Marching In

            Jerome Bishop, composer and trombonist, had never been in a mental hospital before.

            There had been times when he had suspected he might be in one, someday, as a patient (who was safe?), but it had never occurred to him that he might ever be there as a consultant on a question of mental aberration. A consultant.

            He sat there, in the year 2001, with the world in pretty terrible shape, but (they said) pulling out of it, and then rose as a middle-aged women entered. Her hair was beginning to turn gray, and Bishop was thankfully conscious of his own hair still in full shock and evenly dark.

            “Are you Mr. Bishop?” she asked.

            “Last time I looked.”

            She held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Cray. Won’t you come with me?”

            He shook her hand, then followed. He tried not to be haunted by the dull beige uniforms worn by everyone he passed.

            Dr. Cray put a finger to her lip, and motioned him into a chair. She pressed a button and the lights went out, causing a window, with a light behind it, to spring into view. Through the window, Bishop could see a woman in something that looked like a dentist’s chair, tilted back. A forest of flexible wires sprang from her head, a thin narrow beam of light extended from pole to pole behind her, and a somewhat less narrow strip of paper unfolded upward.

            The light went on again; the view vanished.

            Dr. Cray said, “Do you know what we’re doing in there?”

            “You’re recording brain waves? Just a guess.”

            “A good guess. We are. It’s a laser recording. Do you know how that works?”

            “My stuff’s been recorded by laser,” said Bishop, crossing one leg over the other, “but that doesn’t mean I know how it works. It’s the engineers who know the details. ...Look, Doc, if you have an idea I’m a laser engineer, I’m not.”

            “No, I know you’re not,” said Dr. Cray hurriedly. “You’re here for something else. ...Let me explain it to you. We can alter a laser beam very delicately; much more rapidly and much more precisely than we can alter an electric current, or even a beam of electrons. That means that a very complex wave can be recorded in far greater detail than has ever been imagined before. We can make a tracing with a microscopically narrow laser beam and get a wave we can study under a microscope and get accurate detail invisible to the naked eye and unobtainable in any other fashion.”

            Bishop said, ,.It that’s what you want to consult me about, then all I can say is that it doesn’t pay to get all that detail. You can only hear so much. It you sharpen a laser recording past a certain amount, you bring up the expense but you don’t bring up the effect. In fact, some people say you get some kind of buzz that begins to drown out the music. I don’t hear it myself, but I tell you that if you want the best, you don’t narrow the laser beam all the way. ...Of course, maybe it’s different with brain waves but what I told you is an I can tell you, so I’ll go and there’s no charge except for carfare.”

            He made as though to get up, but Dr. Cray was shaking her head vigorously.

            “Please sit down, Mr. Bishop. Recording brain waves is different. There we do need all the detail we can get. Till now, all we’ve ever had out of brain waves are the tiny, overlapping effects of ten billion brain cells, a kind of rough average that wipes out everything but the most general effects.”

            “You mean like listening to ten billion pianos all playing different tunes a hundred miles away?”

            “Exactly.”

            “All you get is noise?”

            “Not quite. We do get some information-about epilepsy, for instance. With laser recording, however, we begin to get the fine detail; we begin to hear the individual tunes those separate pianos are playing; we begin to hear which particular pianos may be out of tune.”

            Bishop lifted his eyebrows. “So you can tell what makes a particular crazy person crazy?”

            “In a way of speaking. Look at this.” In another corner of the room a screen flashed to life, with a thin wavering line over it. “Do you see this, Mr. Bishop?” Dr. Cray pressed the button of an indicator in her hand and one little blip in the line reddened. The line moved along past the lighted screen and red blips appeared periodically.

            “That’s a microphotograph,” said Dr. Cray. “Those little red discontinuities are not visible to the unaided eye and wouldn’t be visible with any recording device less delicate than the laser. It appears only when this particular patient is in depression. The markings are more pronounced, the deeper the depression.”

            Bishop thought about it for a while. Then he said, “Can you do anything about it? So far, it just means you can tell by that blip there’s a depression, which you can tell by just listening to the patient.”

            “Quite right, but the details help. For instance, we can convert the brain waves into delicately flickering light waves and, what’s more, into the equivalent sound waves. We use the same laser system that is used to record your music. We get a sort of dimly musical hum that matches the light flicker. I would like you to listen to it by earphone.”

            “The music from that particular depressive person whose brain produced that line?”

            “Yes, and since we can’t intensify it much without losing detail, we will ask you to listen by earphone.”

            “And watch the light, too?”

            “That’s not necessary. You can close your eyes. Enough of the flicker will penetrate the eyelids to affect the brain.”

            Bishop closed his eyes. Through the hum, he could hear the tiny wail of a complex beat, a complex, sad beat that carried all the troubles of the tired old world in it. He listened, vaguely conscious of the dim light beating on his eyeballs in flickering time.

            He felt his shirt pulled at strenuously. “Mr. Bishop--Mr. Bishop--”

            He took a deep breath. .’Thanks!” he said, shuddering a little. “That upset me, but I couldn’t let go.”

            “You were listening to brain-wave depression and it was affecting you. It was forcing your own brain-wave pattern to keep time. You felt depressed, didn’t you?”

            “All the way.”

            “Well, if we can locate the portion of the wave characteristic of depression, or of any mental abnormality, remove that, and play all the rest of the brain wave, the patient’s pattern will be modified into normal form.”

            “For how long?”

            “For a while after the treatment is stopped. For a while, but not long. A few days. A week. Then the patient has to return.”

            “That’s better than nothing.”

            “And less than enough. A person is born with certain genes, Mr. Bishop, that dictate a certain potential brain structure. A person suffers certain environmental influences. These are not easy things to neutralize, so here in this institution we’ve been trying to find more efficient and long-lasting schemes for neutralization. ...And you can help us, perhaps. That’s why we’ve asked you to come here.”

            “But I don’t know anything about this, Doc. I never heard about recording brain waves by laser.” He pushed his hands apart, palms down. “I’ve got nothing for you.”

            Dr. Cray looked impatient. She pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket and said, “Just a while ago, you said that the laser recorded more detail than the ear could hear.”

            “Yes. I stand by that.”

            “I know. One of my colleagues read an interview with you in the December 2000 issue of High Fidelity magazine, in which you said that. That’s what attracted our attention. The ear can’t get the laser detail, but the eye can, you see. It’s the flickering light that alters the brain pattern to the norm, not the wavering sound. The sound alone will do nothing. It will, however, reinforce the effect when the light is working.”

            “You can’t complain about that.”

            “We can. The reinforcement isn’t good enough. The gentle, delicate, almost infinitely complex variations produced in the sound by laser recording is lost on the ear. Too much is present and it drowns out the portion that is reinforcing.”

            “What makes you think that a reinforcing portion is there?”

            “Because occasionally, more or less by accident, we can produce something that seems to work better than the entire brain wave, but we don’t see why. We need a musician. Maybe you. If you listen to both sets of brain waves, perhaps you can figure out by some insight a beat that will fit the normal set better than the abnormal one. Then that could reinforce the light, you see, and improve the effectiveness of the therapy.”

            “Hey,” said Bishop in alarm, “that’s putting a lot of responsibility on me. When I write music, I’m just caressing the ear and making the muscles jump. I’m not trying to cure an ailing brain.”

            “All we ask is that you caress the ears and make the muscles jump, but do it so that it fits the normal music of the brain waves. ...And I assure you that you need fear no responsibility, Mr. Bishop. It is quite unlikely that your music would do harm, and it might do so much good. And you’ll be paid, Mr. Bishop, win or lose.”

            Bishop said, “Well, I’ll try, though I don’t promise a thing.”

            He was back in two days. Dr. Cray was pulled out of conference to see him. She looked at him out of tired, narrowed eyes.

            “Do you have something?”

            “I have something. It may work. “

            “How do you know?”

            “I don’t. I just have the feel of it. ...Look, I listened to the laser tapes you gave me; the brain-wave music as it came from the patient in depression and the brain-wave music as you’ve modified it to normal. And you’re right; without the flickering light it didn’t affect me either way. Anyway, I subtracted the second from the first to see what the difference was.”

            “You have a computer?” Dr. Cray said, wondering.

