Breeds There a Man?

Police Sergeant Mankiewicz was on the telephone and he wasn’t enjoying it. His conversation was sounding like a one-sided view of a firecracker.

He was saying, “That’s right! He came in here and said, ‘Put me in jail, because I want to kill myself.’

“... I can’t help that. Those were his exact words. It sounds crazy to me, too.

“... Look, mister, the guy answers the description. You asked me for information and I’m giving it to you.

“... He has exactly that scar on his right cheek and he said his name was John Smith. He didn’t say it was Doctor anything-at-all.

“... Well, sure it’s a phony. Nobody is named John Smith. Not in a police station, anyway.

“... He’s in jail now.

“... Yes, I mean it.

“... Resisting an officer; assault and battery; malicious mischief. That’s three counts.

“... I don’t care who he is.

“... All right. I’ll hold on.”

He looked up at Officer Brown and put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. It was a ham of a hand that nearly swallowed up the phone altogether. His blunt-featured face was ruddy and steaming under a thatch of pale-yellow hair.

He said, “Trouble! Nothing but trouble at a precinct station. I’d rather be pounding a beat any day.”

“Who’s on the phone?” asked Brown. He had just come in and didn’t really care. He thought Mankiewicz would look better on a suburban beat, too.

“Oak Ridge. Long Distance. A guy called Grant. Head of somethingological division, and now he’s getting somebody else at seventy-five cents a min... Hello!”

Mankiewicz got a new grip on the phone and held himself down.

“Look,” he said, “let me go through this from the beginning. I want you to get it straight and then if you don’t like it, you can send someone down here. The guy doesn’t want a lawyer. He claims he just wants to stay in jail and, brother, that’s all right with me.

“Well, will you listen? He came in yesterday, walked right up to me, and said, ‘Officer, I want you to put me in jail because I want to kill myself.’ So I said, ‘Mister, I’m sorry you want to kill yourself. Don’t do it, because if you do, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.’

“... I am serious. I’m just telling you what I said. I’m not saying it was a funny joke, but I’ve got my own troubles here, if you know what I mean. Do you think all I’ve got to do here is to listen to cranks who walk in and—

“... Give me a chance, will you?” I said, ‘I can’t put you in jail for wanting to kill yourself. That’s no crime.’ And he said, ‘But I don’t want to die.’ So I said, ‘Look, bud, get out of here.’ I mean if a guy wants to commit suicide, all right, and if he doesn’t want to, all right, but I don’t want him weeping on my shoulder.

“... I’m getting on with it. So he said to me. ‘If I commit a crime, will you put me in jail?” I said, ‘If you’re caught and if someone files a charge and you can’t put up bail, we will. Now beat it.’ So he picked up the inkwell on my desk and, before I could stop him, he turned it upside down on the open police blotter.

“... That’s right! Why do you think we have ‘malicious mischief tabbed on him? The ink ran down all over my pants.

“... Yes, assault and battery, too! I came hopping down to shake a little sense into him, and he kicked me in the shins and handed me one in the eye.

“... I’m not making this up. You want to come down here and look at my face?

“... He’ll be up in court one of these days. About Thursday, maybe.

“... Ninety days is the least he’ll get, unless the psychos say otherwise. I think he belongs in the loony-bin myself.

“... Officially, he’s John Smith. That’s the only name he’ll give.

“... No, sir, he doesn’t get released without the proper legal steps.

“... O.K., you do that, if you want to, bud! I just do my job here.”

He banged the phone into its cradle, glowered at it, then picked it up and began dialing. He said “Gianetti?” got the proper answer and began talking.

“What’s the A.E.C.? I’ve been talking to some Joe on the phone and he says—

“... No, I’m not kidding, lunk-head. If I were kidding, I’d put up a sign. What’s the alphabet soup?”

He listened, said, “Thanks” in a small voice and hung up again.

He had lost some of his color. “That second guy was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission,” he said to Brown. “They must have switched me from Oak Ridge to Washington.”

Brown lounged to his feet, “Maybe the F.B.I, is after this John Smith guy. Maybe he’s one of these here scientists.” He felt moved to philosophy. “They ought to keep atomic secrets away from those guys. Things were O.K. as long as General Groves was the only fella who knew about the atom bomb. Once they cut in these here scientists on it, though—”

“Ah, shut up,” snarled Mankiewicz.

Dr. Oswald Grant kept his eyes fixed on the white line that marked the highway and handled the car as though it were an enemy of his. He always did. He was tall and knobby with a withdrawn expression stamped on his face. His knees crowded the wheel, and his knuckles whitened whenever he made a turn.

Inspector Darrity sat beside him with his legs crossed so that the sole of his left shoe came up hard against the door. It would leave a sandy mark when he took it away. He tossed a nut-brown penknife from hand to hand. Earlier, he had unsheathed its wicked, gleaming blade and scraped casually at his nails as they drove, but a sudden swerve had nearly cost him a finger and he desisted.

He said, “What do you know about this Ralson?”

Dr. Grant took his eyes from the road momentarily, then returned them. He said, uneasily, “I’ve known him since he took his doctorate at Princeton. He’s a very brilliant man.”

“Yes? Brilliant, huh? Why is it that all you scientific men describe one another as ‘brilliant’? Aren’t there any mediocre ones?”

“Many. I’m one of them. But Ralson isn’t. You ask anyone. Ask Oppenheimer. Ask Bush. He was the youngest observer at Alamogordo.”

“O.K. He was brilliant. What about his private life?”

Grant waited. “I wouldn’t know.”

“You know him since Princeton. How many years is that?”

They had been scouring north along the highway from Washington for two hours with scarcely a word between them. Now Grant felt the atmosphere change and the grip of the law on his coat collar.

“He got his degree in ‘43.”

“You’ve known him eight years then.”

“That’s right.”

“And you don’t know about his private life?”

“A man’s life is his own, Inspector. He wasn’t very sociable. A great many of the men are like that. They work under pressure and when they’re off the job, they’re not interested in continuing the lab acquaintanceships.”

“Did he belong to any organizations that you know of?”

“No.”

The inspector said, “Did he ever say anything to you that might indicate he was disloyal?”

Grant shouted “No!” and there was silence for a while.

Then Darrity said, “How important is Ralson in atomic research?”

Grant hunched over the wheel and said, “As important as any one man can be. I grant you that no one is indispensable, but Ralson has always seemed to be rather unique. He has the engineering mentality.”

“What does that mean?”

“He isn’t much of a mathematician himself, but he can work out the gadgets that put someone else’s math into life. There’s no one like him when it comes to that. Time and again, Inspector, we’ve had a problem to lick and no time to lick it in. There were nothing but blank minds all around until he put some thought into it and said, ‘Why don’t you try so-and-so?’ Then he’d go away. He wouldn’t even be interested enough to see if it worked. But it always did. Always! Maybe we would have got it ourselves eventually, but it might have taken months of additional time. I don’t know how he does it. It’s no use asking him either. He just looks at you and says ‘It was obvious’, and walks away. Of course, once he’s shown us how to do it, it is obvious.”

The inspector let him have his say out. When no more came, he said, “Would you say he was queer, mentally? Erratic, you know.”

“When a person is a genius, you wouldn’t expect him to be normal, would you?”

“Maybe not. But just how abnormal was this particular genius?”

“He never talked, particularly. Sometimes, he wouldn’t work.”

“Stayed at home and went fishing instead?”

“No. He came to the labs all right; but he would just sit at his desk. Sometimes that would go on for weeks. Wouldn’t answer you, or even look at you, when you spoke to him.”

“Did he ever actually leave work altogether?”

“Before now, you mean? Never!”

“Did he ever claim he wanted to commit suicide? Ever say he wouldn’t feel safe except in jail?”

“No.”

“You’re sure this John Smith is Ralson?”

“I’m almost positive. He has a chemical bum on his right cheek that can’t be mistaken.”

“O.K. That’s that, then I’ll speak to him and see what he sounds like.”

The silence fell for good this time. Dr. Grant followed the snaking line as Inspector Darrity tossed the penknife in low arcs from hand to hand.

The warden listened to the call-box and looked up at his visitors. “We can have him brought up here, Inspector, regardless.”

“No,” Dr. Grant shook his head. “Let’s go to him.”

Darrity said, “Is that normal for Ralson, Dr. Grant? Would you expect him to attack a guard trying to take him out of a prison cell?”

Grant said, “I can’t say.”

The warden spread a calloused palm. His thick nose twitched a little. “We haven’t tried to do anything about him so far because of the telegram from Washington, but, frankly, he doesn’t belong here. I’ll be glad to have him taken off my hands.”

“We’ll see him in his cell,” said Darrity.

They went down the hard, barlined corridor. Empty, incurious eyes watched their passing.

Dr. Grant felt his flesh crawl. “Has he been kept here all the time?”

Darrity did not answer.

The guard, pacing before them, stopped. “This is the cell.”

Darrity said, “Is that Dr. Ralson?”

Dr. Grant looked silently at the figure upon the cot. The man had been lying down when they first reached the cell, but now he had risen to one elbow and seemed to be trying to shrink into the wall. His hair was sandy and thin, his figure slight, his eyes blank and china-blue. On his right cheek there was a raised pink patch that tailed off like a tadpole.

Dr. Grant said, “That’s Ralson.”

The guard opened the door and stepped inside, but Inspector Darrity sent him out again with a gesture. Ralson watched them mutely. He had drawn both feet up to the cot and was pushing backwards. His Adam’s apple bobbled as he swallowed.

Darrity said quietly, “Dr. Elwood Ralson?”

“What do you want?” The voice was a surprising baritone. “Would you come with us, please? We have some questions we would like to ask you.”

“No! Leave me alone!”

“Dr. Ralson,” said Grant, “I’ve been sent here to ask you to come back to work.”

Ralson looked at the scientist and there was a momentary glint of something other than fear in his eyes. He said, “Hello, Grant.” He got off his cot. “Listen, I’ve been trying to have them put me into a padded cell. Can’t you make them do that for me? You know me, Grant, I wouldn’t ask for something I didn’t feel was necessary. Help me. I can’t stand the hard walls. It makes me want to... bash—” He brought the flat of his palm thudding down against the hard, dull-gray concrete behind his cot.

Darrity looked thoughtful. He brought out his penknife and unbent the Reaming blade. Carefully, he scraped at his thumbnail, and said, “Would you like to see a doctor?”

But Ralson didn’t answer that. He followed the gleam of metal and his lips parted and grew wet. His breath became ragged and harsh.

He said, “Put that away!”

Darrity paused. “Put what away?”

“The knife. Don’t hold it in front of me. I can’t stand looking at it.”

Darrity said, “Why not?” He held it out. “Anything wrong with it? It’s a good knife.”

Ralson lunged. Darrity stepped back and his left hand came down on the other’s wrist. He lifted the knife high in the air. “What’s the matter, Ralson? What are you after?”

Grant cried a protest but Darrity waved him away.

Darrity said, “What do you want, Ralson?”

Ralson tried to reach upward, and bent under the other’s appalling grip. He gasped, “Give me the knife.”

“Why, Ralson? What do you want to do with it?”

“Please. I’ve got to—” He was pleading. “I’ve got to stop living.”

“You want to die?”

“No. But I must.”

Darrity shoved. Ralson flailed backward and tumbled into his cot, so that it squeaked noisily. Slowly, Darrity bent the blade of his penknife into its sheath and put it away. Ralson covered his face. His shoulders were shaking but otherwise he did not move.

There was the sound of shouting from the corridor, as the other prisoners reacted to the noise issuing from Ralson’s cell. The guard came hurrying down, yelling, “Quiet!” as he went.

Darrity looked up. “It’s all right, guard.”

He was wiping his hands upon a large white handkerchief. “I think we’ll get a doctor for him.”

Dr. Gottfried Blaustein was small and dark and spoke with a trace of an Austrian accent. He needed only a small goatee to be the layman’s caricature of a psychiatrist. But he was clean-shaven, and very carefully dressed. He watched Grant closely, assessing him, blocking in certain observations and deductions. He did this automatically, now, with everyone he met.

He said, “You give me a sort of picture. You describe a man of great talent, perhaps even genius. You tell me he has always been uncomfortable with people; that he has never fitted in with his laboratory environment, even though it was there that he met the greatest of success. Is there another environment to which he has fitted himself?”

“I don’t understand.”

“It is not given to all of us to be so fortunate as to find a congenial type of company at the place or in the field where we find it necessary to make a living. Often, one compensates by playing an instrument, or going hiking, or joining some club. In other words, one creates a new type of society, when not working, in which one can feel more at home. It need not have the slightest connection with what one’s ordinary occupation is. It is an escape, and not necessarily an unhealthy one.” He smiled and added, “Myself, I collect stamps. I am an active member of the American Society of Philatelists.”

Grant shook his head. “I don’t know what he did outside working hours. I doubt that he did anything like what you’ve mentioned.”

“Um-m-m. Well, that would be sad. Relaxation and enjoyment are wherever you find them; but you must find them somewhere, no?”

“Have you spoken to Dr. Ralson, yet?”

“About his problems? No.”

“Aren’t you going to?”

“Oh, yes. But he has been here only a week. One must give him a chance to recover. He was in a highly excited state when he first came here. It was almost a delirium. Let him rest and become accustomed to the new environment. I will question him, then.”

“Will you be able to get him back to work?”

Blaustein smiled. “How should I know? I don’t even know what his sickness is.”

“Couldn’t you at least get rid of the worst of it; this suicidal obsession of his, and take care of the rest of the cure while he’s at work?”

“Perhaps. I couldn’t even venture an opinion so far without several interviews.”

“How long do you suppose it will all take?”

“In these matters, Dr. Grant, nobody can say.”

Grant brought his hands together in a sharp slap. “Do what seems best then. But this is more important than you know.”

“Perhaps. But you may be able to help me, Dr. Grant.”

“How?”

“Can you get me certain information which may be classified as top secret?”

“What kind of information?”

“I would like to know the suicide rate, since 1945, among nuclear scientists. Also, how many have left their jobs to go into other types of scientific work, or to leave science altogether.”

“Is this in connection with Ralson?”

“Don’t you think it might be an occupational disease, this terrible unhappiness of his?”

“Well—a good many have left their jobs, naturally.”

“Why naturally, Dr. Grant?”

“You must know how it is, Dr. Blaustein, The atmosphere in modern atomic research is one of great pressure and red tape. You work with the government; you work with military men. You can’t talk about your work; you have to be careful what you say. Naturally, if you get a chance at a job in a university, where you can fix your own hours, do your own work, write papers that don’t have to be submitted to the A.E.C., attend conventions that aren’t held behind locked doors, you take it.”

“And abandon your field of specialty forever.”

“There are always non-military applications. Of course, there was one man who did leave for another reason. He told me once he couldn’t sleep nights. He said he’d hear one hundred thousand screams coming from Hiroshima, when he put the lights out. The last I heard of him he was a clerk in a haberdashery.”

“And do you ever hear a few screams yourself?”

Grant nodded. “It isn’t a nice feeling to know that even a little of the responsibility of atomic destruction might be your own.”

“How did Ralson feel?”

“He never spoke of anything like that.”

“In other words, if he felt it, he never even had the safety-valve effect of letting off steam to the rest of you.”

“I guess he hadn’t.”

“Yet nuclear research must be done, no?”

“I’ll say.”

“What would you do, Dr. Grant, if you felt you had to do something that you couldn’t do.”

Grant shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Some people kill themselves.”

“You mean that’s what has Ralson down.”

“I don’t know. I do not know. I will speak to Dr. Ralson this evening. I can promise nothing, of course, but I will let you know whatever I can.”

Grant rose. “Thanks, Doctor. I’ll try to get the information you want.”

Elwood Ralson’s appearance had improved in the week he had been at Dr. Blaustein’s sanatorium. His face had filled out and some of the restlessness had gone out of him. He was tieless and beltless. His shoes were without laces.

Blaustein said, “How do you feel, Dr. Ralson?”

“Rested.”

“You have been treated well?”

“No complaints, Doctor.”

Blaustein’s hand fumbled for the letter-opener with which it was his habit to play during moments of abstraction, but his fingers met nothing. It had been put away, of course, with anything else possessing a sharp edge. There was nothing on his desk, now, but papers.

He said, “Sit down, Dr. Ralson. How do your symptoms progress?”

“You mean, do I have what you would call a suicidal impulse? Yes. It gets worse or better, depending on my thoughts, I think. But it’s always with me. There is nothing you can do to help.”

“Perhaps you are right. There are often things I cannot help. But I would like to know as much as I can about you. You are an important man—”

Ralson snorted.

