? If we select a baby, that baby is brought up to the life; it knows no other. At this point, it would be necessary to choose an adult and subject him to Ragusnik-hood. No, Dr. Lamorak, we are neither monsters nor abandoned brutes.”

            No use, thought Lamorak helplessly. No use, unless--

            He couldn’t bring himself to face that unless just yet.

            That night, Lamorak slept scarcely at all. Ragusnik asked for only the basic elements of humanity. But opposing that were thirty thousand Elseverians who faced death.

            The welfare of thirty thousand on one side; the just demands of one family on the other. Could one say that thirty thousand who would support such injustice deserved to die? Injustice by what standards? Earth’s? Elsevere’s? And who was Lamorak that he should judge?

            And Ragusnik? He was willing to let thirty thousand die, including men and women who merely accepted a situation they had been taught to accept and could not change if they wished to. And children who had nothing at all to do with it.

            Thirty thousand on one side; a single family on the other.

            Lamorak made his decision in something that was almost despair; in the morning he called the Chief Councillor.

            He said, “Sir, if you can find a substitute, Ragusnik will see that he has lost all chance to force a decision in his favor and will return to work.”

            “There can be no substitute,” sighed the Chief Councillor; “I have explained that.”

            “No substitute among the Elseverians, but I am not an Elseverian; it doesn’t matter to me. I will substitute.”

            They were excited, much more excited than Lamorak himself. A dozen times they asked him if he was serious.

            Lamorak had not shaved, and he felt sick, “Certainly, I’m serious. And any time Ragusnik acts like this, you can always import a substitute. No other world has the taboo and there will always be plenty of temporary substitutes available if you pay enough.”

            (He was betraying a brutally exploited man, and he knew it. But he told himself desperately: Except for ostracism, he’s very well treated. Very well.)

            They gave him the handbooks and he spent six hours, reading and rereading. There was no use asking questions. None of the Elseverians knew anything about the job, except for what was in the handbook; and all seemed uncomfortable if the details were as much as mentioned.

            “Maintain zero reading of galvanometer A-2 at all times during red signal of the Lunge-howler,” read Lamorak. “Now what’s a Lunge-howler?”

            “There will be a sign,” muttered Blei, and the Elseverians looked at each other hang-dog and bent their heads to stare at their finger-ends.

            They left him long before he reached the small rooms that were the central headquarters of generations of working Ragusniks, serving their world. He had specific instructions concerning which turnings to take and what level to reach, but they hung back and let him proceed alone.

            He went through the rooms painstakingly, identifying the instruments and controls, following the schematic diagrams in the handbook.

            There’s a Lunge-howler, he thought, with gloomy satisfaction. The sign did indeed say so. It had a semi-circular face bitten into holes that were obviously designed to glow in separate colors. Why a “howler” then?

            He didn’t know.

            Somewhere, thought Lamorak, somewhere wastes are accumulating, pushing against gears and exits, pipelines and stills, waiting to be handled in half a hundred ways. Now they just accumulate.

            Not without a tremor, he pulled the first switch as indicated by the handbook in its directions for “Initiation.” A gentle murmur of life made itself felt through the floors and walls. He turned a knob and lights went on.

            At each step, he consulted the handbook, though he knew it by heart; and with each step, the rooms brightened and the dial-indicators sprang into motion and a humming grew louder.

            Somewhere deep in the factories, the accumulated wastes were being drawn into the proper channels.

            A high-pitched signal sounded and startled Lamorak out of his painful concentration. It was the communications signal and Lamorak fumbled his receiver into action.

            Ragusnik’s head showed, startled; then slowly, the incredulity and outright shock faded from his eyes. “That’s how it is, then.”

            “I’m not an Elseverian, Ragusnik; I don’t mind doing this.”

            “But what business is it of yours? Why do you interfere?”

            “I’m on your side, Ragusnik, but I must do this.”

            “Why, if you’re on my side? Do they treat people on your world as they treat me here?”

            “Not any longer. But even if you are right, there are thirty thousand people on Elsevere to be considered.”

            “They would have given in; you’ve ruined my only chance.”

            “They would not have given in. And in a way, you’ve won; they know now that you’re dissatisfied. Until now, they never dreamed a Ragusnik could be unhappy, that he could make trouble.”

            “What if they know? Now all they need do is hire an Outworlder anytime.”

            Lamorak shook his head violently. He had thought this through in these last bitter hours. “The fact that they know means that the Elseverians will begin to think about you; some will begin to wonder if it’s right to treat a human so. And if Outworlders are hired, they’ll spread the word that this goes on upon Elsevere and Galactic public opinion will be in your favor.”

            “And?”

            “Things will improve. In your son’s time, things will be much better.”

            “In my son’s time,” said Ragusnik, his cheeks sagging. “I might have had it now. Well, I lose. I’ll go back to the job.”

            Lamorak felt an overwhelming relief. “If you’ll come here now, sir, you may have your job and I’ll consider it an honor to shake your hand.”

            Ragusnik’s head snapped up and filled with a gloomy pride. “You call me ‘sir’ and offer to shake my hand. Go about your business, Earthman, and leave me to my work, for I would not shake yours.”

            Lamorak returned the way he had come, relieved that the crisis was over, and profoundly depressed, too.

            He stopped in surprise when he found a section of corridor cordoned off, so he could not pass. He looked about for alternate routes, then startled at a magnified voice above his head. “Dr. Lamorak do you hear me? This is Councillor Blei.”

            Lamorak looked up. The voice came over some sort of public address system, but he saw no sign of an outlet.

            He called out, “Is anything wrong? Can you hear me?”

            “I hear you.”

            Instinctively, Lamorak was shouting. “Is anything wrong? There seems to be a block here. Are there complications with Ragusnik?”

            “Ragusnik has gone to work,” came Blei’s voice. “The crisis is over, and you must make ready to leave.”

            “Leave?”

            “Leave Elsevere; a ship is being made ready for you now.”

            “But wait a bit.” Lamorak was confused by this sudden leap of events. “I haven’t completed my gathering of data.”

            Blei’s voice said, “This cannot be helped. You will be directed to the ship and your belongings will be sent after you by servo-mechanisms. We trust-- we trust--”

            Something was becoming clear to Lamorak. “You trust what?”

            “We trust you will make no attempt to see or speak directly to any Elseverian. And of course we hope you will avoid embarrassment by not attempting to return to Elsevere at any time in the future. A colleague of yours would be welcome if further data concerning us is needed.”

            “I understand,” said Lamorak, tonelessly. Obviously, he had himself become a Ragusnik. He had handled the controls that in turn had handled the wastes; he was ostracized. He was a corpse-handler, a swineherd, an inside man at the skonk works.

            He said, “Good-bye.”

            Blei’s voice said, “Before we direct you, Dr. Lamorak--. On behalf of the Council of Elsevere, I thank you for your help in this crisis.”

            “You’re welcome,” said Lamorak, bitterly.

---

In some ways, this story has the strangest background of any I ever wrote. It is also the shortest story I ever wrote--only 350 words. The two go together.