            “No, a computer wouldn’t have helped. It would give me too much. You take one complicated laser-wave pattern and subtract another complicated laser-wave pattern and you’re left with what is still a pretty complicated laser-wave pattern. No, I subtracted it in my mind to see what kind of beat was left. ...That would be the abnormal beat that I would have to cancel out with a counter-beat.”

            “How can you subtract in your head?”

            Bishop looked impatient. “I don’t know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain’s a pretty good computer, too, isn’t it?”

            “I guess it is.” She subsided. “Do you have the counterbeat there?”

            “I think so. I have it here on an ordinary tape recording because it doesn’t need anything more. It goes something like--dihdihdihDAH -dihdihdihDAH--dihdihdihDAHDAHDAHdihDAH--and so on. I added a tune to it and you can put it through the earphones while she’s watching the flickering light that’s matched to the normal brain-wave pattern. If I’m right, it will reinforce the living daylights out of it.”

            “Are you sure?”

            “If I were sure, you wouldn’t have to try it, would you, Doc?”

            Dr. Cray was thoughtful for -a moment. “I’ll make an appointment with the patient. I’d like you to be here.”

            “If you want me. It’s part of the consultation job, I suppose.”

            “You won’t be able to be in the treatment room, you understand, but I’d want you out here.”

            “Anything you say.”

            The patient looked careworn when she arrived. Her eyelids drooped and her voice was low and she mumbled.

            Bishop’s glance was casual as he sat quietly, unnoticed, in the corner. He saw her enter the treatment room and waited patiently, thinking: What if it works? Why not package brainwave lights with appropriate sound accompaniment to combat the blues-to increase energy-to heighten love? Not just for sick people but for normal people, who could find a substitute for all the pounding they’d ever taken with alcohol or drugs in an effort to adjust their emotions-an utterly safe substitute based on the brain waves themselves. ...And finally, after forty-five minutes, she came out.

            She was placid now, and the lines had somehow washed out of her face.

            “I feel better, Dr. Cray,” she said, smiling. “I feel much better.”

            “You usually do,” said Dr. Cray quietly.

            “Not this way,” said the woman. “Not this way. This time it’s different. The other times, even when I thought I felt good, I could sense that awful depression in the back of my head just waiting to come back the minute I relaxed. Now--it’s just gone.”

            Dr. Cray said, “We can’t be sure it will always be gone. We’ll make an appointment for, say, two weeks from now but you’ll call me before then if anything goes wrong, won’t you? Did anything seem different in the treatment?”

            The woman thought a bit. “No,” she said hesitantly. Then: “The flickering light, though. That might have been different. Clearer and sharper somehow.”

            “Did you hear anything?”

            “Was I supposed to?”

            Dr. Cray rose. “Very well. Remember to make that appointment with my secretary.”

            The woman stopped at the door, turned, and said, “It’s a happy feeling to feel happy,” and left.

            Dr. Cray said, “She didn’t hear anything, Mr. Bishop. I suppose that your counter-beat reinforced the normal brainwave pattern so naturally that the sound was, so to speak, lost in the light. ...And it may have worked, too.”

            She turned to Bishop, looking him full in the face. “Mr. Bishop, will you consult with us on other cases? We’ll pay you as much as we can, and if this turns out to be an effective therapy for mental disease, we’ll see that you get all the credit due you.”

            Bishop said, “I’ll be glad to help out, Doctor, but it won’t be as hard as you may think. The work is already done.”

            “Already done?”

            “We’ve had musicians for centuries. Maybe they didn’t know about brain waves, but they did their best to get the melodies and beats that would affect people, get their toes tapping, get their muscles twitching, get their faces smiling, get their tear ducts pumping, get their hearts pounding. Those tunes are waiting. Once you get the counter-beat, you pick the tune to fit.”

            “Is that what you did?”

            “Sure. What can snap you out of depression like a revival hymn? It’s what they’re meant to do. The beat gets you out of yourself. It exalts you. Maybe it doesn’t last long by itself, but if you use it to reinforce the normal brain-wave pattern, it ought to pound it in.”

            “A revival hymn?” Dr. Cray stared at him, wide-eyed.

            “Sure. What I used in this case was the best of them all. I gave her ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ “

            He sang it softly, finger-snapping the beat, and by the third bar, Dr. Cray’s toes were tapping.

This next one was requested by Bell Telephone Magazine over an excellent lunch. What they wanted was a 3,000-word story centering on a problem in communications. There were two broad requirements; first, that it be farther out than any of the methods of communication now under development by Bell Telephone, and, second, that I not postulate an end to the requirements for communications corporations.

            As it happened, Kim Armstrong, the editor of the magazine, who was at the lunch, was an extraordinarily charming woman, but I would have agreed to tackle the story anyway, because before the lunch was over I had a plot outline safely tucked away in my head. [People ask me sometimes if I keep a notebook on me at all times to jot down ideas. I do, but it’s inside my head, and therefore never gets mislaid.]  I got to work on it on October 19, 1975. Ms. Armstrong liked it when it was done, and it appeared in the February 1976 issue of the magazine.

Old-fashioned

            Ben Estes knew he was going to die and it didn’t make him feel any better to know that that was the chance he had lived with all these years. The life of an astro-miner, drifting through the still largely uncharted vastness of the asteroid belt, was not particularly sweet, but it was quite likely to be short.

            Of course, there was always the chance of a surprise find .that would make you rich for life, and this had been a surprise find all right. The biggest surprise in the world, but it wasn’t going to make Estes rich. It would make him dead.

            Harvey Funarelli groaned softly from his bunk, and Estes turned, with a wince of his own as his muscles creaked. They had been badly mishandled. That he wasn’t hit as viciously as Funarelli had been was surely because Funarelli was the larger man, and had been closer to the point of near-impact.

            Estes looked somberly at his partner and said, “How do you feel, Harv?”

            Funarelli groaned again. “I feel broken at every joint. What the hell happened? What did we hit?”

            Estes walked over, limping slightly, and said, “Don’t try to stand up.”

            “I can make it,” said Funarelli, “if you’ll just reach out a hand. Wow! I wonder if I’ve got a broken rib. Right here. What happened, Ben?”

            Estes pointed at the main portview. It wasn’t a large one, but it was the best a two-man astro-mining vessel could be expected to have. Funarelli moved toward it very slowly, leaning on Estes’ shoulder. He looked out.

            There were the stars, of course, but the experienced astronautic mind blanks those out. There are always the stars. Closer in, there was a gravel bank of boulders of varying size, all moving slowly relative to their neighbors like a swarm of very, very lazy bees.

            Funarelli said, “I’ve never seen anything like that before. What are they doing here?”

            “Those rocks,” said Estes, “are what’s left of a shattered asteroid, I suspect, and they’re still circling what shattered them, and what shattered us.”

            “What?” Funarelli peered vainly into the darkness.

            Estes pointed. “That!” There was a faint little sparkle in the direction he was pointing.

            “I don’t see anything.”

            “You’re not supposed to. That’s a black hole.” Funarelli’s close-cropped black hair stood on end as a matter of course, and his staring dark eyes added a touch of horror. He said, “You’re crazy.”

            “No. Black holes can come in all sizes. That’s what the astronomers say. That one is about the mass of a large asteroid, I think, and we’re moving around it. How else could something we can’t see be holding us ill orbit?”

            “There’s no report on any--”

            “I know. How can there be? It can’t be seen. It’s massOoops, there comes the Sun.” The slowly rotating ship had brought the Sun into view and the portview automatically polarized into opacity. “Anyway,” said Estes, “we discovered the first black hole actually to be encountered anywhere in the Universe. Only we won’t live to see ourselves get the credit.”

            Funarelli said, “What happened?”

            “We got close enough for the tidal effects to smash us up.”

            “What tidal effects?”

            Estes said, “I’m not an astronomer, but as I understand it, even when the total gravitational pull of a thing like that isn’t large, you can get so close to it that the pull becomes intense. That intensity falls off so rapidly with increasing distance that the near end of an object is pulled far more strongly than the far end. The object is therefore stretched. The closer and bigger an object is, the worse the effect. Your muscles were torn. You’re lucky your bones weren’t broken.”

            Funarelli grimaced. “I’m not sure they aren’t. ...What else happened?”

            “The fuel tanks were destroyed. We’re stuck here in orbit. ...It’s just lucky we happened to end in one far enough away and circular enough to keep the tidal effect down. If we were closer, or if we even zoomed in closely at one end of the orbit--”

            “Can we get word out?”