“You do not consider that to be so?” asked Blaustein.

“No, I don’t. There are no important men, any more than there are important individual bacteria.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

“And yet it seems to me that behind your statement there must have been much thought. It would certainly be of the greatest interest to have you tell me some of this thought.”

For the first time, Ralson smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. His nostrils were white. He said, “It is amusing to watch you, Doctor. You go about your business so conscientiously. You must listen to me, mustn’t you, with just that air of phony interest and unctuous sympathy. I can tell you the most ridiculous things and still be sure of an audience, can’t I?”

“Don’t you think my interest can be real, even granted that it is professional, too?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not interested in discussing it.”

“Would you rather return to your room?”

“If you don’t mind. No!” His voice had suddenly suffused with fury as he stood up, then almost immediately sat down again. “Why shouldn’t I use you? I don’t like to talk to people. They’re stupid. They don’t see things. They stare at the obvious for hours and it means nothing to them. If I spoke to them, they wouldn’t understand; they’d lose patience; they’d laugh. Whereas you must listen. It’s your job. You can’t interrupt to tell me I’m mad, even though you may think so.”

“I’d be glad to listen to whatever you would like to tell me.”

Ralson drew a deep breath. “I’ve known something for a year now, that very few people know. Maybe it’s something no live person knows. Do you know that human cultural advances come in spurts? Over a space of two generations in a city containing thirty thousand free men, enough literary and artistic genius of the first rank arose to supply a nation of millions for a century under ordinary circumstances. I’m referring to the Athens of Pericles.

“There are other examples. There is the Florence of the Medicis, the England of Elizabeth, the Spain of the Cordovan Emirs. There was the spasm of social reformers among the Israelites of the Eighth and Seventh centuries before Christ. Do you know what I mean?”

Blaustein nodded. “I see that history is a subject that interests you.”

“Why not? I suppose there’s nothing that says I must restrict myself to nuclear cross-sections and wave mechanics.”

“Nothing at all. Please proceed.”

“At first, I thought I could learn more of the true inwardness of historical cycles by consulting a specialist. I had some conferences with a professional historian. A waste of time!”

“What was his name; this professional historian?”

“Does it matter?”

“Perhaps not, if you would rather consider it confidential. What did he tell you?”

“He said I was wrong; that history only appeared to go in spasms. He said that after closer studies the great civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria did not arise suddenly or out of nothing, but upon the basis of a long-developing sub-civilization that was already sophisticated in its arts. He said that Periclean Athens built upon a pre-Periclean Athens of lower accomplishments, without which the age of Pericles could not have been.

“I asked why was there not a post-Periclean Athens of higher accomplishments still, and he told me that Athens was ruined by a plague and by a long war with Sparta. I asked about other cultural spurts and each time it was a war that ended it, or, in some cases, even accompanied it. He was like all the rest. The truth was there; he had only to bend and pick it up; but he didn’t.”

Ralson stared at the floor, and said in a tired voice, “They come to me in the laboratory sometimes, Doctor. They say, ‘How the devil are we going to get rid of the such-and-such effect that is ruining all our measurements, Ralson?’ They show me the instruments and the wiring diagrams and I say, ‘It’s staring at you. Why don’t you do so-and-so? A child could tell you that.’ Then I walk away because I can’t endure the slow puzzling of their stupid faces. Later, they come to me and say, ‘It worked, Ralson. How did you figure it out?’ I can’t explain to them, Doctor; it would be like explaining that water is wet. And I couldn’t explain to the historian. And I can’t explain to you. It’s a waste of time.”

“Would you like to go back to your room?”

“Yes.”

Blaustein sat and wondered for many minutes after Ralson had been escorted out of his office. His fingers found their way automatically into the upper right drawer of his desk and lifted out the letter-opener. He twiddled it in his fingers.

Finally, he lifted the telephone and dialed the unlisted number he had been given.

He said, “This is Blaustein. There is a professional historian who was consulted by Dr. Ralson some time in the past, probably a bit over a year ago. I don’t know his name. I don’t even know if he was connected with a university. If you could find him, I would like to see him.”

Thaddeus Milton, Ph.D., blinked thoughtfully at Blaustein and brushed his hand through his iron-gray hair. He said, “They came to me and I said that I had indeed met this man. However, I have had very little connection with him. None, in fact, beyond a few conversations of a professional nature.”

“How did he come to you?”

“He wrote me a letter; why me, rather than someone else, I do not know. A series of articles written by myself had appeared in one of the semi-learned journals of semi-popular appeal about that time. It may have attracted his attention.”

“I see. With what general topic were the articles concerned?”

“They were a consideration of the validity of the cyclic approach to history. That is, whether one can really say that a particular civilization must follow laws of growth and decline in any matter analogous to those involving individuals.”

“I have read Toynbee, Dr. Milton.”

“Well, then, you know what I mean.”

Blaustein said, “And when Dr. Ralson consulted you, was it with reference to this cyclic approach to history?”

“U-m-m-m. In a way, I suppose. Of course, the man is not an historian and some of his notions about cultural trends are rather dramatic and.... what shall I say... tabloidish. Pardon me, Doctor, if I ask a question which may be improper. Is Dr. Ralson one of your patients?”

“Dr. Ralson is not well and is in my care. This, and all else we say here, is confidential, of course.”

“Quite. I understand that. However, your answer explains something to me. Some of his ideas almost verged on the irrational. He was always worried, it seemed to me, about the connection between what he called ‘cultural spurts’ and calamities of one sort or another. Now such connections have been noted frequently. The time of a nation’s greatest vitality may come at a time of great national insecurity. The Netherlands is a good case in point. Her great artists, statesmen, and explorers belong to the early Seventeenth Century at the time when she was locked in a death struggle with the greatest European power of the time, Spain. When at the point of destruction at home, she was building an empire in the Far East and had secured footholds on the northern coast of South America, the southern tip of Africa, and the Hudson Valley of North America. Her fleets fought England to a standstill. And then, once her political safety was assured, she declined.

“Well, as I say, that is not unusual. Groups, like individuals, will rise to strange heights in answer to a challenge, and vegetate in the absence of a challenge. Where Dr. Ralson left the paths of sanity, however, was in insisting that such a view amounted to confusing cause and effect. He declared that it was not times of war and danger that stimulated ‘cultural spurts’, but rather vice versa. He claimed that each time a group of men snowed too much vitality and ability, a war became necessary to destroy the possibility of their further development.”

“I see,” said Blaustein.

“I rather laughed at him, I am afraid. It may be that that was why he did not keep the last appointment we made. Just toward the end of that last conference he asked me, in the most intense fashion imaginable, whether I did not think it queer that such an improbable species as man was dominant on earth, when all he had in his favor was intelligence. There I laughed aloud. Perhaps I should not have, poor fellow.”

“It was a natural reaction,” said Blaustein, “but I must take no more of your time. You have been most helpful.”

They shook hands, and Thaddeus Milton took his leave.

“Well,” said Darrity, “there are your figures on the recent suicides among scientific personnel. Get any deductions out of it?”

“I should be asking you that,” said Blaustein, gently. “The F.B.I, must have investigated thoroughly.”

“You can bet the national debt on that. They are suicides. There’s no mistake about it. There have been people checking on it in another department. The rate is about four times above normal, taking age, social status, economic class into consideration.”

“What about British scientists?”

“Just about the same.”

“And the Soviet Union?”

“Who can tell?” The investigator leaned forward. “Doc, you don’t think the Soviets have some sort of ray that can make people want to commit suicide, do you? It’s sort of suspicious that men in atomic research are the only ones affected.”

“Is it? Perhaps not. Nuclear physicists may have peculiar strains imposed upon them. It is difficult to tell without thorough study.”

“You mean complexes might be coming through?” asked Darrity, warily.

Blaustein made a face. “Psychiatry is becoming too popular. Everybody talks of complexes and neuroses and psychoses and compulsions and whatnot. One man’s guilt complex is another man’s good night’s sleep. If I could talk to each one of the men who committed suicide, maybe I could know something.”

“You’re talking to Ralson.”

“Yes, I’m talking to Ralson.”

“Has he got a guilt complex?”

“Not particularly. He has a background out of which it would not surprise me if he obtained a morbid concern with death. When he was twelve he saw his mother die under the wheels of an automobile. His father died slowly of cancer. Yet the effect of those experiences on his present troubles is not clear.”

Darrity picked up his hat. “Well, I wish you’d get a move on, Doc. There’s something big on, bigger than the H-Bomb. I don’t know how anything can be bigger than that, but it is.”

Ralson insisted on standing. “I had a bad night last night, Doctor.”

“I hope,” said Blaustein, “these conferences are not disturbing you.”

“Well, maybe they are. They have me thinking on the subject again. It makes things bad, when I do that. How do you imagine it feels being part of a bacterial culture, Doctor?”

“I had never thought of that. To a bacterium, it probably feels quite normal.”

Ralson did not hear. He said, slowly, “A culture in which intelligence is being studied. We study all sorts of things as far as their genetic relationships are concerned. We take fruit flies and cross red eyes and white eyes to see what happens. We don’t care anything about red eyes and white eyes, but we try to gather from them certain basic genetic principles. You see what I mean?”

“Certainly.”

“Even in humans, we can follow various physical characteristics. There are the Hapsburg lips, and the hemophilia that started with Queen Victoria and cropped up in her descendants among the Spanish and Russian royal families. We can even follow feeble-mindedness in the Jukeses and Kallikakas. You learn about it in high-school biology. But you can’t breed human beings the way you do fruit flies. Humans live too long. It would take centuries to draw conclusions. It’s a pity we don’t have a special race of men that reproduce at weekly intervals, eh?”

He waited for an answer, but Blaustein only smiled.

Ralson said, “Only that’s exactly what we would be for another group of beings whose life span might be thousands of years. To them, we would reproduce rapidly enough. We would be short-lived creatures and they could study the genetics of such things as musical aptitude, scientific intelligence, and so on. Not that those things would interest them as such, any more than the white eyes of the fruit fly interest us as white eyes.”

“This is a very interesting notion,” said Blaustein.

“It is not simply a notion. It is true. To me, it is obvious, and I don’t care how it seems to you. Look around you. Look at the planet, Earth. What kind of a ridiculous animal are we to be lords of the world after the dinosaurs had failed? Sure, we’re intelligent, but what’s intelligence? We think it is important because we have it. If the Tyrannosaurus could have picked out the one quality that he thought would ensure species domination, it would be size and strength. And he would make a better case for it. He lasted longer than we’re likely to.

“Intelligence in itself isn’t much as far as survival values are concerned. The elephant makes out very poorly indeed when compared to the sparrow even though he is much more intelligent. The dog does well, under man’s protection, but not as well as the housefly against whom every human hand is raised. Or take the primates as a group. The small ones cower before their enemies; the large ones have always been remarkably unsuccessful in doing more than barely holding their own. The baboons do the best and that is because of their canines, not their brains.”

A light film of perspiration covered Ralson’s forehead. “And one can see that man has been tailored, made to careful specifications for those things that study us. Generally, the primate is short-lived. Naturally, the larger ones live longer, which is a fairly general rule in animal life. Yet the human being has a life span twice as long as any of the other great apes; considerably longer even than the gorilla that outweighs him. We mature later. It’s as though we’ve been carefully bred to live a little longer so that our life cycle might be of a more convenient length.”

He jumped to his feet, shaking his fists above his head. “A thousand years are but as yesterday—”

Blaustein punched a button hastily.

For a moment, Ralson struggled against the white-coated orderly who entered, and then he allowed himself to be led away.

Blaustein looked after him, shook his head, and picked up the telephone.

He got Darrity. “Inspector, you may as well know that this may take a long time.”

He listened and shook his head. “I know. I don’t minimize the urgency.”

The voice in the receiver was tinny and harsh. “Doctor, you are minimizing it. I’ll send Dr. Grant to you. He’ll explain the situation to you.”

Dr. Grant asked how Ralson was, then asked somewhat wistfully if he could see him. Blaustein shook his head gently.

Grant said, “I’ve been directed to explain the current situation in atomic research to you.”

“So that I will understand, no?”

“I hope so. It’s a measure of desperation. I’ll have to remind you—”

“Not to breathe a word of it. Yes, I know. This insecurity on the part of you people is a very bad symptom. You must know these things cannot be hidden.”

“You live with secrecy. It’s contagious.”

“Exactly. What is the current secret?”

“There is... or, at least, there might be a defense against the atomic bomb.”

“And that is a secret? It would be better if it were shouted to all the people of the world instantly.”

“For heaven’s sake, no. Listen to me, Dr. Blaustein. It’s only on paper so far. It’s at the E equal me square stage, almost. It may not be practical. It would be bad to raise hopes we would have to disappoint. On the other hand, if it were known that we almost had a defense, there might be a desire to start and win a war before the defense were completely developed.”

“That I don’t believe. But, nevertheless, I distract you. What is the nature of this defense, or have you told me as much as you dare?”

“No, I can go as far as I like; as far as is necessary to convince you we have to have Ralson—and fast!”

“Well, then tell me, and I too, will know secrets. I’ll feel like a member of the Cabinet.”

“You’ll know more than most. Look, Dr. Blaustein, let me explain it in lay language. So far, military advances have been made fairly equally in both offensive and defensive weapons. Once before there seemed to be a definite and permanent tipping of all warfare in the direction of the offense, and that was with the invention of gunpowder. But the defense caught up. The medieval man-in-armor-on-horse became the modern man-in-tank-on-treads, and the stone castle became the concrete pillbox. The same thing, you see, except that everything has been boosted several orders of magnitude.”

“Very good. You make it clear. But with the atomic bomb comes more orders of magnitude, no? You must go past concrete and steel for protection.”

“Right. Only we can’t just make thicker and thicker walls. We’ve run out of materials that are strong enough. So we must abandon materials altogether. If the atom attacks, we must let the atom defend. We will use energy itself; a force field.”

“And what,” asked Blaustein, gently, “is a force field?”

“I wish I could tell you. Right now, it’s an equation on paper. Energy can be so channeled as to create a wall of matterless inertia, theoretically. In practice, we don’t know how to do it.”

“It would be a wall you could not go through, is that it? Even for atoms?”

“Even for atom bombs. The only limit on its strength would be the amount of energy we could pour into it. It could even theoretically be made to be impermeable to radiation. The gamma rays would bounce off it. What we’re dreaming of is a screen that would be in permanent place about cities; at minimum strength, using practically no energy. It could then be triggered to maximum intensity in a fraction of a millisecond at the impingement of short-wave radiation; say the amount radiating from the mass of plutonium large enough to be an atomic war head. All this is theoretically possible.”

“And why must you have Ralson?”

“Because he is the only one who can reduce it to practice, if it can be made practical at all, quickly enough. Every minute counts these days. You know what the international situation is. Atomic defense must arrive before atomic war.”

“You are so sure of Ralson?”

“I am as sure of him as I can be of anything. The man is amazing, Dr. Blaustein. He is always right. Nobody in the field knows how he does it.”

“A sort of intuition, no?” the psychiatrist looked disturbed. “A kind of reasoning that goes beyond ordinary human capacities. Is that it?”

“I make no pretense of knowing what it is.”

“Let me speak to him once more then. I will let you know.”

“Good.” Grant rose to leave; then, as if in afterthought, he said, “I might say, Doctor, that if you don’t do something, the Commission plans to take Dr. Ralson out of your hands.”

“And try another psychiatrist? If they wish to do that, of course, I will not stand in their way. It is my opinion, however, that no reputable practitioner will pretend there is a rapid cure.”

“We may not intend further mental treatment. He may simply be returned to work.”

“That, Dr. Grant, I will fight. You will get nothing out of him. It will be his death.”

“We get nothing out of him anyway.”

“This way there is at least a chance, no?”

“I hope so. And by the way, please don’t mention the fact that I said anything about taking Ralson away.”

“I will not, and I thank you for the warning. Good-bye, Dr. Grant.”

“I made a fool of myself last time, didn’t I, Doctor?” said Ralson. He was frowning.

“You mean you don’t believe what you said then?”

“I do!” Ralson’s slight form trembled with the intensity of his affirmation.

He rushed to the window, and Blaustein swiveled in his chair to keep him in view. There were bars in the window. He couldn’t jump. The glass was unbreakable.

Twilight was ending, and the stars were beginning to come out. Ralson stared at them in fascination, then he turned to Blaustein and flung a finger outward. “Every single one of them is an incubator. They maintain temperatures at the desired point. Different experiments; different temperatures. And the planets that circle them are just huge cultures, containing different nutrient mixtures and different life forms. The experimenters are economical, too—whatever and whoever they are. They’ve cultured many types of life forms in this particular test-tube. Dinosaurs in a moist, tropical age and ourselves among the glaciers. They turn the sun up and down and we try to work out the physics of it. Physics!” He drew his lips back in a snarl.