            It came about this way. On August 21, 1957, I took part in a panel discussion on means of communicating science on WGBH, Boston’s educational TV station. With me were John Hansen, a technical writer of directions for using machinery, and David O. Woodbury, the well-known science writer.

            We all bemoaned the inadequacy of most science writing and technical writing and there was some comment on my own prolificity. With my usual modesty, I attributed my success entirely to an incredible fluency of ideas and a delightful facility in writing. I stated incautiously that I could write a story anywhere, any time, under any conditions within reason. I was instantly challenged to write one right then and there with the television cameras on me.

            I accepted the challenge and began to write, taking for my theme the subject of discussion. The other two did not try to make life easier for me, either. They deliberately kept interrupting in order to drag me into their discussion and interrupt my line of thought, and I was just vain enough to try to answer sensibly while I continued scribbling.

            Before the half-hour program was over I had finished and read the story (which is why it is so short, by the way) and it was the one you see here as “Insert Knob A in Hole B.” In his own introduction to the story, when it appeared in F & SF, Mr. Boucher said he was printing it just as it was (I had sent him the handwritten script, after typing a copy for myself) “even to the retention of its one grammatical error.” I have kept that error here, too. It’s yours for the finding.

            I cheated, though. (Would I lie to you?) The three of us were talking before the program started and somehow I got the idea they might ask me to write a story on the program. So, just in case they did, I spent a few minutes before its start blocking out something.

            Consequently, when they asked me, I had it roughly in mind. All I had to do was work out the details, write it down, and then read it. After all, I had twenty minutes.

            First appearance--The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1957. ©, 1957, by Fantasy House, Inc.

Insert Knob A in Hole B

            Dave Woodbury and John Hansen, grotesque in their spacesuits, supervised anxiously as the large crate swung slowly out and away from the freight-ship and into the airlock. With nearly a year of their hitch on Space Station A5 behind them, they were understandably weary of filtration units that clanked, hydroponic tubs that leaked, air generators that hummed constantly and stopped occasionally.

            “Nothing works,” Woodbury would say mournfully, “because everything is hand-assembled by ourselves.”

            “Following directions,” Hansen would add, “composed by an idiot.”

            There were undoubtedly grounds for complaint there. The most expensive thing about a spaceship was the room allowed for freight so all equipment had to be sent across space disassembled and nested. All equipment had to be assembled at the Station itself with clumsy hands, inadequate tools and with blurred and ambiguous direction sheets for guidance.

            Painstakingly Woodbury had written complaints to which Hansen had added appropriate adjectives, and formal requests for relief of the situation had made their way back to Earth.

            And Earth had responded. A special robot had been designed, with a positronic brain crammed with the knowledge of how to assemble properly any disassembled machine in existence.

            That robot was in the crate being unloaded now and Woodbury was trembling as the airlock closed behind it.

            “First,” he said, “it overhauls the Food-Assembler and adjusts the steak-attachment knob so we can get it rare instead of burnt.”

            They entered the Station and attacked the crate with dainty touches of the demoleculizer rods in order to make sure that not a precious metal atom of their special assembly-robot was damaged.

            The crate fell open!

            And there within it were five hundred separate pieces--and one blurred and ambiguous direction sheet for assemblage.

---

I have frequently (rather to my own uneasy surprise) been accused of writing humorously. Oh, I try, I try, but only very cautiously, and for a long time I thought nobody noticed.

            You see, there is no margin for error in humor. You can try to write suspense and not quite hit the mark, and have a story that is only moderately suspenseful. In analogous manner, you can have a story be only moderately romantic, moderately exciting, moderately eerie, even moderately science-fictiony.

            But what happens when you miss the mark in humor? Is the result moderately humorous? Of course not! The not-quite-humorous remark, the not-quite-witty rejoinder, the not-quite-farcical episode are, respectively, dreary, stupid, and ridiculous.

            Well, with a target that is all bull’s-eye and no larger than a bull’s-eye at that, am I going to blaze away carelessly? Certainly not! I’m fantastically courageous, but I’m not stupid.

            So I have tried being funny only occasionally, and usually only gently and unobtrusively (as in “Nobody Here But--”) .On the few occasions in which I tried to write a purely funny story, I wasn’t completely satisfied.

            Mostly, therefore, I kept my stories grave and sober (as you can tell). Yet, I never quite gave up, either. One day, at the prodding of Mr. Boucher, I tried my hand at a Gilbert and Sullivan parody and finally (in my own eyes, at any rate) I clicked without reservation. I read the story over and laughed heartily.

            That was it. I had found my métier in humor. All I had to do was to assume a very slightly exaggerated pseudo-Victorian style and I found I had no trouble at all in being funny.

            Did I enter a full-fledged career as science fiction humorist at once? Not at all. I kept the humor at the previous level and remained, for the most part, grave and sober. That’s still what I do best.

            However, in the middle 1960s, I took to writing a series of articles for TV Guide which are nothing but this kind of humor, and I love them. (1 am sometimes taken to task, by the way, for saying, in my artless way, that I like my own material, but why shouldn’t I? Is it conceivable that I would spend seventy hours a week on writing and related reading if I didn’t like what I wrote? Come on!)

            By the way, a final word about “The Up-to-Date Sorcerer”--It is not essential to read Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer first, but it would make my story funnier if you did (I think) , and I would like to give it every break.

            First appearance--The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1958. @, 1958, by Mercury Press, Inc.

The Up-to-Date Sorcerer

            It always puzzled me that Nicholas Nitely, although a Justice of the Peace, was a bachelor. The atmosphere of his profession, so to speak, seemed so conducive to matrimony that surely he could scarcely avoid the gentle bond of wedlock.

            When I said as much over a gin and tonic at the Club recently, he said, “Ah, but I had a narrow escape some time ago,” and he sighed.

            “Oh, really?”

            “A fair young girl, sweet, intelligent, pure yet desperately ardent, and withal most alluring to the physical senses for even such an old fogy as myself.”

            I said, “How did you come to let her go?”

            “I had no choice. “He smiled gently at me and his smooth, ruddy complexion, his smooth gray hair, his smooth blue eyes, all combined to give him an expression of near-saintliness. He said, “You see, it was really the fault of her fiancé--”

            “Ah, she was engaged to someone else.”

            “--and of Professor Wellington Johns, who was, although an endocrinologist, by way of being an up-to-date sorcerer. In fact, it was just that--” He sighed, sipped at his drink, and turned on me the bland and cheerful face of one who is about to change the subject

            I said firmly, “Now, then, Nitely, old man, you cannot leave it so. I want to know about your beautiful girl--the flesh that got away.”

            He winced at the pun (one, I must admit, of my more abominable efforts) and settled down by ordering his glass refilled. “You understand,” he said, “I learned some of the details later on.”

            Professor Wellington Johns had a large and prominent nose, two sincere eyes and a distinct talent for making clothes appear too large for him. He said, “My dear children, love is a matter of chemistry.”

            His dear children, who were really students of his, and not his children at all, were named Alexander Dexter and Alice Sanger. They looked perfectly full of chemicals as they sat there holding hands. Together, their age amounted to perhaps 45, evenly split between them, and Alexander said, fairly inevitably, “Vive la chémie!”

