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

Lamorak puffed smoke appreciatively and crossed his lanky legs.

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

“Quite,” said Blei.

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

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

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

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

Blei nodded convulsively at that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The caste system does involve a certain inflexibility.”

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

“And are there no misfits?” asked Lamorak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose?

He slept uneasily, that night.

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

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

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

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

“Fertilizers. Certain organics,” said Blei stiffly.

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

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

Blei did not look in the indicated direction.

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

He looked back and called, “Councillor Blei!”

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

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

“Concerning his demands.”

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

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

Blei muttered something to himself.

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“That includes—uh, human wastes.”

“I assumed so,” said Lamorak.

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

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

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

“Was in charge of waste reclamation.”

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And so?”

“Ragusnik has threatened to cease operations.”

“Go on strike, in other words.”

“Yes.”

“Would that be serious?”

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

“Is Ragusnik aware of this?”

“Yes, of course.”

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

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

Lamorak sniffed mechanically at that, but smelled nothing.

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

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

“On no account,” said Blei, alarmed.

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

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

“Yes.”

“I will ask the Council,” muttered Blei.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An Outworlder?”

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

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

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

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

“You sound like an educated man, Ragusnik.”

“So?”

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

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

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

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

“And if I have?”

“Surely you’re used to it.”

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

The receiver went dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” said the Chief Councillor.

“Then exactly what is Ragusnik’s function?”

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I hear you.”

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

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

“Leave?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said, “Good-bye.”

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

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

The Machine That Won the War

The celebration had a long way to go and even in the silent depths of Multivac’s underground chambers, it hung in the air.

If nothing else, there was the mere fact of isolation and silence. For the first time in a decade, technicians were not scurrying about the vitals of the giant computer, the soft lights did not wink out their erratic patterns, the flow of information in and out had halted.

It would not be halted long, of course, for the needs of peace would be pressing. Yet now, for a day, perhaps for a week, even Multivac might celebrate the great time, and rest.

Lamar Swift took off the military cap he was wearing and looked down the long and empty main corridor of the enormous computer. He sat down rather wearily in one of the technician’s swing-stools, and his uniform, in which he had never been comfortable, took on a heavy and wrinkled appearance.

He said, “I’ll miss it all after a grisly fashion. It’s hard to remember when we weren’t at war with Deneb, and it seems against nature now to be at peace and to look at the stars without anxiety.”

The two men with the Executive Director of the Solar Federation were both younger than Swift. Neither was as gray. Neither looked quite as tired.

John Henderson, thin-lipped and finding it hard to control the relief he felt in the midst of triumph, said, “They’re destroyed! They’re destroyed! It’s what I keep saying to myself over and over and I still can’t believe it. We all talked so much, over so many years, about the menace hanging over Earth and all its worlds, over every human being, and all the time it was true, every word of it. And now we’re alive and it’s the Denebians who are shattered and destroyed. They’ll be no menace now, ever again.”

“Thanks to Multivac,” said Swift, with a quiet glance at the imperturbable Jablonsky, who through all the war had been Chief Interpreter of science’s oracle. “Right, Max?”

Jablonsky shrugged. Automatically, he reached for a cigarette and decided against it. He alone, of all the thousands who had lived in the tunnels within Multivac, had been allowed to smoke, but toward the end he had made definite efforts to avoid making use of the privilege.

He said, “Well, that’s what they say.” His broad thumb moved in the direction of his right shoulder, aiming upward.

“Jealous, Max?”

“Because they’re shouting for Multivac? Because Multivac is the big hero of mankind in this war?” Jablonsky’s craggy face took on an air of suitable contempt. “What’s that to me? Let Multivac be the machine that won the war, if it pleases them.”

Henderson looked at the other two out of the corners of his eyes. In this short interlude that the three had instinctively sought out in the one peaceful corner of a metropolis gone mad; in this entr’acte between the dangers of war and the difficulties of peace; when, for one moment, they might all find surcease; he was conscious only of his weight of guilt.

Suddenly, it was as though that weight were too great to be borne longer. It had to be thrown off, along with the war; now!

Henderson said, “Multivac had nothing to do with victory. It’s just a machine.”

“A big one,” said Swift.

“Then just a big machine. No better than the data fed it.” For a moment, he stopped, suddenly unnerved at what he was saying.

Jablonsky looked at him, his thick fingers once again fumbling for a cigarette and once again drawing back. “You should know. You supplied the data. Or is it just that you’re taking the credit?”

“No,” said Henderson, angrily. “There is no credit. What do you know of the data Multivac had to use; predigested from a hundred subsidiary computers here on Earth, on the Moon, on Mars, even on Titan. With Titan always delayed and always that feeling that its figures would introduce an unexpected bias.”

“It would drive anyone mad,” said Swift, with gentle sympathy.

Henderson shook his head. “It wasn’t just that. I admit that eight years ago when I replaced Lepont as Chief Programmer, I was nervous. But there was an exhilaration about things in those days. The war was still long-range; an adventure without real danger. We hadn’t reached the point where manned vessels had had to take over and where interstellar warps could swallow up a planet clean, if aimed correctly. But then, when the real difficulties began—”

Angrily—he could finally permit anger—he said, “You know nothing about it.”

“Well,” said Swift. “Tell us. The war is over. We’ve won.”

“Yes.” Henderson nodded his head. He had to remember that. Earth had won so all had been for the best. “Well, the data became meaningless.”

“Meaningless? You mean that literally?” said Jablonsky.

“Literally. What would you expect? The trouble with you two was that you weren’t out in the thick of it. You never left Multivac, Max, and you, Mr. Director, never left the Mansion except on state visits where you saw exactly what they wanted you to see.”

“I was not as unaware of that,” said Swift, “as you may have thought.”

“Do you know,” said Henderson, “to what extent data concerning our production capacity, our resource potential, our trained manpower—everything of importance to the war effort, in fact—had become unreliable and untrustworthy during the last half of the war? Group leaders, both civilian and military, were intent on projecting their own improved image, so to speak, so they obscured the bad and magnified the good. Whatever the machines might do, the men who programmed them and interpreted the results had their own skins to think of and competitors to stab. There was no way of stopping that. I tried, and failed.”

“Of course,” said Swift, in quiet consolation. “I can see that you would.”

This time Jablonsky decided to light his cigarette. “Yet I presume you provided Multivac with data in your programming. You said nothing to us about unreliability.”

“How could I tell you? And if I did, how could you afford to believe me?” demanded Henderson, savagely. “Our entire war effort was geared to Multivac. It was the one great weapon on our side, for the Denebians had nothing like it. What else kept up morale in the face of doom but the assurance that Multivac would always predict and circumvent any Denebian move, and would always direct and prevent the circumvention of our moves? Great Space, after our Spy-warp was blasted out of hyperspace we lacked any reliable Denebian data to feed Multivac and we didn’t dare make that public.”

“True enough,” said Swift.

“Well, then,” said Henderson, “if I told you the data was unreliable, what could you have done but replace me and refuse to believe me? I couldn’t allow that.”

“What did you do?” said Jablonsky.

“Since the war is won, I’d tell you what I did. I corrected the data.”

“How?” asked Swift.

“Intuition, I presume. I juggled them till they looked right. At first, I hardly dared, I changed a bit here and there to correct what were obvious impossibilities. When the sky didn’t collapse about us, I got braver. Toward the end, I scarcely cared. I just wrote out the necessary data as it was needed. I even had the Multivac Annex prepare data for me according to a private programming pattern I had devised for the purpose.”

“Random figures?” said Jablonsky.

“Not at all. I introduced a number of necessary biases.”

Jablonsky smiled, quite unexpectedly, his dark eyes sparkling behind the crinkling of the lower lids. “Three times a report was brought me about unauthorized uses of the Annex, and I let it go each time. If it had mattered, I would have followed it up and spotted you, John, and found out what you were doing. But, of course, nothing about Multivac mattered in those days, so you got away with it.”

“What do you mean, nothing mattered?” asked Henderson, suspiciously.

“Nothing did. I suppose if I had told you this at the time, it would have spared you your agony, but then if you had told me what you were doing, it would have spared me mine. What made you think Multivac was in working order, whatever the data you supplied it?”

“Not in working order?” said Swift.

“Not really. Not reliably. After all, where were my technicians in the last years of the war? I’ll tell you, they were feeding computers on a thousand different space devices. They were gone! I had to make do with kids I couldn’t trust and veterans who were out-of-date. Besides, do you think I could trust the solid-state components coming out of Cryogenics in the last years? Cryogenics wasn’t any better placed as far as personnel was concerned than I was. To me, it didn’t matter whether the data being supplied Multivac were reliable or not. The results weren’t reliable. That much I knew.”

“What did you do?” asked Henderson.

“I did what you did, John. I introduced the bugger factor. I adjusted matters in accordance with intuition—and that’s how the machine won the war.”

Swift leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out before him. “Such revelations. It turns out then that the material handed me to guide me in my decision-making capacity was a man-made interpretation of man-made data. Isn’t that right?”

“It looks so,” said Jablonsky.

“Then I perceive I was correct in not placing too much reliance upon it,” said Swift.

“You didn’t?” Jablonsky, despite what he had just said, managed to look professionally insulted.

“I’m afraid I didn’t. Multivac might seem to say, Strike here, not there; do this, not that; wait, don’t act. But I could never be certain that what Multivac seemed to say, it really did say; or what it really said, it really meant. I could never be certain.”

“But the final report was always plain enough, sir,” said Jablonsky.

“To those who did not have to make the decision, perhaps. Not to me. The horror of the responsibility of such decisions was unbearable and not even Multivac was sufficient to remove the weight. But the point is I was justified in doubting and there is tremendous relief in that.”

Caught up in the conspiracy of mutual confession, Jablonsky put titles aside, “What was it you did then, Lamar? After all, you did make decisions. How?”

“Well, it’s time to be getting back perhaps but—I’ll tell you first. Why not? I did make use of a computer, Max, but an older one than Multivac, much older.”

He groped in his own pocket for cigarettes, and brought out a package along with a scattering of small change; old-fashioned coins dating to the first years before the metal shortage had brought into being a credit system tied to a computer-complex.

Swift smiled rather sheepishly. “I still need these to make money seem substantial to me. An old man finds it hard to abandon the habits of youth.” He put a cigarette between his lips and dropped the coins one by one back into his pocket.

He held the last coin between his fingers, staring absently at it. “Multivac is not the first computer, friends, nor the best-known, nor the one that can most efficiently lift the load of decision from the shoulders of the executive. A machine did win the war, John; at least a very simple computing device did; one that I used every time I had a particularly hard decision to make.”

With a faint smile of reminiscence, he flipped the coin he held. It glinted in the air as it spun and came down in Swift’s outstretched palm. His hand closed over it and brought it down on the back of his left hand. His right hand remained in place, hiding the coin.

“Heads or tails, gentlemen?” said Swift.

Eyes Do More than See

After hundreds of billions of years, he suddenly thought of himself as Ames. Not the wavelength combination which, through all the universe was now the equivalent of Ames—but the sound itself. A faint memory came back of the sound waves he no longer heard and no longer could hear.

The new project was sharpening his memory for so many more of the old, old, eons-old things. He flattened the energy vortex that made up the total of his individuality and its lines of force stretched beyond the stars.

Brock’s answering signal came.

Surely, Ames thought, he could tell Brock. Surely he could tell somebody.

Brock’s shifting energy pattern communed, “Aren’t you coming, Ames?”

“Of course.”

“Will you take part in the contest?”

“Yes!” Ames’s lines of force pulsed erratically. “Most certainly. I have thought of a whole new art-form. Something really unusual.”

“What a waste of effort! How can you think a new variation can be thought of after two hundred billion years. There can be nothing new.”

For a moment Brock shifted out of phase and out of communion, so that Ames had to hurry to adjust his lines of force. He caught the drift of other-thoughts as he did so, the view of the powdered galaxies against the velvet of nothingness, and the lines of force pulsing in endless multitudes of energy-life, lying between the galaxies.

Ames said, “Please absorb my thoughts, Brock. Don’t close out. I’ve thought of manipulating Matter. Imagine! A symphony of Matter. Why bother with Energy. Of course, there’s nothing new in Energy; how can there be? Doesn’t that show we must deal with Matter?”

“Matter!”

Ames interpreted Brock’s energy-vibrations as those of disgust.

He said, “Why not? We were once Matter ourselves back—back—Oh, a trillion years ago anyway! Why not build up objects in a Matter medium, or abstract forms or—listen, Brock—why not build up an imitation of ourselves in Matter, ourselves as we used to be?”

Brock said, “I don’t remember how that was. No one does.”

“I do,” said Ames with energy, “I’ve been thinking of nothing else and I am beginning to remember. Brock, let me show you. Tell me if I’m right. Tell me.”

“No. This is silly. It’s—repulsive.”

“Let me try, Brock. We’ve been friends; we’ve pulsed energy together from the beginning—from the moment we became what we are. Brock, please!”

“Then, quickly.”

Ames had not felt such a tremor along his own lines of force in—well, in how long? If he tried it now for Brock and it worked, he could dare manipulate Matter before the assembled Energy-beings who had so drearily waited over the eons for something new.

The Matter was thin out there between the galaxies, but Ames gathered it, scraping it together over the cubic light-years, choosing the atoms, achieving a clayey consistency and forcing matter into an ovoid form that spread out below.

“Don’t you remember, Brock?” he asked softly. “Wasn’t it something like this?”

Brock’s vortex trembled in phase. “Don’t make me remember. I don’t remember.”

“That was the head. They called it the head. I remember it so clearly, I want to say it. I mean with sound.” He waited, then said, “Look, do you remember that?”

On the upper front of the ovoid appeared HEAD.

“What is that?” asked Brock.

“That’s the word for head. The symbols that meant the word in sound. Tell me you remember, Brock!”

“There was something,” said Brock hesitantly, “something in the middle.” A vertical bulge formed.

Ames said, “Yes! Nose, that’s it!” And NOSE appeared upon it. “And those are eyes on either side,” LEFT EYE—RIGHT EYE.

Ames regarded what he had formed, his lines of force pulsing slowly. Was he sure he liked this?

“Mouth,” he said, in small quiverings, “and chin and Adam’s apple, and the collarbones. How the words come back to me.” They appeared on the form.

Brock said, “I haven’t thought of them for hundreds of billions of years. Why have you reminded me? Why?”

Ames was momentarily lost in his thoughts, “Something else. Organs to hear with; something for the sound waves. Ears! Where do they go? I don’t remember where to put them!”

Brock cried out, “Leave it alone! Ears and all else! Don’t remember!”

Ames said, uncertainly, “What is wrong with remembering?”

“Because the outside wasn’t rough and cold like that but smooth and warm. Because the eyes were tender and alive and the lips of the mouth trembled and were soft on mine.” Brock’s lines of force beat and wavered, beat and wavered.

Ames said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“You’re reminding me that once I was a woman and knew love; that eyes do more than see and I have none to do it for me.”

With violence, she added matter to the rough-hewn head and said, “Then let them do it” and turned and fled.

And Ames saw and remembered, too, that once he had been a man. The force of his vortex split the head in two and he fled back across the galaxies on the energy-track of Brock—back to the endless doom of life.

And the eyes of the shattered head of Matter still glistened with the moisture that Brock had placed there to represent tears. The head of Matter did that which the energy-beings could do no longer and it wept for all humanity, and for the fragile beauty of the bodies they had once given up, a trillion years ago.