“Surely,” said Dr. Blaustein, “it is not possible that the sun can be turned up and down at will.”

“Why not? It’s just like a heating element in an oven. You think bacteria know what it is that works the heat that reaches them? Who knows? Maybe they evolve theories, too. Maybe they have their cosmogonies about cosmic catastrophes, in which clashing light-bulbs create strings of Petri dishes. Maybe they think there must be some beneficent creator that supplies them with food and warmth and says to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply!’

“We breed like them, not knowing why. We obey the so-called laws of nature which are only our interpretation of the not-understood forces imposed upon us.

“And now they’ve got the biggest experiment of any yet on their hands. It’s been going on for two hundred years. They decided to develop a strain for mechanical aptitude in England in the seventeen hundreds, I imagine. We call it the Industrial Revolution. It began with steam, went on to electricity, then atoms. It was an interesting experiment, but they took their chances on letting it spread. Which is why they’ll have to be very drastic indeed in ending it.”

Blaustein said, “And how would they plan to end it? Do you have an idea about that?”

“You ask me how they plan to end it. You can look about the world today and still ask what is likely to bring our technological age to an end. All the earth fears an atomic war and would do anything to avoid it; yet all the earth fears that an atomic war is inevitable.”

“In other words, the experimenters will arrange an atom war whether we want it or not, to kill off the technological era we are in, and to start fresh. That is it, no?”

“Yes. It’s logical. When we sterilize an instrument, do the germs know where the killing heat comes from? Or what has brought it about? There is some way the experimenters can raise the heat of our emotions; some way they can handle us that passes our understanding.”

“Tell me,” said Blaustein, “is that why you want to die? Because you think the destruction of civilization is coming and can’t be stopped?”

Ralson said, “I don’t want to die. It’s just that I must.” His eyes were tortured. “Doctor, if you had a culture of germs that were highly dangerous and that you had to keep under absolute control, might you not have an agar medium impregnated with, say, penicillin, in a circle at a certain distance from the center of inoculation? Any germs spreading out too far from the center would die. You would have nothing against the particular germs who were killed; you might not even know that any germs had spread that far in the first place. It would be purely automatic.

“Doctor, there is a penicillin ring about our intellects. When we stray too far; when we penetrate the true meaning of our own existence, we have reached into the penicillin and we must die. It works slowly—but it’s hard to stay alive.”

He smiled briefly and sadly. Then he said, “May I go back to my room now, Doctor?”

Dr. Blaustein went to Ralson’s room about noon the next day. It was a small room and featureless. The walls were gray with padding. Two small windows were high up and could not be reached. The mattress lay directly on the padded floor. There was nothing of metal in the room; nothing that could be utilized in tearing life from body. Even Ralson’s nails were clipped short., Ralson sat up. “Hello!”

“Hello, Dr. Ralson. May I speak to you?”

“Here? There isn’t any seat I can offer you.”

“It is all right. I’ll stand. I have a sitting job and it is good for my sitting-down place that I should stand sometimes. Dr. Ralson, I have thought all night of what you told me yesterday and in the days before.”

“And now you are going to apply treatment to rid me of what you think are delusions.”

“No. It is just that I wish to ask questions and perhaps to point out some consequences of your theories which... you will forgive me?... you may not have thought of.”

“Oh?”

“You see, Dr. Ralson, since you have explained your theories, I, too, know what you know. Yet I have no feeling about suicide.”

“Belief is more than something intellectual, Doctor. You’d have to believe this with all your insides, which you don’t.”

“Do you not think perhaps it is rather a phenomenon of adaptation?”

“How do you mean?”

“You are not really a biologist, Dr. Ralson. And although you are very brilliant indeed in physics, you do not think of everything with respect to these bacterial cultures you use as analogies. You know that it is possible to breed bacterial strains that are resistant to penicillin or to almost any bacterial poison.”

“Well?”

“The experimenters who breed us have been working with humanity for many generations, no? And this particular strain which they have been culturing for two centuries shows no sign of dying out spontaneously. Rather, it is a vigorous strain and a very infective one. Older high-culture strains were confined to single cities or to small areas and lasted only a generation or two. This one is spreading throughout the world. It is a very infective strain. Do you not think it may have developed penicillin immunity? In other words, the methods the experimenters use to wipe out the culture may not work too well any more, no?”

Ralson shook his head. “It’s working on me.”

“You are perhaps non-resistant. Or you have stumbled into a very high concentration of penicillin indeed. Consider all the people who have been trying to outlaw atomic warfare and to establish some form of world government and lasting peace. The effort has risen in recent years, without too awful results.”

“It isn’t stopping the atomic war that’s coming.”

“No, but maybe only a little more effort is all that is required. The peace advocates do not kill themselves. More and more humans are immune to the experimenters. Do you know what they are doing in the laboratory?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“You must know. They are trying to invent a force field that will stop the atom bomb. Dr. Ralson, if I am culturing a virulent and pathological bacterium; then, even with all precautions, it may sometimes happen that I will start a plague. We may be bacteria to them, but we are dangerous to them, also, or they wouldn’t wipe us out so carefully after each experiment.

“They are not quick, no? To them a thousand years is as a day, no? By the time they realize we are out of the culture, past the penicillin, it will be too late for them to stop us. They have brought us to the atom, and if we can only prevent ourselves from using it upon one another, we may turn out to be too much even for the experimenters.”

Ralson rose to his feet. Small though he was, he was an inch and a half taller than Blaustein. “They are really working on a force field?”

“They are trying to. But they need you.”

“No. I can’t.”

“They must have you in order that you might see what is so obvious to you. It is not obvious to them. Remember, it is your help, or else—defeat of man by the experimenters.”

Ralson took a few rapid steps away, staring into the blank, padded wall. He muttered, “But there must be that defeat. If they build a force field, it will mean death for all of them before it can be completed.”

“Some or all of them may be immune, no? And in any case, it will be death for them anyhow. They are trying.”

Ralson said, “I’ll try to help them.”

“Do you still want to kill yourself?”

“Yes.”

“But you’ll try not to, no?”

“I’ll try not to, Doctor.” His lip quivered. “I’ll have to be watched.”

Blaustein climbed the stairs and presented his pass to the guard in the lobby. He had already been inspected at the outer gate, but he, his pass, and its signature were now scrutinized once again. After a moment, the guard retired to his little booth and made a phone call. The answer satisfied him. Blaustein took a seat and, in half a minute, was up again, shaking hands with Dr. Grant.

“The President of the United States would have trouble getting in here, no?” said Blaustein.

The lanky physicist smiled. “You’re right, if he came without warning.”

They took an elevator which traveled twelve floors. The office to which Grant led the way had windows in three directions. It was sound-proofed and air-conditioned. Its walnut furniture was in a state of high polish.

Blaustein said, “My goodness. It is like the office of the chairman of a board of directors. Science is becoming big business.”

Grant looked embarrassed. “Yes, I know, but government money flows easily and it is difficult to persuade a congressman that your work is important unless he can see, smell, and touch the surface shine.”

Blaustein sat down and felt the upholstered seat give way slowly. He said, “Dr. Elwood Ralson has agreed to return to work.”

“Wonderful. I was hoping you would say that. I was hoping that was why you wanted to see me.” As though inspired by the news, Grant offered the psychiatrist a cigar, which was refused.

“However,” said Blaustein, “he remains a very sick man. He will have to be treated carefully and with insight.”

“Of course. Naturally.”

“It’s not quite as simple as you may think. I want to tell you something of Ralson’s problems, so that you will really understand how delicate the situation is.”

He went on talking and Grant listened first in concern, and then in astonishment. “But then the man is out of his head, Dr. Blaustein. He’ll be of no use to us. He’s crazy.”

Blaustein shrugged. “It depends on how you define ‘crazy.’ It’s a bad word; don’t use it. He had delusions, certainly. Whether they will affect his peculiar talents one cannot know.”

“But surely no sane man could possibly—”

“Please. Please. Let us not launch into long discussions on psychiatric definitions of sanity and so on. The man has delusions and, ordinarily, I would dismiss them from all consideration. It is just that I have been given to understand that the man’s particular ability lies in his manner of proceeding to the solution of a problem by what seems to be outside ordinary reason. That is so, no?”

“Yes. That must be admitted.”

“How can you and I judge then as to the worth of one of his conclusions. Let me ask you, do you have suicidal impulses lately?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And other scientists here?”

“No, of course not.”

“I would suggest, however, that while research on the force field proceeds, the scientists concerned be watched here and at home. It might even be a good enough idea that they should not go home. Offices like these could be arranged to be a small dormitory—”

“Sleep at work. You would never get them to agree.”

“Oh, yes. If you do not tell them the real reason but say it is for security purposes, they will agree. ‘Security purposes’ is a wonderful phrase these days, no? Ralson must be watched more than anyone.”

“Of course.”

“But all this is minor. It is something to be done to satisfy my conscience in case Ralson’s theories are correct. Actually, I don’t believe them. They are delusions, but once that is granted, it is necessary to ask what the causes of those delusions are. What is it in Ralson’s mind, in his background, in his life that makes it so necessary for him to have these particular delusions? One cannot answer that simply. It may well take years of constant psychoanalysis to discover the answer. And until the answer is discovered, he will not be cured.

“But, meanwhile, we can perhaps make intelligent guesses. He has had an unhappy childhood, which, in one way or another, has brought him face to face with death in very unpleasant fashion. In addition, he has never been able to form associations with other children, or, as he grew older, with other men. He was always impatient with their slower forms of reasoning. Whatever difference there is between his mind and that of others, it has built a wall between him and society as strong as the force field you are trying to design. For similar reasons, he has been unable to enjoy a normal sex life. He has never married; he has had no sweethearts.

“It is easy to see that he could easily compensate to himself for this failure to be accepted by his social milieu by taking refuge in the thought that other human beings are inferior to himself. Which is, of course, true, as far as mentality is concerned. There are, of course, many, many facets to the human personality and in not all of them is he superior. No one is. Others, then, who are more prone to see merely what is inferior, just as he himself is, would not accept his affected preeminence of position. They would think him queer, even laughable, which would make it even more important to Ralson to prove how miserable and inferior the human species was. How could he better do that than to show that mankind was simply a form of bacteria to other superior creatures which experiment upon them. And then his impulses to suicide would be a wild desire to break away completely from being a man at all; to stop this identification with the miserable species he has created in his mind. You see?”

Grant nodded. “Poor guy.”

“Yes, it is a pity. Had he been properly taken care of in childhood—Well, it is best for Dr. Ralson that he have no contact with any of the other men here. He is too sick to be trusted with them. You, yourself, must arrange to be the only man who will see him or speak to him. Dr. Ralson has agreed to that. He apparently thinks you are not as stupid as some of the others.”

Grant smiled faintly. “That is agreeable to me.”

“You will, of course, be careful. I would not discuss anything with him but his work. If he should volunteer information about his theories, which I doubt, confine yourself to something noncommittal, and leave. And at all times, keep away anything that is sharp and pointed. Do not let him reach a window. Try to have his hands kept in view. You understand. I leave my patient in your care, Dr. Grant.”

“I will do my best, Dr. Blaustein.”

For two months, Ralson lived in a comer of Grant’s office, and Grant lived with him. Gridwork had been built up before the windows, wooden furniture was removed and upholstered sofas brought in. Ralson did his thinking on the couch and his calculating on a desk pad atop a hassock.

The “Do Not Enter” was a permanent fixture outside the office. Meals were left outside. The adjoining men’s room was marked off for private use and the door between it and the office removed. Grant switched to an electric razor. He made certain that Ralson took sleeping pills each night and waited till the other slept before sleeping himself.

And always reports were brought to Ralson. He read them while Grant watched and tried to seem not to watch.

Then Ralson would let them drop and stare at the ceiling, with one hand shading his eyes.

“Anything?” asked Grant.

Ralson shook his head from side to side.

Grant said, “Look, I’ll clear the building during the swing shift. It’s important that you see some of the experimental jigs we’ve been setting up.”

They did so, wandering through the lighted, empty buildings like drifting ghosts, hand in hand. Always hand in hand. Grant’s grip was tight. But after each trip, Ralson would still shake his head from side to side.

Half a dozen times he would begin writing; each time there would be a few scrawls and then he would kick the hassock over on its side.

Until, finally, he began writing once again and covered half a page rapidly. Automatically, Grant approached. Ralson looked up, covering the sheet of paper with a trembling hand.

He said, “Call Blaustein.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Call Blaustein.’ Get him here. Now!” Grant moved to the telephone.

Ralson was writing rapidly now, stopping only to brush wildly at his forehead with the back of a hand. It came away wet.

He looked up and his voice was cracked, “Is he coming?”

Grant looked worried. “He isn’t at his office.”

“Get him at his home. Get him wherever he is. Use that telephone. Don’t play with it.”

Grant used it; and Ralson pulled another sheet toward himself.

Five minutes later, Grant said, “He’s coming. What’s wrong? You’re looking sick.”

Ralson could speak only thickly, “No time—Can’t talk—”

He was writing, scribbling, scrawling, shakily diagramming. It was as though he were driving his hands, fighting it.

“Dictate!” urged Grant. “I’ll write.”

Ralson shook him off. His words were unintelligible. He held his wrist with his other hand, shoving it as though it were a piece of wood, and then he collapsed over the papers.

Grant edged them out from under and laid Ralson down on the couch. He hovered over him restlessly and hopelessly until Blaustein arrived.

Blaustein took one look. “What happened?”

Grant said, “I think he’s alive,” but by that time Blaustein had verified that for himself, and Grant told him what had happened.

Blaustein used a hypodermic and they waited. Ralson’s eyes were blank when they opened. He moaned.

Blaustein leaned close. “Ralson.”

Ralson’s hands reached out blindly and clutched at the psychiatrist. “Doc. Take me back.”

“I will. Now. It is that you have the force field worked out, no?”

“It’s on the papers. Grant, it’s on the papers.”

Grant had them and was leafing through them dubiously. Ralson said, weakly, “It’s not all there. It’s all I can write. You’ll have to make it out of that. Take me back, Doc!”

“Wait,” said Grant. He whispered urgently to Blaustein. “Can’t you leave him here till we test this thing? I can’t make out what most of this is. The writing is illegible. Ask him what makes him think this will work.”

“Ask him?” said Blaustein, gentry. “Isn’t he the one who always knows?”

“Ask me, anyway,” said Ralson, overhearing from where he lay on the couch. His eyes were suddenly wide and blazing.

They turned to him.

He said, “They don’t want a force field. They! The experimenters! As long as I had no true grasp, things remained as they were. But I hadn’t followed up that thought—that thought which is there in the papers—I hadn’t followed it up for thirty seconds before I felt... I felt—Doctor—”

Blaustein said, “What is it?”

Ralson was whispering again, “I’m deeper in the penicillin. I could feel myself plunging in and in, the further I went with that. I’ve never been in... so deep. That’s how I knew I was right. Take me away.”

Blaustein straightened. “I’ll have to take him away, Grant. There’s no alternative. If you can make out what he’s written, that’s it. If you can’t make it out, I can’t help you. That man can do no more work in his field without dying, do you understand?”

“But,” said Grant, “he’s dying of something imaginary.”

“All right. Say that he is. But he will be really dead just the same, no?”

Ralson was unconscious again and heard nothing of this. Grant looked at him somberly, then said, “Well, take him away, then.”

Ten of the top men at the Institute watched glumly as slide after slide filled the illuminated screen. Grant faced them, expression hard and frowning.

He said, “I think the idea is simple enough. You’re mathematicians and you’re engineers. The scrawl may seem illegible, but it was done with meaning behind it. That meaning must somehow remain in the writing, distorted though it is. The first page is clear enough. It should be a good lead. Each one of you will look at every page over and over again. You’re going to put down every possible version of each page as it seems it might be. You will work independently. I want no consultations.”

One of them said, “How do you know it means anything, Grant?”

“Because those are Ralson’s notes.”

“Ralson! I thought he was—”

“You thought he was sick,” said Grant. He had to shout over the rising hum of conversation. “I know. He is. That’s the writing of a man who was nearly dead. It’s all we’ll ever get from Ralson, any more. Somewhere in that scrawl is the answer to the force field problem. If we can’t find it, we may have to spend ten years looking for it elsewhere.”

They bent to their work. The night passed. Two nights passed. Three nights—

Grant looked at the results. He shook his head. “I’ll take your word for it that it is all self-consistent. I can’t say I understand it.”