            Professor Johns smiled reprovingly. “Or rather endocrinology. Hormones, after all, affect our emotions and it is not surprising that one should, specifically, stimulate that feeling we call love.”

            “But that’s so unromantic,” murmured Alice. “I’m sure I don’t need any.” She looked up at Alexander with a yearning glance.

            “My dear,” said the professor, “your blood stream was crawling with it at that moment you, as the saying is, fell in love. Its secretion had been stimulated by”--for a moment he considered his words carefully, being a highly moral man--”by some environmental factor involving your young man, and once the hormonal action had taken place, inertia carried you on. I could duplicate the effect easily.”

            “Why, Professor,” said Alice, with gentle affection. “It would be delightful to have you try,” and she squeezed Alexander’s hand shyly.

            “I do not mean,” said the professor, coughing to hide his embarrassment, “that I would personally attempt to reproduce--or, rather, to duplicate-- the conditions that created the natural secretion of the hormone. I mean, instead, that I could inject the hormone itself by hypodermic or even by oral ingestion, since it is a steroid hormone. I have, you see,” and here he removed his glasses and polished them proudly, “isolated and purified the hormone.”

            Alexander sat erect. “Professor! And you have said nothing?”

            “I must know more about it first.”

            “Do you mean to say,” said Alice, her lovely brown eyes shimmering with delight, “that you can make people fed the wonderful delight and heaven-surpassing tenderness of true love by means of a ... a pill?”

            The professor said, “I can indeed duplicate the emotion to which you refer in those rather cloying terms.”

            “Then why don’t you?”

            Alexander raised a protesting hand. “Now, darling, your ardor leads you astray. Our own happiness and forthcoming nuptials make you forget certain facts of life. If a married person were, by mistake, to accept this hormone--”

            Professor Johns said, with a trace of hauteur, “Let me explain right now that my hormone, or my amatogenic principle, as I call it--” (for he, in common with many practical scientists, enjoyed a proper scorn for the rarefied niceties of classical philology).

            “Call it a love-philtre, Professor,” said Alice, with a melting sigh.

            “My amatogenic cortical principle,” said Professor Johns, sternly, “has no effect on married individuals. The hormone cannot work if inhibited by other factors, and being married is certainly a factor that inhibits love.”

            “Why, so I have heard,” said Alexander, gravely, “but I intend to disprove that callous belief in the case of my own Alice.”

            “Alexander,” said Alice. “My love.”

            The professor said, “I mean that marriage inhibits extramarital love.”

            Alexander said, “Why, it has come to my ears that sometimes it does not.”

            Alice said, shocked, “Alexander!”

            “Only in rare instances, my dear, among those who have not gone to college.”

            The professor said, “Marriage may not inhibit a certain paltry sexual attraction, or tendencies toward minor trifling, but true love, as Miss Sanger expressed the emotion, is something which cannot blossom when the memory of a stern wife and various unattractive children hobbles the subconscious.”

            “Do you mean to say,” said Alexander, “that if you were to feed your love-philtre--beg pardon, your amatogenic principle--to a number of people indiscriminately, only the unmarried individuals would be affected?”

            “That is right, I have experimented on certain animals which, though not going through the conscious marriage rite, do form monogamous attachments. Those with the attachments already formed are not affected.”

            “Then, Professor, I have a perfectly splendid idea. Tomorrow night is the night of the Senior Dance here at college. There will be at least fifty couples present, mostly unmarried. Put your philtre in the punch.”

            “What? Are you mad?”

            But Alice had caught fire. “Why, it’s a heavenly idea, Professor. To think that all my friends will feel as I feel! Professor, you would be an angel from heaven. --But oh, Alexander, do you suppose the feelings might be a trifle uncontrolled? Some of our college chums are a little wild and if, in the heat of discovery of love, they should, well, kiss--”

            Professor Johns said, indignantly, “My dear Miss Sanger. You must not allow your imagination to become overheated. My hormone induces only those feelings which lead to marriage and not to the expression of anything that might be considered indecorous.”

            “I’m sorry,” murmured Alice, in confusion. “I should remember, Professor, that you are the most highly moral man I know--excepting always dear Alexander--and that no scientific discovery of yours could possibly lead to immorality.”

            She looked so woebegone that the professor forgave her at once.

            “Then you’ll do it, Professor?” urged Alexander. “After all, assuming there will be a sudden urge for mass marriage afterward, I can take care of that by having Nicholas Nitely, an old and valued friend of the family, present on some pretext. He is a Justice of the Peace and can easily arrange for such things as licenses and so on.”

            “I could scarcely agree,” said the professor, obviously weakening, “to perform an experiment without the consent of those experimented upon. It would be unethical.”

            “But you would be bringing only joy to them. You would be contributing to the moral atmosphere of the college. For surely, in the absence of overwhelming pressure toward marriage, it sometimes happens even in college that the pressure of continuous propinquity breeds a certain danger of-- of--”

            “Yes, there is that,” said the professor. “Well, I shall try a dilute solution. After all, the results may advance scientific knowledge tremendously and, as you say, it will also advance morality.”

            Alexander said, “And, of course, Alice and I will drink the punch, too.”

            Alice said, “Oh, Alexander, surely such love as ours needs no artificial aid.”

            “But it would not be artificial, my soul’s own. According to the professor, your love began as a result of just such a hormonal effect, induced, I admit, by more customary methods.”

            Alice blushed rosily. “But then, my only love, why the need for the repetition?”

            “To place us beyond all vicissitudes of Fate, my cherished one.”

            “Surely, my adored, you don’t doubt my love.”

            “No, my heart’s charmer, but--”

            “But? Is it that you do not trust me, Alexander?”

            “Of course I trust you, Alice, but--”

            “But? Again but!” Alice rose, furious. “If you cannot trust me, sir, perhaps I had better leave--” And she did leave indeed, while the two men stared after her, stunned.

            Professor Johns said, “I am afraid my hormone has, quite indirectly, been the occasion of spoiling a marriage rather than of causing one.”

            Alexander swallowed miserably, but his pride upheld him. “She will come back,” he said, hollowly. “A love such as ours is not so easily broken.”

            The Senior Dance was, of course, the event of the year. The young men shone and the young ladies glittered. The music lilted and the dancing feet touched the ground only at intervals. Joy was unrestrained.

            Or, rather, it was unrestrained in most cases. Alexander Dexter stood in one corner, eyes hard, expression icily bleak. Straight and handsome he might be, but no young woman approached him. He was known to belong to Alice Sanger, and under such circumstances, no college girl would dream Of, poaching. Yet where was Alice?

            She had not come with Alexander and Alexander’s pride prevented him from searching for her. From under grim eyelids, he could only watch the circulating couples cautiously.

            Professor Johns, in formal clothes that did not fit although made to measure, approached him. He said, “I will add my hormone to the punch shortly before the midnight toast. Is Mr. Nitely still here?”