            “Not a word,” said Estes. “Communications are smashed.”

            “You can’t fix it?”

            “I’m not really a communications expert, but even if I were--It can’t be fixed.”

            “Can’t something be jury-rigged?”

            Estes shook his head. “We’ve just got to wait-and die. That’s not what bothers me so much.”

            “It bothers me,” said Funarelli, sitting down on his bunk and placing his head in his hands.

            “We’ve got the pills,” said Estes. “It would be an easy death. What’s really bad is that we can’t get word back about --that.” He pointed to the portview, which was clear again as the Sun moved out of range.

            “About the black hole?”

            “Yes, it’s dangerous. It seems to be in orbit about the Sun, but who knows whether that orbit is stable. And even if it is, it’s bound to get larger.”

            “I guess it will swallow stuff.”

            “Sure. Everything it encounters. There’s cosmic dust spiraling into it all the time, and giving off energy as it spirals and drops in. That’s what makes those dim sparkles of light. Every once in a while, the hole will swallow up a large piece that gets in the way and there’ll be a flash of radiation, right down to X rays. The larger it gets, the easier it is for it to drag in material from a greater and greater distance.”

            For a moment, both men stared at the portview, then Estes went on. “Right now it can be handled maybe. If NASA can maneuver a fairly large asteroid here and send it past the hole in the proper way, the hole will be pulled out of its orbit by mutual gravitational attraction between itself and the asteroid. The hole can be made to curve itself into a path that could head it out of the Solar System, with some further help and acceleration.”

            Funarelli said, “Do you suppose it started very small?”

            “It could have been a micro-hole formed at the time of the big bang, when the Universe was created. It may have been growing for billions of years and if it continues to grow, it may become unmanageable. It will then eventually become the grave of the Solar System.”

            “Why haven’t they found it?”

            “No one’s been looking. Who would expect a black bole in the asteroid belt? And it doesn’t produce enough radiation to be noticeable, or enough mass to be noticeable. You have to run into it, as we did.”

            “Are you sure we have no communications at all, Ben? ...How far to Vesta? They could reach us from Vesta without much delay. It’s the largest base in the asteroid belt.”

            Estes shook his head. “I don’t know where Vesta is right now. The computer’s knocked out, too.”

            “God! What isn’t knocked out?”

            “The air system is working. The water purifier is on. We’ve got plenty of power and food. We can last two weeks, maybe more.”

            A silence fell. “Look,” said Funarelli after a while. “Even if we don’t know where Vesta is exactly, we know it can’t be more than a few million kilometers away. If we could reach them with some signal, they could get a drone ship out here within a week.”

            “A drone ship, yes,” said Estes. That was easy. An unmanned ship could be accelerated to levels that human flesh and blood would not endure. It could make trips in a third the time a manned vessel could.

            Funarelli closed his eyes, as though blocking out the pain, and said, “Don’t sneer at a drone ship. It could bring us emergency supplies, and it would have stuff on board we could use to set up a communications system. We could hold out till the real rescuers came.”

            Estes sat down on the other bunk. “I wasn’t sneering at a drone ship. I was just thinking that there’s no way to send a signal, no way at all. We can’t even yell. The vacuum of space won’t carry sound. “

            Funarelli said stubbornly, “I can’t believe you can’t think of something. Our lives depend on it. “

            “The lives of all mankind depend on it, maybe, but I still can’t think of anything. Why don’t you think of something?”

            Funarelli grunted as he moved his hips. He seized the hand grips on the wall next to his bunk and pulled himself up to a standing position. “I can think of one thing,” he said, “why don’t you turn off the gravity motors and save the power and put less strain on our muscles?”

            Estes muttered, “Good idea.” He rose and moved to the control board, where he cut the gravity.

            Funarelli floated upward with a sigh and said, “Why can’t they find the black hole, the idiots?”

            “You mean like we did? There’s no other way. It’s not doing enough.”

            Funarelli said, “I still hurt, even with no gravity to fight…Oh well, if it keeps on hurting like this, it won’t matter so much when it comes to pill-taking time. ...Is there any way we can make that black hole do more than it’s doing?”

            Estes said grimly, “If one of those bits of gravel should take it into its head to drop into the hole, a burst of X rays would shoot out.”

            “Would they detect that on Vesta?”

            Estes shook his head. “I doubt it. They’re not looking for such a thing. They’d be sure to detect it on Earth, though. Some of the space stations keep the sky under constant surveillance for radiation changes. They’d pick up astonishingly small bursts.”

            “All right, Ben, reaching Earth would be just as well. They’d send a message to Vesta to investigate. It would take the X rays about fifteen minutes to get to Earth and then it would take fifteen minutes for radio waves to get to Vesta. “

            “And how about the time between? The receivers may automatically record a burst of X rays from such and such a direction, but who’s to say where it’s from? It could be from a distant galaxy that happens to lie in this particular direction. Some technician will notice the bump in the recording and will watch for more bursts in the same place and there won’t be any and it will be crossed off as unimportant. Besides, it won’t happen, Harv. There must have been lots of X rays when the black hole broke up this asteroid with its tidal effect, but that may have been thousands of years ago when no one was watching. Now what’s left of these fragments must have fairly stable orbits.”

            “If we had our rockets--”

            “Let me guess. We could drive our ship into the black hole. Use our deaths to send a message. That wouldn’t do any good either. It would still be one pulse from anywhere.”

            Funarelli said indignantly, “I wasn’t thinking of that. I’m not in the market for heroic death. I meant, we’ve got three engines. If we could rig them on to three pretty large size rocks and send each one into the hole, there would be three bursts of X rays and if we did them a day apart, the source would move detectably against the stars. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? The technicians would pick that up at once, wouldn’t they?”

            “Maybe, and maybe not. Besides, we don’t have any rocketry left and couldn’t put them on the rocks if we--” Estes fell silent. Then he said in an altered voice, “I wonder if our space suits are intact.”

            “Our suit radios,” said Funarelli excitedly.

            “Hell, they don’t reach out more than a few kilometers,” said Estes. “I’m thinking of something else. I’m thinking of going out there.” He opened the suit locker. “They seem all right.”

            “Why do you want to go out?”

            “We may not have any rockets, but we still have muscle power. At least I have. Do you think you can throw a rock?”

            Funarelli made a throwing gesture, or the beginning of one, and a look of agony came over his face. “Can I jump to the Sun?” he said.

            “I’ll go out and throw some. ...The suit seems to check out. Maybe I can throw some into the hole. ...I hope the air lock operates.”

            “Can we spare the air?” said Funarelli anxiously.

            “Will it matter in two weeks?” said Estes wearily.

            Every astro-miner has to get outside the ship occasionally --to carry out some repair, to bring in some chunk of matter in the vicinity. Ordinarily, it’s an exciting time. In any case, it’s a change.

            Estes felt little excitement, only a vast anxiety. His notion was so damned primitive, he felt foolish to have it. It was bad enough dying without having to die a damn fool.

            He found himself in the black of space, with the glittering stars he had seen a hundred times before. Now, though, in the faint reflection of the small and distant Sun, there was the dim glow of hundreds of bits of rock that must once have been part of an asteroid and that now formed a tiny Saturn’s ring about a black hole. The rocks seemed almost motionless, as all drifted along with the ship.

            Estes judged the direction of wheel of the stars and knew that ship and rocks were moving slowly in the other direction. If he could throw a rock in the direction of the star motion, he would neutralize some of the rock’s velocity relative to the black hole. If he neutralized not enough of the velocity, or too much, the rock would drop toward the hole, skim about it, and come back to the point it had left. If he neutralized just enough, it would come close enough to be powdered by the tidal effect. The grains of powder, in their motions, would slow each other and spiral into the hole, releasing X rays as they did so.

            Estes used his miner’s net of tantalum steel to gather rocks, choosing them fist size. He was thankful that modern suits allowed complete freedom of motion and were not the virtual coffins they had been when the first astronauts, over a century ago, had reached the Moon.

            Once he had enough rocks, he threw one, and he could see it glimmer and fade in the sunlight as it dropped toward the hole. He waited and nothing happened. He didn’t know how long it might take to fall into the black hole-if it fell in at all, that is--but he counted six hundred to himself and threw again.