Lowe, who, in the absence of Ralson, would readily have been rated the best nuclear engineer at the Institute, shrugged. “It’s not exactly clear to me. If it works, he hasn’t explained why.”

“He had no time to explain. Can you build the generator as he describes it?”

“I could try.”

“Would you look at all the other versions of the pages?”

“The others are definitely not self-consistent.”

“Would you double-check?”

“Sure.”

“And could you start construction anyway?”

“I’ll get the shop started. But I tell you frankly that I’m pessimistic.”

“I know. So am I.”

The thing grew. Hal Ross, Senior Mechanic, was put in charge of the actual construction, and he stopped sleeping. At any hour of the day or night, he could be found at it, scratching his bald head.

He asked questions only once, “What is it, Dr. Lowe? Never saw anything like it? What’s it supposed to do?”

Lowe said, “You know where you are, Ross. You know we don’t ask questions here. Don’t ask again.”

Ross did not ask again. He was known to dislike the structure that was being built. He called it ugly and unnatural. But he stayed at it.

Blaustein called one day.

Grant said, “How’s Ralson?”

“Not good. He wants to attend the testing of the Field Projector he designed.”

Grant hesitated, “I suppose we should. It’s his after all.”

“I would have to come with him.”

Grant looked unhappier. “It might be dangerous, you know. Even in a pilot test, we’d be playing with tremendous energies.”

Blaustein said, “No more dangerous for us than for you.”

“Very well. The list of observers will have to be cleared through the Commission and the F.B.I., but I’ll put you in.”

Blaustein looked about him. The field projector squatted in the very center of the huge testing laboratory, but all else had been cleared. There was no visible connection with the plutonium pile which served as energy-source, but from what the psychiatrist heard in scraps about him—he knew better than to ask Ralson—the connection was from beneath.

At first, the observers had circled the machine, talking in incomprehensibles, but they were drifting away now. The gallery was filling up. There were at least three men in generals’ uniforms on the other side, and a real coterie of lower-scale military. Blaustein chose an unoccupied portion of the railing; for Ralson’s sake, most of all.

He said, “Do you still think you would like to stay?”

It was warm enough within the laboratory, but Ralson was in his coat, with his collar turned up. It made little difference, Blaustein felt. He doubted that any of Ralson’s former acquaintances would now recognize him.

Ralson said, “I’ll stay.”

Blaustein was pleased. He wanted to see the test. He turned again at a new voice.

“Hello, Dr. Blaustein.”

For a minute, Blaustein did not place him, then he said, “Ah, Inspector Darrity. What are you doing here?”

“Just what you would suppose.” He indicated the watchers. “There isn’t any way you can weed them out so that you can be sure there won’t be any mistakes. I once stood as near to Klaus Fuchs as I am standing to you.” He tossed his pocketknife into the air and retrieved it with a dexterous motion.

“Ah, yes. Where shall one find perfect security? What man can trust even his own unconscious? And you will now stand near to me, no?”

“Might as well.” Darrity smiled. “You were very anxious to get in here, weren’t you?”

“Not for myself, Inspector. And would you put away the knife, please.”

Darrity turned in surprise in the direction of Blaustein’s gentle hand gesture. He put his knife away and looked at Blaustein’s companion for the second time. He whistled softly.

He said, “Hello, Dr. Ralson.”

Ralson croaked, “Hello.”

Blaustein was not surprised at Darrity’s reaction. Ralson had lost twenty pounds since returning to the sanatorium. His face was yellow and wrinkled; the face of a man who had suddenly become sixty.

Blaustein said, “Will the test be starting soon?”

Darrity said, “It looks as if they’re starting now.”

He turned and leaned on the rail. Blaustein took Ralson’s elbow and began leading him away, but Darrity said, softly, “Stay here, Doc. I don’t want you wandering about.”

Blaustein looked across the laboratory. Men were standing about with the uncomfortable air of having turned half to stone. He could recognize Grant, tall and gaunt, moving his hand slowly to light a cigarette, then changing his mind and putting lighter and cigarette in his pocket. The young men at the control panels waited tensely.

Then there was a low humming and the faint smell of ozone filled the air.

Ralson said harshly, “Look!”

Blaustein and Darrity looked along the pointing finger. The projector seemed to flicker. It was as though there were heated air rising between it and them. An iron ball came swinging down pendulum fashion and passed through the flickering area.

“It slowed up, no?” said Blaustein, excitedly.

Ralson nodded. “They’re measuring the height of rise on the other side to calculate the loss of momentum. Fools! I said it would work.” He was speaking with obvious difficulty.

Blaustein said, “Just watch, Dr. Ralson. I would not allow myself to grow needlessly excited.”

The pendulum was stopped in its swinging, drawn up. The flickering about the projector became a little more intense and the iron sphere arced down once again.

Over and over again, and each time the sphere’s motion was slowed with more of a jerk. It made a clearly audible sound as it struck the flicker. And eventually, it bounced. First, soggily, as though it hit putty, and then ringingly, as though it hit steel, so that the noise filled the place.

They drew back the pendulum bob and used it no longer. The projector could hardly be seen behind the haze that surrounded it.

Grant gave an order and the odor of ozone was suddenly sharp and pungent. There was a cry from the assembled observers; each one exclaiming to his neighbor. A dozen fingers were pointing.

Blaustein leaned over the railing, as excited as the rest. Where the projector had been, there was now only a huge semi-globular mirror. It was perfectly and beautifully clear. He could see himself in it, a small man standing on a small balcony that curved up on each side. He could see the fluorescent lights reflected in spots of glowing illumination. It was wonderfully sharp.

He was shouting, “Look, Ralson. It is reflecting energy. It is reflecting light waves like a mirror. Ralson—”

He turned, “Ralson! Inspector, where is Ralson?”

“What?” Darrity whirled. “I haven’t seen him.”

He looked about, wildly. “Well, he won’t get away. No way of getting out of here now. You take the other side.” And then he clapped hand to thigh, fumbled for a moment in his pocket, and said, “My knife is gone.”

Blaustein found him. He was inside the small office belonging to Hal Ross. It led off the balcony, but under the circumstances, of course, it had been deserted. Ross himself was not even an observer. A senior mechanic need not observe. But his office would do very well for the final end of the long fight against suicide.

Blaustein stood in the doorway for a sick moment, then turned. He caught Darrity’s eye as the latter emerged from a similar office a hundred feet down the balcony. He beckoned, and Darrity came at a run.

Dr. Grant was trembling with excitement. He had taken two puffs at each of two cigarettes and trodden each underfoot thereafter. He was fumbling with the third now.

He was saying, “This is better than any of us could possibly have hoped. We’ll have the gunfire test tomorrow. I’m sure of the result now, but we’ve planned it; we’ll go through with it. We’ll skip the small arms and start with the bazooka levels. Or maybe not. It might be necessary to construct a special testing structure to take care of the ricochet problem.”

He discarded his third cigarette.

A general said, “We’d have to try a literal atom-bombing, of course.”

“Naturally. Arrangements have already been made to build a mock-city at Eniwetok. We could build a generator on the spot and drop the bomb. There’d be animals inside.”

“And you really think if we set up a field in full power it would hold the bomb?”

“It’s not just that, general. There’d be no noticeable field at all until the bomb is dropped. The radiation of the plutonium would have to energize the field before explosion. As we did here in the last step. That’s the essence of it all.”

“You know,” said a Princeton professor, “I see disadvantages, too. When the field is on full, anything it protects is in total darkness, as far as the sun is concerned. Besides that, it strikes me that the enemy can adopt the practice of dropping harmless radioactive missiles to set off the field at frequent intervals. It would have nuisance value and be a considerable drain on our pile as well.”

“Nuisances,” said Grant, “can be survived. These difficulties will be met eventually, I’m sure, now that the main problem has been solved.”

The British observer had worked his way toward Grant and was shaking hands. He said, “I feel better about London already. I cannot help but wish your government would allow me to see the complete plans. What I have seen strikes me as completely ingenious. It seems obvious now, of course, but how did anyone ever come to think of it?”

Grant smiled. “That question has been asked before with reference to Dr. Ralson’s devices—”

He turned at the touch of a hand upon his shoulder. “Dr. Blaustein! I had nearly forgotten. Here, I want to talk to you.”

He dragged the small psychiatrist to one side and hissed in his ear, “Listen, can you persuade Ralson to be introduced to these people? This is his triumph.”

Blaustein said, “Ralson is dead.”

“What!”

“Can you leave these people for a time?”

“Yes... yes—Gentlemen, you will excuse me for a few minutes?”

He hurried off with Blaustein.

The Federal men had already taken over. Unobtrusively, they barred the doorway to Ross’s office. Outside there were the milling crowd discussing the answer to Alamogordo that they had just witnessed. Inside, unknown to them, was the death of the answerer. The G-man barrier divided to allow Grant and Blaustein to enter. It closed behind them again.

For a moment, Grant raised the sheet. He said, “He looks peaceful.”

“I would say—happy,” said Blaustein.

Darrity said, colorlessly, “The suicide weapon was my own knife. It was my negligence; it will be reported as such.”

“No, no,” said Blaustein, “that would be useless. He was my patient and I am responsible. In any case, he would not have lived another week. Since he invented the projector, he was a dying man.”

Grant said, “How much of this has to be placed in the Federal files? Can’t we forget all about his madness?”

“I’m afraid not, Dr. Grant,” said Darrity.

“I have told him the whole story,” said Blaustein, sadly.

Grant looked from one to the other. “I’ll speak to the Director. I’ll go to the President, if necessary. I don’t see that there need be any mention of suicide or of madness. He’ll get full publicity as inventor of the field projector. It’s the least we can do for him.” His teeth were gritting.

Blaustein said, “He left a note.”

“A note?”

Darrity handed him a sheet of paper and said, “Suicides almost always do. This is one reason the doctor told me about what really killed Ralson.”

The note was addressed to Blaustein and it went:

“The projector works; I knew it would. The bargain is done. You’ve got it and you don’t need me any more. So I’ll go. You needn’t worry about the human race, Doc. You were right. They’ve bred us too long; they’ve taken too many chances. We’re out of the culture now and they won’t be able to stop us. I know. That’s all I can say. I know.”

He had signed his name quickly and then underneath there was one scrawled line, and it said:

“Provided enough men are penicillin-resistant.”

Grant made a motion to crumple the paper, but Darrity held out a quick hand.

“For the record, Doctor,” he said.

Grant gave it to him and said, “Poor Ralson! He died believing all that trash.”

Blaustein nodded. “So he did. Ralson will be given a great funeral, I suppose, and the fact of his invention will be publicized without the madness and the suicide. But the government men will remain interested in his mad theories. They may not be so mad, no, Mr. Darrity?”

“That’s ridiculous, Doctor,” said Grant. “There isn’t a scientist on the job who has shown the least uneasiness about it at all.”

“Tell him, Mr. Darrity,” said Blaustein.

Darrity said, “There has been another suicide. No, no, none of the scientists. No one with a degree. It happened this morning, and we investigated because we thought it might have some connection with today’s test. There didn’t seem any, and we were going to keep it quiet till the test was over. Only now there seems to be a connection.

“The man who died was just a guy with a wife and three kids. No reason to die. No history of mental illness. He threw himself under a car. We have witnesses, and it’s certain he did it on purpose. He didn’t die right away and they got a doctor to him. He was horribly mangled, but his last words were ‘I feel much better now’ and he died.”

“But who was he?” cried Grant.

“Hal Ross. The guy who actually built the projector. The guy whose office this is.”

Blaustein walked to the window. The evening sky was darkening into starriness.

He said, “The man knew nothing about Ralson’s views. He had never spoken to Ralson, Mr. Darrity tells me. Scientists are probably resistant as a whole. They must be or they are quickly driven out of the profession. Ralson was an exception, a penicillin-sensitive who insisted on remaining. You see what happened to him. But what about the others; those who have remained in walks of life where there is no constant weeding out of the sensitive ones. How much of humanity is penicillin-resistant?”

“You believe Ralson?” asked Grant in horror.

“I don’t really know.”

Blaustein looked at the stars.

Incubators?

Hostess

Rose Smollett was happy about it; almost triumphant. She peeled off her gloves, put her hat away, and turned her brightening eyes upon her husband.

She said, “Drake, we’re going to have him here.”

Drake looked at her with annoyance. “You’ve missed supper. I thought you were going to be back by seven.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter. I ate something on the way home. But, Drake, we’re going to have him here!”

“Who here? What are you talking about?”

“The doctor from Hawkin’s Planet! Didn’t you realize that was what today’s conference was about? We spent all day talking about it. It’s the most exciting thing that could possibly have happened!”

Drake Smollett removed the pipe from the vicinity of his face. He stared first at it and then at his wife. “Let me get this straight. When you say the doctor from Hawkin’s Planet, do you mean the Hawkinsite you’ve got at the Institute?”

“Well, of course. Who else could I possibly mean?”

“And may I ask what the devil you mean by saying we’ll have him here?”

“Drake, don’t you understand?”

“What is there to understand? Your Institute may be interested in the thing, but I’m not. What have we to do with it personally? It’s Institute business, isn’t it?”

“But, darling,” Rose said, patiently, “the Hawkinsite would like to stay at a private house somewhere, where he won’t be bothered with official ceremony, and where he’ll be able to proceed more according to his own likes and dislikes. I find it quite understandable.”

“Why at our house?”

“Because our place is convenient for the purpose, I suppose. They asked if I would allow it, and frankly,” she added with some stiffness, “I consider it a privilege.”

“Look!” Drake put his fingers through his brown hair and succeeded in rumpling it. “We’ve got a convenient little place here—granted! It’s not the most elegant place in the world, but it does well enough for us. However, I don’t see where we’ve got room for extraterrestrial visitors.”

Rose began to look worried. She removed her glasses and put them away in their case. “He can stay in the spare room. He’ll take care of it himself. I’ve spoken to him and he’s very pleasant. Honestly, all we have to do is show a certain amount of adaptability.”

Drake said, “Sure, just a little adaptability! The Hawkinsites breathe cyanide. We’ll just adapt ourselves to that, I suppose!”

“He carries cyanide in a little cylinder. You won’t even notice it.”

“And what else about them that I won’t notice?”

“Nothing else. They’re perfectly harmless. Goodness, they’re even vegetarians.”

“And what does that mean? Do we feed him a bale of hay for dinner?”

Rose’s lower lip trembled. “Drake, you’re being deliberately hateful. There are many vegetarians on Earth; they don’t eat hay.”

“And what about us? Do we eat meat ourselves or will that make us look like cannibals to him? I won’t live on salads to suit him; I warn you.”

“You’re being quite ridiculous.”

Rose felt helpless. She had married late in life, comparatively. Her career had been chosen; she herself had seemed well settled in it. She was a fellow in biology at the Jenkins Institute for the Natural Sciences, with over twenty publications to her credit. In a word, the line was hewed, the path cleared; she had been set for a career and spinsterhood. And now, at thirty-five, she was still a little amazed to find herself a bride of less than a year.

Occasionally, it embarrassed her, too, since she sometimes found that she had not the slightest idea of how to handle her husband. What did one do when the man of the family became mulish? That was not included in any of her courses. As a woman of independent mind and career, she couldn’t bring herself to cajolery.

So she looked at him steadily and said simply, “It means very much to me.”

“Why?”

“Because, Drake, if he stays here for any length of time, I can study him really closely. Very little work has been done on the biology and psychology of the individual Hawkinsite or of any of the extraterrestrial intelligences. We have some of their sociology and history, of course, but that’s all. Surely, you must see the opportunity. He stays here; we watch him, speak to him, observe his habits—”

“Not interested.”

“Oh, Drake, I don’t understand you.”

“You’re going to say I’m not usually like this, I suppose.”

“Well, you’re not.”

Drake was silent for a while. He seemed withdrawn and his high cheekbones and large chin were twisted and frozen into a brooding position.

He said finally, “Look, I’ve heard a bit about the Hawkinsites in the way of my own business. You say there have been investigations of their sociology, but not of their biology. Sure. It’s because the Hawkinsites don’t like to be studied as specimens any more than we would. I’ve spoken to men who were in charge of security groups watching various Hawkinsite missions on Earth. The missions stay in the rooms assigned to them and don’t leave for anything but the most important official business. They have nothing to do with Earthmen. It’s quite obvious that they are as revolted by us as I personally am by them.

“In fact, I just don’t understand why this Hawkinsite at the Institute should be any different. It seems to me to be against all the rules to have him come here by himself, anyway—and to have him want to stay in an Earthman’s home just puts the maraschino cherry on top.”