            “I saw him a moment ago. In his capacity as chaperon he was busily engaged in making certain that the proper distance between dancing couples was maintained. Four fingers, I believe, at the point of closest approach. Mr. Nitely was most diligently making the necessary measurements.”

            “Very good. Oh, I had neglected to ask: Is the punch alcoholic? Alcohol would affect the workings of the amatogenic principle adversely.”

            Alexander, despite his sore heart, found spirit to deny the unintended slur upon his class. “Alcoholic, Professor? This punch is made along those principles firmly adhered to by all young college students. It contains only the purest of fruit juices, refined sugar, and a certain quantity of lemon peel-- enough to stimulate but not inebriate.”

            “Good,” said the professor. “Now I have added to the hormone a sedative designed to put our experimental subjects to sleep for a short time while the hormone works. Once they awaken, the first individual each sees--that is, of course, of the opposite sex--will inspire that individual with a pure and noble ardor that can end only in marriage.”

            Then, since it was nearly midnight, he made his way through the happy couples, all dancing at four-fingers’ distance, to the punch bowl.

            Alexander, depressed nearly to tears, stepped out to the balcony. In doing so, he just missed Alice, who entered the ballroom from the balcony by another door.

            “Midnight,” called out a happy voice. “Toast! Toast! Toast to the life ahead of us.”

            They crowded about the punch bowl; the little glasses were passed round.

            “To the life ahead of us,” they cried out and, with all the enthusiasm of young college students, downed the fiery mixture of pure fruit juices, sugar, and lemon peel, with--of course--the professor’s sedated amatogenic principle.

            As the fumes rose to their brains, they slowly crumpled to the floor.

            Alice stood there alone, still holding her drink, eyes wet with unshed tears. “Oh, Alexander, Alexander, though you doubt, yet are you my only love. You wish me to drink and I shall drink.” Then she, too, sank gracefully downward.

            Nicholas Nitely had gone in search of Alexander, for whom his warm heart was concerned. He had seen him arrive without Alice and he could only assume that a lovers’ quarrel had taken place. Nor did he feel any dismay at leaving the party to its own devices. These were not wild youngsters, but college boys and girls of good family and gentle upbringing. They could be trusted to the full to observe the four-finger limit, as he well knew.

            He found Alexander on the balcony, staring moodily out at a star-riddled sky.

            “Alexander, my boy.” He put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “This is not like you. To give way so to depression. Chut, my young friend, chut.”

            Alexander’s head bowed at the sound of the good old man’s voice. “It is unmanly, I know, but I yearn for Alice. I have been cruel to her and I am justly treated now. And yet, Mr. Nitely, if you could but know--” He placed his clenched fist on his chest, next his heart. He could say no more.

            Nitely said, sorrowfully, “Do you think because I am unmarried that I am unacquainted with the softer emotions? Be undeceived. Time was when I, too, knew love and heartbreak. But do not do as I did once and allow pride to prevent your reunion. Seek her out, my boy, seek her out and apologize. Do not allow yourself to become a solitary old bachelor such as I myself. --But, tush, I am puling.”

            Alexander’s back had straightened. “I will be guided by you, Mr. Nitely. I will seek her out.”

            “Then go on in. For shortly before I came out, I believe I saw her there.”

            Alexander’s heart leaped. “Perhaps she searches for me even now. I will go-- But, no. Go you first, Mr. Nitely, while I stay behind to recover myself. I would not have her see me a prey to womanish tears.”

            “Of course, my boy.”

            Nitely stopped at the door into the ballroom in astonishment. Had a universal catastrophe struck all low? Fifty couples were lying on the floor, some heaped together most indecorously.

            But before he could make up his mind to see if the nearest were dead, to sound the fire alarm, to call the police, to anything, they were rousing and struggling to their feet.

            Only one still remained. A lonely girl in white, one arm outstretched gracefully beneath her fair head. It was Alice Sanger and Nitely hastened to her, oblivious to the rising clamor about him.

            He sank to his knees. “Miss Sanger. My dear Miss Sanger. Are you hurt?”

            She opened her beautiful eyes slowly, and said, “Mr. Nitely! I never realized you were such a vision of loveliness.”

            “I?” Nitely started back with horror, but she had now risen to her feet and there was light in her eyes such as Nitely had not seen in a maiden’s eyes for thirty years--and then only weakly.

            She said, “Mr. Nitely, surely you will not leave me?”

            “No, no,” said Nitely, confused. “If you need me, I shall stay.”

            “I need you. I need you with all my heart and soul. I need you as a thirsty flower needs the morning dew. I need you as Thisbe of old needed Pyramus.”

            Nitely, still backing away, looked about hastily, to see if anyone could be hearing this unusual declaration, but no one seemed to be paying any attention. As nearly as he could make out, the air was filled with other declarations of similar sort, some being even more forceful and direct.

            His back was up against a wall, and Alice approached him so closely as to break the four-finger rule to smithereens. She broke, in fact, the no-finger rule, and at the resulting mutual pressure, a certain indefinable something seemed to thud away within Nitely.

            “Miss Sanger. Please.”

            “Miss Sanger? Am I Miss Sanger to you?” exclaimed Alice, passionately. “Mr. Nitely! Nichoks! Make me your Alice, your own. Marry me. Marry me!”

            All around there was the cry of “Marry me. Marry me!” and young men and women crowded around Nitely, for they knew well that he was a Justice of the Peace. They cried out, “Marry us, Mr. Nitely. Marry us!”

            He could only cry in return, “I must get you all licenses.”

            They parted to let him leave on that errand of mercy. Only Alice followed him.

            Nitely met Alexander at the door of the balcony and turned him back toward the open and fresh air. Professor Johns came at that moment to join them all.

            Nitely said, “Alexander. Professor Johns. The most extraordinary thing has occurred--”

            “Yes,” said the professor, his mild face beaming with joy. “The experiment has been a success. The principle is far more effective on the human being, in fact, than on any of my experimental animals.” Noting Nitely’s confusion, he explained what had occurred in brief sentences.

            Nitely listened and muttered, “Strange, strange. There is a certain elusive familiarity about this.” He pressed his forehead with the knuckles of both hands, but it did not help.

            Alexander approached Alice gently, yearning to clasp her to his strong bosom, yet knowing that no gently nurtured girl could consent to such an expression of emotion from one who had not yet been forgiven.

            He said, “Alice, my lost love, if in your heart you could find--”

            But she shrank from him, avoiding his arms though they were outstretched only in supplication. She said, “Alexander, I drank the punch. It was your wish.”

            “You needn’t have. I was wrong, wrong.”

            “But I did, and oh, Alexander, I can never be yours.”

            “Never be mine? But what does this mean?”

            And Alice, seizing Nitely’s arm, clutched it avidly. “My soul is intertwined indissolubly with that of Mr. Nitely, of Nicholas, I mean. My passion for him--that is, my passion for marriage with him--cannot be withstood. It racks my being.”

            “You are false?” cried Alexander, unbelieving.

            “You are cruel to say ‘false,’ “ said Alice, sobbing. “I cannot help it.”