The Martian Way

1

From the doorway of the short corridor between the only two, rooms in the travel-head of the spaceship, Mario Esteban Rioz watched sourly as Ted Long adjusted the video dials painstakingly. Long tried a touch clockwise, then a touch counter. The picture was lousy.

Rioz knew it would stay lousy. They were too far from Earth and at a bad position facing the Sun. But then Long would not be expected to know that. Rioz remained standing in the doorway for an additional moment, head bent to clear the upper lintel, body turned half sidewise to fit the narrow opening. Then he jerked into the galley like a cork popping out of a bottle.

“What are you after?” he asked.

“I thought I’d get Hilder,” said Long.

Rioz propped his rump on the corner of a table shelf. He lifted a conical can of milk from the companion shelf just above his head. Its point popped under pressure. He swirled it gently as he waited for it to warm.

“What for?” he said. He upended the cone and sucked noisily.

“Thought I’d listen.”

“I think it’s a waste of power.”

Long looked up, frowning. “It’s customary to allow free use of personal video sets.”

“Within reason,” retorted Rioz.

Their eyes met challengingly. Rioz had the rangy body, the gaunt, cheek-sunken face that was almost the hallmark of the Martian Scavenger, those Spacers who patiently haunted the space routes between Earth and Mars Pcrte blue eyes were set keenly in the brown, lined face which, in turn, stood darkly out against the white surrounding syntho-fur that lined the upturned collar of his leathtic space jacket.

Long was altogether paler and softer. He bore some of the marks of the Grounder, although no second-generation Martian could be a Grounder in the sense that Earthmen were. His own collar was thrown back and his dark brown hair freely exposed.

“What do you call within reason?” demanded Long.

Rioz’s thin lips grew thinner. He said, “Considering that we’re not even going to make expenses this trip, the way it looks, any power drain at all is outside reason.”

Long said, “If we’re losing money, hadn’t you better get back to your post? It’s your watch.”

Rioz grunted and ran a thumb and forefinger over the stubble on his chin. He got up and trudged to the door, his soft, heavy boots muting the sound of his steps. He paused to look at the thermostat, then turned with a flare of fury.

“I thought it was bot. Where do you think you are?”

Long said, “Forty degrees isn’t excessive.”

“For you it isn’t, maybe. But this is space, not a heated office at the iron mines.” Rioz swung the thermostat control down to minimum with a quick thumb movement. “Sun’s warm enough.”

“The galley isn’t on Sunside.”

“It’ll percolate through, damn it.” Rioz stepped through the door and Long stared after him for a long moment, then turned back to the video. He did not turn up the thermostat.

The picture was still flickering badly, but it would have to do. Long folded a chair down out of the wall. He leaned forward waiting through the formal announcement, the momentary pause before the slow dissolution of the curtain, the spotlight picking out the well-known bearded figure which grew as it was brought forward until it filled the screen.

The voice, impressive even through the flutings and croakings induced by the electron storms of twenty millions of miles, began:

“Friends! My fellow citizens of Earth...”

2

Rioz’s eye caught the flash of the radio signal as he stepped into the pilot room. For one moment, the palms of his hands grew clammy when it seemed to him that it was a radar pip; but that was only his guilt speaking. He should not have left the pilot room while on duty theoretically, though all Scavengers did it. Still, it was the standard nightmare, this business of a strike turning up during just those five minutes when one knocked off for a quick coffee because it seemed certain that space was clear. And the nightmare had been known to happen, too.

Rioz threw in the multi-scanner. It was a waste of power, but while he was thinking about it, he might as well make sure.

Space was clear except for the far-distant echoes from the neighboring ships on the scavenging line.

He hooked up the radio circuit, and the blond, long-nosed head of Richard Swenson, copilot of the next ship on the Mars-ward side, filled it.

“Hey, Mario,” said Swenson.

“Hi. What’s new?”

There was a second and a fraction of pause between that and Swenson’s next comment, since the speed of electromagnetic radiation is not infinite.

“What a day I’ve had.”

“Something happened?” Rioz asked.

“I had a strike.”

“Well, good.”

“Sure, if I’d roped it in,” said Swenson morosely.

“What happened?”

“Damn it, I headed in the wrong direction.”

Rioz knew better than to laugh. He said, “How did you do that?”

“It wasn’t my fault. The trouble was the shell was moving way out of the ecliptic. Can you imagine the stupidity of a pilot that can’t work the release maneuver decently? How was I to know? I got the distance of the shell and let it go at that. I just assumed its orbit was in the usual trajectory family. Wouldn’t you? I started along what I thought was a good line of intersection and it was five minutes before I noticed the distance was still going up. The pips were taking their sweet time returning. So then I took the angular projections of the thing, and it was too late to catch up with it.”

“Any of the other boys getting it?”

“No. It’s way out of the ecliptic and’ll keep on going forever. That’s not what bothers me so much. It was only an inner shell. But I hate to tell you how many tons of propulsion I wasted getting up speed and then getting back to station. You should have heard Canute.”

Canute was Richard Swenson’s brother and partner.

“Mad, huh?” said Rioz.

“Mad? Like to have killed me! But then we’ve been out five months now and it’s getting kind of sticky. You know.”

“I know.”

“How are you doing, Mario?”

Rioz made a spitting gesture. “ About that much this trip. Two shells in the last two weeks and I had to chase each one for six hours.”

“Big ones?”

“Are you kidding? I could have scaled them down to Phobos by hand. This is the worst trip I’ve ever had.”

“How much longer are you staying?”

“For my part, we can quit tomorrow. We’ve only been out two months and it’s got so I’m chewing Long out all the time.”

There was a pause over and above the electromagnetic lag.

Swenson said, “What’s he like, anyway? Long, I mean.”

Rioz looked over his shoulder. He could hear the soft, crackly mutter of the video in the galley. “I can’t make him out. He says to me about a week after the start of the trip, ‘Mario, why are you a Scavenger?’ I just look at him and say, ‘To make a living. Why do you suppose?’ I mean, what the hell kind of a question is that? Why is anyone a Scavenger?

“Anyway, he says, ‘That’s not it, Mario.’ He’s telling me, you see. He says, ‘You’re a Scavenger because this is part of the Martian way.‘ “

Swenson said, “And what did he mean by that?”

Rioz shrugged. “I never asked him. Right now he’s sitting in there listening to the ultra-microwave from Earth. He’s listening to some Grounder called Hilder.”

“Hilder? A Grounder politician, an Assemblyman or something, isn’t he?”

“That’s right. At least, I think that’s right. Long is always doing things like that. He brought about fifteen pounds of books with him, all about Earth. Just plain dead weight, you know.”

“Well, he’s your partner. And talking about partners, I think I’ll get back on the job. If I miss another strike, there’ll be murder around here.”

He was gone and Rioz leaned back. He watched the even green line that was the pulse scanner. He tried the multiscanner a moment. Space was still clear.

He felt a little better. A bad spell is always worse if the Scavengers all about you are pulling in shell after shell; if the shells go spiraling down to the Phobos scrap forges with everyone’s brand welded on except your own. Then, too, he had managed to work off some of his resentment toward Long.

It was a mistake teaming up with Long. It was always a mistake to team up with a tenderfoot. They thought what you wanted was conversation, especially Long, with his eternal theories about Mars and its great new role in human progress. That was the way he said it—Human Progress: the Martian Way; the New Creative Minority. And all the time what Rioz wanted wasn’t talk, but a strike, a few shells to call their own.

At that, he hadn’t any choice, really. Long was pretty well known down on Mars and made good pay as a mining engineer. He was a friend of Commissioner Sankov and he’d been out on one or two short scavenging missions before. You can’t turn a fellow down flat before a tryout, even though it did look funny. Why should a mining engineer with a comfortable job and good money want to muck around in space?

Rioz never asked Long that question. Scavenger partners are forced too close together to make curiosity desirable, or ‘sometimes even safe. But Long talked so much that he answered the question.

“I had to come out here, Mario,” he said. “The future of Mars isn’t in the mines; it’s in space.”

Rioz wondered how it would it be to try a trip alone. Everyone said it was impossible. Even discounting lost opportunities when one man had to go off watch to sleep or attend to other things, it was well known that one man alone in space would become intolerably depressed in a relatively short while.

Taking a partner along made a six-month trip possible. A regular crew would be better, but no Scavenger could make money on a ship large enough to carry one. The capital it would take in propulsion alone!

Even two didn’t find it exactly fun in space. Usually you had to change partners each trip and you could stay out longer with some than with others. Look at Richard and Canute Swenson. They teamed up every five or six trips because they were brothers. And yet whenever they did, it was a case of constantly mounting tension and antagonism after the first week.

Oh well. Space was clear. Rioz would feel a little better if he went back in the galley and smoothed down some of the bickering with Long. He might as well show he was an old space hand who took the irritations of space as they came.

He stood up, walked the three steps necessary to reach the short, narrow corridor that tied together the two rooms of the spaceship.

3

Once again Rioz stood in the doorway for a moment, watching. Long was intent on the flickering screen.

Rioz said gruffly, “I’m shoving up the thermostat. It’s all right—we can spare the power.”

Long nodded. “If you like.”

Rioz took a hesitant step forward. Space was clear, so to hell with sitting and looking at a blank, green, pipless line. He said, “What’s the Grounder been talking about?”

“History of space travel mostly. Old stuff, but he’s doing it well. He’s giving the whole works—color cartoons, trick photography, stills from old films, everything.”

As if to illustrate Long’s remarks, the bearded figure faded out of view, and a cross-sectional view of a spaceship flitted onto the screen. Hilder’s voice continued, pointing out features of interest that appeared in schematic color. The communications system of the ship outlined itself in red as he talked about it, the storerooms, the proton micropile drive, the cybernetic circuits...

Then Hilder was back on the screen. “But this is only the travel-head of the ship. What moves it? What gets it off the Earth?”

Everyone knew what moved a spaceship, but Hilder’s voice was like a drug. He made spaceship propulsion sound like the secret of the ages, like an ultimate revelation. Even Rioz felt a slight tingling of suspense, though he had spent the greater part of his life aboard ship.

Hilder went on. “Scientists call it different names. They call it the Law of Action and Reaction. Sometimes they call it Newton’s Third Law. Sometimes they call it Conservation of Momentum. But we don’t have to call it any name. We can just use our common sense. When we swim, we push water backward and move forward ourselves. When we walk, we push back against the ground and move forward. When we fly a gyro-flivver, we push air backward and move forward.

“Nothing can move forward unless something else moves backward. It’s the old principle of ‘You can’~ get something for nothing.,

“Now imagine a spaceship that weighs a hundred thousand tons lifting off Earth. To do that, something else must be moved downward. Since a spaceship is extremely heavy, a great deal of material must be moved downward. So much material, in fact, that there is no place to keep it all aboard ship. A special compartment must be built behind the ship to hold it.”

Again Hilder faded out and the ship returned. It shrank and a truncated cone appeared behind it. In bright yellow, words appeared within it: MATERIAL TO BE THROWN AWAY.

“But now,” said Hilder, “the total weight of the ship is much greater. You need still more propulsion and still more.”

The ship shrank enormously to add on another larger shell and still another immense one. The ship proper, the travel-head, was a little dot on the screen, a glowing red dot.

Rioz said, “Hell, this is kindergarten stuff.”

“Not to the people he’s speaking to, Mario,” replied Long. “Earth isn’t Mars. There must be billions of Earth people who’ve never even seen a spaceship; don’t know the first thing about it.”

Hilder was saying, “When the material inside the biggest shell is used up, the shell is detached. It’s thrown away, too.”

The outermost shell came loose, wobbled about the screen.

“Then the second one goes,” said Hilder, “and then, if the trip is a long one, the last is ejected.”

The ship was just a red dot now, with three shells shifting and moving, lost in space.

Hilder said, “These shells represent a hundred thousand tons of tungsten, magnesium, aluminum, and steel. They are gone forever from Earth. Mars is ringed by Scavengers, waiting along the routes of space travel, waiting for the cast-off shells, netting and branding them, saving them for Mars. Not one cent of payment reaches Earth for them. They are salvage. They belong to the ship that finds them.”

Rioz said, “We risk our investment and our lives. If we don’t pick them up, no one gets them. What loss is that to Earth?”

“Look,” said Long, “he’s been talking about nothing but the drain that Mars, Venus, and the Moon put on Earth. This is just another item of loss.”

“They’ll get their return. We’re mining more iron every year.”

“And most of it goes right back into Mars. If you can believe his figures, Earth has invested two hundred billion dollars in Mars and received back about five billion dollars’ worth of iron. It’s put five hundred billion dollars into the Moon and gotten back a little over twenty-five billion dollars of magnesium, titanium, and assorted light metals. It’s put fifty billion dollars into Venus and gotten back nothing. And that’s what the taxpayers of Earth are really interested—tax money out, nothing in.”

The screen was filled, as he spoke, with diagrams of the Scavengers on the route to Mars; little, grinning caricatures of ships, reaching, out wiry, tenuous arms that groped for the tumbling, empty shells, seizing and snaking them in, branding them MARS PROPERTY in glowing letters, then scaling them down to Phobos.

Then it was Hilder again. “They tell us eventually they will return it all to us. Eventually! Once they are a going concern! We don’t know when that will be. A century from now? A thousand years? A million? ‘Eventually.’ Let’s take them at their word. Someday they will give us back all our metals. Someday they will grow their own food, use their own power, live their own lives.

“But one thing they can never return. Not in a hundred million years. Water!

“Mars has only a trickle of water because it is too small. Venus has no water at all because it is too hot. The Moon has none because it is too hot and too small. So Earth must supply not only drinking water and washing water for the Spacers, water to run their industries, water for the hydroponic factories they claim to be setting up—but even water to throwaway by the millions of tons.

“What is the propulsive force that spaceships use? What is it they throw out behind so that they can accelerate forward? Once it was the gases generated from explosives. That was very expensive. Then the proton micropile was invented—a cheap power source that could heat up any liquid until it was a gas under tremendous pressure. What is the cheapest and most plentiful liquid available? Why, water, of course.

“Each spaceship leaves Earth carrying nearly a million tons—not pounds, tons—of water, for the sole purpose of driving it into space so that it may speed up or slow down.

“Our ancestors burned the oil of Earth madly and willfully. They destroyed its coal recklessly. We despise and condemn them for that, but at least they had this—they thought that when the need arose, substitutes would be found. And they were right. We have our plankton farms and our proton micropiles.

“But there is no substitute for water. None! There never can be. And when our descendants view the desert we will have made of Earth, what excuse will they find for us? When the droughts come and grow—”

Long leaned forward and turned off the set. He said, “That bothers me. The damn fool is deliberately—what’s the matter?”

Rioz had risen uneasily to his feet. “I ought to be watching the pips.”

“The hell with the pips.” Long got up likewise, followed Rioz through the narrow corridor, and stood just inside the pilot room. “If Hilder carries this through, if he’s got the guts to make a real issue out of it—wow!”

He had seen it too. The pip was a Class A, racing after the outgoing signal like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit.

Rioz was babbling, “Space was clear, I tell you, clear. For Mars’ sake, Ted, don’t just freeze on me. See if you can spot it visually.”

Rioz was working speedily and with an efficiency that was the result of nearly twenty years of scavenging. He had the distance in two minutes. Then, remembering Swenson’s experience, he measured the angle of declination and the radial velocity as well.