Rose said, wearily, “This is different. I’m surprised you can’t understand it, Drake. He’s a doctor. He’s coming here in the way of medical research, and I’ll grant you that he probably doesn’t enjoy staying with human beings and will find us perfectly horrible. But he must stay just the same! Do you suppose human doctors enjoy going into the tropics, or that they are particularly fond of letting themselves be bitten by infected mosquitoes?”

Drake said sharply, “What’s this about mosquitoes? What have they to do with it?”

“Why, nothing,” Rose answered, surprised. “It just came to my mind, that’s all. I was thinking of Reed and his yellow-fever experiments.”

Drake shrugged. “Well, have it your own way.”

For a moment, Rose hesitated. “You’re not angry about this, are you?” To her own ears she sounded unpleasantly girlish.

“No.”

And that, Rose knew, meant that he was.

Rose surveyed herself doubtfully in the full-length mirror. She had never been beautiful and was quite reconciled to the fact; so much so that it no longer mattered. Certainly, it would not matter to a being from Hawkin’s Planet. What did bother her was this matter of being a hostess under the very queer circumstances of having to be tactful to an extraterrestrial creature and, at the same time, to her husband as well. She wondered which would prove the more difficult.

Drake was coming home late that day; he was not due for half an hour. Rose found herself inclined to believe that he had arranged that purposely in a sullen desire to leave her alone with her problem. She found herself in a state of mild resentment.

He had called her just before noon at the Institute and had asked abruptly, “When are you taking him home?”

She answered, curtly, “In about three hours.”

“All right. What’s his name? His Hawkinsite name?”

“Why do you want to know?” She could not keep the chill from her words.

“Let’s call it a small investigation of my own. After all, the thing will be in my house.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Drake, don’t bring your job home with you!”

Drake’s voice sounded tinny and nasty in her ears. “Why not, Rose? Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing?”

It was, of course, so she gave him the information he wanted.

This was the first time in their married life that they had had even the semblance of a quarrel, and, as she sat there before the full-length mirror, she began to wonder if perhaps she ought not make an attempt to see his side of it. In essence, she had married a policeman. Of course he was more than simply a policeman; he was a member of the World Security Board.

It had been a surprise to her friends. The fact of the marriage itself had been the biggest surprise, but if she had decided on marriage, the attitude was, why not with another biologist? Or, if she had wanted to go afield, an anthropologist, perhaps; even a chemist; but why, of all people, a policeman? Nobody had exactly said those things, naturally, but it had been in the very atmosphere at the time of her marriage.

She had resented it then, and ever since. A man could marry whom he chose, but if a doctor of philosophy, female variety, chose to marry a man who never went past the bachelor’s degree, there was shock. Why should there be? What business was it of theirs? He was handsome, in a way, intelligent, in another way, and she was perfectly satisfied with her choice.

Yet how much of this same snobbishness did she bring home with her? Didn’t she always have the attitude that her own work, her biological investigations, were important, while his job was merely something to be kept within the four walls of his little office in the old U.N. buildings on the East River?

She jumped up from her seat in agitation and, with a deep breath, decided to leave such thoughts behind her. She desperately did not want to quarrel with him. And she just wasn’t going to interfere with him. She was committed to accepting the Hawkinsite as guest, but otherwise she would let Drake have his own way. He was making enough of a concession as it was.

Harg Tholan was standing quietly in the middle of the living room when she came down the stairs. He was not sitting, since he was not anatomically constructed to sit. He stood on two sets of limbs placed close together, while a third pair entirely different in construction were suspended from a region that would have been the upper chest in a human being. The skin of his body was hard, glistening and ridged, while his face bore a distant resemblance to something alienly bovine. Yet he was not completely repulsive, and he wore clothes of a sort over the lower portion of his body in order to avoid offending the sensibilities of his human hosts.

He said, “Mrs. Smollett, I appreciate your hospitality beyond my ability to express it in your language,” and he drooped so that his forelimbs touched the ground for a moment.

Rose knew this to be a gesture signifying gratitude among the beings of Hawkin’s Planet. She was grateful that he spoke English as well as he did. The construction of his mouth, combined with an absence of incisors, gave a whistling sound to the sibilants. Aside from that, he might have been born on Earth for all the accent his speech showed.

She said, “My husband will be home soon, and then we will eat.”

“Your husband?” For a moment, he said nothing more, and then added, “Yes, of course.”

She let it go. If there was one source of infinite confusion among the five intelligent races of the known Galaxy, it lay in the differences among them with regard to their sex life and the social institutions that grew around it. The concept of husband and wife, for instance, existed only on Earth. The other races could achieve a sort of intellectual understanding of what it meant, but never an emotional one.

She said, “I have consulted the Institute in preparing your menu. I trust you will find nothing in it that will upset you.”

The Hawkinsite blinked its eyes rapidly. Rose recalled this to be a gesture of amusement.

He said, “Proteins are proteins, my dear Mrs. Smollett. For those trace factors which I need but are not supplied in your food, I have brought concentrates that will be most adequate.”

And proteins were proteins. Rose knew this to be true. Her concern for the creature’s diet had been largely one of formal politeness. In the discovery of life on the planets of the outer stars, one of the most interesting generalizations that had developed was the fact that, although life could be formed on the basis of substances other than proteins—even on elements other than carbon—it remained true that the only known intelligences were proteinaceous in nature. This meant that each of the five forms of intelligent life could maintain themselves over prolonged periods on the food of any of the other four.

She heard Drake’s key in the door and went stiff with apprehension.

She had to admit he did well. He strode in, and, without hesitation, thrust his hand out at the Hawkinsite, saying firmly, “Good evening, Dr. Tholan.”

The Hawkinsite put out his large and rather clumsy forelimb and the two, so to speak, shook hands. Rose had already gone through that procedure and knew the queer feeling of a Hawkinsite hand in her own. It had felt rough and hot and dry. She imagined that, to the Hawkinsite, her own and Drake’s felt cold and slimy.

At the time of the formal greeting, she had taken the opportunity to observe the alien hand. It was an excellent case of converging evolution. Its morphological development was entirely different from that of the human hand, yet it had brought itself into a fairly approximate similarity. There were four fingers but no thumb. Each finger had five independent ball-and-socket joints. In this way, the flexibility lost with the absence of the thumb was made up for by the almost tentacular properties of the fingers. What was even more interesting to her biologist’s eyes was the fact that each Hawkinsite finger ended in a vestigial hoof, very small and, to the layman, unidentifiable as such, but clearly adapted at one time to running, just as man’s had been to climbing.

Drake said, in friendly enough fashion, “Are you quite comfortable, sir?”

The Hawkinsite answered, “Quite. Your wife has been most thoughtful in all her arrangements.”

“Would you care for a drink?”

The Hawkinsite did not answer but looked at Rose with a slight facial contortion that indicated some emotion which, unfortunately, Rose could not interpret. She said, nervously, “On Earth there is the custom of drinking liquids which have been fortified with ethyl alcohol. We find it stimulating.”

“Oh, yes. I am afraid, then, that I must decline. Ethyl alcohol would interfere most unpleasantly with my metabolism.”

“Why, so it does to Earthmen, too, but I understand, Dr. Tholan,” Drake replied. “Would you object to my drinking?”

“Of course not.”

Drake passed close to Rose on his way to the sideboard and she caught only one word. He said, “God!” in a tightly controlled whisper, yet he managed to put seventeen exclamation points after it.

The Hawkinsite stood at the table. His fingers were models of dexterity as they wove their way around the cutlery. Rose tried not to look at him as he ate. His wide lipless mouth split his face alarmingly as he ingested food, and in chewing, his large jaws moved disconcertingly from side to side. It was another evidence of his ungulate ancestry. Rose found herself wondering if, in the quiet of his own room, he would later chew his cud, and was then panic-stricken lest Drake get the same idea and leave the table in disgust. But Drake was taking everything quite calmly.

He said, “I imagine, Dr. Tholan, that the cylinder at your side holds cyanide?”

Rose started. She had actually not noticed it. It was a curved metal object, something like a water canteen, that fitted flatly against the creature’s skin, half-hidden behind its clothing. But, then, Drake had a policeman’s eyes.

The Hawkinsite was not in the least disconcerted. “Quite so,” he said, and his hoofed fingers held out a thin, flexible hose that ran up his body, its tint blending into that of his yellowish skin, and entered the corner of his wide mouth. Rose felt slightly embarrassed, as though at the display of intimate articles of clothing.

Drake said, “And does it contain pure cyanide?”

The Hawkinsite humorously blinked his eyes. “I hope you are not considering possible danger to Earthites. I know the gas is highly poisonous to you and I do not need a great deal. The gas contained in the cylinder is five per cent hydrogen cyanide, the remainder oxygen. None of it emerges except when I actually suck at the tube, and that need not be done frequently.”

“I see. And you really must have the gas to live?”

Rose was slightly appalled. One simply did not ask such questions without careful preparation. It was impossible to foresee where the sensitive points of an alien psychology might be. And Drake must be doing this deliberately, since he could not help realizing that he could get answers to such questions as easily from herself. Or was it that he preferred not to ask her?

The Hawkinsite remained apparently unperturbed. “Are you not a biologist, Mr. Smollett?”

“No, Dr. Tholan.”

“But you are in close association with Mrs. Dr. Smollett.”

Drake smile a bit. “Yes, I am married to a Mrs. doctor, but just the same I am not a biologist; merely a minor government official. My wife’s friends,” he added, “call me a policeman.”

Rose bit the inside of her cheek. In this case it was the Hawkinsite who had impinged upon the sensitive point of an alien psychology. On Hawkin’s Planet, there was a tight caste system and intercaste associations were limited. But Drake wouldn’t realize that.

The Hawkinsite turned to her. “May I have your permission, Mrs. Smollett, to explain a little of our biochemistry to your husband? It will be dull for you, since I am sure you must understand it quite well already.”

She said, “By all means do, Dr. Tholan.”

He said, “You see, Mr. Smollett, the respiratory system in your body and in the bodies of all air-breathing creatures on Earth is controlled by certain metal-containing enzymes, I am taught. The metal is usually iron, though sometimes it is copper. In either case, small traces of cyanide would combine with these metals and immobilize the respiratory system of the terrestrial living cell. They would be prevented from using oxygen and killed in a few minutes.

“The life on my own planet is not quite so constituted. The key respiratory compounds contain neither iron nor copper; no metal at all, in fact. It is for this reason that my blood is colorless. Our compounds contain certain organic groupings which are essential to life, and these groupings can only be maintained intact in the presence of a small concentration of cyanide. Undoubtedly, this type of protein has developed through millions of years of evolution on a world which has a few tenths of a per cent of hydrogen cyanide occurring naturally in the atmosphere. Its presence is maintained by a biological cycle. Various of our native micro-organisms liberate the free gas.”

“You make it extremely clear, Dr. Tholan, and very interesting,” Drake said. “What happens if you don’t breathe it? Do you just go, like that?” He snapped his fingers.

“Not quite. It isn’t equivalent to the presence of cyanide for you. In my case, the absence of cyanide would be equivalent to slow strangulation. It happens sometimes, in ill-ventilated rooms on my world, that the cyanide is gradually consumed and falls below the minimum necessary concentration. The results are very painful and difficult to treat.”

Rose had to give Drake credit; he really sounded interested. And the alien, thank heaven, did not mind the catechism.

The rest of the dinner passed without incident. It was almost pleasant.

Throughout the evening, Drake remained that way; interested. Even more than that—absorbed. He drowned her out, and she was glad of it. He was the one who was really colorful and it was only her job, her specialized training, that stole the color from him. She looked at him gloomily and thought, Why did he marry me?

Drake sat, one leg crossed over the other, hands clasped and tapping his chin gently, watching the Hawkinsite intently. The Hawkinsite faced him, standing in his quadruped fashion.

Drake said, “I find it difficult to keep thinking of you as a doctor.”

The Hawkinsite laughingly blinked his eyes. “I understand what you mean,” he said. “I find it difficult to think of you as a policeman. On my world, policemen are very specialized and distinctive people.”

“Are they?” said Drake, somewhat drily, and then changed the subject. “I gather that you are not here on a pleasure trip.”

“No, I am here very much on business. I intend to study this queer plane* you call Earth, as it has never been studied before by any of my people.’

“Queer?” asked Drake. “In what way?”

The Hawkinsite looked at Rose. “Does he know of the Inhibition Death?”

Rose felt embarrassed. “His work is important,” she said. “I am afraid that my husband has little time to listen to the details of my work.” She knew that this was not really adequate and she felt herself to be the recipient, yet again, of one of the Hawkinsite’s unreadable emotions.

The extraterrestrial creature turned back to Drake. “It is always amazing to me to find how little you Earthmen understand your own unusual characteristics. Look, there are five intelligent races in the Galaxy. These have all developed independently, yet have managed to converge in remarkable fashion. It is as though, in the long run, intelligence requires a certain physical makeup to flourish. I leave that question for philosophers. But I need not belabor the point, since it must be a familiar one to you.

“Now when the differences among the intelligences are closely investigated, it is found over and over again that it is you Earthmen, more than any of the others, who are unique. For instance, it is only on Earth that life depends upon metal enzymes for respiration. Your people are the only ones which find hydrogen cyanide poisonous. Yours is the only form of intelligent life which is carnivorous. Yours is the only form of life which has not developed from a grazing animal. And, most interesting of all, yours is the only form of intelligent life known which stops growing upon reaching maturity.”

Drake grinned at him. Rose felt her heart suddenly race. It was the nicest thing about him, that grin, and he was using it perfectly naturally. It wasn’t forced or false. He was adjusting to the presence of this alien creature. He was being pleasant—and he must be doing it for her. She loved that thought and repeated it to herself. He was doing it for her; he was being nice to the Hawkinsite for her sake.

Drake was saying with his grin, “You don’t look very large, Dr. Tholan. I should say that you are an inch taller than I am, which would make you six feet two inches tall. Is it that you are young, or is it that the others on your world are generally small?”

“Neither,” said the Hawkinsite. “We grow at a diminishing rate with the years, so that at my age it would take fifteen years to grow an additional inch, but—and this is the important point—we never entirely stop. And, of course, as a consequence, we never entirely die.”

Drake gasped and even Rose felt herself sitting stiffly upright. This was something new. This was something which, to her knowledge, the few expeditions to Hawkin’s Planet had never brought back. She was torn with excitement but held an exclamation back and let Drake speak for her.

He said, “They don’t entirely die? You’re not trying to say, sir, that the people on Hawkin’s Planet are immortal?”

“No people are truly immortal. If there were no other way to die, there would always be accident, and if that fails, there is boredom. Few of us live more than several centuries of your time. Still, it is unpleasant to think that death may come involuntarily. It is something which, to us, is extremely horrible. It bothers me even as I think of it now, this thought that against my will and despite all care, death may come.”

“We,” said Drake, grimly, “are quite used to it.”

“You Earthmen live with the thought; we do not. And this is why we are disturbed to find that the incidence of Inhibition Death has been increasing in recent years.”

“You have not yet explained,” said Drake, “just what the Inhibition Death is, but let me guess. Is the Inhibition Death a pathological cessation of growth?”

“Exactly.”

“And how long after growth’s cessation does death follow?”

“Within the year. It is a wasting disease, a tragic one, and absolutely incurable.”

“What causes it?”

The Hawkinsite paused a long time before answering, and even then there was something strained and uneasy about the way he spoke. “Mr. Smollett, we know nothing about the cause of the disease.”

Drake nodded thoughtfully. Rose was following the conversation as though she were a spectator at a tennis match.

Drake said, “And why do you come to Earth to study this disease?”

“Because again Earthmen are unique. They are the only intelligent beings who are immune. The Inhibition Death affects all the other races. Do your biologists know that, Mrs. Smollett?”

He had addressed her suddenly, so that she jumped slightly. She said, “No, they don’t.”

“I am not surprised. That piece of information is the result of very recent research. The Inhibition Death is easily diagnosed incorrectly and the incidence is much lower on the other planets. In fact, it is a strange thing, something to philosophize over, that the incidence of the Death is highest on my world, which is closest to Earth, and lower on each more distant planet—so that it is lowest on the world of the star Tempora, which is farthest from Earth, while Earth itself is immune. Somewhere in the biochemistry of the Earthite, there is the secret of that immunity. How interesting it would be to find it.”

Drake said, “But look here, you can’t say Earth is immune. From where I sit, it looks as if the incidence is a hundred per cent. All Earthmen stop growing and all Earthmen die. We’ve all got the Inhibition Death.”