            “No, indeed,” said Professor Johns, who had been listening to this in the greatest consternation, after having made his explanation to Nitely. “She could scarcely help it. It is simply an endocrinological manifestation.”

            “Indeed that is so,” said Nitely, who was struggling with endocrinological manifestations of his own. “There, there, my--my dear.” He patted Alice’s head in a most fatherly way and when she held her enticing face up toward his, swooningly, he considered whether it might not be a fatherly thing-- nay, even a neighborly thing--to press those lips with his own, in pure fashion.

            But Alexander, out of his heart’s despair, cried, “You are false, false--false as Cressid,” and rushed from the room.

            And Nitely would have gone after him, but that Alice had seized him about the neck and bestowed upon his slowly melting lips a kiss that was not daughterly in the least.

            It was not even neighborly.

            They arrived at Nitely’s small bachelor cottage with its chaste sign of justice of the peace in Old English letters, its air of melancholy peace, its neat serenity, its small stove on which the small kettle was quickly placed by Nitely’s left hand (his right arm being firmly in the clutch of Alice, who, with a shrewdness beyond her years, chose that as one sure method of rendering impossible a sudden bolt through the door on his part).

            Nitely’s study could be seen through the open door of the dining room, its walls lined with gentle books of scholarship and joy.

            Again Nitely’s hand (his left hand) went to his brow. “My dear,” he said to Alice, “it is amazing the way--if you would release your hold the merest trifle, my child, so that circulation might be restored--the way in which I persist in imagining that all this has taken place before.”

            “Surely never before, my dear Nicholas,” said Alice, bending her fair head upon his shoulder, and smiling at him with a shy tenderness that made her beauty as bewitching as moonlight upon still waters, “could there have been so wonderful a modem-day magician as our wise Professor Johns, so up-to-date a sorcerer.”

            “So up-to-date a--” Nitely had started so violently as to lift the fair Alice a full inch from the floor. “Why, surely that must be it. Dickens take me, if that’s not it.” (For on rare occasions, and under the stress of overpowering emotions, Nitely used strong language.)

            “Nicholas. What is it? You frighten me, my cherubic one.”

            But Nitely walked rapidly into his study, and she was forced to run with him. His face was white, his lips firm, as he reached for a volume from the shelves and reverently blew the dust from it.

            “Ah,” he said with contrition, “how I have neglected the innocent joys of my younger days. My child, in view of this continuing incapacity of my right arm, would you be so kind as to turn the pages until I tell you to stop?”

            Together they managed, in such a tableau of preconnubial bliss as is rarely seen, he holding the book with his left hand, she turning the pages slowly with her right.

            “I am right!” Nitely said with sudden force. “Professor Johns, my dear fellow, do come here. This is the most amazing coincidence--a frightening example of the mysterious unfelt power that must sport with us on occasion for some hidden purpose.”

            Professor Johns, who had prepared his own tea and was sipping it patiently, as befitted a discreet gentleman of intellectual habit in the presence of two ardent lovers who had suddenly retired to the next room, called out, “Surely you do not wish my presence?”

            “But I do, sir. I would fain consult one of your scientific attainments.”

            “But you are in a position--”

            Alice screamed, faintly, “Professor!”

            “A thousand pardons, my dear,” said Professor Johns, entering. “My cobwebby old mind is filled with ridiculous fancies. It is long since I--” and he pulled mightily at his tea (which he had made strong) and was himself again at once.

            “Professor,” said Nitely. “This dear child referred to you as an up-to-date sorcerer and that turned my mind instantly to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer.”

            “What,” asked Professor Johns, mildly, “are Gilbert and Sullivan?”

            Nitely cast a devout glance upward, as though with the intention of gauging the direction of the inevitable thunderbolt and dodging. He said in a hoarse whisper, “Sir William Schwenck Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote, respectively, the words and music of the greatest musical comedies the world has ever seen. One of these is entitled The Sorcerer. In it, too, a philtre was used: a highly moral one which did not affect married people, but which did manage to deflect the young heroine away from her handsome young lover and into the arms of an elderly man.”

            “And,” asked Professor Johns, “were matters allowed to remain so?”

            “Well, no. --Really, my dear, the movements of your fingers in the region of the nape of my neck, while giving rise to undeniably pleasurable sensations, do rather distract me. --There is a reunion of the young lovers, Professor.”

            “Ah,” said Professor Johns. “Then in view of the close resemblance of the fictional plot to real life, perhaps the solution in the play will help point the way to the reunion of Alice and Alexander. At least, I presume you do not wish to go through life with one arm permanently useless.”

            Alice said, “I have no wish to be reunited. I want only my own Nicholas.”

            “There is something,” said Nitely, “to be said for that refreshing point of view, but tush--youth must be served. There is a solution in the play, Professor Johns, and it is for that reason that I most particularly wanted to talk to you.” He smiled with a gentle benevolence. “In the play, the effects of the potion were completely neutralized by the actions of the gentleman who administered the potion in the first place: the gentleman, in other words, analogous to yourself.”

            “And those actions were?”

            “Suicide! Simply that! In some manner unexplained by the authors, the effect of this suicide was to break the sp--”

            But by now Professor Johns had recovered his equilibrium and said in the most sepulchrally forceful tone that could be imagined, “My dear sir, may I state instantly that, despite my affection for the young persons involved in this sad dilemma, I cannot under any circumstances consent to self-immolation. Such a procedure might be extremely efficacious in connection with love potions of ordinary vintage, but my amatogenic principle, I assure you, would be completely unaffected by my death.”

            Nitely sighed. “I feared that. As a matter of fact, between ourselves, it was a very poor ending for the play, perhaps the poorest in the canon,” and he looked up briefly in mute apology to the spirit of William S. Gilbert. “It was pulled out of a hat. It had not been properly foreshadowed earlier in the play. It punished an individual who did not deserve the punishment. In short, it was, alas, completely unworthy of Gilbert’s powerful genius.”

            Professor Johns said, “Perhaps it was not Gilbert. Perhaps some bungler had interfered and botched the job.”

            “There is no record of that.”

            But Professor Johns, his scientific mind keenly aroused by an unsolved puzzle, said at once, “We can test this. Let us study the mind of this--this Gilbert. He wrote other plays, did he?”

            “Fourteen, in collaboration with Sullivan.”

            “Were there endings that resolved analogous situations in ways which were more appropriate?”

            Nitely nodded. “One, certainly. There was Ruddigore.”

            “Who was he?”

            “Ruddigore is a place. The main character is revealed as the true bad baronet of Ruddigore and is, of course, under a curse.”

            “To be sure,” muttered Professor Johns, who realized that such an eventuality frequently befell bad baronets and was even inclined to think it served them right.

            Nitely said, “The curse compelled him to commit one crime or more each day. Were one day to pass without a crime, he would inevitably die in agonizing torture.”

            “How horrible,” murmured the soft-hearted Alice.

            “Naturally,” said Nitely, “no one can think up a crime each day, so our hero was forced to use his ingenuity to circumvent the curse.”

            “How?”