He yelled at Long, “Once point seven six radians. You can’t miss it, man.”

Long held his breath as he adjusted the vernier. “It’s only half a radian off the Sun, It’ll only be crescent-lit.”

He increased magnification as rapidly as he dared, watching for the one “star” that changed position and grew to have a form, revealing itself to be no star.

“I’m starting, anyway,” said Rioz. “We can’t wait.”

“I’ve got it. I’ve got it.” Magnification was still too small to give it a definite shape, but the dot Long watched was brightening and dimming rhythmically as the shell rotated and caught sunlight on cross sections of different sizes.

“Hold on.”

The first of many fine spurts of steam squirted out of the proper vents, leaving long trails of micro-crystals of ice gleaming mistily in the pale beams of the distant Sun. They thinned out for a hundred miles or more. One spurt, then another, then another, as the Scavenger ship moved out of its stable trajectory and took up a course tangential to that of the shell.

“It’s moving like a comet at perihelion!” yelled Rioz. “Those damned Grounder pilots knock the shells off that way on purpose. I’d like to—”

He swore his anger in a frustrated frenzy as he kicked steam backward and backward recklessly, till the hydraulic cushioning of his chair had sloughed back a full foot and Long had found himself all but unable to maintain his grip on the guard rail.

“Have a heart,” he begged.

But Rioz had his eye on the pips. “If you can’t take it, man, stay on Mars!” The steam spurts continued to boom distantly.

The radio came to life. Long managed to lean forward through what seemed like molasses and closed contact. It was Swenson, eyes glaring.

Swenson yelled; “Where the hell are you guys going? You ‘ll be in my sector in ten seconds.”

Rioz said, “I’m chasing a shell. “

“In my sector?”

“It started in mine and you’re not in position to get it. Shut off that radio, Ted.”

The ship thundered through space, a thunder that could be heard only within the hull. And then Rioz cut the engines in stages large enough to make Long flail forward. The sudden silence was more ear-shattering than the noise that had preceded it.

Rioz said, “All right. Let me have the ’scope.”

They both watched. The shell was a definite truncated cone now, tumbling with slow solemnity as it passed along among the stars.

“It’s a Class A shell, all right,” said Rioz with satisfaction.

A giant among shells, he thought. It would put them into the black.

Long said, “We’ve got another pip on the scanner. I think it’s Swenson taking after us.”

Rioz scarcely gave it a glance, “He won’t catch us.”

The shell grew larger still, filling the visiplate.

Rioz’s hands were on the harpoon lever. He waited, adjusted the angle microscopically twice, played out the length allotment. Then he yanked, tripping the release.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then a metal mesh cable snaked out onto the visiplate, moving toward the shell like a striking cobra. It made contact, but it did not hold. If it had, it would have snapped instantly like a cobweb strand. The shell was turning with a rotational momentum amounting to thousands of tons. What the cable did do was to set up a powerful magnetic field that acted as a brake on the shell.

Another cable and another lashed out. Rioz sent them out in an almost heedless expenditure of energy.

“I’ll get this one! By Mars, I’ll get this one!”

With some two dozen cables stretching between ship and shell, he desisted. The shell’s rotational energy, converted by breaking into heat, had raised its temperature to a point where its radiation could be picked up by the ship’s meters.

Long said, “Do you want me to put our brand on?”

“Suits me. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s my watch.”

“I don’t mind.”

Long clambered into his suit and went out the lock. It was the surest sign of his newness to the game that he could count the number of times he had been out in space in a suit. This was the fifth time.

He went out along the nearest cable, hand over hand, feeling the vibration of the mesh against the metal of his mitten.

He burned their serial number in the smooth metal of the shell. There was nothing to oxidize the steel in the emptiness of space. It simply melted and vaporized, condensing some feet away from the energy beam, turning the surface it touched into gray, powdery dullness.

Long swung back toward the ship.

Inside again, he took off his helmet, white and thick with frost that collected as soon as he had entered.

The first thing he heard was Swenson’s voice coming over the radio in this almost unrecognizable rage; “...straight to the Commissioner. Damn it, there are rules to this game!”

Rioz sat back, unbothered. “Look, it hit my sector. I was late spotting it and I chased it into yours. You couldn’t have gotten it with Mars for a backstop. That’s all there is to it—you back, Long?”

He cut contact.

The signal button raged at him, but he paid no attention.

“He’s going to the Commissioner?” Long asked.

“Not a chance. He just goes on like that because it breaks the monotony. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He knows it’s our shell. And how do you like that hunk of stuff, Ted?”

“Pretty good.”

“Pretty good? It’s terrific! Hold on. I’m setting it swinging.“

The side jets spat steam and the ship started a slow rotation about the shell. The shell followed it. In thirty minutes, they were a gigantic bolo spinning in emptiness. Long checked the Ephemeris for the position of Deimos.

At a precisely calculated moment, the cables released their magnetic field and the shell went streaking off tangentially in a trajectory that would, in a day or so, bring it within pronging distance of the shell stores on the Martian satellite.

Rioz watched it go. He felt good. He turned to Long. “This is one fine day for us.”

“What about Hilder’s speech?” asked Long.

“What? Who? Oh, that. Listen, if I had to worry about every thing some damned Grounder said, I’d never get any sleep. Forget it.”

“I don’t think we should forget it.”

“You’re nuts. Don’t bother me about it, will you? Get some sleep instead.”

4

Ted Long found the breadth and height of the city’s main thoroughfare exhilarating. It had been two months since the Commissioner had declared a moratorium on scavenging and had pulled all ships out of space, but this feeling of a stretched-out vista had not stopped thrilling Long. Even the thought that the moratorium was called pending a decision on the part of Earth to enforce its new insistence on water economy, by deciding upon a ration limit for scavenging, did not cast him entirely down.

The roof of the avenue was painted a luminous light blue, perhaps as an old-fashioned imitation of Earth’s sky. Ted wasn’t sure. The walls were lit with the store windows that pierced it.

Off in the distance, over the hum of traffic and the sloughing noise of people’s feet passing him, he could hear the intermittent blasting as new channels were being bored into Mars’ crust. All his life he remembered such blastings. The ground he walked on had been part of solid, unbroken rock when he was born. The city was growing and would keep on growing—if Earth would only let it.

He turned off at a cross street, narrower, not quite as brilliantly lit, shop windows giving way to apartment houses, each with its row of lights along the front facade. Shoppers and traffic gave way to slower-paced individuals and to squalling youngsters who had as yet evaded the maternal summons to the evening meal.

At the last minute, Long remembered the social amenities and stopped off at a corner water store.

He passed over his canteen. “Fill ‘er up.”

The plump storekeeper unscrewed the cap, cocked an eye into the opening. He shook it a little and let it gurgle. “Not much left,” he said cheerfully.

“No,” agreed Long.

The storekeeper trickled water in, holding the neck of the canteen close to the hose tip to avoid spillage. The volume gauge whirred. He screwed the cap back on.

Long passed over the coins and took his canteen. It clanked against his hip now with a pleasing heaviness. It would never do to visit a family without a full canteen. Among the boys, it didn’t matter. Not as much, anyway.

He entered the hallway of No. 27, climbed a short flight of stairs, and paused with his thumb on the signal.

The sound of voices could be heard quite plainly.

One was a woman’s voice, somewhat shrill. “It’s all right for you to have your Scavenger friends here, isn’t it? I’m supposed to be thankful you manage to get home two months a year. Oh, it’s quite enough that you spend a day or two with me. After that, it’s the Scavengers again.

“I’ve been home for a long time now,” said a male voice, “and this is business. For Mars’ sake, let up, Dora. They’ll be here soon.”

Long decided to wait a moment before signaling. It might give them a chance to hit a more neutral topic.

“What do I care if they come?” retorted Dora. “Let them hear me. And I’d just as soon the Commissioner kept the moratorium on permanently. You hear me?”

“And what would we live on?” came the male voice hotly. “You tell me that.”

“I’ll tell you. You can make a decent, honorable living right here on Mars, just like everybody else. I’m the only one in this apartment house that’s a Scavenger widow. That’s what I am—a widow. I’m worse than a widow, because if I were a widow, I’d at least have a chance to marry someone else—what did you say?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Oh, I know what you said. Now listen here, Dick Swenson—”

“I only said,” cried Swenson, “that now I know why Scavengers usually don’t marry.”

“You shouldn’t have either. I’m tired of having every person in the neighborhood pity me and smirk and ask when you’re coming home. Other people can be mining engineers and administrators and even tunnel borers. At least tunnel borers’ wives have a decent home life and their children don’t grow up like vagabonds. Peter might as well not have a father—”

A thin boy-soprano voice made its way through the door. It was somewhat more distant, as though it were in another room. “Hey, Mom, what’s a vagabond?”

Dora’s voice rose a notch. “Peter! You keep your mind on your homework.”

Swenson said in a low voice, “It’s not right to talk this way in front of the kid. What kind of notions will he get about me?”

“Stay home then and teach him better notions.”

Peter’s voice called out again. “Hey, Mom, I’m going to be a Scavenger when I grow up.”

Footsteps sounded rapidly. There was a momentary hiatus in the sounds, then a piercing, “Mom! Hey, Mom! Leggo my ear! What did I do?” and a snuffling silence.

Long seized the chance. He worked the signal vigorously.

Swenson opened the door, brushing down his hair with both hands.

“Hello, Ted,” he said in a subdued voice. Then loudly, “Ted’s here, Dora. Where’s Mario, Ted?”

Long said, “He’ll be here in a while.”

Dora came bustling out of the next room, a small, dark woman with a pinched nose, and hair, just beginning to show touches of gray, combed off the forehead.

“Hello, Ted. Have you eaten?”

“Quite well, thanks. I haven’t interrupted you, have I?”

“Not at all. We finished ages ago. Would you like some coffee?”

“I think so.” Ted unslung his canteen and offered it.

“Oh, goodness, that’s all right. We’ve plenty of water.”

“I insist.”

“Well then—”

Back into the kitchen she went. Through the swinging door, Long caught a glimpse of dishes sitting in Secoterg, the “waterless cleaner that soaks up and absorbs grease and dirt in a twinkling. One ounce of water will rinse eight square feet of dish surface clean as clean. Buy Secoterg. Secoterg just cleans it right, makes your dishes shiny bright, does away with water waste—”

The tune started whining through his mind and Long crushed it with speech. He said, “How’s Pete?”

“Fine, fine. The kid’s in the fourth grade now. You know I don’t get to see him much. Well sir, when I came back last time, he looked at me and said...”

It went on for a while and wasn’t too bad as bright sayings of bright children as told by dull parents go.

The door signal burped and Mario Rioz came in, frowning and red.

Swenson stepped to him quickly. “Listen, don’t say anything about shell-snaring. Dora still remembers the time you fingered a Class A shell out of my territory and she’s in one of her moods now.”

“Who the hell wants to talk about shells?” Rioz slung off a fur-lined jacket, threw it over the back of the chair and sat down.

Dora came through the swinging door, viewed the newcomer with a synthetic smile, and said, “Hello, Mario. Coffee for you, too?”.

“Yeah,” he said, reaching automatically for his canteen.

“Just use some more of my water, Dora,” said Long quickly. “He’ll owe it to me.”

“Yeah,” said Rioz.

“What’s wrong, Mario?” asked Long.

Rioz said heavily, “Go on. Say you told me so. A year ago when Hilder made that speech, you told me so. Say it.”

Long shrugged. Rioz said, “They’ve set up the quota. Fifteen minutes ago the news came out.”

“Well?”

“Fifty thousand tons of water per trip.”

“What?” yelled Swenson, burning. “You can’t get off Mars with fifty thousand!”

“That’s the figure. It’s a deliberate piece of gutting. No more scavenging.”

Dora came out with the coffee and set it down all around.

“What’s all this about no more scavenging?” She sat down very firmly and Swenson looked helpless.

“It seems,” said Long, “that they’re rationing us at fifty thousand tons and that means we can’t make any more trips.”

“Well, what of it?” Dora sipped her coffee and smiled gaily. “If you want my opinion, it’s a good thing. It’s time all you Scavengers found yourselves a nice, steady job here on Mars. I mean it. It’s no life to be running all over space—”

“Please, Dora,” said Swenson.

Rioz came close to a snort.

Dora raised her eyebrows. “I’m just giving my opinions.”

Long said, “Please feel free to do so. But I would like to say something. Fifty thousand is just a detail. We know that Earth—or at least Hilder’s party—wants to make political capital out of a campaign for water economy, so we’re in a bad hole. We’ve got to get water somehow or they’ll shut us down altogether, right?”

“Well, sure,” said Swenson. “But the question is how, right?”

“If it’s only getting water,” said Rioz in a sudden gush of words, “there’s only one thing to do and you know it. If the Grounders won’t give us water, we’ll take it. The water doesn’t belong to them just because their fathers and grandfathers were too damned sick-yellow ever to leave their fat planet. Water belongs to people wherever they are. We’re people and the water’s ours, too. We have a right to it.”

“How do you propose taking it?” asked Long.

“Easy! They’ve got oceans of water on Earth. They can’t post a guard over every square mile. We can sink down on the night side of the planet any time we want, fill our shells, then get away. How can they stop us?”

“In half a dozen ways, Mario. How do you spot shells in space up to distances of a hundred thousand miles? One thin metal shell in all that space. How? By radar. Do you think there’s no radar on Earth? Do you think that if Earth ever gets the notion we’re engaged in waterlegging, it won’t be simple for them to set up a radar network to spot ships coming in from space?”

Dora broke in indignantly. “I’ll tell you one thing, Mario Rioz. My husband isn’t going to be part of any raid to get water to keep up his scavenging with.”

“It isn’t just scavenging,” said Mario. “Next they’ll be cutting down on everything else. We’ve got to stop them now.”

“But we don’t need their water, anyway,” said Dora. “We’re not the Moon or Venus. We pipe enough water down from the polar caps for all we need. We have a water tap right in this apartment. There’s one in every apartment on this block.”

Long said, “Home use is the smallest part of it. The mines use water. And what do we do about the hydroponic tanks?”

“That’s right,” said Swenson. “What about the hydroponic tanks, Dora? They’ve got to have water and it’s about time we arranged to grow our own fresh food instead of having to live on the condensed crud they ship us from Earth.”

“Listen to him,” said Dora scornfully. “What do you know about fresh food? You’ve never eaten any.”

“I’ve eaten more than you think. Do you remember those carrots I picked up once?”

“Well, what was so wonderful about them? If you ask me, good baked protomeal is much better. And healthier, too. It just seems to be the fashion now to be talking fresh vegetables because they’re increasing taxes for these hydroponics. Besides, all this will blow over.”

Long said, “I don’t think so. Not by itself, anyway. Hilder will probably be the next Coordinator, and then things may really get bad. If they cut down on food shipments, too—”

“Well, then,” shouted Rioz, “what do we do? I still say take it! Take the water!”

“And I say we can’t do that, Mario. Don’t you see that what you ‘re suggesting is the Earth way, the Grounder way? You’re trying to hold on to the umbilical cord that ties Mars to Earth. Can’t you get away from that? Can’t you see the Martian way?”

“No, I can’t. Suppose you tell me.”

“I will, if you’ll listen. When we think about the Solar System, what do we think about? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Phobos, and Deimos. There you are—seven bodies, that’s all. But that doesn’t represent one percent of the Solar System. We Martians are right at the edge of the other ninety-nine percent. Out there, farther from the Sun, there’s unbelievable amounts of water!”