            Over and over he did so, with a terrible patience born of searching for an alternative to death, and finally there was a sudden blaze in the direction of the black hole. Visible light and, he knew, a burst of higher-energy radiation as far as X rays at least.

            He had to stop to gather more rocks, and then he got the range. He was hitting it almost every time. He oriented himself so that the soft glimmer of the black hole would be seen just above the midportion of the ship. That was one relationship that didn’t change as the ship circled and rolled on an axis--or changed least.

            Even allowing for his care, however, it seemed to him he was making too many strikes. The black hole, he thought, was more massive than he knew and would swallow up its prey from a larger distance. That made it more dangerous, but increased their chance of rescue.

            He worked his way through the lock and back into the ship. He was bone-weary and his right shoulder hurt him.

            Funarelli helped him off with the suit. “That was terrific. You were throwing rocks into the black hole.”

            Estes nodded. “Yes, and I’m hoping my suit has been stopping the X rays. I’d just as soon not die of radiation poisoning.”

            “They’ll see this back on Earth, won’t they?”

            “I’m sure they will,” said Estes, “but will they pay attention? They’ll record it all and wonder about it. But what’s going to make them come out here for a closer look? I’ve got to work out something that will make them come, after I have just a little time to rest.”

            An hour later, he lifted out another space suit. No time to wait for the recharge of the solar batteries in the first one. He said, “I hope I haven’t lost the range.”

            He was out again, and it had become clear that even allowing a fairly wide spread of velocities and direction, the black hole would suck up the slowing rocks as they moved inward.

            Estes gathered as many rocks as he could manage and placed them carefully on an indentation in the hull of the ship. They didn’t stay there, but they drifted only exceedingly slowly, and even after Estes had collected all he could, those he had placed there first had spread out no more than billiard balls on a pool table.

            Then he threw them, at first tensely, and then with growing confidence, and the black hole flashed--and flashed--and flashed.

            It seemed to him that the target became steadily easier to hit and that the black hole was growing madly with each impact and that soon it would reach out and suck him and the ship into its never-sated maw.

            It was his imagination, of course, and nothing more. Finally all the rocks were gone and he felt he could throw nothing more in any case. He had been out there, it seemed, for hours.

            When he was within the ship again he said, as soon as Funarelli had helped him off with his helmet, “That’s it. I can’t do anything more.”

            “You had plenty of flashes there,” said Funarelli.

            “Plenty, and they should surely be recorded. We’ll just have to wait now. They’ve got to come.”

            Funarelli helped him off with the rest of his suit as best his muscle-torn body would allow. Then he stood, grunting and gasping, and said, “Do you really think they’ll come, Ben?”

            “I think they’ve got to,” said Estes, almost as though he were trying to force the event by the sheer power of wishing. “I think they’ve got to.”

            “Why do you think they’ve got to?” said Funarelli, sounding like a man who wanted to grasp at straws but didn’t dare.

            “Because I communicated,” said Estes. “We’re not only the first people to encounter a black hole, we’re the first to use it to communicate; we’re the first to use the ultimate communication system of the future, the one that might send messages from star to star and galaxy to galaxy, and that might be the ultimate energy source as well--” He was panting, and he sounded a little wild.

            “What are you talking about?” said Funarelli.

            “I threw those rocks in rhythm, Harv,” said Estes, “and the X-ray bursts came in rhythm. It was flash-flash-flash--flash--flash--flash--flash-flash-flash, and so on.”

            “Yes?”

            “It’s old-fashioned; old-fashioned, but that’s one thing everyone remembers from the days when people communicated by electric currents running through wires.”

            “You mean the photograph--phonograph--”

            “The telegraph, Harv. Those flashes I produced will be recorded and the first time someone looks at that record, all hell will break loose. It’s not just that they’ll be spotting an X-ray source; it’s not just that it will be an X-ray source moving very slowly against the stars so that it has to be within our Solar System. What it is, is that they’ll be seeing an X-ray source going on and off and producing the signal sos--sos--And when an X-ray Source is shouting for help, you’ll bet they’ll come--as fast as they can--if only to see--what’s--there--that--”

            He was asleep.

            --And five days later, a drone ship arrived.

Incidentally, it may occur to some of my Gentle Readers that there is a certain similarity between the story and my very first published story, MAROONED OFF VESTA, which appeared in print thirty-seven years earlier. In each story, two men are trapped on a spaceship wrecked in the asteroid belt and must use their ingenuity to devise a way of escaping what looked like certain death.

            Of course, the resolutions are completely different, and it was in my mind to demonstrate some of the changes in our outlook on the Universe that took place in those thirty-seven years by producing in 1976 a resolution that would have been inconceivable in 1939.

In the fall of 1975, Fred Dannay (better known as Ellery Queen) approached me with a very intriguing idea for the August 1976 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which would be on the stands at the time of the Bicentennial. He planned to publish a mystery dealing with the Bicentennial itself, and another dealing with the Centennial in 1876. What he needed now was one for the Tricentennial in 2076 and, of course, that meant a science fiction story.

            Since I have been writing numerous mystery stories for the magazine in recent years, he thought of me and proposed that I tackle the job. I agreed and got to work on November 1, 1975. I ended with uncompromising science fiction which I feared might make a little heavy going for mystery readers. Fred thought otherwise, apparently, for he took the story and was even kind enough to pay me a bonus.

The Tercentenary Incident

            July 4, 2076--and for the third time the accident of the conventional system of numeration, based on powers of ten, had brought the last two digits of the year back to the fateful 76 that had seen the birth of the nation.

            It was no longer a nation in the old sense; it was rather a geographic expression; part of a greater whole that made up the Federation of all of humanity on Earth, together with its offshoots on the Moon and in the space colonies. By culture and heritage, however, the name and the idea lived on, and that portion of the planet signified by the old name was still the most prosperous and advanced region of the world....And the President of the United States was still the most powerful single figure in the Planetary Council.

            Lawrence Edwards watched the small figure of the President from his height of two hundred feet. He drifted lazily above the crowd, his flotron motor making a barely heard chuckle on his back, and what he saw looked exactly like what anyone would see on a holovision scene. How many times had he seen little figures like that in his living room, little figures in a cube of sunlight, looking as real as though they were living homunculi, except that you could put your hand through them.

            You couldn’t put your hand through those spreading out in their tens of thousands over the open spaces surrounding the Washington Monument. And you couldn’t put your hand through the President. You could reach out to him instead, touch him, and shake his hand.

            Edwards thought sardonically of the uselessness of that added element of tangibility and wished himself a hundred miles away, floating in air over some isolated wilderness, instead of here where he had to watch for any sign of disorder. There wouldn’t be any necessity for his being here but for the mythology of the value of “pressing the flesh.”

            Edwards was not an admirer of the President--Hugo Allen Winkler, fifty-seventh of the line.

            To Edwards, President Winkler seemed an empty man, a charmer, a vote grabber, a promiser. He was a disappointing man to have in office now after all the hopes of those first months of his administration. The World Federation was in danger of breaking up long before its job had been completed and Winkler could do nothing about it. One needed a strong hand now, not a glad hand; a hard voice, not a honey voice.

            There he was now, shaking hands--a space forced around him by the Service, with Edwards himself, plus a few others of the Service, watching from above.

            The President would be running for re-election certainly, and there seemed a good chance he might be defeated. That would just make things worse, since the opposition party was dedicated to the destruction of the Federation.

            Edwards sighed. It would be a miserable four years coming up--maybe a miserable forty--and all he could do was float in the air, ready to reach every Service agent on the ground by laser-phone if there was the slightest

            He didn’t see the slightest. There was no sign of disturbance. Just a little puff of white dust, hardly visible; just a momentary glitter in the sunlight, up and away, gone as soon as he was aware of it.

            Where was the President? He had lost sight of him in the dust. He looked about in the vicinity of where he had seen him last. The President could not have moved far.

            Then he became aware of disturbance. First it was among the Service agents themselves, who seemed to have gone off their heads and to be moving this way and that jerkily. Then those among the crowd near them caught the contagion and then those farther off. The noise rose and became a thunder.

            Edwards didn’t have to hear the words that made up the rising roar. It seemed to carry the news to him by nothing more than its mass clamorous urgency. President Winkler had disappeared! He had been there one moment and had turned into a handful of vanishing dust the next.

            Edwards held his breath in an agony of waiting during what seemed a drug-ridden eternity, for the long moment of realization to end and for the mob to break into a mad, rioting stampede.