            “He reasoned thus: If he deliberately refused to commit a crime, he was courting death by his own act. In other words, he was attempting suicide, and attempting suicide is, of course, a crime--and so he fulfills the conditions of the curse.”

            “I see. I see,” said Professor Johns. “Gilbert obviously believes in solving matters by carrying them forward to their logical conclusions.” He closed his eyes, and his noble brow clearly bulged with the numerous intense thought waves it contained.

            He opened them. “Nitely, old chap, when was The Sorcerer first produced?”

            “In eighteen hundred and seventy-seven.”

            “Then that is it, my dear fellow. In eighteen seventy-seven, we were faced with the Victorian age. The institution of marriage was not to be made sport of on the stage. It could not be made a comic matter for the sake of the plot. Marriage was holy, spiritual, a sacrament--”

            “Enough,” said Nitely, “of this apostrophe. What is in your mind?”

            “Marriage. Marry the girl, Nitely. Have all your couples marry, and that at once. I’m sure that was Gilbert’s original intention.”

            “But that,” said Nitely, who was strangely attracted by the notion, “is precisely what we are trying to avoid.”

            “I am not,” said Alice, stoutly (though she was not stout, but, on the contrary, enchantingly lithe and slender).

            Professor Johns said, “Don’t you see? Once each couple is married, the amatogenic principle--which does not affect married people--loses its power over them. Those who would have been in love without the aid of the principle remain in love; those who would not are no longer in love--and consequently apply for an annulment.”

            “Good heavens,” said Nitely. “How admirably simple. Of course! Gilbert must have intended that until a shocked producer or theater manager--a bungler, as you say--forced the change.”

            “And did it work?” I asked. “After all, you said quite distinctly that the professor had said its effect on married couples was only to inhibit extramarital re--”

            “It worked,” said Nitely, ignoring my comment. A tear trembled on his eyelid, but whether it was induced by memories or by the fact that he was on his fourth gin and tonic, I could not tell.

            “It worked,” he said. “Alice and I were married, and our marriage was almost instantly-annulled by mutual consent on the grounds of the use of undue pressure. And yet, because of the incessant chaperoning to which we were subjected, the incidence of undue pressure between ourselves was, unfortunately, virtually nil.” He sighed again. “At any rate, Alice and Alexander were married soon after and she is now, I understand, as a result of various concomitant events, expecting a child.”

            He withdrew his eyes from the deep recesses of what was left of his drink and gasped with sudden alarm. “Dear me! She again.”

            I looked up, startled. A vision in pastel blue was in the doorway. Imagine, if you will, a charming face made for kissing; a lovely body made for loving.

            She called, “Nicholas! Wait!”

            “Is that Alice?” I asked.

            “No, no. This is someone else entirely: a completely different story. --But I must not remain here.”

            He rose and, with an agility remarkable in one so advanced in years and weight, made his way through a window. The feminine vision of desirability, with an agility only slightly less remarkable, followed.

            I shook my head in pity and sympathy. Obviously, the poor man was continually plagued by these wondrous things of beauty who, for one reason oj another, were enamored of him. At the thought of this horrible fate, I downed my own drink at a gulp and considered the odd fact that no such difficulties had ever troubled me.

            And at that thought, strange to tell, I ordered another drink savagely, and a scatological exclamation rose, unbidden, to my lips.

---

Not long after the appearance of “The Up-to-Date Sorcerer,” Mr. Boucher retired as editor of F & SF, and was succeeded in the post by Robert P. Mills.

            Mr. Mills proceeded to do me the largest single favor of my writing life since Mr. Campbell had started the discussion that had led to “Nightfall.” Mr. Mills asked me to write a monthly column on science for F & SF and I complied at once. Since the November 1958 issue, in which my first column appeared, I have kept right on going, month after month, and, as I write this, I am about to celebrate my tenth anniversary as monthly columnist for the magazine.

            Of all the writing I do, fiction, non-fiction, adult, or juvenile, these F & SF articles are by far the most fun, and in them, during Mr. Mills’ tenure I never referred to him as other than the “Kindly Editor.”

            Anyway, over lunch one day, Mr. Mills said he had seen the name Lefkowitz on several different and unrelated occasions that day, which struck him as a curious coincidence. Could I make a story out of it? In my usual offhand manner, I said, “Sure!” and gave it a little thought.

            The result was a story that served as a tribute to Mr. Boucher, too. He was, you see, a devout Catholic. (I must say “was,” for he died in April 1968 to the heartfelt grief of all who knew him. He was so kind a man that he was loved by the very authors he rejected, even while he was rejecting them, and there simply isn’t any harsher test of true love than that.) And because Mr. Boucher was a sincere Catholic, there was very often a faintly Catholic air about F & SF under his leadership; always a pleasant and liberal one, though, for that was the kind of man he was.

            So I thought that as my tribute to Mr. Boucher’s editorship, I would try my hand at that kind of flavor myself. I couldn’t handle it Catholic-fashion, of course, for I am not Catholic. I did it the only way I could manage, and wrote a Jewish story--the only Jewish story it ever occurred to me to write, I think.

            And I made Mr. Mills’ remark about Lefkowitz become “Unto the Fourth Generation.”

            First appearance--The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1959. ©. 1959, by Mercury Press, Inc.

Unto the Fourth Generation

            At ten of noon, Sam Marten hitched his way out of the taxicab, trying as usual to open the door with one hand, hold his briefcase in another and reach for his wallet with a third. Having only two hands, he found it a difficult job and, again as usual, he thudded his knee against the cab-door and found himself still groping uselessly for his wallet when his feet touched pavement.

            The traffic of Madison Avenue inched past. A red truck slowed its crawl reluctantly, then moved on with a rasp as the light changed. White script on its side informed an unresponsive world that its ownership was that of F. Lewkowitz and Sons, Wholesale Clothiers.

            Levkowich, thought Marten with brief inconsequence, and finally fished out his wallet. He cast an eye on the meter as he clamped his briefcase under his arm. Dollar sixty-five, make that twenty cents more as a tip, two singles gone would leave him only one for emergencies, better break a fiver.

            “Okay,” he said, “take out one-eighty-five, bud.”

            “Thanks,” said the cabbie with mechanical insincerity and made the change.

            Marten crammed three singles into his wallet, put it away, lifted his briefcase and breasted the human currents on the sidewalk to reach the glass doors of the building.

            Levkovich? he thought sharply, and stopped. A passerby glanced off his elbow.

            “Sorry,” muttered Marten, and made for the door again.

            Levkovich? That wasn’t what the sign on the truck had said. The name had read Lewkowitz, Loo-koh-itz. Why did he think Levkovich? Even with his college German in the near past changing the w’s to v’s, where did he get the “-ich” from?

            Levkovich? He shrugged the whole matter away roughly. Give it a chance and it would haunt him like a Hit Parade tinkle.

            Concentrate on business. He was here for a luncheon appointment with this man, Naylor. He was here to turn a contract into an account and begin, at twenty-three, the smooth business rise which, as he planned it, would marry him to Elizabeth in two years and make him a paterfamilias in the suburbs in ten.