The others stared.

Swenson said uncertainly, “You mean the layers of ice on Jupiter and Saturn?”

“Not that specifically, but it is water, you’ll admit. A thousand-mile-thick layer of water is a lot of water.”

“But it’s all covered up with layers of ammonia or—or something, isn’t it?” asked Swenson. “Besides, we can’t land on the major planets.”

“I know that,” said Long, “but I haven’t said that was the answer. The major planets aren’t the only objects out there. What about the asteroids and the satellites? Vesta is a two-hundred-mile-diameter asteroid that’s hardly more than a chunk of ice. One of the moons of Saturn is mostly ice. How about that?”

Rioz said, “Haven’t you ever been in space, Ted?”

“You know I have. Why do you ask?”

“Sure, I know you have, but you still talk like a Grounder. Have you thought of the distances involved? The average asteroid is a hundred twenty million miles from Mars at the closest. That’s twice the Venus-Mars hop and you know that hardly any liners do even that in one jump. They usually stop off at Earth or the Moon. After all, how long do you expect anyone to stay in space, man?”

“I don’t know. What’s your limit?”

“You know the limit. You don’t have to ask me. It’s six months. That’s handbook data. After six months, if you’re still in space, you’re psychotherapy meat. Right, Dick?”

Swenson nodded.

“And that’s just the asteroids,” Rioz went on. “From Mars to Jupiter is three hundred thirty million miles, and to Saturn it’s seven hundred million. How can anyone handle that kind of distance? Suppose you hit standard velocity or, to make it even, say you get up to a good two hundred kilomiles an hour. It would take you—let’s see, allowing time for acceleration and deceleration—about six or seven months to get to Jupiter and nearly a year to get to Saturn. Of course, you could hike the speed to a million miles an hour, theoretically, but where would you get the water to do that?”

“Gee,” said a small voice attached to a smutty nose and round eyes, “Saturn!”

Dora whirled in her chair. “Peter, march right back into your room!”

“Aw, Ma.”

“Don’t ‘Aw Ma’ me.” She began to get out of the chair, and Peter scuttled away.

Swenson said, “Say, Dora, why don’t you keep him company for a while? It’s hard to keep his mind on homework if we’re all out here talking.”

Dora sniffed obstinately and stayed put, “I’ll sit right here until I find out what Ted Long is thinking of. I tell you right now I don’t like the sound of it.”

Swenson said nervously, “Well, never mind Jupiter and Saturn. I’m sure Ted isn’t figuring on that. But what about Vesta? We could make it in ten or twelve weeks there and the same back. And two hundred miles in diameter. That’s four million cubic miles of ice!”

“So what?” said Rioz. “What do we do on Vesta? Quarry the ice? Set up mining machinery? Say, do you know how long that would take?”

Long said, “I’m talking about Saturn, not Vesta.”

Rioz addressed an unseen audience. “I tell him seven hundred million miles and he keeps on talking.”

“All right,” said Long, “suppose you tell me how you know we can only stay in spa«;:e six months, Mario?”

“It’s common knowledge, damn it.”

“Because it’s in the Handbook of Space Flight. It’s data compiled by Earth scientists from experience with Earth pilots and spacemen. You’re still thinking Grounder style. You won’t think the Martian way.”

“A Martian may be a Martian, but he’s still a man.”

“But how can you be so blind? How many times have you fellows been out for over six months without a break?”

Rioz said, “That’s different.”

“Because you’re Martians? Because you’re professional Scavengers?”

“No. Because we’re not on a flight. We can put back for Mars any time we want to.”

“But you don’t want to. That’s my point. Earthmen have tremendous ships with libraries of films, with a crew of fifteen plus passengers. Still, they can only stay out six months maximum. Martian Scavengers have a two-room ship with only one partner. But we can stick it out more than six months.”

Dora said, “I suppose you want to stay in a ship for a year and go to Saturn.”

“Why not, Dora?” said Long. “We can do it. Don’t you see we can? Earthmen can’t. They’ve got a real world. They’ve got open sky and fresh food, all the air and water they want. Getting into a ship is a terrible change for them. More than six months is too much for them for that very reason. Martians are been living on a ship our entire lives.

“That’s all Mars is—a ship. It’s just a big ship forty-five hundred miles across with one tiny room in it occupied by fifty thousand people. It’s closed in like a ship. We breathe packaged air and drink packaged water, which we repurify over and over. We eat the same food rations we eat aboard ship. When we get into a ship, it’s the same thing we’ve known all our lives. We can stand it for a lot more than a year if we have to.”

Dora said, “Dick, too?”

“We all can.”

“Well, Dick can’t. It’s all very well for you, Ted Long, and this shell stealer here, this Mario, to talk about jaunting off for a year. You’re not married. Dick is. He has a wife and he has a child and that’s enough for him. He can just get a regular job right here on Mars. Why, my goodness, suppose you go to Saturn and find there’s no water there. How’ll you get back? Even if you had water left, you’d be out of food. It’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.”

“No. Now listen,” said Long tightly. “I’ve thought this thing out. I’ve talked to Commissioner Sankov and he’ll help. But we’ve got to have ships and men. I can’t get them. The men won’t listen to me. I’m green. You two are known and respected. You’re veterans. If you back me, even if you don’t go yourselves, if you’ll just help me sell this thing to the rest, get volunteers—”

“First,” said Rioz grumpily, “you’ll have to do a lot more explaining. Once we get to Saturn, where’s the water?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” said Long. “That’s why it’s got to be Saturn. The water there is just floating around in space for the taking.”

5

When Hamish Sankov had come to Mars, there was no such thing as a native Martian. Now there were two-hundred-odd babies whose grandfathers had been born on Mars—native in the third generation.

When he had come as a boy in his teens, Mars had been scarcely more than a huddle of grounded spaceships connected by sealed underground tunnels. Through the years, he had seen buildings grow and burrow widely, thrusting blunt snouts up into the thin, unbreathable atmosphere. He had seen huge storage depots spring up into which spaceships and their loads could be swallowed whole. He had seen the mines grow from nothing to a huge gouge in the Martian crust, while the population of Mars grew from fifty to fifty thousand.

It made him feel old, these long memories—they and the even dimmer memories induced by the presence of this Earthman before him. His visitor brought up those long-forgotten scraps of thought about a soft-warm world that was as kind and gentle to mankind as the mother’s womb.

The Earthman seemed fresh from that womb. Not very tall, not very lean; in fact, distinctly plump. Dark hair with a neat little wave in it, a neat little mustache, and neatly scrubbed skin. His clothing was right in style and as fresh and neatly turned as plastek could be.

Sankov’s own clothes were of Martian manufacture, serviceable and clean, but many years behind the times. His face was craggy and lined, his hair was pure white, and his Adam’s apple wobbled when he talked.

The Earthman was Myron Digby, member of Earth’s General Assembly. Sankov was Martian Commissioner.

Sankov said, “This all hits us hard, Assemblyman.”

“It’s hit most of us hard, too, Commissioner.”

“Uh-huh. Can’t honestly say then that I can make it out. Of course, you understand, I don’t make out that I can understand Earth ways, for all that I was born there. Mars is a hard place to live, Assemblyman, and you have to understand that. It takes a lot of shipping space just to bring us food, water, and raw materials so we can live. There’s not much room left for books and news films. Even video programs can’t reach Mars, except for about a month when Earth is in conjunction, and even then nobody has much time to listen.

“My office gets a weekly summary film from Planetary Press. Generally, I don’t have time to pay attention to it. Maybe you’d call us provincial, and you’d be right. When something like this happens, all we can do is kind of helplessly look at each other.”

Digby said slowly, “You can’t mean that your people on Mars haven’t heard of Hilder’s anti-Waster campaign.”

“No, can’t exactly say that. There’s a young Scavenger, son of a good friend of mine who died in space”—Sankov scratched the side of his neck doubtfully—”who makes a hobby out of reading up on Earth history and things like that. He catches video broadcasts when he’s out in space and he listened to this man Hilder. Near as I can make out that was the first talk Hilder made about Wasters.

“The young fellow came to me with that. Naturally, I didn’t take him very serious. I kept an eye on the Planetary Press films for a while after that, but there wasn’t much mention of Hilder and what there was made him out to look pretty funny.”

“Yes, Commissioner,” said Digby, “it all seemed quite a joke when it started.”

Sankov stretched out a pair of long legs to one side of his desk and crossed them at the ankles. “Seems to me it’s still pretty much of a joke. What’s his argument? We’re using up water. Has he tried looking at some figures? I got them all here. Had them brought to me when this committee arrived.

“Seems that Earth has four hundred million cubic miles of water in its oceans and each cubic mile weighs four and a half billion tons. That’s a lot of water. Now we use some of that heap in space flight. Most of the thrust is inside Earth’s gravitational field, and that means the water thrown out finds its way back to the oceans. Hilder doesn’t figure that in. When he says a million tons of water is used up per flight, he’s a liar. It’s less than a hundred thousand tons.

“Suppose, now, we have fifty thousand flights a year. We don’t, of course; not even fifteen hundred. But let’s say there are fifty thousand. I figure there’s going to be considerable expansion as time goes on. With fifty thousand flights, one cubic mile of water would be lost to space each year. That means that in a million years, Earth would lose one quarter of one percent of its total water supply!”

Digby spread his hands, palms upward, and let them drop. “Commissioner, Interplanetary Alloys has used figures like that in their campaign against Hilder, but you can’t fight a tremendous, emotion-filled drive with cold mathematics. This man Hilder has invented a name, ‘Wasters.’ Slowly he has built this name up into a gigantic conspiracy; a gang of brutal, profit-seeking wretches raping Earth for their own immediate benefit.

“He has accused the government of being riddled with them, the Assembly of being dominated by them, the press of being owned by them. None of this, unfortunately, seems ridiculous to the average man. He knows all too well what selfish men can do to Earth’s resources. He knows what happened to Earth’s oil during the Time of Troubles, for instance, and the way topsoil was ruined.

“When a farmer experiences a drought, he doesn’t care that the amount of water lost in space flight isn’t a droplet in a fog as far as Earth’s overall water supply is concerned. Hilder has given him something to blame and that’s the strongest possible consolation for disaster. He isn’t going to give that up for a diet of figures.”

Sankov said, “That’s where I get puzzled. Maybe it’s because I don’t know how things work on Earth, but it seems to me that there aren’t just droughty farmers there. As near as I could make out from the news summaries, these Hilder people are a minority. Why is it Earth goes along with a few farmers and some crackpots that, egg them on?”

“Because, Commissioner, there are such things as worried human beings. The steel industry sees that an era of space flight will stress increasingly the light, nonferrous alloys. The various miners’ unions worry about extraterrestrial competition. Any Earthman who can’t get aluminum to build a prefab is certain that it is because the aluminum is going to Mars. I know a professor of archaeology who’s an anti-Waster because he can’t get a government grant to cover his excavations. He’s convinced that all government money is going into rocketry research and space medicine and he resents it.”

Sankov said, “That doesn’t sound like Earth people are much different from us here on Mars. But what about the General Assembly? Why do they have to go along with Hilder?”

Digby smiled sourly. “Politics isn’t pleasant to explain. Hilder introduced this bill to set up a committee to investigate waste in space flight. Maybe three-fourths or more of the General Assembly was against such an investigation as an intolerable and useless extension of bureaucracy—which it is. But then how could any legislator be against a mere investigation of waste? It would sound as though he had something to fear or to conceal. It would sound as though he were himself profiting from waste. Hilder is not in the least afraid of making such accusations, and whether true or not, they would be a powerful factor with the voters in the next election. The bill passed.

“And then there came the question of appointing the members of the committee. Those who were against Hilder shied away from membership, which would have meant decisions that would be continually embarrassing. Remaining on the side lines would make that one that much less a target for Hilder. The result is that I am the only member of the committee who is outspokenly anti-Hilder and it may cost me reelection.”

Sankov said, “I’d be sorry to hear that, Assemblyman. It looks as though Mars didn’t have as many friends as we thought we had. We wouldn’t like to lose one. But if Hilder wins out, what’s he after, anyway?”

“I should think,” said Digby, “that that is obvious. He wants to be the next Global Coordinator.”

“Think he’ll make it?”

“If nothing happens to stop him, he will.”

“And then what? Will he drop this Waster campaign then?”

“I can’t say. I don’t know if he’s laid his plans past the Co-ordinacy. Still, if you want my guess, he couldn’t abandon the campaign and maintain his popularity. It’s gotten out of hand.”

Sankov scratched the side of his neck. “All right. In that case, I’ll ask you for some advice. What can we folks on Mars do? You know Earth. You know the situation. We don’t. Tell us what to do.”

Digby rose and stepped to the window. He looked out upon the low domes of other buildings; red, rocky, completely desolate plain in between; a purple sky and a shrunken sun.

He said, without turning, “Do you people really like it on Mars?”

Sankov smiled. “Most of us don’t exactly know any other world, Assemblyman. Seems to me Earth would be something queer and uncomfortable to them.”

“But wouldn’t Martians get used to it? Earth isn’t hard to take after this. Wouldn’t your people learn to enjoy the privilege of breathing air under an open sky? You once lived on Earth. You remember what it was like.”

“I sort of remember. Still, it doesn’t seem to be easy to explain. Earth is just there. It fits people and people fit it. People take Earth the way they find it. Mars is different. It’s sort of raw and doesn’t fit people. People got to make something out of it. They got to build a world, and not take what they find. Mars isn’t much yet, but we’re building, and when we’re finished, we’re going to have just what we like. It’s sort of a great feeling to know you’re building a world. Earth would be kind of unexciting after that.”

The Assemblyman said, “Surely the ordinary Martian isn’t such a philosopher that he’s content to live this terribly hard life for the. sake of a future that must be hundreds of generations away.”

“No-o, not just like that.” Sankov put his right ankle on his left knee and cradled it as he spoke. “Like I said, Martians are a lot like Earthmen, which means they’re sort of human beings, and human beings don’t go in for philosophy much. Just the same, there’s something to living in a growing world, whether you think about it much or not.

“My father used to send me letters when I first came to Mars. He was an accountant and he just sort of stayed an accountant. Earth wasn’t much different when he died from what it was when he was born. He didn’t see anything happen. Every day was like every other day, and living was just a way of passing time until he died,

“On Mars, it’s different. Every day there’s something new—the city’s bigger, the ventilation system gets another kick, the water lines from the poles get slicked up. Right now, we’re planning to set up a news-film association of our own. We’re going to call it Mars Press. If you haven’t lived when things are growing all about you, you’ll never understand how wonderful it feels.

“No, Assemblyman, Mars is hard and tough and Earth is a lot more comfortable, but seems to me if you take our boys to Earth, they’ll be unhappy. They probably wouldn’t be able to figure out why, most of them, but they’d feel lost; lost and useless. Seems to me lots of them would never make the adjustment.”

Digby turned away from the window and the smooth, pink skin of his forehead was creased into a frown. “In that case, Commissioner, I am sorry for you. For all of you.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think there’s anything your people on Mars can do. Or the people on the Moon or Venus. It won’t happen now; maybe it won’t happen for a year or two, or even for five years. But pretty soon you’ll all have to come back to Earth, unless—”

Sankov’s white eyebrows bent low over his eyes. “Well?”

“Unless you can find another source of water besides the planet Earth.”