            --When a resonant voice sounded over the gathering din, and at its sound, the noise faded, died, and became a silence. It was as though it were all a holovision program after all and someone had turned the sound down and out.

            Edwards thought: My God, it’s the President. There was no mistaking the voice. Winkler stood on the guarded stage from which he was to give his Tercentenary speech, and from which he had left but ten minutes ago to shake hands with some in the crowd.

            How had he gotten back there? Edwards listened

            “Nothing has happened to me, my fellow Americans. What you have seen just now was the breakdown of a mechanical device. It was not your President, so let us not allow a mechanical failure to dampen the celebration of the happiest day the world has yet seen....My fellow Americans, give me your attention--”

            And what followed was the Tercentenary speech, the greatest speech Winkler had ever made, or Edwards had ever heard. Edwards found himself forgetting his supervisory job in his eagerness to listen.

            Winkler had it right! He understood the importance of the Federation and he was getting it across.

            Deep inside, though, another part of him was remembering the persistent rumors that the new expertise in robotics had resulted in the construction of a look-alike President, a robot who could perform the purely ceremonial functions, who could shake hands with the crowd, who could be neither bored nor exhausted--nor assassinated.

            Edwards thought, in obscure shock, that that was how it had happened. There had been such a look-alike robot indeed, and in a way--it had been assassinated.

            October 13, 2078

            Edwards looked up as the waist-high robot guide approached and said mellifluously, “Mr. Janek will see you now.”

            Edwards stood up, feeling tall as he towered above the stubby, metallic guide. He did not feel young, however. His face had gathered lines in the last two years or so and he was aware of it.

            He followed the guide into a surprisingly small room, where, behind a surprisingly small desk, there sat Francis Janek, a slightly paunchy and incongruously young-looking man.

            Janek smiled and his eyes were friendly as he rose to shake hands. “Mr. Edwards.”

            Edwards muttered, “I’m glad to have the opportunity, sir--” Edwards had never seen Janek before, but then the job of personal secretary to the President is a quiet one and makes little news.

            Janek said, “Sit down. Sit down. Would you care for a soya stick?”

            Edwards smiled a polite negative, and sat down. Janek was clearly emphasizing his youth. His ruffied shirt was open and the hairs on his chest had been dyed a subdued but definite violet.

            Janek said, “I know you have been trying to reach me for some weeks now. I’m sorry for the delay. I hope you understand that my time is not entirely my own. However, we’re here now....I have referred to the Chief of the Service, by the way, and he gave you very high marks. He regrets your resignation.”

            Edwards said, eyes downcast, “It seemed better to carry on my investigations without danger of embarrassment to the Service.”

            Janek’s smile flashed. “Your activities, though discreet, have not gone unnoticed, however. The Chief explains that you have been investigating the Tercentenary Incident, and I must admit it was that which persuaded me to see you as soon as I could. You’ve given up your position for that? You’re investigating a dead issue.”

            “How can it be a dead issue, Mr. Janek? Your calling it an Incident doesn’t alter the fact that it was an assassination attempt.”

            “A matter of semantics. Why use a disturbing phrase?”

            “Only because it would seem to represent a disturbing truth. Surely you would say that someone tried to kill the President.”

            Janek spread his hands. “If that is so, the plot did not succeed. A mechanical device was destroyed. Nothing more. In fact, if we look at it properly, the Incident--whatever you choose to call it--did the nation and the world an enormous good. As we all know, the President was shaken by the Incident and the nation as well. The President and all of us realized what a return to the violence of the last century might mean and it produced a great turnaround.”

            “I can’t deny that.”

            “Of course you can’t. Even the President’s enemies will grant that the last two years have seen great accomplishments. The Federation is far stronger today than anyone could have dreamed it would be on that Tercentenary day. We might even say that a breakup of the global economy has been prevented.”

            Edwards said cautiously, “Yes, the President is a changed man. Everyone says so.”

            Janek said, “He was a great man always. The Incident made him concentrate on the great issues with a fierce intensity, however.”

            “Which he didn’t do before?”

            “Perhaps not quite as intensely....In effect then, the President, and all of us, would like the Incident forgotten. My main purpose in seeing you, Mr. Edwards, is to make that plain to you. This is not the Twentieth Century and we can’t throw you in jail for being inconvenient to us, or hamper you in any way, but even the Global Charter doesn’t forbid us to attempt persuasion. Do you understand me?”

            “I understand you, but I do not agree with you. Can we forget the Incident when the person responsible has never been apprehended?”

            “Perhaps that is just as well, too, sir. Far better that some, uh, unbalanced person escape than that the matter be blown out of proportion and the stage set, possibly, for a return to the days of the Twentieth Century.”

            “The official story even states that the robot spontaneously exploded--which is impossible, and which has been an unfair blow to the robot industry.”

            “A robot is not the term I would use, Mr. Edwards. It was a mechanical device. No one has said that robots are dangerous, per se, certainly not the workaday metallic ones. The only reference here is to the unusually complex manlike devices that seem flesh and blood and that we might call androids. Actually, they are so complex that perhaps they might explode at that; I am not an expert in the field. The robotics industry will recover.”

            “Nobody in the government,” said Edwards stubbornly, “seems to care whether we reach the bottom of the matter or not.”

            “I’ve already explained that there have been no consequences but good ones. Why stir the mud at the bottom, when the water above is clear?”

            “And the use of the disintegrator?”

            For a moment, Janek’s hand, which had been slowly turning the container of soya sticks on his desk, held still, then it returned to its rhythmic movement. He said lightly, “What’s that?”

            Edwards said intently, “Mr. Janek, I think you know what I mean. As part of the Service--”

            “To which you no longer belong, of course:”

            “Nevertheless, as part of the Service, I could not help but hear things that were not always, I suppose, for my ears. I had heard of a new weapon, and I saw something happen at the Tercentenary which would require one. The object everyone thought was the President disappeared into a cloud of very fine dust. It was as though every atom within the object had had its bonds to other atoms loosed. The object had become a cloud of individual atoms, which began to combine again of course, but which dispersed too quickly to do more than appear a momentary glitter of dust.”

            “Very science-fictionish.”

            “I certainly don’t understand the science behind it, Mr. Janek, but I do see that it would take considerable energy to accomplish such bond breaking. This energy would have to be withdrawn from the environment. Those people who were standing near the device at the time, and whom I could locate--and who would agree to talk--were unanimous in reporting a wave of coldness washing over them.”

            Janek put the soya-stick container to one side with a small click of transite against cellulite. He said, “Suppose just for argument that there is such a thing as a disintegrator.”

            “You need not argue. There is.”

            “I won’t argue. I know of no such thing myself, but in my office, I am not likely to know of anything so security-bound as new weaponry. But if a disintegrator exists and is as secret as all that, it must be an American monopoly, unknown to the rest of the Federation. It would then not be something either you or I should talk about. It could be a more dangerous war weapon than the nuclear bombs, precisely because--if what you say is so--it produces nothing more than disintegration at the point of impact and cold in the immediate neighborhood. No blast, no fire, no deadly radiation. Without these distressing side effects, there would be no deterrent to its use, yet for all we know it might be made large enough to destroy the planet itself.”

            “I go along with all of that,” said Edwards.

            “Then you see that if there is no disintegrator, it is foolish to talk about one; and if there is a disintegrator, then it is criminal to talk about one.”

            “I haven’t discussed it, except to you, just now, because I’m trying to persuade you of the seriousness of the situation. If one had been used, for instance, ought not the government be interested in deciding how it came to be used--if another unit of the Federation might be in possession?”

            Janek shook his head. “I think that we can rely on appropriate organs of this government to take such a thing into consideration. You had better not concern yourself with the matter.”

            Edwards said, in barely controlled impatience, “Can you assure me that the United States is the only government that has such a weapon at its disposal?”

            “I can’t tell you, since I know nothing about such a weapon, and should not know. You should not have spoken of it to me. Even if no such weapon exists, the rumor of its existence could be damaging.”

            “But since I have told you and the damage is done, please hear me out. Let me have the chance of convincing you that you, and no one else, hold the key to a fearful situation that perhaps I alone see.”

            “You alone see? I alone hold the key?”

            “Does that sound paranoid? Let me explain and then judge for yourself.”