“Not at all. Earthmen live up to seventy years after the cessation of growth. That is not the Death as we know it. Your equivalent disease is rather one of unrestrained growth. Cancer, you call it. —But come, I bore you.”

Rose protested instantly. Drake did likewise with even more vehemence, but the Hawkinsite determinedly changed the subject. It was then that Rose had her first pang of suspicion, for Drake circled Harg Tholan warily with his words, worrying him, jabbing at him, attempting always to get the information back to the point where the Hawkinsite had left off. Not badly, not unskillfully, but Rose knew him, and could tell what he was after. And what could he be after but that which was demanded by his profession? And, as though in response to her thoughts, the Hawkinsite took up the phrase which had begun careening in her mind like a broken record on a perpetual turntable.

He asked, “Did you not say you were a policeman?”

Drake said, curtly, “Yes.”

“Then there is something I would like to request you to do for me. I have been wantisg to all this evening, since I discovered your profession, and yet I hesitate. I do not wish to be troublesome to my host and hostess.”

“We’ll do what we can.”

“I have a profound curiosity as to how Earthmen live; a curiosity which is not perhaps shared by the generality of my countrymen. So I wonder, could you show me through one of the police departments on your planet?”

“I do not belong to a police department in exactly the way you imagine,” said Drake, cautiously. “However, I am known to the New York police department. I can manage it without trouble. Tomorrow?”

“That would be most convenient for me. Would I be able to visit the Missing Persons Bureau?”

“The what?”

The Hawkinsite drew his four standing legs closer together, as if he were becoming more intense. “It is a hobby of mine, a little queer comer of interest I have always had. I understand you have a group of police officers whose sole duty it is to search for men who are missing.”

“And women and children,” added Drake. “But why should that interest you so particularly?”

“Because there again you are unique. There is no such thing as a missing person on our planet. I can’t explain the mechanism to you, of course, but among the people of other worlds, there is always an awareness of one another’s presence, especially if there is a strong, affectionate tie. We are always aware of each other’s exact location, no matter where on the planet we might be.”

Rose grew excited again. The scientific expeditions to Hawkin’s Planet had always had the greatest difficulty in penetrating the internal emotional mechanisms of the natives, and here was one who talked freely, who would explain! She forgot to worry about Drake and intruded into the conversations. “Can you feel such awareness even now? On Earth?”

The Hawkinsite said, “You mean across space? No, I’m afraid not. But you see the importance of the matter. All the uniqueness of Earth should be linked. If the lack of this sense can be explained, perhaps the immunity to Inhibition Death can be, also. Besides, it strikes me as very curious that any form of intelligent community life can be built among people who lack this community awareness. How can an Earthman tell, for instance, when he has formed a congenial sub-group, a family? How can you two, for instance, know that there is a true tie between you?”

Rose found herself nodding. How strongly she missed such a sense!

But Drake only smiled. “We have our ways. It is as difficult to explain what we call ‘love’ to you as it is for you to explain your sense to us.”

“I suppose so. Yet tell me truthfully, Mr. Smollett—if Mrs. Smollett were to leave this room and enter another without your having seen her do so, would you really not be aware of her location?”

“I really would not.”

The Hawkinsite said, “Amazing.” He hesitated, then added, “Please do not be offended at the fact that I find it revolting as well.”

After the light in the bedroom had been put out, Rose went to the door three times, opening it a crack and peering out. She could feel Drake watching her. There was a hard kind of amusement in his voice as he asked, finally, “What’s the matter?”

She said, “I want to talk to you.”

“Are you afraid our friend can hear?”

Rose was whispering. She got into bed and put her head on his pillow so that she could whisper better. She said, “Why were you talking about the Inhibition Death to Dr. Tholan?”

“I am taking an interest in your work, Rose. You’ve always wanted me to take an interest.”

“I’d rather you weren’t sarcastic.” She was almost violent, as nearly violent as she could be in a whisper. “I know that there’s something of your own interest in this—of police interest, probably. What is it?”

He said, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“No, right now.”

He put his hand under her head, lifting it. For a wild moment she thought he was going to kiss her—just kiss her on impulse the way husbands sometimes did, or as she imagined they sometimes did. Drake never did, and he didn’t now.

He merely held her close and whispered, “Why are you so interested?”

His hand was almost brutally hard upon the nape of her neck, so that she stiffened and tried to draw back. Her voice was more than a whisper now. “Stop it, Drake.”

He said, “I want no questions from you and no interference. You do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

“The nature of my job is open and known.”

“The nature of my job,” he retorted, “isn’t, by definition. But I’ll tell you this. Our six-legged friend is here in this house for some definite reason. You weren’t picked as biologist in charge for any random reason. Do you know that two days ago, he’d been inquiring about me at the Commission?”

“You’re joking.”

“Don’t believe that for a minute. There are depths to this that you know nothing about. But that’s my job and I won’t discuss it with you any further. Do you understand?”

“No, but I won’t question you if you don’t want me to.”

“Then go to sleep.”

She lay stiffly on her back and the minutes passed, and then the quarter-hours. She was trying to fit the pieces together. Even with what Drake had told her, the curves and colors refused to blend. She wondered what Drake would say if he knew she had a recording of that night’s conversation!

One picture remained clear in her mind at that moment. It hovered over her mockingly. The Hawkinsite, at the end of the long evening, had turned to her and said gravely, “Good night, Mrs. Smollett. You are a most charming hostess.”

She had desperately wanted to giggle at the time. How could he call her a charming hostess? To him, she could only be a horror, a monstrosity with too few limbs and a too-narrow face.

And then, as the Hawkinsite delivered himself of this completely meaningless piece of politeness, Drake had turned white! For one instant, his eyes had burned with something that looked like terror.

She had never before known Drake to show fear of anything, and the picture of that instant of pure panic remained with her until all her thoughts finally sagged into the oblivion of sleep.

It was noon before Rose was at her desk the next day. She had deliberately waited until Drake and the Hawkinsite had left, since only then was she able to remove the small recorder that had been behind Drake’s armchair the previous evening. She had had no original intention of keeping its presence secret from him. It was just that he had come home so late, and she couldn’t say anything about it with the Hawkinsite present. Later on, of course, things had changed—

The placing of the recorder had been only a routine maneuver. The Hawkinsite’s statements and intonations needed to be preserved for future intensive studies by various specialists at the Institute. It had been hidden in order to avoid the distortions of self-consciousness that the visibility of such a device would bring, and now it couldn’t be shown to the members of the Institute at all. It would have to serve a different function altogether. A rather nasty function.

She was going to spy on Drake.

She touched the little box with her fingers and wondered, irrelevantly, how Drake was going to manage, that day. Social intercourse between inhabited worlds was, even now, not so commonplace that the sight of a Hawkinsite on the city streets would not succeed in drawing crowds. But Drake would manage, she knew. Drake always managed.

She listened once again to the sounds of last evening, repeating the interesting moments. She was dissatisfied with what Drake had told her. Why should the Hawkinsite have been interested in the two of them particularly? Yet Drake wouldn’t lie. She would have liked to check at the Security Commission, but she knew she could not do that. Besides, the thought made her feel disloyal; Drake would definitely not lie.

But, then again, why should Harg Tholan not have investigated them? He might have inquired similarly about the families of all the biologists at the Institute. It would be no more than natural to attempt to choose the home he would find most pleasant by his own standards, whatever they were.

And if he had—even if he had investigated only the Smolletts—why should that create the great change in Drake from intense hostility to intense interest? Drake undoubtedly had knowledge he was keeping to himself. Only heaven knew how much.

Her thoughts churned slowly through the possibilities of interstellar intrigue. So far, to be sure, there were no signs of hostility or ill-feeling among any of the five intelligent races known to inhabit the Galaxy. As yet they were spaced at intervals too wide for enmity. Even the barest contact among them was all but impossible. Economic and political interests just had no point at which to conflict.

But that was only her idea and she was not a member of the Security Commission. If there were conflict, if there were danger, if there were any reason to suspect that the mission of a Hawkinsite might be other than peaceful—Drake would know.

Yet was Drake sufficiently high in the councils of the Security Commission to know, off-hand, the dangers involved in the visit of a Hawkinsite physician? She had never thought of his position as more than that of a very minor functionary in the Commission; he had never presented himself as more. And yet—

Might he be more?

She shrugged at the thought. It was reminiscent of Twentieth Century spy novels and of costume dramas of the days when there existed such things as atom bomb secrets.

The thought of costume dramas decided her. Unlike Drake, she wasn’t a real policeman, and she didn’t know how a real policeman would go about it. But she knew how such things were done in the old dramas.

She drew a piece of paper toward her and, with a quick motion, slashed a vertical pencil mark down its center. She headed one column “Harg Tholan,” the other “Drake.” Under “Harg Tholan” she wrote “bonafide” and thoughtfully put three question marks after it. After all, was he a doctor at all, or was he what could only be described as an interstellar agent? What proof had even the Institute of his profession except his own statements? Was that why Drake had quizzed him so relentlessly concerning the Inhibition Death? Had he boned up in advance and tried to catch the Hawkinsite in an error?

For a moment, she was irresolute; then, springing to her feet, she folded the paper, put it in the pocket of her short jacket, and swept out of her office. She said nothing to any of those she passed as she left the Institute. She left no word at the reception desk as to where she was going, or when she would be back.

Once outside, she hurried into the third-level tube and waited for an empty compartment to pass. The two minutes that elapsed seemed unbearably long. It was all she could do to say, “New York Academy of Medicine,” into the mouthpiece just above the seat.

The door of the little cubicle closed, and the sound of the air flowing past the compartment hissed upward in pitch.

The New York Academy of Medicine had been enlarged both vertically and horizontally in the past two decades. The library alone occupied one entire wing of the third floor. Undoubtedly, if all the books, pamphlets and periodicals it contained were in their original printed form, rather than in microfilm, the entire building, huge though it was, would not have been sufficiently vast to hold them. As it was, Rose knew there was already talk of limiting printed works to the last five years, rather than to the last ten, as was now the case.

Rose, as a member of the Academy, had free entry to the library. She hurried toward the alcoves devoted to extraterrestrial medicine and was relieved to find them unoccupied.

It might have been wiser to have enlisted the aid of a librarian, but she chose not to. The thinner and smaller the trail she left, the less likely it was that Drake might pick it up.

And so, without guidance, she was satisfied to travel along the shelves, following the titles anxiously with her fingers. The books were almost all in English, though some were in German or Russian. None, ironically enough, were in extraterrestrial symbolisms. There was a room somewhere for such originals, but they were available only to official translators.

Her traveling eye and finger stopped. She had found what she was looking for.

She dragged half a dozen volumes from the shelf and spread them out upon the small dark table. She fumbled for the light switch and opened the first of the volumes. It was entitled Studies on Inhibition* She leafed through it and then turned to the author index. The name of Harg Tholan was there.

One by one, she looked up the references indicated, then returned to the shelves for translations of such original papers as she could find.

She spent more than two hours in the Academy. When she was finished, she knew this much—there was a Hawkinsite doctor named Harg Tholan, who was an expert on the Inhibition Death. He was connected with the Hawkinsite research organization with which the Institute had been in correspondence. Of course, the Harg Tholan she knew might simply be impersonating an actual doctor to make the role more realistic, but why should that be necessary?

She took the paper out of her pocket and, where she had written “bonafide” with three question marks, she now wrote a YES in capitals. She went back to the Institute and at 4 p.m. was once again at her desk. She called the switchboard to say that she would not answer any phone calls and then she locked her door.

Underneath the column headed “Harg Tholan” she now wrote two questions: “Why did Harg Tholan come to Earth alone?” She left considerable space. Then, “What is his interest in the Missing Persons Bureau?”

Certainly, the Inhibition Death was all the Hawkinsite said it was. From her reading at the Academy, it was obvious that it occupied the major share of medical effort on Hawkin’s Planet. It was more feared there than cancer was on Earth. If they had thought the answer to it lay on Earth, the Hawkinsites would have sent a full-scale expedition. Was it distrust and suspicion on their part that made them send only one investigator?

What was it Harg Tholan had said the night before? The incidence of the Death was highest upon his own world, which was closest to Earth, lowest upon the world farthest from Earth. Add to that the fact implied by the Hawkinsite, and verified by her own readings at the Academy, that the incidence had expanded enormously since interstellar contact had been made with Earth....

Slowly and reluctantly she came to one conclusion. The inhabitants of Hawkin’s Planet might have decided that somehow Earth had discovered the cause of the Inhibition Death, and was deliberately fostering it among the alien peoples of the Galaxy, with the intention, perhaps, of becoming supreme among the stars.

She rejected this conclusion with what was almost panic. It could not be; it was impossible. In the first place, Earth wouldn ‘t do such a horrible thing. Secondly, it couldn ‘t

As far as scientific advance was concerned, the beings of Hawkin’s Planet were certainly the equals of Earthmen. The Death had occurred there for thousands of years and their medical record was one of total failure. Surely, Earth, in its long-distance investigations into alien biochemistry, could not have succeeded so quickly. In fact, as far as she knew, there were no investigations to speak of into Hawkinsite pathology on the part of Earth biologists and physicians.

Yet all the evidence indicated that Harg Tholan had come in suspicion and had been received in suspicion. Carefully, she wrote down under the question, “Why did Harg Tholan come to Earth alone?” the answer, “Hawkin’s Planet believes Earth is causing the Inhibition Death.”

But, then, what was this business about the Bureau of Missing Persons? As a scientist, she was rigorous about the theories she developed. All the facts had to fit in, not merely some of them.

Missing Persons Bureau! If it was a false trail, deliberately intended to deceive Drake, it had been done clumsily, since it came only after an hour of discussion of the Inhibition Death.

Was it intended as an opportunity to study Drake? If so, why? Was this perhaps the major point? The Hawkinsite had investigated Drake before coming to them. Had he come because Drake was a policeman with entry to Bureaus of Missing Persons?

But why? Why?

She gave it up and turned to the column headed “Drake.”

And there a question wrote itself, not in pen and ink upon the paper, but in the much more visible letters of thought on mind. Why did he marry me? thought Rose, and she covered her eyes with her hands so that the unfriendly light was excluded.

They had met quite by accident somewhat more than a year before, when he had moved into the apartment house in which she then lived. Polite greetings had somehow become friendly conversation and this, in turn, had led to occasional dinners in a neighborhood restaurant. It had been very friendly and normal and an exciting new experience, and she had fallen in love.

When he asked her to marry him, she was pleased—and overwhelmed. At the time, she had many explanations for it. He appreciated her intelligence and friendliness. She was a nice girl. She would make a good wife, a splendid companion.

She had tried all those explanations and had half-believed every one of them. But half-belief was not enough.

It was not that she had any definite fault to find in Drake as a husband. He was always thoughtful, kind and a gentleman. Their married life was not one of passion, and yet it suited the paler emotional surges of the late thirties. She wasn’t nineteen. What did she expect?

That was it; she wasn’t nineteen. She wasn’t beautiful, or charming, or glamorous. What did she expect? Could she have expected Drake—handsome and rugged, whose interest in intellectual pursuits was quite minor, who neither asked about her work in all the months of their marriage, nor offered to discuss his own with her? Why, then, did he marry her?

But there was no answer to that question, and it had nothing to do with what Rose was trying to do now. It was extraneous, she told herself fiercely; it was a childish distraction from the task she had set herself. She was acting like a girl of nineteen, after all, with no chronological excuse for it.

She found that the point of her pencil had somehow broken, and took a new one. In the column headed “Drake” she wrote, “Why is he suspicious of Harg Tholan?” and under it she put an arrow pointing to the other column.

What she had already written there was sufficient explanation. If Earth was spreading the Inhibition Death, or if Earth knew it was suspected of such a deed, then, obviously, it would be preparing for eventual retaliation on the part of the aliens. In fact, the setting would actually be one of preliminary maneuvering for the first interstellar war of history. It was an adequate but horrible explanation.

Now there was left the second question, the one she could not answer. She wrote it slowly, “Why Drake’s reaction to Tholan’s words, ‘You are a most charming hostess’?”

She tried to bring back the exact setting. The Hawkinsite had said it innocuously, matter-of-factly, politely, and Drake had frozen at the sound of it. Over and over, she had listened to that particular passage in the recording. An Earthman might have said it in just such an inconsequential tone on leaving a routine cocktail party. The recording did not carry the sight of Drake’s face; she had only her memory for that. Drake’s eyes had become alive with fear and hate, and Drake was one who feared practically nothing. What was there to fear in the phrase, “You are a most charming hostess,” that could upset him so? Jealousy? Absurd. The feeling that Tholan had been sarcastic? Maybe, though unlikely. She was sure Tholan was sincere.