Sankov shook his head. “Don’t seem likely, does it?”

“Not very.”

“And except for that, seems to you there’s no chance?”

“None at all.”

Digby said that and left, and Sankov stared for a long time at nothing before he punched a combination of the local communiline.

After a while, Ted Long looked out at him.

Sankov said, “You were right, son. There’s nothing they can do. Even the ones that mean well see no way out. How did you know?”

“Commissioner,” said Long, “when you’ve read all you can about the Time of Troubles, particularly about the twentieth century, nothing political can come as a real surprise.”

“Well, maybe. Anyway, son, Assemblyman Digby is sorry for us, quite a piece sorry, you might say, but that’s all. He says we’ll have to leave Mars—or else get water somewhere else. Only he thinks that we can’t get water somewhere else.”

“You know we can, don’t you, Commissioner?”

“I know we might, son. It’s a terrible risk.”

“If I find enough volunteers, the risk is our business. “

“How is it going?”

“Not bad. Some of the boys are on my side right now. I talked Mario Rioz into it, for instance, and you know he’s one of the best.”

“That’s just it—the volunteers will be the best men we have. I hate to allow it.”

“If we get back, it will be worth it.”

“If! It’s a big word, son.”

“And a big thing we’re trying to do.”

“Well, I gave my word that if there was no help on Earth, I’ll see that the Phobos water hole lets you have all the water you’ll need. Good luck.”

6

Half a million miles above Saturn, Mario Rioz was cradled on nothing and sleep was delicious. He came out of it slowly and for a while, alone in his suit, he counted the stars and traced lines from one to another.

At first, as the weeks flew past, it was scavenging all over again, except for the gnawing feeling that every minute meant an additional number of thousands of miles away from all humanity. That made it worse.

They had aimed high to pass out of the ecliptic while moving through the Asteroid Belt. That had used up water and had probably been unnecessary. Although tens of thousands of worldlets look as thick as vermin in two-dimensional projection upon a photographic plate, they are nevertheless scattered so thinly through the quadrillions of cubic miles that make up their conglomerate orbit that only the most ridiculous of coincidences would have brought about a collision.

Still, they passed over the Belt and someone calculated the chances of collision with a fragment of matter large enough to do damage. The value was so low, so impossibly low, that it was perhaps inevitable that the notion of the “space-float” should occur to someone.

The days were long and many, space was empty, only one man was needed at the controls at anyone time. The thought was a natural.

First, it was a particularly daring one who ventured out for fifteen minutes or so. Then another who tried half an hour. Eventually, before the asteroids were entirely behind, each ship regularly had its off-watch member suspended in space at the end of a cable.

It was easy enough. The cable, one of those intended for operations at the conclusion of their journey, was magnetically attached at both ends, one to the space suit to start with. Then you clambered out the lock onto the ship’s hull and attached the other end there. You paused awhile, clinging to the metal skin by the electromagnets in your boots. Then you neutralized those and made the slightest muscular effort.

Slowly, ever so slowly, you lifted from the ship and even more slowly the ship’s larger mass moved an equivalently shorter distance downward. You floated incredibly, weightlessly, in solid, speckled black. When the ship had moved far enough away from you, your gauntleted hand, which kept touch upon the cable, tightened its grip slightly. Too tightly, and you would begin moving back toward the ship and it toward you. Just tightly enough, and friction would halt you. Because your motion was equivalent to that of the ship, it seemed as motionless below you as though it had been painted against an impossible background while the cable between you hung in coils that had no reason to straighten out.

It was a half-ship to your eye. One half was lit by the light of the feeble Sun, which was still too bright to look at directly without the heavy protection of the polarized space-suit visor. The other half was black on black, invisible.

Space closed in and it was like sleep. Your suit was warm, it renewed its air automatically, it had food and drink in special containers from which it could be sucked with a minimal motion of the head, it took care of wastes appropriately. Most of all, more than anything else, there was the delightful euphoria of weightlessness.

You never felt so well in your life. The days stopped being too long, they weren’t long enough, and there weren’t enough of them.

They had passed Jupiter’s orbit at a spot some thirty degrees from its then position. For months, it was the brightest object in the sky, always excepting the glowing white pea that was the Sun. At its brightest, some of the Scavengers insisted they could make out Jupiter as a tiny sphere, one side squashed out of true by the night shadow.

Then over a period of additional months it faded, while another dot of light grew until it was brighter than Jupiter. It was Saturn, first as a dot of brilliance, then as an oval, glowing splotch.

(“Why oval?” someone asked, and after a while, someone else said, “the rings, of course,” and it was obvious.)

Everyone space-floated at all possible times toward the end, watching Saturn incessantly.

(“Hey, you jerk, come on back in, damn it. You’re on duty.” “Who’s on duty? I’ve got fifteen minutes more by my watch.“ “You set your watch back. Besides, I gave you twenty minutes yesterday.” “You wouldn’t give two minutes to your grandmother.” “Come on in, damn it, or I’m coming out anyway.“ “All right, I’m coming. Holy howlers, what a racket over a lousy minute.” But no quarrel could possibly be serious, not in space. It felt too good. )

Saturn grew until at last it rivaled and then surpassed the Sun. The rings, set at a broad angle to their trajectory of approach, swept grandly about the planet, only a small portion being eclipsed. Then, as they approached, the span of the rings grew still wider, yet narrower as the angle of approach constantly decreased.

The larger moons showed up in the surrounding sky like serene fireflies.

Mario Rioz was glad he was awake so that he could watch again.

Saturn filled half the sky, streaked with orange, the night shadow cutting it fuzzily nearly one quarter of the way in from the right. Two round little dots in the brightness were shadows of two of the moons. To the left and behind him (he could look over his left shoulder to see, and as he did so, the rest of his body inched slightly to the right to conserve angular momentum) was the white diamond of the Sun.

Most of all he liked to watch the rings. At the left, they emerged from behind Saturn, a tight, bright triple band of orange light. At the right, their beginnings were hidden in the night shadow, but showed up closer and broader. They widened as they came, like the flare of a horn, growing hazier as they approached, until, while the eye followed them, they seemed to fill the sky and lose themselves.

From the position of the Scavenger fleet just inside the outer rim of the outermost ring, the rings broke up and assumed their true identity as a phenomenal cluster of solid fragments rather than the tight, solid band of light they seemed.

Below him, or rather in the direction his feet pointed, some twenty miles away, was one of the ring fragments. It looked like a large, irregular splotch, marring the symmetry of space, three-quarters in brightness and the night shadow cutting it like a knife. Other fragments were farther off, sparkling like star dust, dimmer and thicker, until, as you followed them down, they became rings once more.

The fragments were motionless, but that was only because the ships had taken up an orbit about Saturn equivalent to that of the outer edge of the rings.

The day before, Rioz reflected, he had been on that nearest fragment, working along with more than a score of others to mold it into the desired shape. Tomorrow he would be at it again.

Today—today he was space-floating.

“Mario?” The voice that broke upon his earphones was questioning.

Momentarily Rioz was flooded with annoyance. Damn it, he wasn’t in the mood for company.

“Speaking,” he said.

“I thought I had your ship spotted. How are you?”

“Fine. That you, Ted?”

“That’s right,” said Long.

“Anything wrong on the fragment?”

“Nothing. I’m out here floating. “

“You?”

“It gets me, too, occasionally. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Nice,” agreed Rioz.

“You know, I’ve read Earth books—”

“Grounder books, you mean.” Rioz yawned and found it difficult under the circumstances to use the expression with the proper amount of resentment.

“—and sometimes I read descriptions of people lying on grass,” continued Long. “You know, that green stuff like thin, long pieces of paper they have all over the ground down there, and they look up at the blue sky with clouds in it. Did you ever see any films of that?”

“Sure. It didn’t attract me. It looked cold.”

“I suppose it isn’t, though. After all, Earth is quite close to the Sun, and they say their atmosphere is thick enough to hold the heat. I must admit that personally I would hate to be caught under open sky with nothing on but clothes. Still, I imagine they like it.”

“Grounders are nuts!”

“They talk about the trees, big brown stalks, and the winds, air movements, you know.”

“You mean drafts. They can keep that, too.”

“It doesn’t matter. The point is they describe it beautifully, almost passionately. Many times I’ve wondered, ‘What’s it really like? Will I ever feel it or is this something only Earthmen can possibly feel?’ I’ve felt so often that I was missing something vital. Now I know what it must be like. It’s this. Complete peace in the middle of a beauty-drenched universe.”

Rioz said, “They wouldn’t like it. The Grounders, I mean. They’re so used to their own lousy little world they wouldn’t appreciate what it’s like to float and look down on Saturn.”

He flipped his body slightly and began swaying back and forth about his center of mass, slowly, soothingly.

Long said, “Yes, I think so too. They’re slaves to their planet. Even if they come to Mars, it will only be their children that are free. There’ll be starships someday; great, huge things that can carry thousands of people and maintain their self-contained equilibrium for decades, maybe centuries. Mankind will spread through the whole Galaxy. But people will have to live their lives out on shipboard until new methods of interstellar travel are developed, so it will be Martians, not planetbound Earthmen, who will colonize the Universe. That’s Inevitable. It’s got to be. It’s the Martian way.”

But Rioz made no answer. He had dropped off to sleep again, rocking and swaying gently, half a million miles above Saturn.

7

The work shift of the ring fragment was the tail of the coin. The weightlessness, peace, and privacy of the space-float gave place to something that had neither peace nor privacy, Even the weightlessness, which continued, became more a purgatory than a paradise under the new conditions..

Try to manipulate an ordinary nonportable heat projector. It could be lifted despite the fact that it was six feet high and wide and almost solid metal, since it weighed only a fraction of an ounce. But its inertia was exactly what it had always been, which meant that if it wasn’t moved into position very slowly, it would just keep going, taking you with it. Then you would have to hike the pseudo-grav field of your suit and come down with a jar.

Keralski had hiked the field a little too high and he came down a little too roughly, with the projector coming down with him at a dangerous angle. His crushed ankle had been the first casualty of the expedition.

Rioz was swearing fluently and nearly continuously. He continued to have the impulse to drag the back of his hand across his forehead in order to wipe away the accumulating sweat. The few times that he had succumbed to the impulse, metal had met silicone with a clash that rang loudly inside his suit, but served no useful purpose. The desiccators within the suit were sucking at maximum and, of course, recovering the water and restoring ion-exchanged liquid, containing a careful proportion of salt, into the appropriate receptacle.

Rioz yelled, “Damn it, Dick, wait till I give the word, will you?”

And Swenson’s voice rang in his ears, “Well, how long am I supposed to sit here?”

“Till I say,” replied Rioz.

He strengthened pseudo-grav and lifted the projector a bit. He released pseudo-grav, insuring that the projector would stay in place for minutes even if he withdrew support altogether. He kicked the cable out of the way (it stretched beyond the close “horizon” to a power source that was out of sight) and touched the release.

The material of which the fragment was composed bubbled and vanished under its touch. A section of the lip of the tremendous cavity he had already carved into its substance melted away and a roughness in its contour had disappeared.

“Try it now,” called Rioz.

Swenson was in the ship that was hovering nearly over Rioz’s head.

Swenson called, “ All clear?”

“I told you to go ahead.”

It was a feeble flicker of steam that issued from one of the ship’s forward vents. The ship drifted down toward the ring fragment. Another flicker adjusted a tendency to drift sidewise. It came down straight.

A third flicker to the rear slowed it to a feather rate.

Rioz watched tensely. “Keep “her coming. You’ll make it. You’ll make it.”

The rear of the ship entered the hole, nearly filling it. The bellying walls came closer and closer to its rim. There was a grinding vibration as the ship’s motion halted.

It was Swenson’s turn to curse. “It doesn’t fit,” he said.

Rioz threw the projector groundward in a passion and went flailing up into space. The projector kicked up a white crystalline dust all about it, and when Rioz came down under pseudo-grav, he did the same.

He said, “You went in on the bias, you dumb Grounder.”

“I hit it level, you dirt-eating farmer.”

Backward-pointing side jets of the ship were blasting more strongly than before, and Rioz hopped to get out of the way.

The ship scraped up from the pit, then shot into space half a mile before forward jets could bring it to a halt.

Swenson said tensely, “We’ll spring half a dozen plates if we do this once again. Get it right, will you?”

“I’ll get it right. Don’t worry about it. Just you come in right.”

Rioz jumped upward and allowed himself to climb three hundred yards to get an overall look at the cavity. The gouge marks of the ship were plain enough. They were concentrated at one point halfway down the pit. He would get that.

It began to melt outward under the blaze of the projector.

Half an hour later the ship snuggled neatly into its cavity, and Swenson, wearing his space suit, emerged to join Rioz. Swenson said, “If you want to step in and climb out of the suit, I’ll take care of the icing.”

“It’s all right,” said Rioz. “I’d just as soon sit here and watch Saturn.”

He sat down at the lip of the pit. There was a six-foot gap between it and the ship. In some places about the circle, it was two feet; in a few places, even merely a matter of inches. You couldn’t expect a better fit out of handwork. The final adjustment would be made by steaming ice gently and letting it freeze into the cavity between the lip and the ship.

Saturn moved visibly across the sky, its vast bulk inching below the horizon.”

Rioz said, “How many ships are left to put in place?”

Swenson said, “Last I heard, it was eleven. We’re in now, so that means only ten. Seven of the ones that are placed are iced in. Two or three are dismantled.”

“We’re coming along fine.”

“There’s plenty to do yet. Don’t forget the main jets at the other end. And the cables and the power lines. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll make it. On the way out, it didn’t bother me so much, but just now I was sitting at the controls and I was saying, ‘We won’t make it. We’ll sit out here and starve and die with nothing but Saturn over us.’ It makes me feel—”

He didn’t explain how it made him feel. He just sat there. Rioz said, “You think too damn much.”

“It’s different with you,” said Swenson. “I keep thinking of Pete—and Dora.”

“What for? She said you could go, didn’t she? The Commissioner gave her that talk on patriotism and how you’d be a hero and set for life once you got back, and she said you could go. You didn’t sneak out the way Adams did.”

“Adams is different. That wife of his should have been shot when she was born. Some women can make hell for a guy, can’t they? She didn’t want him to go—but she’d probably rather he didn’t come back if she can get his settlement pay.”

“What’s your kick, then? Dora wants you back, doesn’t she?”

Swenson sighed. “I never treated her right.”

“You turned over your pay, it seems to me. I wouldn’t do that for any woman. Money for value received, not a cent more.”

“Money isn’t it. I get to thinking out here. A woman likes company. A kid needs his father. What am I doing way out here?”

“Getting set to go home.”

“Ah-h, you don’t understand.”

8

Ted Long wandered over the ridged surface of the ring fragment with his spirits as icy as the ground he walked on. It had all seemed perfectly logical back on Mars, but that was Mars. He had worked it out carefully in his mind in perfectly reasonable steps. He could still remember exactly how it went..

It didn’t take a ton of water to move a ton of ship. It was not mass equals mass, but mass time!! velocity equals mass times velocity. It didn’t matter, in other words, whether you shot out a ton of water at a mile a second or a hundred pounds of water. at twenty miles a second. You got the same final velocity out of the ship.

That meant the jet nozzles had to be made narrower and the steam hotter. But then drawbacks appeared. The narrower the nozzle, the more energy was lost in friction and turbulence. The hotter the steam, the more refractory the nozzle had to be and the shorter its life. The limit in that direction was quickly reached.