            “I will give you a little more time, sir, but what I have said stands. You must abandon this--this hobby of yours--this investigation. It is terribly dangerous.”

            “It is its abandonment that would be dangerous. Don’t you see that if the disintegrator exists and if the United States has the monopoly of it, then it follows that the number of people who could have access to one would be sharply limited. As an ex-member of the Service, I have some practical knowledge of this and I tell you that the only person in the world who could manage to abstract a disintegrator from our top-secret arsenals would be the President....Only the President of the United States, Mr. Janek, could have arranged that assassination attempt.”

            They stared at each other for a moment and then Janek touched a contact at his desk.

            He said, “Added precaution. No one can overhear us now by any means. Mr. Edwards, do you realize the danger of that statement? To yourself? You must not overestimate the power of the Global Charter. A government has the right to take reasonable measures for the protection of its stability.”

            Edwards said, “I’m approaching you, Mr. Janek, as someone I presume to be a loyal American citizen. I come to you with news of a terrible crime that affects all Americans and the entire Federation. A crime that has produced a situation that perhaps only you can right. Why do you respond with threats?”

            Janek said, “That’s the second time you have tried to make it appear that I am a potential savior of the world. I can’t conceive of myself in that role. You understand, I hope, that I have no unusual powers.”

            “You are the secretary to the President.”

            “That does not mean I have special access to him or am in some intimately confidential relationship to him. There are times, Mr. Edwards, when I suspect others consider me to be nothing more than a flunky, and there are even times when I find myself in danger of agreeing with them.”

            “Nevertheless, you see him frequently, you see him informally, you see him--”

            Janek said impatiently, “I see enough of him to be able to assure you that the President would not order the destruction of that mechanical device on Tercentenary day.”

            “Is it in your opinion impossible, then?”

            “I did not say that. I said he would not. After all, why should he? Why should the President want to destroy a look-alike android that had been a valuable adjunct to him for over three years of his Presidency? And if for some reason he wanted it done, why on Earth should he do it in so incredibly public a way--at the Tercentenary, no less--thus advertising its existence, risking public revulsion at the thought of shaking hands with a mechanical device, to say nothing of the diplomatic repercussions of having had representatives of other parts of the Federation treat with one? He might, instead, simply have ordered it disassembled in private. No one but a few highly placed members of the Administration would have known.”

            “There have not, however, been any undesirable consequences for the President as a result of the Incident, have there?”

            “He has had to cut down on ceremony. He is no longer as accessible as he once was.”

            “As the robot once was.”

            “Well,” said Janek uneasily. “Yes, I suppose that’s right.”

            Edwards said, “And, as a matter of fact, the President was re-elected and his popularity has not diminished even though the destruction was public. The argument against public destruction is not as powerful as you make it sound.”

            “But the re-election came about despite the Incident. It was brought about by the President’s quick action in stepping forward and delivering what you will have to admit was one of the great speeches of American history. It was an absolutely amazing performance; you will have to admit that.”

            “It was a beautifully staged drama. The President, one might think, would have counted on that.”

            Janek sat back in his chair. “If I understand you, Edwards, you are suggesting an involuted storybook plot. Are you trying to say that the President had the device destroyed, just as it was--in the middle of a crowd, at precisely the time of the Tercentenary celebration, with the world watching--so that he could win the admiration of all by his quick action? Are you suggesting that he arranged it all so that he could establish himself as a man of unexpected vigor and strength under extremely dramatic circumstances and thus turn a losing campaign into a winning one? ...Mr. Edwards, you’ve been reading fairy tales.”

            Edwards said, “If I were trying to claim all this, it would indeed be a fairy tale, but I am not. I never suggested that the President ordered the killing of the robot. I merely asked if you thought it were possible and you have stated quite strongly that it wasn’t. I’m glad you did, because I agree with you.”

            “Then what is all this? I’m beginning to think you’re wasting my time.”

            “Another moment, please. Have you ever asked yourself why the job couldn’t have been done with a laser beam, with a field deactivator--with a sledgehammer, for God’s sake? Why should anyone go to the incredible trouble of getting a weapon guarded by the strongest possible government security to do a job that didn’t require such a weapon? Aside from the difficulty of getting it, why risk revealing the existence of a disintegrator to the rest of the world?”

            “This whole business of a disintegrator is just a theory of yours.”

            “The robot disappeared completely before my eyes. I was watching. I rely on no secondhand evidence for that. It doesn’t matter what you call the weapon; whatever name you give it, it had the effect of taking the robot apart atom by atom and scattering all those atoms irretrievably. Why should this be done? It was tremendous overkill.”

            “I don’t know what was in the mind of the perpetrator.”

            “No? Yet it seems to me that there is only one logical reason for a complete powdering when something much simpler would have carried through the destruction. The powdering left no trace behind of the destroyed object. It left nothing to indicate what it had been, whether robot or anything else.”

            Janek said, “But there is no question of what it was.”

            “Isn’t there? I said only the President could have arranged for a disintegrator to be obtained and used. But, considering the existence of a look-alike robot, which President did the arranging?”

            Janek said harshly, “I don’t think we can carry on this conversation. You are mad.”

            Edwards said, “Think it through. For God’s sake, think it through. The President did not destroy the robot. Your arguments there are convincing. What happened was that the robot destroyed the President. President Winkler was killed in the crowd on July 4, 2076. A robot resembling President Winkler then gave the Tercentenary speech, ran for re-election, was re-elected, and still serves as President of the United States!”

            “Madness!”

            “I’ve come to you, to you because you can prove this--and correct it, too.”

            “It is simply not so. The President is--the President.” Janek made as though to rise and conclude the interview.

            “You yourself say he’s changed,” said Edwards quickly and urgently. “The Tercentenary speech was beyond the powers of the old Winkler. Haven’t you been yourself amazed at the accomplishments of the last two years? Truthfully--could the Winkler of the first term have done all this?”

            “Yes, he could have, because the President of the second term is the President of the first term.”

            “Do you deny he’s changed? I put it to you. You decide and I’ll abide by your decision.”

            “He’s risen to meet the challenge, that is all. It’s happened before this in American history.” But Janek sank back into his seat. He looked uneasy.

            “He doesn’t drink,” said Edwards.

            “He never did--very much.”

            “He no longer womanizes. Do you deny he did so in the past?”

            “A President is a man. For the last two years, however, he’s felt dedicated to the matter of the Federation.”

            “It’s a change for the better, I admit,” said Edwards, “but it’s a change. Of course, if he had a woman, the masquerade could not be carried on, could it?”

            Janek said, “Too bad he doesn’t have a wife.” He pronounced the archaic word a little self-consciously. “The whole matter wouldn’t arise if he did.”

            “The fact that he doesn’t made the plot more practical. Yet he has fathered two children. I don’t believe they have been in the White House, either one of them, since the Tercentenary.”

            “Why should they be? They are grown, with lives of their own.”

            “Are they invited? Is the President interested in seeing them? You’re his private secretary. You would know. Are they?”

            Janek said, “You’re wasting time. A robot can’t kill a human being. You know that that is the First Law of Robotics.”

            “I know it. But no one is saying that the robot-Winkler killed the human-Winkler directly. When the human-Winkler was in the crowd, the robot-Winkler was on the stand and I doubt that a disintegrator could be aimed from that distance without doing more widespread damage. Maybe it could, but more likely the robot-Winkler had an accomplice--a hit man, if that is the correct Twentieth-Century jargon.”

            Janek frowned. His plump face puckered and looked pained. He said, “You know, madness must be catching. I’m actually beginning to consider the insane notion you’ve brought here. Fortunately, it doesn’t hold water. After all, why would an assassination of the human-Winkler be arranged in public? All the arguments against destroying the robot in public hold against the killing of a human President in public. Don’t you see that ruins the whole theory?”

            “It does not--” began Edwards. “It does. No one except for a few officials knew that the mechanical device existed at all. If President Winkler were killed privately and his body disposed of, the robot could easily take over without suspicion--without having roused yours, for instance.”

            “There would always be a few officials who would know, Mr. Janek. The assassinations would have to broaden.” Edwards leaned forward earnestly. “See here, ordinarily there couldn’t have been any danger of confusing the human being and the machine. I imagine the robot wasn’t in constant use, but was pulled out only for specific purposes, and there would always be key individuals, perhaps quite a number of them, who would know where the President was and what he was doing. If that were so, the assassination would have to be carried out at a time when those officials actually thought the President was really the robot.”