She gave it up and put a large question mark under that second question. There were two of them now, one under “Harg Tholan” and one under “Drake.” Could there be a connection between Tholan’s interest in missing persons and Drake’s reaction to a polite party phrase? She could think of none.

She put her head down upon her arms. It was getting dark in the office and she was very tired. For a while, she must have hovered in that queer land between waking and sleeping, when thoughts and phrases lose the control of the conscious and disport themselves erratically and surrealistically through one’s head. But, no matter where they danced and leaped, they always returned to that one phrase, “You are a most charming hostess.” Sometimes she heard it in Harg Tholan’s cultured, lifeless voice, and sometimes in Drake’s vibrant one. When Drake said it, it was full of love, full of a love she never heard from him. She liked to hear him say it.

She startled herself to wakefulness. It was quite dark in the office now, and she put on the desk light. She blinked, then frowned a little. Another thought must have come to her in that fitful half-sleep. There had been another phrase which had upset Drake. What was it? Her forehead furrowed with mental effort. It had not been last evening. It was not anything in the recorded conversation, so it must have been before that. Nothing came and she grew restless.

Looking at her watch, she gasped. It was almost eight. They would be at home waiting for her.

But she did not want to go home. She did not want to face them. Slowly, she took up the paper upon which she had scrawled her thoughts of the afternoon, tore it into little pieces and let them flutter into the little atomic-flash ashtray upon her desk. They were gone in a little flare and nothing was left of them.

If only nothing were left of the thoughts they represented as well.

It was no use. She would have to go home.

They were not there waiting for her, after all. She came upon them getting out of a gyrocab just as she emerged from the tubes on to street level. The gyrocabbie, wide-eyed, gazed after his fares for a moment, then hovered upward and away. By unspoken mutual consent, the three waited until they had entered the apartment before speaking.

Rose said disinterestedly, “I hope you have had a pleasant day, Dr. Tholan.”

“Quite. And a fascinating and profitable one as well, I think.”

“Have you had a chance to eat?” Though Rose had not herself eaten, she was anything but hungry.

“Yes, indeed.”

Drake interrupted, “We had lunch and supper sent up to us. Sandwiches.” He sounded tired.

Rose said, “Hello, Drake.” It was the first time she had addressed him.

Drake scarcely looked at her. “Hello.”

The Hawkinsite said, “Your tomatoes are remarkable vegetables. We have nothing to compare with them in taste on our own planet. I believe I ate two dozen, as well as an entire bottle of tomato derivative.”

“Ketchup,” explained Drake, briefly.

Rose said, “And your visit at the Missing Persons Bureau, Dr. Tholan? You say you found it profitable?”

“I should say so. Yes.”

Rose kept her back to him. She plumped up sofa cushions as she said, “In what way?”

“I find it most interesting that the large majority of missing persons are males. Wives frequently report missing husbands, while the reverse is practically never the case.”

Rose said, “Oh, that’s not mysterious, Dr. Tholan. You simply don’t realize the economic setup we have on Earth. On this planet, you see, it is the male who is usually the member of the family that maintains it as an economic unit. He is the one whose labor is repaid in units of currency. The wife’s function is generally that of taking care of home and children.”

“Surely this is not universal!”

Drake put in, “More or less. If you are thinking of my wife, she is an example of the minority of women who are capable of making their own way in the world.”

Rose looked at him swiftly. Was he being sarcastic?

The Hawkinsite said, “Your implication, Mrs. Smollett, is that women, being economically dependent upon their male companions, find it less feasible to disappear?”

“That’s a gentle way of putting it,” said Rose, “but that’s about it.”

“And would you call the Missing Persons Bureau of New York a fair sampling of such cases in the planet at large?”

“Why, I should think so.”

The Hawkinsite said, abruptly, “And is there, then, an economic explanation for the fact that since interstellar travel has been developed, the percentage of young males among the missing is more pronounced than ever?”

It was Drake who answered, with a verbal snap. “Good lord, that’s even less of a mystery than the other. Nowadays, the runaway has all space to disappear into. Anyone who wants to get away from trouble need only hop the nearest space freighter. They’re always looking for crewmen, no questions asked, and it would be almost impossible to locate the runaway after that, if he really wanted to stay out of circulation.”

“And almost always young men in their first year of marriage.”

Rose laughed suddenly. She said, “Why, that’s just the time a man’s troubles seem the greatest. If he survives the first year, there is usually no need to disappear at all.”

Drake was obviously not amused. Rose thought again that he looked tired and unhappy. Why did he insist on bearing the load alone? And then she thought that perhaps he had to.

The Hawkinsite said, suddenly, “Would it offend you if I disconnected for a period of time?”

Rose said, “Not at all. I hope you haven’t had too exhausting a day. Since you come from a planet whose gravity is greater than that of Earth’s, I’m afraid we too easily presume that you would show greater endurance than we do.”

“Oh, I am not tired in a physical sense.” He looked for a moment at her legs and blinked very rapidly, indicating amusement. “You know, I keep expecting Earthmen to fall either forward or backward in view of their meager equipment of standing limbs. You must pardon me if my comment is overfamiliar, but your mention of the lesser gravity of Earth brought it to my mind. On my planet, two legs would simply not be enough. But this is all beside the point at the moment. It is just that I have been absorbing so many new and unusual concepts that I feel the desire for a little disconnection.”

Rose shrugged inwardly. Well, that was as close as one race could get to another, anyway. As nearly as the expeditions to Hawkin’s Planet could make out, Hawkinsites had the faculty for disconnecting their conscious mind from all its bodily functions and allowing it to sink into an undisturbed meditative process for periods of time lasting up to terrestrial days. Hawkinsites found the process pleasant, even necessary sometimes, though no Earthman could truly say what function it served.

Conversely, it had never been entirely possible for Earthmen to explain the concept of “sleep” to a Hawkinsite, or to any extraterrestrial. What an Earthman would call sleep or a dream, a Hawkinsite would view as an alarming sign of mental disintegration.

Rose thought uneasily, Here is another way Earthmen are unique.

The Hawkinsite was backing away, drooping so that his forelimbs swept the floor in polite farewell. Drake nodded curtly at him as he disappeared behind the bend in the corridor. They heard his door open, close, then silence.

After minutes in which the silence was thick between them, Drake’s chair creaked as he shifted restlessly. With a mild horror, Rose noticed blood upon his lips. She thought to herself, He’s in some kind of trouble. I’ve got to talk to him. I can’t let it go on like this.

She said, “Drake!”

Drake seemed to look at her from a far, far distance. Slowly, his eyes focused closer at hand and he said, “What is it? Are you through for the day, too?”

“No, I’m ready to begin. It’s the tomorrow you spoke of. Aren’t you going to speak to me?”

“Pardon me?”

“Last night, you said you would speak to me tomorrow. I am ready now.”

Drake frowned. His eyes withdrew beneath a lowered brow and Rose felt some of her resolution begin to leave her. He said, “I thought it was agreed that you would not question me about my business in this matter.”

“I think it’s too late for that. I know too much about your business by now.”

“What do you mean?” he shouted, jumping to his feet. Recollecting himself, he approached, laid his hands upon her shoulders and repeated in a lower voice, “What do you mean?”

Rose kept her eyes upon her hands, which rested limply in her lap. She bore the painfully gripping fingers patiently, and said slowly, “Dr. Tholan thinks that Earth is spreading the Inhibition Death purposely. That’s it, isn’t it?”

She waited. Slowly, the grip relaxed and he was standing there, hands at his side, face baffled and unhappy. He said, “Where did you get that notion?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

He said breathlessly, unnaturally, “I want to know exactly why you say that. Don’t play foolish games with me, Rose. This is for keeps.”

“If I tell you, will you answer one question? Is Earth spreading the disease deliberately, Drake?”

Drake flung his hands upward. “Oh, for Heaven’s sake!”

He knelt before her. He took her hands in his and she could feel their trembling. He was forcing his voice into soothing, loving syllables.

He was saying, “Rose dear, look, you’ve got something red-hot by the tail and you think you can use it to tease me in a little husband-wife repartee. No, I’m not asking much. Just tell me exactly what causes you to say what— what you have just said.” He was terribly earnest about it.

“I was at the New York Academy of Medicine this afternoon. I did some reading there.”

“But why? What made you do it?”

“You seemed so interested in the Inhibition Death, for one thing. And Dr. Tholan made those statements about the incidence increasing since interstellar travel, and being the highest on the planet nearest Earth.” She paused.

“And your reading?” he prompted. “What about your reading, Rose?” c

She said, “It backs him up. All I could do was to skim hastily into the direction of their research in recent decades. It seems obvious to me, though, that at least some of the Hawkinsites are considering the possibility the Inhibition Death originates on Earth.”

“Do they say so outright?”

“No. Or, if they have, I haven’t seen it.” She gazed at him in surprise. In a matter like this, certainly the government would have investigated Hawkinsite research on the matter. She said, gently, “Don’t you know about Hawkinsite research in the matter, Drake? The government—”

“Never mind about that.” Drake had moved away from her and now he turned again. His eyes were bright. He said, as though making a wonderful discovery, “Why, you’re an expert in this!”

Was she? Did he find that out only now that he needed her? Her nostrils flared and she said flatly, “I am a biologist.”

He said, “Yes, I know that, but I mean your particular specialty is growth. Didn’t you once tell me you had done work on growth?”

“You might call it that. I’ve had twenty papers published on the relationship of nucleic acid fine structure and embryonic development on my Cancer Society grant.”

“Good. I should have thought of that.” He was choked with a new excitement. “Tell me, Rose— Look, I’m sorry if I lost my temper with you a moment ago. You’d be as competent as anyone to understand the direction of their researches if you read about it, wouldn’t you?”

“Fairly competent, yes.”

“Then tell me how they think the disease is spread. The details, I mean.”

“Oh, now look, that’s asking a little too much. I spent a few hours in the Academy, that’s all. I’d need much more time than that to be able to answer your question.”

“An intelligent guess, at least. You can’t imagine how important it is.”

She said, doubtfully, “Of course, ‘Studies on Inhibition’ is a major treatise in the field. It would summarize all of the available research data.”

“Yes? And how recent is it?”

“It’s one of those periodic things. The last volume is about a year old.”

“Does it have any account of his work in it?” His finger jabbed in the direction of Harg Tholan’s bedroom.

“More than anyone else’s. He’s an outstanding worker in the field. I looked over his papers especially.”

“And what are his theories about the origin of the disease? Try to remember, Rose.”

She shook her head at him. “I could swear he blames Earth, but he admits they know nothing about how the disease is spread. I could swear to that, too.”

He stood stiffly before her. His strong hands were clenched into fists at his side and his words were scarcely more than a mutter. “It could be a matter of complete overestimation. Who knows—”

He whirled away. “I’ll find out about this right now, Rose. Thank you for your help.”

She ran after him. “What are you going to do?”

“Ask him a few questions.” He was rummaging through the drawers of his desk and now his right hand withdrew. It held a needle-gun.

She cried, “No, Drake!”

He shook her off roughly, and turned down the corridor toward the Hawkinsite’s bedroom.

Drake threw the door open and entered. Rose was at his heels, still trying to grasp his arm, but now he stopped and looked at Harg Tholan.

The Hawkinsite was standing there motionless, eyes unfocused, his four standing limbs sprawled out in four directions as far as they would go. Rose felt ashamed of intruding, as though she were violating an intimate rite. But Drake, apparently unconcerned, walked to within four feet of the creature and stood there. They were face to face, Drake holding the needle-gun easily at a level of about the center of the Hawkinsite’s torso.

Drake said, “Now keep quiet. He’ll gradually become aware of me.”

“How do you know?”

The answer was flat. “I know. Now get out of here.”

But she did not move and Drake was too absorbed to pay her further attention.

Portions of the skin on the Hawkinsite’s face were beginning to quiver slightly. It was rather repulsive and Rose found herself preferring not to watch.

Drake suddenly, “That’s about all, Dr. Tholan. Don’t throw in connection with any of the limbs. Your sense organs and voice box will be quite enough.”

The Hawkinsite’s voice was dim. “Why do you invade my disconnection chamber?” Then, more strongly, “And why are you armed?”

His head wobbled slightly atop a still frozen torso. He had, apparently, followed Drake’s suggestion against limb connection. Rose wondered how Drake knew such partial reconnection to be possible. She herself had not known of it.

The Hawkinsite spoke again. “What do you want?”

And this time Drake answered. He said, “The answer to certain questions.”

“With a gun in your hand? I would not humor your discourtesy so far.”

“You would not merely be humoring me. You might be saving your own life.”

“That would be a matter of considerable indifference to me, under the circumstances. I am sorry, Mr. Smollett, that the duties toward a guest are so badly understood on Earth.”

“You are no guest of mine, Dr. Tholan,” said Drake. “You entered my house on false pretenses. You had some reason for it, some way you had planned of using me to further your own purposes. I have no compunction in reversing the process.”

“You had better shoot. It will save time.”

“You are convinced that you will answer no questions? That, in itself, is suspicious. It seems that you consider certain answers to be more important than your life.”

“I consider the principles of courtesy to be very important. You, as an Earthman, may not understand.”

“Perhaps not. But I, as an Earthman, understand one thing.” Drake had jumped forward, faster than Rose could cry out, faster than the Hawkinsite could connect his limbs. When he sprang backward, the flexible hose of Harg Tholan’s cyanide cylinder was in his hand. At the corner of the Hawkinsite’s wide mouth, where the hose had once been affixed, a droplet of colorless liquid oozed sluggishly from a break in the rough skin, and slowly solidified into a brown jellylike globule, as it oxidized.

Drake yanked at the hose and the cylinder jerked free. He plunged home the knob that controlled the needle valve at the head of the cylinder and the small hissing ceased.

“I doubt,” said Drake, “that enough will have escaped to endanger us. I hope, however, that you realize what will happen to you now, if you do not answer the questions I am going to ask you—and answer them in such a way that I am convinced you are being truthful.”

“Give me back my cylinder,” said the Hawkinsite, slowly, “If not, it will be necessary for me to attack you and then it will be necessary for you to kill me.”

Drake stepped back. “Not at all. Attack me and I shoot your legs from under you. You will lose them; all four, if necessary, but you will still live, in a horrible way. You will live to die of cyanide lack. It would be a most uncomfortable death. I am only an Earthman and I can’t appreciate its true horrors, but you can, can’t you?”

The Hawkinsite’s mouth was open and something within quivered yellow-green. Rose wanted to throw up. She wanted to scream. Give him bock the cylinder, Drake! But nothing would come. She couldn’t even turn her head.

Drake said, “You have about an hour, I think, before the effects are irreversible. Talk quickly, Dr. Tholan, and you will have your cylinder back.”

“And after that—” said the Hawkinsite.

“After that, what does it matter to you? Even if I kill you then, it will be a clean death; not cyanide lack.”

Something seemed to pass out of the Hawkinsite. His voice grew guttural and his words blurred as though he no longer had the energy to keep his English perfect. He said, “What are your questions?” and as he spoke, his eyes followed the cylinder in Drake’s hand.

Drake swung it deliberately, tantalizingly, and the creature’s eyes followed —followed—

Drake said, “What are your theories concerning the Inhibition Death? Why did you really come to Earth? What is your interest in the Missing Persons Bureau?”

Rose found herself waiting in breathless anxiety. These were the questions she would like to have asked, too. Not in this manner, perhaps, but in Drake’s job, kindness and humanity had to take second place to necessity.

She repeated that to herself several times in an effort to counteract the fact that she found herself loathing Drake for what he was doing to Dr. Tholan.

The Hawkinsite said, “The proper answer would take more than the hour I have left me. You have bitterly shamed me by forcing me to talk under duress. On my own planet, you could not have done so under any circumstances. It is only here, on this revolting planet, that I can be deprived of cyanide.”

“You are wasting your hour, Dr. Tholan.”

“I would have told you this eventually, Mr. Smollett. I needed your help. It is why I came here.”

“You are still not answering my questions.”

“I will answer them now. For years, in addition to my regular scientific work, I have been privately investigating the cells of my patients suffering from Inhibition Death. I have been forced to use the utmost secrecy and to work without assistance, since the methods I used to investigate the bodies of my patients were frowned upon by my people. Your society would have similar feelings against human vivisection, for instance. For this reason, I could not present the results I obtained to my fellow physicians until I had verified my theories here on Earth.”

“What are your theories?” demanded Drake. The feverishness had returned to his eyes.

“It became more and more obvious to me as I proceeded with my studies that the entire direction of research into the Inhibition Death was wrong. Physically, there was no solution to its mystery. The Inhibition Death is entirely a disease of the mind.”