Then, since a given weight of water could move considerably more than its own weight under the narrow-nozzle conditions, it paid to be big. The bigger the water—storage space, the larger the size of the actual travel-head, even in proportion. So they started to make liners heavier and bigger. But then the larger the shell, the heavier the bracings, the more difficult the weldings, the more exacting the engineering requirements. At the moment, the limit in that direction had been reached also.

And then he had put his finger on what had seemed to him to be the basic flaw—the original unswervable conception that the fuel had to be placed inside the ship; the metal had to be built to encircle a million tons of water.

Why? Water did not have to be water. It could be ice, and ice could be shaped. Holes could be melted into it. Travelheads and jets could be fitted into it. Cables could hold travelheads and jets stiffly together under the influence of magnetic field-force grips.

Long felt the trembling of the ground he walked on. He was at the head of the fragment. A dozen ships were blasting in and out of sheaths carved in its substance, and the fragment shuddered under the continuing impact.

The ice didn’t have to be quarried. It existed in proper chunks in the rings of Saturn. That’s all the rings were—pieces of nearly pure ice, circling Saturn. So spectroscopy stated and so it had turned out to be. He was standing on one such piece now, over two miles long, nearly one mile thick. It was almost half a billion tons of water, all in one piece, and he was standing on it.

But now he was face-to-face with the realities of life. He had never told the men just how quickly he had expected to set up the fragment as a ship, but in his heart, he had imagined it would be two days. It was a week now and he didn’t dare to estimate the remaining time. He no longer even had any confidence that the task was a possible one. Would they be able to control jets with enough delicacy through leads slung across two miles of ice to manipulate out of Saturn’s dragging gravity?

Drinking water was low, though they could always distill more out of the ice. Still, the food stores were not in a good way either.

He paused, looked up into the sky, eyes straining. Was the object growing larger? He ought to measure its distance. Actually, he lacked the spirit to add that trouble to the others. His mind slid back to greater immediacies.

Morale, at least, was high. The men seemed to enjoy being out Saturn-way. They were the first humans to penetrate this far, the first to pass the asteroids, the first to see Jupiter like a glowing pebble to the naked eye, the first to see Saturn-like that.

He didn’t think fifty practical, case-hardened, shell-snatching Scavengers would take time to feel that sort of emotion. But they did. And they were proud.

Two men and a half-buried ship slid up the moving horizon as he walked.

He called crisply, “Hello, there!”

Rioz answered, “That you, Ted?”

“You bet. Is that Dick with you?”

“Sure. Come on, sit down. We were just getting ready to ice in and we were looking for an excuse to delay.”

“I’m not,” said Swenson promptly. “When will we be leaving, Ted?”

“As soon as we get through. That’s no answer, is it?”

Swenson said dispiritedly, “I suppose there isn’t any other answer.”

Long looked up, staring at the irregular bright splotch in the sky.

Rioz followed his glance. “What’s the matter?”

For a moment, Long did not reply. The sky was black otherwise and the ring fragments were an orange dust against it. Saturn was more than three-fourths below the horizon and the rings were going with it. Half a mile away a ship bounded past the icy rim of the planetoid into the sky, was orange—lit by Saturn—light, and sank down again.

The ground trembled gently.

Rioz said, “Something bothering you about the Shadow?”

They called it that. It was the nearest fragment of the rings, quite close considering that they were at the outer rim of the rings, where the pieces spread themselves relatively thin. It was perhaps twenty miles off, a jagged mountain, its shape clearly visible.

“How does it look to you?” asked Long.

Rioz shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I don’t see anything wrong.”

“Doesn’t it seem to be getting larger?”

“Why should it?”

“Well, doesn’t it?” Long insisted.

Rioz and Swenson stared at it thoughtfully.

“It does look bigger,” said Swenson.

“You’re just putting the notion into our minds,” Rioz argued. “If it were getting bigger, it would be coming closer.”

“What’s impossible about that?”

“These things are stable orbits.”

“They were when we came here,” said Long. “There, did you feel that?”

The ground had trembled again.

Long said, “We’ve been blasting this thing for a week now. First, twenty-five ships landed on it, which changed its momentum right there. Not much, of course. Then we’ve been melting parts of it away and our ships have been blasting in and out of it—all at one end, too. In a week, we may have changed its orbit just a bit. The two fragments, this one and the Shadow, might be converging.”

“It’s got plenty of room to miss us in.” Rioz watched it thoughtfully. “Besides, if we can’t even tell for sure that it’s getting bigger, how quickly can it be moving? Relative to us, I mean.”

“It doesn’t have to be moving quickly. Its momentum is as large as ours, so that, however gently it hits, we’ll be nudged completely out of our orbit, maybe in toward Saturn, where we don’t want to go. As a matter of fact, ice has a very low tensile strength, so that both planetoids might break up into gravel.”

Swenson rose to his feet. “Damn it, if I can tell you a shell is moving a thousand miles away, I can tell what a mountain is doing twenty miles away.” He turned toward the ship.

Long didn’t stop him.

Rioz said, “There’s a nervous guy.”

The neighboring planetoid rose to zenith, passed overhead, began sinking. Twenty minutes later, the horizon opposite that portion behind which Saturn had disappeared burst into orange flame as its bulk began lifting again.

Rioz called into his radio, “Hey, Dick, are you dead in there?”

“I’m checking,” came the muffled response.

“Is it moving?” asked Long.

“Yes.”

“Toward us?”

There was a pause. Swenson’s voice was a sick one. “On the nose, Ted. Intersection of orbits will take place in three days.”

“You’re crazy!” yelled Rioz.

“I checked four times,” said Swenson.

Long thought blankly, What do we do now?

9

Some of the men were having trouble with the cables. They had to be laid precisely; their geometry had to be very nearly perfect for the magnetic field to attain maximum strength. In space, or even in air, it wouldn’t have mattered. The cables would have lined up automatically once the juice went on.

Here it was different. A gouge had to be plowed along the planetoid’s surface and into it the cable had to be laid. If it were not lined up within a few minutes of arc of the calculated direction, a torque would be applied to the entire planetoid, with consequent loss of energy, none of which could be spared. The gouges then had to be redriven, the cables shifted and iced into the new positions.

The men plodded wearily through the routine.

And then the word reached them:

“All hands to the jets!”

Scavengers could not be said to be the type that took kindly to discipline. It was a grumbling, growling, muttering group that set about disassembling the jets of the ships that yet remained intact, carrying them to the tail end of the planetoid, grubbing them into position, and stringing the leads along the surface.

It was almost twenty-four hours before one of them looked into the sky and said, “Holy jeepers!” followed by something less printable.

His neighbor looked and said, “I’ll be damned!”

Once they noticed, all did. It became the most astonishing fact in the Universe.

“Look at the Shadow!”

It was spreading across the sky like an infected wound. Men looked at it, found it had doubled its size, wondered why they hadn’t noticed that sooner.

Work came to a virtual halt. They besieged Ted Long.

He said, “We can’t leave. We don’t have the fuel to see us back to Mars and we don’t have the equipment to capture another planetoid. So we’ve got to stay. Now the Shadow is creeping in on us because our blasting has thrown us out of orbit. We’ve got to change that by continuing the blasting. Since we can’t blast the front end any more without endangering the ship we’re building, let’s try another way.”

They went back to work on the jets with a furious energy that received impetus every half hour when the Shadow rose again over the horizon, bigger and more menacing than before.

Long had no assurance that it would work. Even if the jets would respond to the distant controls, even if the supply of water, which depended upon a storage chamber opening directly into the icy body of the planetoid, with built-in heat projectors steaming the propulsive fluid directly into the driving cells, were adequate, there was still no certainty that the body of the planetoid without a magnetic cable sheathing would hold together under the enormously disruptive stresses.

“Ready!” came the signal in Long’s receiver.

Long called, “Ready!” and depressed the contact.

The vibration grew about him. The star field in the visiplate trembled.

In the rearview, there was a distant gleaming spume of swiftly moving ice crystals.

“It’s blowing!” was the cry. It kept on blowing. Long dared not stop. For six hours, it blew, hissing, bubbling, steaming into space; the body of the planetoid converted to vapor and hurled away.

The Shadow came closer until men did nothing but stare at the mountain in the sky, surpassing Saturn itself in spectacularity. Its every groove and valley was a plain scar upon its face. But when it passed through the planetoid’s orbit, it crossed more than half a mile behind its then position.

The steam jet ceased.

Long bent in his seat and covered his eyes. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He could eat now, though. Not another planetoid was close enough to interrupt them, even if it began an approach that very moment.

Back on the planetoid’s surface, Swenson said, “ All the time I watched that damned rock coming down, I kept saying to myself, ‘This can’t happen. We can’t let it happen.’”

“Hell,” said Rioz, “we were all nervous. Did you see Jim Davis? He was green. I was a little jumpy myself.”

“That’s not it. It wasn’t just—dying, you know. I was thinking—I know it’s funny, but I can’t help it—I was thinking that Dora warned me I’d get myself killed, she’ll never let me hear the last of it. Isn’t that a crummy sort of attitude at a time like that?”

“Listen,” said Rioz, “you wanted to get married, so you got married. Why come to me with your troubles?”

10

The flotilla, welded into a single unit, was returning over its mighty course from Saturn to Mars. Each day it flashed over a length of space it had taken nine days outward.

Ted Long had put the entire crew on emergency. With twenty-five ships embedded in the planetoid taken out of Saturn’s rings and unable to move or maneuver independently, the coordination of their power sources into unified blasts was a ticklish problem. The jarring that took place on the first day of travel nearly shook them out from under their hair.

That, at least, smoothed itself out as the velocity raced upward under the steady thrust from behind. They passed the one-hundred-thousand-mile-an-hour mark late on the second day, and climbed steadily toward the million-mile mark and beyond.

Long’s ship, which formed the needle point of the frozen fleet, was the only one which possessed a five-way view of space. It was an uncomfortable position under the circumstances. Long found himself watching tensely, imagining somehow that the stars would slowly begin to slip backward, to whizz past them, under the influence of the multi-ship’s tremendous rate of travel.

They didn’t, of course. They remained nailed to the black backdrop, their distance scorning with patient immobility any speed mere man could achieve.

The men complained bitterly after the first few days. It was not only that they were deprived of the space-float. They were burdened by much more than the ordinary pseudo-gravity field of the ships, by the effects of the fierce acceleration under which they were living. Long himself was weary to death of the relentless pressure against hydraulic cushions.

They took to shutting off the jet thrusts one hour out of every four and Long fretted.

It had been just over a year that he had last seen Mars shrinking in an observation window from this ship, which had then been an independent entity. What had happened since then? Was the colony still there?

In something like a growing panic, Long sent out radio pulses toward Mars daily, with the combined power of twenty-five ships behind it. There was no answer. He expected none. Mars and Saturn were on opposite sides of the Sun now, and until he mounted high enough above the ecliptic to get the Sun well beyond the line connecting himself and Mars, solar interference would prevent any signal from getting through.

High above the outer rim of the Asteroid Belt, they reached maximum velocity. With short spurts of power from first one side jet, then another, the huge vessel reversed itself. The composite jet in the rear began its mighty roaring once again, but now the result was deceleration.

They passed a hundred million miles over the Sun, curving down to intersect the orbit of Mars.

A week out of Mars, answering signals were heard for the first time, fragmentary, ether-torn, and incomprehensible, but they were coming from Mars. Earth and Venus were at angles sufficiently different to leave no doubt of that.

Long relaxed. There were still humans on Mars, at any rate.

Two days out of Mars, the signal was strong and clear and Sankov was at the other end.

Sankov said, “Hello, son. It’s three in the morning here. Seems like people have no consideration for an old man. Dragged me right out of bed.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Don’t be. They were following orders. I’m afraid to ask, son. Anyone hurt? Maybe dead?”

“No deaths, sir. Not one.”

“And—and the water? Any left?”

Long said with an effort at nonchalance, “Enough.”

“In that case, get home as fast as you can. Don’t take any chances, of course.”

“There’s trouble, then.”

“Fair to middling. When will you come down?”

“Two days. Can you hold out that long?”

“I’ll hold out.”

Forty hours later Mars had grown to a ruddy-orange ball that filled the ports and they were in the final planet-landing spiral.

“Slowly,” Long said to himself, “slowly.” Under these conditions, even the thin atmosphere of Mars could do dreadful damage if they moved through it too quickly.

Since they came in from well above the ecliptic, their spiral passed from north to south. A polar cap shot whitely below them, then the much smaller one of the summer hemisphere, the large one again, the small one, at longer and longer intervals. The planet approached closer, the landscape began to show features.

“Prepare for landing!” called Long.

11

Sankov did his best to look placid, which was difficult considering how closely the boys had shaved their return. But it had worked out well enough.

Until a few days before, he had no sure knowledge that they had survived. It seemed more likely—inevitable, almost—that they were nothing but frozen corpses somewhere in the trackless stretches from Mars to Saturn, new planetoids that had once been alive.

The Committee had been dickering with him for weeks before the news had come. They had insisted on his signature to the paper for the sake of appearances. It would look like an agreement, voluntarily and mutually arrived at. But Sankov knew well that, given complete obstinacy on his part, they would act unilaterally and be damned with appearances. It seemed fairly certain that Hilder’s election was secure now and they would take the chance of arousing a reaction of sympathy for Mars.

So he dragged out the negotiations, dangling before them always the possibility of surrender.

And then he heard from Long and concluded the deal quickly.

The papers had lain before him and he had made a last statement for the benefit of the reporters who were present.

He said, “Total imports of water from Earth are twenty million tons a year. This is declining as we develop our own piping system. If I sign this paper agreeing to an embargo, our industry will be paralyzed, any possibilities of expansion will halt. It looks to me as if that can’t be what’s in Earth’s mind, can it?”

Their eyes met his and held only a hard glitter. Assemblyman Digby had already been replaced and they were unanimous against him.

The Committee Chairman impatiently pointed out, “You have said all this before.”

“I know, but right now I’m kind of getting ready to sign and I want it clear in my head. Is Earth set and determined to bring us to an end here?”

“Of course not. Earth is interested in conserving its irreplaceable water supply, nothing else.”

“You have one and a half quintillion tons of water on Earth.”

The Committee Chairman said, “We cannot spare water.”

And Sankov had signed.

That had been the final note he wanted. Earth had one and a half quintillion tons of water and could spare none of it.

Now, a day and a half later, the Committee and the reporters waited in the spaceport dome. Through thick, curving windows, they could see the bare and empty grounds of Mars Spaceport.

The Committee Chairman asked with annoyance, “How much longer do we have to wait? And, if you don’t mind, what are we waiting for?”

Sankov said, “Some of our boys have been out in space, out past the asteroids.”

The Committee Chairman removed a pair of spectacles and cleaned them with a snowy-white handkerchief. “ And they’re returning?”

“They are.”

The Chairman shrugged, lifted his eyebrows in the direction of the reporters.

In the smaller room adjoining, a knot of women and children clustered about another window. Sankov stepped back a bit to cast a glance toward them. He would much rather have been with them, been part of their excitement and tension. He, like them, had waited over a year now. He, like them, had thought, over and over again, that the men must be dead.

“You see that?” said Sankov, pointing.

“Hey!” cried a reporter. “It’s a ship!”

A confused shouting came from the adjoining room.