            “I don’t follow you.”

            “See here. One of the robot’s tasks was to shake hands with the crowd; press the flesh. When this was taking place, the officials in the know would be perfectly aware that the hand shaker was, in truth, the robot.”

            “Exactly. You’re making sense now. It was the robot.”

            “Except that it was the Tercentenary, and except that President Winkler could not resist. I suppose it would be more than human to expect a President--particularly an empty crowd pleaser and applause hunter like Winkler--to give up the adulation of the crowd on this day of all days, and let it go to a machine. And perhaps the robot carefully nurtured this impulse so that on this one Tercentenary day, the President would have ordered the robot to remain behind the podium, while he himself went out to shake hands and to be cheered.”

            “Secretly?”

            “Of course secretly. If the President had told anyone in the Service, or any of his aides, or you, would he have been allowed to do it? The official attitude concerning the possibility of assassination has been practically a disease since the events of the late Twentieth Century. So with the encouragement of an obviously clever robot--”

            “You assume the robot to be clever because you assume he is now serving as President. That is circular reasoning. If he is not President, there is no reason to think he is clever, or that he were capable of working out this plot. Besides, what motive could possibly drive a robot to plot an assassination? Even if it didn’t kill the President directly, the taking of a human life indirectly is also forbidden by the First Law, which states: ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’”

            Edwards said, “The First Law is not absolute. What if harming a human being saves the lives of two others, or three others, or even three billion others? The robot may have thought that saving the Federation took precedence over the saving of one life. It was no ordinary robot, after all. It was designed to duplicate the properties of the President closely enough to deceive anyone. Suppose it had the understanding of President Winkler, without his weaknesses, and suppose it knew that it could save the Federation where the President could not.”

            “You can reason so, but how do you know a mechanical device would?”

            “It is the only way to explain what happened.”

            “I think it is a paranoid fantasy.”

            Edwards said, “Then tell me why the object that was destroyed was powdered into atoms. What else would make sense than to suppose that that was the only way to hide the fact that it was a human being and not a robot that was destroyed? Give me an alternate explanation.”

            Janek reddened. “I won’t accept it.”

            “But you can prove the whole matter--or disprove it. It’s why I have come to you--to you.”

            “How can I prove it? Or disprove it either?”

            “No one sees the President at unguarded moments as you do. It is with you--in default of family--that he is most informal. Study him.”

            “I have. I tell you he isn’t--”

            “You haven’t. You suspected nothing wrong--Little signs meant nothing to you. Study him now, being aware that he might be a robot, and you will see.”

            Janek said sardonically, “I can knock him down and probe for metal with an ultrasonic detector. Even an android has a platinum-iridium brain.”

            “No drastic action will be necessary. Just observe him and you will see that he is so radically not the man he was that he cannot be a man.”

            Janek looked at the clock-calendar on the wall. He said, “We have been here over an hour.”

            “I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time, but you see the importance of all this, I hope.”

            “Importance?” said Janek. Then he looked up and what had seemed a despondent air turned suddenly into something of hope. “But is it, in fact, important? Really, I mean?”

            “How can it not be important? To have a robot as President of the United States? That’s not important?”

            “No, that’s not what I mean. Forget what President Winkler might be. Just consider this. Someone serving as President of the United States has saved the Federation; he has held it together and, at the present moment, he runs the Council in the interests of peace and of constructive compromise. You’ll admit all that?”

            Edwards said, “Of course, I admit all that. But what of the precedent established? A robot in the White House for a very good reason now may lead to a robot in the White House twenty years from now for a very bad reason, and then to robots in the White House for no reason at all but only as a matter of course. Don’t you see the importance of muffling a possible trumpet call for the end of humanity at the time of its first uncertain note?”

            Janek shrugged. “Suppose I find out he’s a robot? Do we broadcast it to all the world? Do you know how that will affect the Federation? Do you know what it will do to the world’s financial structure? Do you know--”

            “I do know. That is why I have come to you privately, instead of trying to make it public. It is up to you to check out the matter and come to a definite conclusion. It is up to you, next, having found the supposed President to be a robot, which I am certain you will do, to persuade him to resign.”

            “And by your version of his reaction to the First Law, he will then have me killed since I will be threatening his expert handling of the greatest global crisis of the Twenty-first Century.”

            Edwards shook his head. “The robot acted in secret before, and no one tried to counter the arguments he used with himself. You will be able to reinforce a stricter interpretation of the First Law with your arguments. If necessary, we can get the aid of some official from U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation who constructed the robot in the first place. Once he resigns, the Vice-President will succeed. If the robot-Winkler has put the old world on the right track, good; it can now be kept on the right track by the Vice-President, who is a decent and honorable woman. But we can’t have a robot ruler, and we mustn’t ever again.

            “What if the President is human?”

            “I’ll leave that to you. You will know.”

            Janek said, “I am not that confident of myself. What if I can’t decide? If I can’t bring myself to? If I don’t dare to? What are your plans?”

            Edwards looked tired. “I don’t know. I may have to go to U. S. Robots. But I don’t think it will come to that. I’m quite confident that now that I’ve laid the problem in your lap, you won’t rest till it’s settled. Do you want to be ruled by a robot?”

            He stood up, and Janek let him go. They did not shake hands.

            Janek sat there in the gathering twilight in deep shock. A robot!

            The man had walked in and had argued, in perfectly rational manner, that the President of the United States was a robot.

            It should have been easy to fight that off. Yet though Janek had tried every argument he could think of, they had all been useless, and the man had not been shaken in the least.

            A robot as President! Edwards had been certain of it, and he would stay certain of it. And if Janek insisted that the President was human, Edwards would go to U. S. Robots. He wouldn’t rest.

            Janek frowned as he thought of the twenty-seven months since the Tercentenary and of how well all had gone in the face of the probabilities. And now?

            He remained lost in somber thought.

            He still had the disintegrator but surely it would not be necessary to use it on a human being, the nature of whose body was not in question. A silent laser stroke in some lonely spot would do.

            It had been hard to maneuver the President into the earlier job, but in this present case, it wouldn’t even have to know.

My first thought was to call the previous story “Death at the Tricentennial,” but the dictionary assured me that “tercentenary” was a perfectly good way of referring to a three hundredth birthday, so I called it “Death at the Tercentenary.”

            Fred changed that name to THE TERCENTENARY INCIDENT, which was a great improvement in my opinion, and I adopted it with glad cries. I am not always pleased with his title changes and generally say so, as in my collection of mystery short stories Tales of the Black Widowers. It is only fair now that I give him credit for a good change.

            --One more thing. Again, this story represents a return to a theme I handled in an earlier story .The earlier story in this case was EVIDENCE, first published in 1946, thirty years before this story was. There is, except for theme, no similarity between the two stories, and I leave it to the Gentle Reader, if he or she has read both, to decide whether I have improved or not in the interval. (Don’t write, however, unless you think I have improved.)

Time flies. I myself am ever-youthful, but everything else is getting older. Do you realize that with the April 1976 issue, Amazing Stories, the oldest of the science fiction magazines, celebrated its Semicentennial?

            The April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories was Volume I, Number 1. It was the very first issue of the first magazine ever to be devoted entirely to science fiction-and that was fifty years ago.

            Hugo Gernsback had been born in Luxemburg in 1884 and had emigrated to the United States in 1904. He went on to write some excruciatingly bad science fiction with some excruciatingly good predictions in it, to edit a magazine, in which he included science fiction stories (or scientifiction, as be called it) , and to begin thinking of publishing an all-science-fiction magazine for some time. A probing circular be sent out in 1924 brought in disappointing results, but then, in 1926, without any advance fanfare at all, he placed the new magazine on the stands.

            Sol Cohen, the current publisher of the magazine, called me in the fall of 1975 to ask me if I could make some contribution in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the magazine, and although, as usual, I was drowning in commitments, there was no way I could let that pass. On November 22, 1975, I sat down to write BIRTH OF A NOTION and so I was represented in the anniversary issue.

Birth of a Notion

            That the first inventor of a workable time machine was a science fiction enthusiast is by no means a coincidence. It was inevitable. Why else should an otherwise sane physicist even dare track down the various out-of -the-way theories that seemed to point toward maneuverability in time in the very teeth of General Relativity?