Rose interrupted, “Surely, Dr. Tholan, it isn’t psychosomatic.”

A thin, gray translucent film had passed over the Hawkinsite’s eyes. He no longer looked at them. He said, “No, Mrs. Smollett, it is not psychosomatic. It is a true disease of the mind; a mental infection. My patients had double minds. Beyond and beneath the one that obviously belonged to them, there was evidence of another one—an alien mind. I worked with Inhibition Death patients of other races than my own, and the same could be found. In short, there are not five intelligences in the Galaxy, but six. And the sixth is parasitic.”

Rose said, “This is wild—impossible! You must be mistaken, Dr. Tholan.”

“I am not mistaken. Until I came to Earth, I thought I might be. But my stay at the Institute and my researches at the Missing Persons Bureau convinced me that is not so. What is so impossible about the concept of a parasitic intelligence? Intelligences like these would not leave fossil remains, nor even leave artifacts—if their only function is to derive nourishment somehow from the mental activities of other creatures. One can imagine such a parasite, through the course of millions of years, perhaps, losing all portions of its physical being but that which remains necessary, just as a tapeworm, among your Earthly physical parasites, eventually lost all its functions but the single one of reproduction. In the case of the parasitic intelligence, all physical attributes would eventually be lost. It would become nothing but pure mind, living in some mental fashion we cannot conceive of on the minds of others. Particularly on the minds of Earthmen.”

Rose said, “Why particularly Earthmen?”

Drake simply stood apart, intent, asking no further questions. He was content, apparently, to let the Hawkinsite speak.

“Have you not surmised that the sixth intelligence is a native of Earth? Mankind from the beginning has lived with it, has adapted to it, is unconscious of it. It is why the higher species of terrestrial animals, including man, do not grow after maturity and, eventually, die what is called natural death. It is the result of this universal parasitic infestation. It is why you sleep and dream, since it is then that the parasitic mind must feed and then that you are a little more conscious of it, perhaps. It is why the terrestrial mind alone of the intelligences is so subject to instability. Where else in the Galaxy are found split personalities and other such manifestations? After all, even now there must be occasional human minds which are visibly harmed by the presence of the parasite.

“Somehow, these parasitic minds could traverse space. They had no physical limitations. They could drift between the stars in what would correspond to a state of hibernation. Why the first ones did it, I don’t know; probably no one will ever know. But once those first discovered the presence of intelligence on other planets in the Galaxy, there was a small, steady stream of parasitic intelligences making their way through space. We of the outer worlds must have been a gourmet’s dish for them or they would have never struggled so hard to get to us. I imagine many must have failed to make the trip, but it must have been worth the effort to those who succeeded.

“But you see, we of the other worlds had not lived with these parasites for millions of years, as man and his ancestors had. We had not adapted ourselves to it. Our weak strains had not been killed off gradually through hundreds of generations until only the resistants were left. So, where Earthmen could survive the infection for decades with little harm, we others die a quick death within a year.”

“And is that why the incidence has increased since interstellar travel between Earth and the other planets has begun?”

“Yes.” For a moment there was silence, and then the Hawkinsite said with a sudden access of energy, “Give me back my cylinder. You have your answer.”

Drake said, coolly, “What about the Missing Persons Bureau?” He was swinging the cylinder again; but now the Hawkinsite did not follow its movements. The gray translucent film on his eyes had deepened and Rose wondered whether that was simply an expression of weariness or an example of the changes induced by cyanide lack.

The Hawkinsite said, “As we are not well adapted to the intelligence that infests man, neither is it well adapted to us. It can live on us—it even prefers to, apparently—but it cannot reproduce with ourselves alone as the source of its life. The Inhibition Death is therefore not directly contagious among our people.”

Rose looked at him with growing horror. “What are you implying, Dr. Tholan?”

“The Earthman remains the prime host for the parasite. An Earthman may infect one of us if he remains among us. But the parasite, once it is located in an intelligence of the outer worlds, must somehow return to an Earthman, if it expects to reproduce. Before interstellar travel, this was possible only by a re-passage of space and therefore the incidence of infection remained infinitesimal. Now we are infected and reinfected as the parasites return to Earth and come back to us via the mind of Earthmen who travel through space.”

Rose said faintly, “And the missing persons—”

“Are the intermediate hosts. The exact process by which it is done, I, of course, do not know. The masculine terrestrial mind seems better suited for their purposes. You’ll remember that at the Institute I was told that the life expectancy of the average human male is three years less than that of the average female. Once reproduction has been taken care of, the infested male leaves, by spaceship, for the outer worlds. He disappears.”

“But this is impossible,” insisted Rose. “What you say implies that the parasite mind can control the actions of its host! This cannot be, or we of Earth would have noticed their presence.”

“The control, Mrs. Smollett, may be very subtle, and may, moreover, be exerted only during the period of active reproduction. I simply point to your Missing Persons Bureau. Why do the young men disappear? You have economic and psychological explanations, but they are not sufficient. —But I am quite ill now and cannot speak much longer. I have only this to say. In the mental parasite, your people and mine have a common enemy. Earthmen, too, need not die involuntarily, except for its presence. I thought that if I found myself unable to return to my own world with my information because of the unorthodox methods I used to obtain it, I might bring it to the authorities on Earth, and ask their help in stamping out this menace. Imagine my pleasure when I found that the husband of one of the biologists at the Institute was a member of one of Earth’s most important investigating bodies. Naturally, I did what I could to be made a guest at his home in order that I might deal with him privately; convince him of the terrible truth; utilize his position to help in the attack on the parasites.

“This is, of course, now impossible. I cannot blame you too far. As Earthmen, you cannot be expected to understand the psychology of my people. Nevertheless, you must understand this. I can have no further dealing with either of you. I could not even bear to remain any longer on Earth.”

Drake said, “Then you alone, of all your people, have any knowledge of this theory of yours.”

“I atone.”

Drake held out the cylinder. “Your cyanide, Dr. Tholan.”

The Hawkinsite groped for it eagerly. His supple fingers manipulated the hose and the needle valve with the utmost delicacy. In the space of ten seconds, he had it in place and was inhaling the gas in huge breaths. His eyes were growing clear and transparent.

Drake waited until the Hawkinsite breathings had subsided to normal, and then, without expression, he raised his needle-gun and fired. Rose screamed. The Hawkinsite remained standing. His four lower limbs were incapable of buckling, but his head lolled and from his suddenly flaccid mouth, the cyanide hose fell, disregarded. Once again, Drake closed the needle valve and now he tossed the cylinder aside and stood there somberly, looking at the dead creature. There was no external mark to show that he had been killed. The needle-gun’s pellet, thinner than the needle which gave the gun its name, entered the body noiselessly and easily, and exploded with devastating effect only within the abdominal cavity.

Rose ran from the room, still screaming. Drake pursued her, seized her arm. She heard the hard, flat sounds of his palm against her face without feeling them and subsided into little bubbling sobs.

Drake said, “I told you to have nothing to do with this. Now what do you think you’ll do?”

She said, “Let me go. I want to leave. I want to go away.”

“Because of something it was my job to do? You heard what the creature was saying. Do you suppose I could allow him to return to his world and spread those lies? They would believe him. And what do you think would happen then? Can you imagine what an interstellar war might be like? They would imagine they would have to kill us all to stop the disease.”

With an effort that seemed to turn her inside out, Rose steadied. She looked firmly into Drake’s eyes and said, “What Dr. Tholan said were no lies and no mistakes, Drake,”

“Oh, come now, you’re hysterical. You need sleep.”

“I know what he said is so because the Security Commission knows all about that same theory, and knows it to be true.”

“Why do you say such a preposterous thing?”

“Because you yourself let that slip twice.”

Drake said, “Sit down.” She did so, and he stood there, looking curiously at her. “So I have given myself away twice, have I? You’ve had a busy day of detection, my dear. You have facets you keep well hidden.” He sat down and crossed his legs.

Rose thought, yes, she had had a busy day. She could see the electric clock on the kitchen wall from where she sat; it was more than two hours past midnight. Harg Tholan had entered their house thirty-five hours before and now he lay murdered in the spare bedroom.

Drake said, “Well, aren’t you going to tell me where I pulled my two boners?”

“You turned white when Harg Tholan referred to me as a charming hostess. Hostess has a double meaning, you know, Drake. A host is one who harbors a parasite.”

“Number one,” said Drake. “What’s number two?”

“That’s something you did before Harg Tholan entered the house. I’ve been trying to remember it for hours. Do you remember, Drake? You spoke about how unpleasant it was for Hawkinsites to associate with Earthmen, and I said Harg Tholan was a doctor and had to. I asked you if you thought that human doctors particularly enjoyed going to the tropics, or letting infected mosquitoes bite them. Do you remember how upset you became?”

Drake laughed. “I had no idea I was so transparent. Mosquitoes are hosts for the malaria and yellow fever parasites.” He sighed. “I’ve done my best to keep you out of this. I tried to keep the Hawkinsite away. I tried threatening you. Now there’s nothing left but to tell you the truth. I must, because only the truth—or death—will keep you quiet. And I don’t want to kill you.”

She shrank back in her chair, eyes wide.

Drake said, “The Commission knows the truth. It does us no good. We can only do all in our power to prevent the other worlds from finding out.”

“But the truth can’t be held down forever! Harg Tholan found out. You’ve killed him, but another extraterrestrial will repeat the same discovery—over and over again. You can’t kill them all.”

“We know that, too,” agreed Drake. “We have no choice.”

“Why?” cried Rose. “Harg Tholan gave you the solution. He made no suggestions or threats of war between worlds. He suggested that we combine with the other intelligences and help to wipe out the parasite. And we can! If we, in common with all the others, put every scrap of effort into it—”

“You mean we can trust him? Does he speak for his government or for the other races?”

“Can we dare to refuse the risk?”

Drake said, “You don’t understand.” He reached toward her and took one of her cold, unresisting hands between both of his. He went on, “I may seem silly trying to teach you anything about your specialty, but I want you to hear me out. Harg Tholan was right. Man and his prehistoric ancestors have been living with this parasitic intelligence for uncounted ages; certainly for a much longer period than we have been truly Homo sapiens. In that interval, we have not only become adapted to it, we have become dependent upon it. It is no longer a case of parasitism. It is a case of mutual cooperation. You biologists have a name for it.”

She tore her hand away. “What are you talking about? Symbiosis?”

“Exactly. We have a disease of our own, remember. It is a reverse disease; one of unrestrained growth. We’ve mentioned it already as a contrast to the Inhibition Death. Well, what is the cause of cancer? How long have biologists, physiologists, biochemists and all the others been working on it? How much success have they had with it? Why? Can’t you answer that for yourself now?”

She said, slowly, “No, I can’t. What are you talking about?”

“It’s all very well to say that if we could remove the parasite, we would have eternal growth and life if we wanted it; or at least until we got tired of being too big or of living too long, and did away with ourselves neatly. But how many millions of years has it been since the human body has had occasion to grow in such an unrestrained fashion? Can it do so any longer? Is the chemistry of the body adjusted to that? Has it got the proper whatchamacallits?”

“Enzymes,” Rose supplied in a whisper.

“Yes, enzymes. It’s impossible for us. If for any reason the parasitic intelligence, as Harg Tholan calls it, does leave the human body, or if its relationship to the human mind is in any way impaired, growth does take place, but not in any orderly fashion. We call the growth cancer. And there you have it. There’s no way of getting rid of the parasite. We’re together for all eternity. To get rid of their inhibition Death, extraterrestrials must first wipe out all vertebrate life on Earth. There is no other solution for them, and so we must keep knowledge of it from them. Do you understand?”

Her mouth was dry and it was difficult to talk. “I understand, Drake.” She noticed that his forehead was damp and that there was a line of perspiration down each cheek. “And now you’ll have to get it out of the apartment.”

“It’s late at night and I’ll be able to get the body out of the building. From there on—” He turned to her. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“I understand, Drake,” she said again.

Harg Tholan was heavy. Drake had to drag him through the apartment. Rose turned away, retching. She hid her eyes until she heard the front door close. She whispered to herself, “I understand, Drake.”

It was 3 a.m. Nearly an hour had passed since she had heard the front door click gently into place behind Drake and his burden. She didn’t know where he was going, what he intended doing—

She sat there numbly. There was no desire to sleep; no desire to move. She kept her mind traveling in tight circles, away from the thing she knew and which she wanted not to know.

Parasitic minds! Was it only a coincidence or was it some queer racial memory, some tenuous long-sustained wisp of tradition or insight, stretching back through incredible millennia, that kept current the odd myth of human beginnings? She thought to herself, there were two intelligences on Earth to begin with. There were humans in the Garden of Eden and also the serpent, which “was more subtil than any beast of the field.” The serpent infected man and, as a result, it lost its limbs. Its physical attributes were no longer necessary. And because of the infection, man was driven out of the Garden of eternal life. Death entered the world.

Yet, despite her efforts, the circle of her thoughts expanded and returned to Drake. She shoved and it returned; she counted to herself, she recited the names of the objects in her field of vision, she cried, “No, no, no,” and it returned. It kept returning.

Drake had lied to her. It had been a plausible story. It would have held good under most circumstances; but Drake was not a biologist. Cancer could not be, as Drake had said, a disease that was an expression of a lost ability for normal growth. Cancer attacked children while they were still growing; it could even attack embryonic tissue. It attacked fish, which, like extraterrestrials, never stopped growing while they lived, and died only by disease or accident. It attacked plants which had no minds and could not be parasitized. Cancer had nothing to do with the presence or absence of normal growth; it was the general disease of life, to which no tissue of no multicellular organism was completely immune.

He should not have bothered lying. He should not have allowed some obscure sentimental weakness to persuade him to avoid the necessity of killing her in that manner. She would tell them at the Institute. The parasite could be beaten. Its absence would not cause cancer. But who would believe her?

She put her hands over her eyes. The young men who disappeared were usually in the first year of their marriage. Whatever the process of reproduction of the parasite intelligences, it must involve close association with another parasite—the type of close and continuous association that might only be possible if their respective hosts were in equally close relationship. As in the case of newly married couples.

She could feel her thoughts slowly disconnect. They would be coming to her. They would be saying, “Where is Harg Tholan?” And she would answer, “With my husband.” Only they would say, “Where is your husband?” because he would be gone, too. He needed her no longer. He would never return. They would never find him, because he would be out in space. She would report them both, Drake Smollett and Harg Tholan, to the Missing Persons Bureau.

She wanted to weep, but couldn’t; she was dry-eyed and it was painful.

And then she began to giggle and couldn’t stop. It was very funny. She had looked for the answers to so many questions and had found them all. She had even found the answer to the question she thought had no bearing on the subject.

She had finally learned why Drake had married her.

Sally

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

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

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

He smiled at me and nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A nice automatobile,” said Gellhorn.

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

Not once.

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Hester glared at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I explained that to Gellhorn.

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

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

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

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

“And you’ve spent a long time at it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That always does. How?”

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

“So?”

“Ever think of selling a few?”

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

“The money would go to the Farm.”

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

“What about the motors, then?”

“I don’t understand you.”

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

“That’s no secret.”

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

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

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

“It wouldn’t be exactly ethical.”

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

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

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

“I don’t think I would. No.”

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

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

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

“What that?” said Gellhorn.

“That’s the way Sally laughs.”

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

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

“I wonder.”

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

Sally’s motor revved up. She backed away.

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

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

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

He said, “It opened a minute ago.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I kept expecting them to turn out.”

“They did. One went through a fence.”

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

“Which we would split?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shrugged. “Well, then, goodbye.”

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

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

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

I didn’t move. I just watched him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I made you a proposition day before yesterday.”

“The answer’s still no.”

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

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

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

I said, “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My cars always do,” I replied stiffly.

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

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

“Get started!” he said.

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

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

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

“Look, you crazy old fool—”

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

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

The thugs stared, then backed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’re killers!”

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

Gellhorn didn’t answer.

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

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

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

It was faint and distant, but unmistakable.

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

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

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

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

Gellhorn yelled.

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

Gellhorn turned the gun in Sally’s direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, “This is a rebuilt job.”

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

I tore at the repair panel, forcing it aside.

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

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

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

He said, “Do I look crazy?”

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

“It works, doesn’t it?”

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

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

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

“How will that help you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what? What can they do?”

He hunched over the controls, peering through the windshield.

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

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

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

Gellhorn yelled and laughed madly.

I cried, “Stop! Stop the car!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I knew the needle gun was about to fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about him?”

I dreaded her answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cars get ill-used, you know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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