It wasn’t a ship so much as a bright dot obscured by a drifting white cloud. The cloud grew larger and began to have form. It was a double streak against the sky, the lower ends billowing out and upward again. As it dropped still closer, the bright dot at the upper end took on a crudely cylindrical form.

It was rough and craggy, but where the sunlight hit, brilliant highlights bounced back.

The cylinder dropped toward the ground with the ponderous slowness characteristic of space vessels. It hung suspended on those blasting jets and settled down upon the recoil of tons of matter hurling downward like a tired man dropping into his easy chair.

And as it did so, a silence fell upon all within the dome. The women and children in one room, the politicians and reporters in the other remained frozen, heads craned incredulously upward.

The cylinder’s landing flanges, extending far below the two rear jets, touched ground and sank into the pebbly morass. And then the ship was motionless and the jet action ceased.

But the silence continued in the dome. It continued for a long time.

Men came clambering down the sides of the immense vessel, inching down, down the two-mile trek to the ground, with spikes on their shoes and ice axes in their hands. They were gnats against the blinding surface.

One of the reporters croaked, “What is it?”

“That,” said Sankov calmly, “happens to be a chunk of matter that spent its time scooting around Saturn as part of its rings. Our boys fitted it out with travel-head and jets and ferried it home. It just turns out the fragments in Saturn’s rings are made up out of ice.”

He spoke into a continuing deathlike silence. “That thing that looks like a spaceship is just a mountain of hard water. If it were standing like that on Earth, it would be melting into a puddle and maybe it would break under its own weight. Mars is colder and has less gravity, so there’s no such danger.

“Of course, once we get this thing really organized, we can have water stations on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and on the asteroids. We can scale in chunks of Saturn’s rings and pick them up and send them on at the various stations. Our Scavengers are good at that sort of thing.

“We’ll have all the water we need. That one chunk you see is just under a cubic mile—or about what Earth would send us in two hundred years. The boys used quite a bit of it coming back from Saturn. They made it in five weeks, they tell me, and used up about a hundred million tons. But, Lord, that didn’t make any dent at all in that mountain. Are you getting all this, boys?”

He turned to the reporters. There was no doubt they were getting it.

He said, “Then get this, too. Earth is worried about its water supply. It only has one and a half quintillion tons. It can’t spare us a single ton out of it. Write down that we folks on Mars are worried about Earth and don’t want anything to happen to Earth people. Write down that we’ll sell water to Earth. Write down that we’ll let them have million-ton lots for a reasonable fee. Write down that in ten years, we figure we can sell it in cubic-mile lots. Write down that Earth can quit worrying because Mars can sell it all the water it needs and wants.”

The Committee Chairman was past hearing. He was feeling the future rushing in. Dimly he could see the reporters grinning as they wrote furiously.

Grinning.

He could hear the grin become laughter on Earth as Mars turned the tables so neatly on the anti-Wasters. He could hear the laughter thunder from every continent when word of the fiasco spread. And he could see the abyss, deep and black as space, into which would drop forever the political hopes of John Hilder and of every opponent of space flight left on Earth—his own included, of course.

In the adjoining room, Dora Swenson screamed with joy, and Peter, grown two inches, jumped up and down, calling, “Daddy! Daddy!”

Richard Swenson had just stepped off the extremity of the flange and, face showing clearly through the clear silicone of the headpiece, marched toward the dome.

“Did you ever see a guy look so happy?” asked Ted Long. “Maybe there’s something in this marriage business.”

“Ah, you’ve just been out in space too long,” Rioz said.

Franchise

Linda, age ten, was the only one of the family who seemed to enjoy being awake.

Norman Muller could hear her now through his own drugged, unhealthy coma. (He had finally managed to fall asleep an hour earlier but even then it was more like exhaustion than sleep.)

She was at his bedside now, shaking him. “Daddy, Daddy, wake up. Wake up!”

He suppressed a groan. “All right, Linda.”

“But, Daddy, there’s more policemen around than any time! Police cars and everything!”

Norman Muller gave up and rose blearily to his elbows. The day was beginning. It was faintly stirring toward dawn outside, the germ of a miserable gray that looked about as miserably gray as he felt. He could hear Sarah, his wife, shuffling about breakfast duties in the kitchen. His father-in-law, Matthew, was hawking strenuously in the bathroom. No doubt Agent Handley was ready and waiting for him.

This was the day.

Election Day!

To begin with, it had been like every other year. Maybe a little worse, because it was a presidential year, but no worse than other presidential years if it came to that.

The politicians spoke about the guh-reat electorate and the vast electronic intelligence that was its servant. The press analyzed the situation with industrial computers (the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had their own computers) and were full of little hints as to what would be forthcoming. Commentators and columnists pinpointed the crucial state and county in happy contradiction to one another.

The first hint that it would not be like every other year was when Sarah Muller said to her husband on the evening of October 4 (with Election Day exactly a month off), “Cantwell Johnson says that Indiana will be the state this year. He’s the fourth one. Just think, our state this time.”

Matthew Hortenweiler took his fleshy face from behind the paper, stared dourly at his daughter and growled, “Those fellows are paid to tell lies. Don’t listen to them.”

“Four of them, Father,” said Sarah mildly. “They all say Indiana.”

“Indiana is a key state, Matthew,” said Norman, just as mildly, “on account of the Hawkins-Smith Act and this mess in Indianapolis. It—”

Matthew twisted his old face alarmingly and rasped out, “No one says Bloomington or Monroe County, do they?”

“Well—” said Norman.

Linda, whose little pointed-chinned face had been shifting from one speaker to the next, said pipingly, “You going to be voting this year, Daddy?”

Norman smiled gently and said, “I don’t think so, dear.”

But this was in the gradually growing excitement of an October in a presidential election year and Sarah had led a quiet life with dreams for her companions. She said longingly, “Wouldn’t that be wonderful, though?”

“If I voted?” Norman Muller had a small blond mustache that had given him a debonair quality in the young Sarah’s eyes, but which, with gradual graying, had declined merely to lack of distinction. His forehead bore deepening lines born of uncertainty and, in general, he had never seduced his clerkly soul with the thought that he was either born great or would under any circumstances achieve greatness. He had a wife, a job and a little girl, and except under extraordinary conditions of elation or depression was inclined to consider that to be an adequate bargain struck with life.

So he was a little embarrassed and more than a little uneasy at the direction his wife’s thoughts were taking. “Actually, my dear,” he said, “there are two hundred million people in the country, and, with odds like that, I don’t think we ought to waste our time wondering about it.”

His wife said, “Why, Norman, it’s no such thing like two hundred million and you know it. In the first place, only people between twenty and sixty are eligible and it’s always men, so that puts it down to maybe fifty million to one. Then, if it’s really Indiana—”

“Then it’s about one and a quarter million to one. You wouldn’t want me to bet in a horse race against those odds, now, would you? Let’s have supper.”

Matthew muttered from behind his newspaper, “Damned foolishness.”

Linda asked again, “You going to be voting this year, Daddy?”

Norman shook his head and they all adjourned to the dining room.

By October 20, Sarah’s excitement was rising rapidly. Over the coffee, she announced that Mrs. Schultz, having a cousin who was the secretary of an Assemblyman, said that all the “smart money” was on Indiana.

“She says President Villers is even going to make a speech at Indianapolis.”

Norman Muller, who had had a hard day at the store, nudged the statement with a raising of eyebrows and let it go at that.

Matthew Hortenweiler, who was chronically dissatisfied with Washington, said, “If Villers makes a speech in Indiana, that means he thinks Multivac will pick Arizona. He wouldn’t have the guts to go closer, the mush-head.”

Sarah, who ignored her father whenever she could decently do so, said, “I don’t know why they don’t announce the state as soon as they can, and then the county and so on. Then the people who were eliminated could relax.”

“If they did anything like that,” pointed out Norman, “the politicians would follow the announcements like vultures. By the time it was narrowed down to a township, you’d have a Congressman or two at every street corner.”

Matthew narrowed his eyes and brushed angrily at his sparse, gray hair. “They’re vultures, anyhow. Listen—”

Sarah murmured, “Now, Father—”

Matthew’s voice rumbled over her protest without as much as a stumble or hitch. “Listen, I was around when they set up Multivac. It would end partisan politics, they said. No more voters’ money wasted on campaigns. No more grinning nobodies high-pressured and advertising-campaigned into Congress or the White House. So what happens. More campaigning than ever, only now they do it blind. They’ll send guys to Indiana on account of the Hawkins-Smith Act and other guys to California in case it’s the Joe Hammer situation that turns out crucial. I say, wipe out all that nonsense. Back to the good old—”

Linda asked suddenly, “Don’t you want Daddy to vote this year, Grandpa?”

Matthew glared at the young girl. “Never you mind, now.” He turned back to Norman and Sarah. “There was a time I voted. Marched right up to the polling booth, stuck my fist on the levers and voted. There was nothing to it. I just said: This fellow’s my man and I’m voting for him. That’s the way it should be.”

Linda said excitedly, “You voted, Grandpa? You really did?”

Sarah leaned forward quickly to quiet what might easily become an incongruous story drifting about the neighborhood, “It’s nothing, Linda. Grandpa doesn’t really mean voted. Everyone did that kind of voting, your grandpa, too, but it wasn’t really voting.”

Matthew roared, “It wasn’t when I was a little boy. I was twenty-two and I voted for Langley and it was real voting. My vote didn’t count for much, maybe, but it was as good as anyone else’s. Anyone else’s. And no Multivac to—”

Norman interposed, “All right, Linda, time for bed. And stop asking questions about voting. When you grow up, you’ll understand all about it.”

He kissed her with antiseptic gentleness and she moved reluctantly out of range under maternal prodding and a promise that she might watch the bedside video till 9:15, if she was prompt about the bathing ritual.

Linda said, “Grandpa,” and stood with her chin down and her hands behind her back until his newspaper lowered itself to the point where shaggy eyebrows and eyes, nested in fine wrinkles, showed themselves. It was Friday, October 31.

He said, “Yes?”

Linda came closer and put both her forearms on one of the old man’s knees so that he had to discard his newspaper altogether.

She said, “Grandpa, did you really once vote?”

He said, “You heard me say I did, didn’t you? Do you think I tell fibs?”

“N—no, but Mamma says everybody voted then.”

“So they did.”

“But how could they? How could everybody vote?”

Matthew stared at her solemnly, then lifted her and put her on his knee.

He even moderated the tonal qualities of his voice. He said, “You see, Linda, till about forty years ago, everybody always voted. Say we wanted to decide who was to be the new President of the United States. The Democrats and Republicans would both nominate someone, and everybody would say who they wanted. When Election Day was over, they would count how many people wanted the Democrat and how many wanted the Republican. Whoever had more votes was elected. You see?”

Linda nodded and said, “How did all the people know who to vote for? Did Multivac tell them?”

Matthew’s eyebrows hunched down and he looked severe. “They just used their own judgment, girl.”

She edged away from him, and he lowered his voice again, “I’m not angry at you, Linda. But, you see, sometimes it took all night to count what everyone said and people were impatient. So they invented special machines which could look at the first few votes and compare them with the votes from the same places in previous years. That way the machine could compute how the total vote would be and who would be elected. You see?”

She nodded. “Like Multivac.”

“The first computers were much smaller than Multivac. But the machines grew bigger and they could tell how the election would go from fewer and fewer votes. Then, at last, they built Multivac and it can tell from just one voter.”

Linda smiled at having reached a familiar part of the story and said, “That’s nice.”

Matthew frowned and said, “No, it’s not nice. I don’t want a machine telling me how I would have voted just because some joker in Milwaukee says he’s against higher tariffs. Maybe I want to vote cockeyed just for the pleasure of it. Maybe I don’t want to vote. Maybe—”

But Linda had wriggled from his knee and was beating a retreat.

She met her mother at the door. Her mother, who was still wearing her coat and had not even had time to remove her hat, said breathlessly, “Run, along, Linda. Don’t get in Mother’s way.”

Then she said to Matthew, as she lifted her hat from her head and patted her hair back into place, “I’ve been at Agatha’s.”

Matthew stared at her censoriously and did not even dignify that piece of information with a grunt as he groped for his newspaper.

Sarah said, as she unbuttoned her coat, “Guess what she said?”

Matthew flattened out his newspaper for reading purposes with a sharp crackle and said, “Don’t much care.”

Sarah said, “Now, Father—” But she had no time for anger. The news i had to be told and Matthew was the only recipient handy, so she went on, “Agatha’s Joe is a policeman, you know, and he says a whole truckload of secret service men came into Bloomington last night.”

“They’re not after me.”

“Don’t you see, Father? Secret service agents, and it’s almost election time. In Bloomington.”

“Maybe they’re after a bank robber.”

“There hasn’t been a bank robbery in town in ages.... Father, you’re hopeless.”

She stalked away.

Nor did Norman Muller receive the news with noticeably greater excitement.

“Now, Sarah, how did Agatha’s Joe know they were secret service agents?” he asked calmly. “They wouldn’t go around with identification cards pasted on their foreheads.”

But by next evening, with November a day old, she could say triumphantly, “It’s just everyone in Bloomington that’s waiting for someone local to be the voter. The Bloomington News as much as said so on video.”

Norman stirred uneasily. He couldn’t deny it, and his heart was sinking. If Bloomington was really to be hit by Multivac’s lightning, it would mean newspapermen, video shows, tourists, all sorts of—strange upsets. Norman liked the quiet routine of his life, and the distant stir of politics was getting uncomfortably close.

He said, “It’s all rumor. Nothing more.”

“You wait and see, then. You just wait and see.”

As things turned out, there was very little time to wait, for the doorbell rang insistently, and when Norman Muller opened it and said, “Yes?” a tall, grave-faced man said, “Are you Norman Muller?”

Norman said, “Yes,” again, but in a strange dying voice. It was not difficult to see from the stranger’s bearing that he was one carrying authority, and the nature of his errand suddenly became as inevitably obvious as it had, until the moment before, been unthinkably impossible.

The man presented credentials, stepped into the house, closed the door behind him and said ritualistically, “Mr. Norman Muller, it is necessary for me to inform you on the behalf of the President of the United States that you have been chosen to represent the American electorate on Tuesday, November 4, 2008.”

Norman Muller managed, with difficulty, to walk unaided to his chair. He sat there, white-faced and almost insensible, while Sarah brought water, slapped his hands in panic and moaned to her husband between clenched teeth, “Don’t be sick, Norman. Don’t be sick. They’ll pick someone else.”

When Norman could manage to talk, he whispered, “I’m sorry, sir.”

The secret service agent had removed his coat, unbuttoned his jacket and was sitting at ease on the couch.

“It’s all right,” he said, and the mark of officialdom seemed to have vanished with the formal announcement and leave him simply a large and rather friendly man. “This is the sixth time I’ve made the announcement and I’ve seen all kinds of reactions. Not one of them was the kind you see on the video. You know what I mean? A holy, dedicated look, and a character who says, ‘It will be a great privilege to serve my country.’ That sort of stuff.” The agent laughed comfortingly.

Sarah’s accompanying laugh held a trace of shrill hysteria.

The agent said, “Now you’re going to have me with you for a while. My name is Phil Handley. I’d appreciate it if you call me Phil. Mr. Muller can’t leave the house any more till Election Day. You’ll have to inform the department store that he’s sick, Mrs. Muller. You can go about your business for a while, but you’ll have to agree not to say a word about this. Right, Mrs. Muller?”

Sarah nodded vigorously. “No, sir. Not a word.”