            He entered the lobby with grim firmness and headed for the banks of elevators, his eye catching at the white-lettered directory as he passed.

            It was a silly habit of his to want to catch suite numbers as he passed, without slowing, or (heaven forbid) coming to a full halt. With no break in his progress, he told himself, he could maintain the impression of belonging, of knowing his way around, and that was important to a man whose job involved dealing with other human beings.

            Kulin-etts was what he wanted, and the word amused him. A firm specializing in the production of minor kitchen gadgets, striving manfully for a name that was significant, feminine, and coy, all at once--

            His eyes snagged at the M’s and moved upward as he walked. Mandel, Lusk, Lippert Publishing Company (two full floors), Lafkowitz, Kulin-etts. There it was--1024. Tenth floor. OK.

            And then, after all, he came to a dead halt, turned in reluctant fascination, returned to the directory, and stared at it as though he were an out-of-towner.

            Lafkowitz?

            What kind of spelling was that?

            It was clear enough. Lafkowitz, Henry J., 701. With an A. That was no good. That was useless.

            Useless? Why useless? He gave his head one violent shake as though to clear it of mist. Damn it, what did he care how it was spelled? He turned away, frowning and angry, and hastened to an elevator door, which closed just before he reached it, leaving him flustered.

            Another door opened and he stepped in briskly. He tucked his briefcase under his arm and tried to look bright alive--junior executive in its finest sense. He had to make an impression on Alex Naylor, with whom so far he had communicated only by telephone. If he was going to brood about Lewkowitzes and Lafkowitzes--

            The elevator slid noiselessly to a halt at seven. A youth in shirt-sleeves stepped off, balancing what looked like a desk-drawer in which were three J containers of coffee and three sandwiches.

            Then, just as the doors began closing, frosted glass with black lettering S

            loomed before Marten’s eyes. It read: 701--henry j. lefkowitz--importer and was pinched off by the inexorable coming together of the elevator doors.

            Marten leaned forward in excitement. It was his impulse to say: Take me back down to 7.

            But there were others in the car. And after all, he had no reason.

            Yet there was a tingle of excitement within him. The Directory had been wrong. It wasn’t A, it was E. Some fool of a non-spelling menial with a packet of small letters to go on the board and only one hind foot to do it with.

            Lefkowitz. Still not right, though.

            Again, he shook his head. Twice. Not right for what?

            The elevator stopped at ten and Marten got off.

            Alex Naylor of Kulin-etts turned out to be a bluff, middle-aged man with a shock of white hair, a ruddy complexion, and a broad smile. His palms were dry and rough, and he shook hands with a considerable pressure, putting his left hand on Marten’s shoulder in an earnest display of friendliness.

            He said, “Be with you in two minutes. How about eating right here in the building? Excellent restaurant, and they’ve got a boy who makes a good martini. That sound all right?”

            “Fine. Fine.” Marten pumped up enthusiasm from a somehow-clogged reservoir.

            It was nearer ten minutes than two, and Marten waited with the usual uneasiness of a man in a strange office. He stared at the upholstery on the chairs and at the little cubby-hole within which a young and bored switchboard operator sat. He gazed at the pictures on the wall and even made a half-hearted attempt to glance through a trade journal on the table next to him.

            What he did not do was think of Lev--

            He did not think of it.

            The restaurant was good, or it would have been good if Marten had been perfectly at ease. Fortunately, he was freed of the necessity of carrying the burden of the conversation. Naylor talked rapidly and loudly, glanced over the menu with a practiced eye, recommended the Eggs Benedict, and commented on the weather and the miserable traffic situation.

            On occasion, Marten tried to snap out of it, to lose that edge of fuzzed absence of mind. But each time the restlessness would return. Something was wrong. The name was wrong. It stood in the way of what he had to do.

            With main force, he tried to break through the madness. In sudden verbal clatter, he led the conversation into the subject of wiring. It was reckless of him. There was no proper foundation; the transition was too abrupt.

            But the lunch had been a good one; the dessert was on its way; and Naylor responded nicely.

            He admitted dissatisfaction with existing arrangements. Yes, he had been looking into Marten’s firm and, actually, it seemed to him that, yes, there was a chance, a good chance, he thought, that--

            A hand came down on Naylor’s shoulder as a man passed behind his chair. “How’s the boy, Alex?”

            Naylor looked up, grin ready-made and flashing. “Hey, Lefk, how’s business?”

            “Can’t complain. See you at the--” He faded into the distance.

            Marten wasn’t listening. He felt his knees trembling, as he half-rose. “Who was that man?” he asked, intensely. It sounded more peremptory than he intended.

            “Who? Lefk? Jerry Lefkovitz. You know him?” Naylor stared with cool surprise at his lunch companion.

            “No. How do you spell his name?”

            “L-E-F-K-O-V-I-T-Z, I think. Why?”

            “With a V?”

            “An F. . . . Oh, there’s a V in it, too.” Most of the good nature had left Naylor’s face.

            Marten drove on. “There’s a Lefkowitz in the building. With a W. You know, Lef-COW-itz.”

            “Oh?”

            “Room 701. This is not the same one?”

            “Jerry doesn’t work in this building. He’s got a place across the street. I don’t know this other one. This is a big building, you know. I don’t keep tabs on everyone in it. What is all this, anyway?”

            Marten shook his head and sat back. He didn’t know what all this was, anyway. Or at least, if he did, it was nothing he dared explain. Could he say: I’m being haunted by all manner of Lefkowitzes today.

            He said, “We were talking about wiring.”

            Naylor said, “Yes. Well, as I said, I’ve been considering your company. I’ve got to talk it over with the production boys, you understand. I’ll let you know.”

            “Sure,” said Marten, infinitely depressed. Naylor wouldn’t let him know. The whole thing was shot.

            And yet, through and beyond his depression, there was still that restlessness.

            The hell with Naylor. All Marten wanted was to break this up and get on with it. (Get on with what? But the question was only a whisper. Whatever did the questioning inside him was ebbing away, dying down . . .)

            The lunch frayed to an ending. If they had greeted each other like long-separated friends at last reunited, they parted like strangers.

            Marten felt only relief.

            He left with pulses thudding, threading through the tables, out of the haunted building, onto the haunted street.

            Haunted? Madison Avenue at 1:20 p.m. in an early fall afternoon with the sun shining brightly and ten thousand men and women be-hiving its long straight stretch.

            But Marten felt the haunting. He tucked his briefcase under his arm and headed desperately northward. A last sigh of the normal within him warned him he had a three o’clock appointment on 36th Street. Never mind. He headed uptown. Northward.

            At 54th Street, he crossed Madison and walked west, came abruptly to a halt and looked upward.

            There was a sign on the window, three stories up. He could make it out clearly: a. s. lefkowich, certified accountant.

            It had an F and an OW, but it was the first “-ich” ending he had seen. The first one. He was getting closer. He turned north again on Fifth Avenue, hurrying through the unreal streets of an unreal city, panting with the chase of something, while the crowds about him began to fade.

            A sign in a ground floor window, m. r. lefkowicz, m.d.