            It took energy, of course. Everything takes energy. But Simeon Weill was prepared to pay the price. Anything (well, almost anything) to make his hidden science-fictional dream come true.

            The trouble was that there was no way of controlling either the direction or distance through which one was chronologically thrust. It was all the result of random temporal collisions of the harnessed tachyons. Weill could make mice and even rabbits disappear--but future or past, he couldn’t say. One mouse reappeared, so he must have traveled but a short way into the past--and it seemed quite unharmed. The others? Who could tell?

            He devised an automatic release for the machine. Theoretically, it would reverse the push (whatever the push might be) and bring back the object (from whichever direction and whatever distance it had gone). It didn’t always work, but five rabbits were brought back unharmed.

            If he could only make the release foolproof, Weill would have tried it himself. He was dying to try it--which was not the proper reaction of a theoretical physicist, but-was the absolute predictable emotion of a crazed s.f. fan who was particularly fond of the space-operish productions of some decades before the present year of 1976.

            It was inevitable, then, that the accident should happen. On no account would he have stepped between the tempodes with conscious determination. He knew the chances were about two in five he would not return. On the other hand, he was dying to try it, so he tripped over his own big feet and went staggering between those tempodes as a result of total accident. ...But are there really accidents?

            He might have been hurled into the past or into the future. As 1t happened, he was ,hurled into the past.

            He might have been hurled uncounted thousands of years into the past or one and a half days. As it happened, he was hurled fifty-one years into the past to a time when the Teapot Dome Scandal was burning brightly but the nation was keeping Cool with Coolidge and knew that nobody in the world could lick Jack Dempsey.

            But there was something that his theories didn’t tell Weill. He knew what could happen to the particles themselves, but there was no way of predicting what would happen to the relationships between the various particles. And where are relationships more complex than in the brain?

            So what happened was that as Weill moved backward through time, his mind unreeled. Not all the way, fortunately, since Weill had not yet been conceived in the year before America’s Sesquicentennial, and a brain with less than no development would have been a distinct handicap.

            It unreeled haltingly, and partially, and clumsily, and when Weill found himself on a park bench not far from his 1976 home in lower Manhattan, where he experimented in dubious symbiosis with New York University, he found himself in the year 1925 with an abysmally aching head and no very clear idea as to what anything was all about.

            He found himself staring at a man of about forty, hair slicked down, cheekbones prominent, beaky nose, who was sharing the same bench with him.

            The man looked concerned. He said, “Where did you come from? You were not here a moment ago.” He had a distinct Teutonic accent. .

            Weill wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember. But one phrase seemed to stick through the chaos within his skull even though he wasn’t sure what it meant.

            “Time machine,” he gasped.

            The other man stiffened. He said, “Do you read pseudoscientific romances?”

            “What?” said Weill.

            “Have you read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine?”

             The repetition of the phrase seemed to soothe Weill a bit. The pain in his head lessened. The name Wells seemed familiar, or was that his own name? No. his own name was Weill.

            “Wells?” he said. “I am Weill.”

            The other man thrust out a hand. “I am Hugo Gernsback. I write pseudo-scientific romances at times, but of course, it is not right to say ‘pseudo.’ That makes it seem there is something fake about it. That is not so. It should be properly written and then it will be scientific fiction. I like to shorten that”-his dark eyes gleamed--”to scientifiction. “

            “Yes,” said Weill, trying desperately to collect shattered memories and unwound experiences and getting only moods and impressions. “Scientifiction. Better than pseudo. Still not quite--”

            “If done well. Have you read my ‘Ralph 124C41 +’?”

            “Hugo Gernsback,” said Weill, frowning, “Famous--”

            “In a small way,” said the other, nodding his head. “I have been publishing magazines on radio and on electrical inventions for years. Have you read ‘Science and Invention’?”

            Weill caught the word “invention” and somehow that left him on the edge of understanding what he had meant by “time machine.” He grew eager and said, “Yes, yes.”

            “And what do you think of the scientifiction that I add in each issuer’

            Scientifiction again. The word had a soothing effect on him and yet it was not quite right. Something more--Not quite--

            He said it, “Something more. Not quite--”

            “Not quite enough? Yes, I’ve been thinking that. Last year I sent out circulars asking for subscriptions to a magazine to contain nothing but scientifiction. I would call it Scientifiction. The results were very disappointing. How would you explain that?”

            Weill didn’t hear him. He was still concentrating on the word “scientifiction,” which didn’t seem quite right, but he couldn’t understand why it didn’t.

            He said, “The name is not right.”

            “Not right for a magazine? Maybe that’s so. I have not thought of a good name; something to catch the eye, to get across just what the reader will get, and what he will want. That is it. If I could get a good name I would start the magazine and not worry about circulars. I would not ask anything. I would simply put it on every newsstand in the United States next spring; that is all.”

            Weill stared at him blankly.

            The man said, “Of course, the stories I want should teach science even as they amuse and excite the reader. They should open to him the vast scope of the future. Airplanes will cross the Atlantic nonstop.”

            “Airplanes?” Weill caught a fugitive vision of a large metal whale, rising on its own exhaust. A moment, and it was gone. He said, “Large ones, carrying hundreds of people faster than sound.”

            “Of course. Why not? Staying in touch at all times by radio.”

            “Satellites.”

            “What?” It was the other man’s turn to look puzzled.

            “Radio waves bounce off an artificial satellite in space.”

            The other man nodded vigorously. “I predicted the use of radio waves to detect at a distance in ‘Ralph 124C41 + .’ Space mirrors? I’ve predicted that. And television, of course. And energy from the atom.”

            Weill was galvanized. Images flashed before his mind’s eye in no suitable order. “Atom,” he said, “Yes. Nuclear bombs.”

            “Radium,” said the other man complacently.

            “Plutonium,” said Weill.

            “What?”

            “Plutonium. And nuclear fusion. Imitating the Sun. Nylon and plastics. Pesticides to kill the insects. Computers to kill the problems.”

            “Computers? You mean robots?”

            “Pocket computers,” said Weill enthusiastically. “Little things. Hold them in your hand and work out problems. Little radios. Hold them in your hand, too. Cameras take photographs and develop them right in the box. Holographs. Three. dimensional pictures.”

            The other man said, “Do you write scientifiction?”

            Weill didn’t listen. He kept trying to trap the images. They were growing clearer. “Skyscrapers,” he said. “Aluminum and glass. Highways. Color television. Man on the Moon. Probes to Jupiter.”

            “Man on the Moon,” said the other man. “Jules Verne. Do you read Jules Verne?”

            Weill shook his head. It was quite clear now. The mind was healing a bit. “Stepping down onto the Moon’s surface on television. Everyone watching. And pictures of Mars. No canals on Mars.”

            “No canals on Mars?” said the other man, astonished. “They have been seen.”

            “No canals,” said Weill firmly. “Volcanoes. The biggest. Canyons the biggest. Transistors, lasers, tachyons. Trap the tachyons. Make them push against time. Move through time. Move through time. A--ma--”

            Weill’s voice was fading and his outlines trembled. It so happened that the other man looked away at this moment, staring into the blue sky, and muttering, “Tachyons? What is he saying?”

            He was thinking that if a stranger he met casually in the park was so interested in scientifiction, it might be a good sign that it was time for the magazine. And then he remembered he had no name and dismissed the notion regretfully.

            He looked back in time to hear Weill’s last words, “Tachyonic time travel--an--amazing--stor--y--” And he was gone, snapping back to his own time.

            Hugo Gernsback stared in horror at the place where the man had been. He hadn’t seen him come and now he really hadn’t seen him go. His mind rejected the actual disappearance. How strange a man-his clothes were oddly cut, come to think of it, and his words were wild and whirling.

            The stranger himself said it-an amazing story. His last words.

            And then Gemsback muttered the phrase under his breath, “Amazing story. ...Amazing Stories?”

            A smile tugged at the comers of his mouth.

One last word--

            In putting together the stories for this collection, I couldn’t help noticing that between November 1974 and November 1975, I had written and sold seven science fiction stories. In addition, I had written and sold two mystery stories and one mystery novel, for a total of 132,000 words of fiction.

            You understand then, why, when some people, blinded by my 120+ books of nonfiction, ask me why I have quit writing fiction, I always answer, “I haven’t.”

            Well, I haven’t!

            And while I live, I won’t!