“All right. But, Mrs. Muller,” Handley looked grave, “we’re not kidding now. Go out only if you must and you’ll be followed when you do. I’m sorry but that’s the way we must operate.”

“Followed?”

“It won’t be obvious. Don’t worry. And it’s only for two days till the formal announcement to the nation is made. Your daughter—”

“She’s in bed,” said Sarah hastily.

“Good. She’ll have to be told I’m a relative or friend staying with the family. If she does find out the truth, she’ll have to be kept in the house. Your father had better stay in the house in any case.”

“He won’t like that,” said Sarah.

“Can’t be helped. Now, since you have no others living with you—”

“You know all about us apparently,” whispered Norman.

“Quite a bit,” agreed Handley. “In any case, those are all my instructions to you for the moment. I’ll try to cooperate as much as I can and be as little of a nuisance as possible. The government will pay for my maintenance so I won’t be an expense to you. I’ll be relieved each night by someone who will sit up in this room, so there will be no problem about sleeping accommodations. Now, Mr. Muller—”

“Sir?”

“You can call me Phil,” said the agent again. “The purpose of the two-day preliminary before formal announcement is to get you used to your position. We prefer to have you face Multivac in as normal a state of mind as possible. Just relax and try to feel this is all in a day’s work. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Norman, and then shook his head violently. “But I don’t want the responsibility. Why me?”

“All right,” said Handley, “let’s get that straight to begin with. Multivac weighs all sorts of known factors, billions of them. One factor isn’t known, though, and won’t be known for a long time. That’s the reaction pattern of the human mind. All Americans are subjected to the molding pressure of what other Americans do and say, to the things that are done to him and the things he does to others. Any American can be brought to Multivac to have the bent of his mind surveyed. From that the bent of all other minds in the country can be estimated. Some Americans are better for the purpose than others at some given time, depending upon the happenings of that year. Multivac picked you as most representative this year. Not the smartest, or the strongest, or the luckiest, but just the most representative. Now we don’t question Multivac, do we?”

“Couldn’t it make a mistake?” asked Norman.

Sarah, who listened impatiently, interrupted to say, “Don’t listen to him* sir. He’s just nervous, you know. Actually, he’s very well read and he always follows politics very closely.”

Handley said, “Multivac makes the decisions, Mrs. Muller. It picked your husband.”

“But does it know everything?” insisted Norman wildly. “Couldn’t it have made a mistake?”

“Yes, it can. There’s no point in not being frank. In 1993, a selected Voter died of a stroke two hours before it was time for him to be notified. Multivac didn’t predict that; it couldn’t. A Voter might be mentally unstable, morally unsuitable, or, for that matter, disloyal. Multivac can’t know everything about everybody until he’s fed all the data there is. That’s why alternate selections are always held in readiness. I don’t think we’ll be using one this time. You’re in good health, Mr. Muller, and you’ve been carefully investigated. You qualify.”

Norman buried his face in his hands and sat motionless.

“By tomorrow morning, sir,” said Sarah, “he’ll be perfectly all right. He just has to get used to it, that’s all.”

“Of course,” said Handley.

In the privacy of their bedchamber, Sarah Muller expressed herself in other and stronger fashion. The burden of her lecture was, “So get hold of yourself, Norman. You’re trying to throw away the chance of a lifetime.”

Norman whispered desperately, “It frightens me, Sarah. The whole thing.”

“For goodness’ sake, why? What’s there to it but answering a question or two?”

“The responsibility is too great. I couldn’t face it.”

“What responsibility? There isn’t any. Multivac picked you. It’s Multivac’s responsibility. Everyone knows that.”

Norman sat up in bed in a sudden excess of rebellion and anguish. “Everyone is supposed to know that. But they don’t. They—”

“Lower your voice,” hissed Sarah icily. “They’ll hear you downtown.”

“They don’t,” said Norman, declining quickly to a whisper. “When they talk about the Ridgely administration of 1988, do they say he won them over with pie-in-the-sky promises and racist baloney? No! They talk about the ‘goddam MacComber vote,’ as though Humphrey MacComber was the only man who had anything to do with it because he faced Multivac. I’ve said it myself—only now I think the poor guy was just a truck farmer who didn’t ask to be picked. Why was it his fault more than anyone else’s? Now his name is a curse.”

“You’re just being childish,” said Sarah.

“I’m being sensible. I tell you, Sarah, I won’t accept. They can’t make me vote if I don’t want to. I’ll say I’m sick. I’ll say—”

But Sarah had had enough. “Now you listen to me,” she whispered in a cold fury. “You don’t have only yourself to think about. You know what it means to be Voter of the Year. A presidential year at that. It means publicity and fame and, maybe, buckets of money—”

“And then I go back to being a clerk.”

“You will not. You’ll have a branch managership at the least if you have any brains at all, and you will have, because I’ll tell you what to do. You control the kind of publicity if you play your cards right, and you can force Kennell Stores, Inc., into a tight contract and an escalator clause in connection with your salary and a decent pension plan.”

“That’s not the point in being Voter, Sarah.”

“That will be your point. If you don’t owe anything to yourself or to me —I’m not asking for myself—you owe something to Linda.”

Norman groaned.

“Well, don’t you?” snapped Sarah.

“Yes, dear,” murmured Norman.

On November 3, the official announcement was made and it was too late for Norman to back out even if he had been able to find the courage to make the attempt.

Their house was sealed off. Secret service agents made their appearance in the open, blocking off all approach.

At first the telephone rang incessantly, but Philip Handley with an engagingly apologetic smile took all calls. Eventually, the exchange shunted all calls directly to the police station.

Norman imagined that, in that way, he was spared not only the bubbling (and envious?) congratulations of friends, but also the egregious pressure of salesmen scenting a prospect and the designing smoothness of politicians from all over the nation.... Perhaps even death threats from the inevitable cranks.

Newspapers were forbidden to enter the house now in order to keep out weighted pressures, and television was gently but firmly disconnected, over Linda’s loud protests.

Matthew growled and stayed in his room; Linda, after the first flurry of excitement, sulked and whined because she could not leave the house; Sarah divided her time between preparation of meals for the present and plans for the future; and Norman’s depression lived and fed upon itself.

And the morning of Tuesday, November 4, 2008, came at last, and it was Election Day.

It was early breakfast, but only Norman Muller ate, and that mechanically. Even a shower and shave had not succeeded in either restoring him to reality or removing his own conviction that he was as grimy without as he felt grimy within.

Handley’s friendly voice did its best to shed some normality over the gray and unfriendly dawn. (The weather prediction had been for a cloudy day with prospects of rain before noon.)

Handley said, “We’ll keep this house insulated till Mr. Muller is back, but after that we’ll be off your necks.” The secret service agent was in full uniform now, including sidearms in heavily brassed holsters.

“You’ve been no trouble at all, Mr. Handley,” simpered Sarah.

Norman drank through two cups of black coffee, wiped his lips with a napkin, stood up and said haggardly, “I’m ready.”

Handley stood up, too. “Very well, sir. And thank you, Mrs. Muller, for your very kind hospitality.”

The armored car purred down empty streets. They were empty even for that hour of the morning.

Handley indicated that and said, “They always shift traffic away from the line of drive ever since the attempted bombing that nearly ruined the Leverett Election of ‘ninety-two.”

When the car stopped, Norman was helped out by the always polite Handley into an underground drive whose walls were lined with soldiers at attention.

He was led into a brightly lit room, in which three white-uniformed men greeted him smilingly.

Norman said sharply, “But this is the hospital.”

“There’s no significance to that,” said Handley at once. “It’s just that the hospital has the necessary facilities.”

“Well, what do I do?”

Handley nodded. One of the three men in white advanced and said, “I’ll take over now, agent.”

Handley saluted in an offhand manner and left the room.

The man in white said, “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Muller? I’m John Paulson, Senior Computer. These are Sajn Levine and Peter Dorogobuzh, my assistants.”

Norman shook hands numbly all about. Paulson was a man of middle height with a soft face that seemed used to smiling and a very obvious toupee. He wore plastic-rimmed glasses of an old-fashioned cut, and he lit a cigarette as he talked. (Norman refused his offer of one.)

Paulson said, “In the first place, Mr. Muller, I want you to know we are in no hurry. We want you to stay with us all day if necessary, just so that you get used to your surroundings and get over any thought you might have that there is anything unusual in this, anything clinical, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s all right,” said Norman. “I’d just as soon this were over.”

“I understand your feelings. Still, we want you to know exactly what’s going on. In the first place, Multivac isn’t here.”

“It isn’t?” Somehow through all his depression, he had still looked forward to seeing Multivac. They said it was half a mile long and three stories high, that fifty technicians walked the corridors within its structure continuously. It was one of the wonders of the world.

Paulson smiled. “No. It’s not portable, you know. It’s located underground, in fact, and very few people know exactly where. You can understand that, since it is our greatest natural resource. Believe me, elections aren’t the only things it’s used for.”

Norman thought he was being deliberately chatty and found himself intrigued all the same. “I thought I’d see it. I’d like to.”

“I’m sure of that. But it takes a presidential order and even then it has to be countersigned by Security. However, we are plugged into Multivac right here by beam transmission. What Multivac says can be interpreted here and what we say is beamed directly to Multivac, so in a sense we’re in its presence.”

Norman looked about. The machines within the room were all meaningless to him.

“Now let me explain, Mr. Muller,” Paulson went on. “Multivac already has most of the information it needs to decide all the elections, national, state and local. It needs only to check certain imponderable attitudes of mind and it will use you for that. We can’t predict what questions it will ask, but they may not make much sense to you, or even to us. It may ask you how you feel about garbage disposal in your town; whether you favor central incinerators. It might ask you whether you have a doctor of your own or whether you make use of National Medicine, Inc. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Whatever it asks, you answer in your own words in any way you please. If you feel you must explain quite a bit, do so. Talk an hour, if necessary.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, one more thing. We will have to make use of some simple devices which will automatically record your blood pressure, heartbeat, skin conductivity and brain-wave pattern while you speak. The machinery will seem formidable, but it’s all absolutely painless. You won’t even know it’s going on.”

The other two technicians were already busying themselves with smooth-gleaming apparatus on oiled wheels.

Norman said, “Is that to check on whether I’m lying or not?”

“Not at all, Mr. Muller. There’s no question of lying. It’s only a matter of emotional intensity. If the machine asks you your opinion of your child’s school, you may say, ‘I think it is overcrowded.’ Those are only words. From the way your brain and heart and hormones and sweat glands work, Multivac can judge exactly how intensely you feel about the matter. It will understand your feelings better than you yourself.”

“I never heard of this,” said Norman.

“No, I’m sure you didn’t. Most of the details of Multivac’s workings are top secret. For instance, when you leave, you will be asked to sign a paper swearing that you will never reveal the nature of the questions you were asked, the nature of your responses, what was done, or how it was done. The less is known about the Multivac, the less chance of attempted outside pressures upon the men who service it.” He smiled grimly. “Our lives are hard enough as it is.”

Norman nodded. “I understand.”

“And now would you like anything to eat or drink?”

“No. Nothing right now.”

““Do you have any questions?”

Norman shook his head.

“Then you tell us when you’re ready.”

“I’m ready right now.”

“You’re certain?”

“Quite.”

Paulson nodded, and raised his hand in a gesture to the others. They advanced with their frightening equipment, and Norman Muller felt his breath come a little quicker as he watched.

The ordeal lasted nearly three hours, with one short break for coffee and an embarrassing session with a chamber pot. During all this time, Norman Muller remained encased in machinery. He was bone-weary at the close.

He thought sardonically that his promise to reveal nothing of what had passed would be an easy one to keep. Already the questions were a hazy mishmash in his mind.

Somehow he had thought Multivac would speak in a sepulchral, superhuman voice, resonant and echoing, but that, after all, was just an idea he had from seeing too many television shows, he now decided. The truth was distressingly undramatic. The questions were slips of a kind of metallic foil patterned with numerous punctures. A second machine converted the pattern into words and Paulson read the words to Norman, then gave him the question and let him read it for himself.

Norman’s answers were taken down by a recording machine, played back to Norman for confirmation, with emendations and added remarks also taken down. All that was fed into a pattern-making instrument and that, in turn, was radiated to Murtivac.

The one question Norman could remember at the moment was an incongruously gossipy: “What do you think of the price of eggs?”

Now it was over, and gently they removed the electrodes from various portions of his body, unwrapped the pulsating band from his upper arm, moved the machinery away.

He stood up, drew a deep, shuddering breath and said, “Is that all? Am I through?”

“Not quite.” Paulson hurried to him, smiling in reassuring fashion. “We’ll have to ask you to stay another hour.”

“Why?” asked Norman sharply.

“It will take that long for Multivac to weave its new data into the trillions of items it has. Thousands of elections are concerned, you know. It’s very complicated. And it may be that an odd contest here or there, a comptroller-ship in Phoenix, Arizona, or some council seat in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, may be in doubt. In that case, Multivac may be compelled to ask you a deciding question or two.”

“No,” said Norman. “I won’t go through this again.”

“It probably won’t happen,” Paulson said soothingly. “It rarely does. But, just in case, you’ll have to stay.” A touch of steel, just a touch, entered his voice. “You have no choice, you know. You must.”

Norman sat down wearily. He shrugged.

Paulson said, “We can’t let you read a newspaper, but if you’d care for a murder mystery, or if you’d like to play chess, or if there’s anything we can do for you to help pass the time, I wish you’d mention it.”

“It’s all right. I’ll just wait.”

They ushered him into a small room just next to the one in which he had been questioned. He let himself sink into a plastic-covered armchair and closed his eyes.

As well as he could, he must wait out this final hour.

He sat perfectly still and slowly the tension left him. His breathing grew less ragged and he could clasp his hands without being quite so conscious of the trembling of his fingers.

Maybe there would be no questions. Maybe it was all over.

If it were over, then the next thing would be torchlight processions and invitations to speak at all sorts of functions. The Voter of the Year!

He, Norman Muller, ordinary clerk of a small department store in Bloomington, Indiana, who had neither been born great nor achieved greatness would be in the extraordinary position of having had greatness thrust upon him.

The historians would speak soberly of the Muller Election of 2008. That would be its name, the Muller Election.

The publicity, the better job, the flash flood of money that interested Sarah so much, occupied only a comer of his mind. It would all be welcome, of course. He couldn’t refuse it. But at the moment something else was beginning to concern him.

A latent patriotism was stirring. After all, he was representing the entire electorate. He was the focal point for them. He was, in his own person, for this one day, all of America!

The door opened, snapping him to open-eyed attention. For a moment, his stomach constricted. Not more questions!

But Paulson was smiling. “That will be all, Mr. Muller.”

“No more questions, sir?”

“None needed. Everything was quite clear-cut. You will be escorted back to your home and then you will be a private citizen once more. Or as much so as the public will allow.”

“Thank you. Thank you.” Norman flushed and said, “I wonder—who was elected?”

Paulson shook his head. “That will have to wait for the official announcement. The rules are quite strict. We can’t even tell you. You understand.”

“Of course. Yes.” Norman felt embarrassed.

“Secret service will have the necessary papers for you to sign.”

“Yes.” Suddenly, Norman Muller felt proud. It was on him now in full strength. He was proud.

In this imperfect world, the sovereign citizens of the first and greatest Electronic Democracy had, through Norman Muller (through him!) exercised once again its free, untrammeled franchise.