            A small gold-leaf semi-circle of letters in a candy-store window: jacob levkow.

            (Half a name, he thought savagely. Why is he disturbing me with half a name?)

            The streets were empty now except for the varying clan of Lefkowitz, Levkowitz, Lefkowicz to stand out in the vacuum.

            He was dimly aware of the park ahead, standing out in painted motionless green. He turned west. A piece of newspaper fluttered at the corner of his eyes, the only movement in a dead world. He veered, stooped, and picked it up, without slackening his pace.

            It was in Yiddish, a torn half-page.

            He couldn’t read it. He couldn’t make out the blurred Hebrew letters, and could not have read it if they were clear. But one word was clear. It stood out in dark letters in the center of the page, each letter clear in its every serif. And it said Lefkovitsch, he knew, and as he said it to himself, he placed its accent on the second syllable: Lef-KUH-vich.

            He let the paper flutter away and entered the empty park.

            The trees were still and the leaves hung in odd, suspended attitudes. The sunlight was a dead weight upon him and gave no warmth.

            He was running, but his feet kicked up no dust and a tuft of grass on which he placed his weight did not bend.

            And there on a bench was an old man; the only man in the desolate park. He wore a dark felt cap, with a visor shading his eyes. From underneath it, tufts of gray hair protruded His grizzled beard reached the uppermost button of his rough jacket. His old trousers were patched, and a strip of burlap was wrapped about each worn and shapeless shoe.

            Marten stopped. It was difficult to breathe. He could only say one word and he used it to ask his question: “Levkovich?”

            He stood there, while the old man rose slowly to his feet; brown old eyes peering close.

            “Marten,” he sighed. “Samuel Marten. You have come.” The words sounded with an effect of double exposure, for under the English, Marten heard the faint sigh of a foreign tongue. Under the “Samuel” was the unheard shadow of a “Schmu-el.”

            The old man’s rough, veined hands reached out, then withdrew as though he were afraid to touch. “I have been looking but there are so many people in this wilderness of a city-that-is-to-come. So many Martins and Martines and Mortons and Mertons. I stopped at last when I found greenery, but for a moment only--I would not commit the sin of losing faith. And then you came.”

            “It is I,” said Marten, and knew it was. “And you are Phinehas Levkovich. Why are we here?”

            “I am Phinehas ben Jehudah, assigned the name Levkovich by the ukase of the Tsar that ordered family names for all. And we are here,” the old man said, softly, “because I prayed. When I was already old, Leah, my only daughter, the child of my old age, left for America with her husband, left the knouts of the old for the hope of the new. And my sons died, and Sarah, the wife of my bosom, was long dead and I was alone. And the time came when I, too, must die. But I had not seen Leah since her leaving for the far country and word had come but rarely. My soul yearned that I might see sons born unto her; sons of my seed; sons in whom my soul might yet live and not die.”

            His voice was steady and the soundless shadow of sound beneath his words was the stately roll of an ancient language.

            “And I was answered and two hours were given me that I might see the first son of my line to be born in a new land and in a new time. My daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s son, have I found you, then, amidst the splendor of this city?”

            “But why the search? Why not have brought us together at once?”

            “Because there is pleasure in the hope of the seeking, my son,” said the old man, radiantly, “and in the delight of the finding. I was given two hours in which I might seek, two hours in which I might find . . . and behold, thou art here, and I have found that which I had not looked to see in life.” His voice was old, caressing. “Is it well with thee, my son?”

            “It is well, my father, now that I have found thee,” said Marten, and dropped to his knees. “Give me thy blessing, my father, that it may be well with me all the days of my life, and with the maid whom I am to take to wife and the little ones yet to be born of my seed and thine.”

            He felt the old hand resting lightly on his head and there was only the soundless whisper.

            Marten rose. The old man’s eyes gazed into his yearningly. Were they losing focus?

            “I go to my fathers now in peace, my son,” said the old man, and Marten was alone in the empty park.

            There was an instant of renewing motion, of the Sun taking up its interrupted task, of the wind reviving, and even with that first instant of sensation, all slipped back--

            At ten of noon, Sam Marten hitched his way out of the taxicab, and found himself groping uselessly for his wallet while traffic inched on.

            A red truck slowed, then moved on. A white script on its side announced: F. Lewkowitz and Sons, Wholesale Clothiers.

            Marten didn’t see it. Yet somehow he knew that all would be well with him. Somehow, as never before, he knew. ...

---

This one is complicated. It goes back to 1938-39 when, for some half a dozen issues or so, a magazine I won’t name tried to make a go of what I can only call “spicy science fiction stories.” Considering the sexual freedom allowed the writers of today, those old spicy s.f. stories read like “The Bobbsey Twins in Outer Space” now, but they were sizzlers to the magazine’s few readers then.

            The stories dealt very heavily with the hot passion of alien monsters for Earthwomen. Clothes were always getting ripped off and breasts were described in a variety of elliptical phrases. (Yes, I know that’s a pun.) The magazine died a deserved death, not so much for its sex and sadism, as for the deadly sameness of its stories and the abysmal quality of its “writing.”

            The curtain falls, and rises again in 1960. The magazine Playboy decided to have a little fun with science fiction. They published an article entitled “Girls for the Slime God” in which they pretended (good-naturedly) that all science fiction was sex and sadism. They could find very little real stuff to satirize, however, for until 1960 there was no branch of literature anywhere (except perhaps for the children’s stories in Sunday school bulletins) as puritanical as science fiction. Since 1960, to be sure, sexual libertarianism has penetrated even science fiction.

            Playboy therefore had to illustrate its article with the funny-sexy covers of fictitious magazines and had to draw all its quotations from only one source--that 1938-39 magazine I mentioned above.

            Cele Goldsmith, the editor of Amazing Stories, read the article and called me at once. She suggested I write a story entitled “Playboy and the Slime God” satirizing the satire. I was strongly tempted to do so for several reasons:

            1) Miss Goldsmith had to be seen to be believed. She was the only science fiction editor I’ve ever seen who looked like a show girl, and I happen to be aesthetically affected (or something) by show-girl types.

            2) I take science fiction seriously and I was annoyed that that 1938-39 magazine should have given Playboy a handle for satire. I wanted to satire back at them.

            3) I quickly thought up exactly what I wanted to say. So I wrote “Playboy and the Slime God” using some of the same quotes that Playboy had used and trying to show what an encounter between sex-interested aliens and an Earth-woman might really be like. (1 might say that Miss Goldsmith wrote the final three paragraphs of the story. I had a quite pretentious ending and Miss Goldsmith’s was much better. So I let it stand, not only in the magazine, but here.)

            The title was a problem, though. It’s disgusting. When the late (alas!) Groff Conklin, who was one of the most indefatigable anthologizers in the business, was considering the story for one of his collections, he asked rather piteously if I had an alternate title. “You bet!” I said, “How about ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?”

            Mr. Conklin was delighted and so was I, and that is the title that he used, and the one that I am now using.

            First appearance--Amazing Stories, March 1961, under the title “Playboy and the Slime God.” Copyright ©, 1961, by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.