Ten

On the third day of his job, Forrester had been six days out of the freezer. He felt as though it had been a million.

But he was learning. Yes, he told himself—gravely gratulatory—he was doing all his homework, and it was only a question of time until all answers were revealed to him and he took his proper place in this freemasonry of heroes.

Meanwhile, working for the Sirian was not at all disagreeable. The social pressure against his job came only from Adne, and he had seen very little of her since that first day. He missed her; but he had other things on his mind. The Sirian—it had agreed to allow Forrester to think of it as a male, although it did not concur in the diagnosis and would not explain further—was curious, insatiable but patient. When Forrester could not answer questions, it permitted him to take time to look them up. Its orientation, surprisingly enough, was all to the past. It volunteered an explanation for this—well, a sort of explanation. In its view, it said, the present state of any phenomenon was a mere obvious derivative of some prior state; and it was the prior states of mankind that it wanted to know about.

It crossed Forrester’s mind that if he were a war captive on a planet of alien enemies, the sort of knowledge that he would try to acquire would have more to do with arms and defense strategies. But he was not a Sirian, and he had decided not to bother trying to think like one. That was obviously beyond his powers. So he answered questions about Madison Avenue ad agencies and the angst that surrounded a World Series, and every day called up his bank to verify that his day’s salary had been deposited.

It had finally penetrated to Forrester that money was still money. His quarter of a million dollars would have bought him—and in fact had bought him—something very like a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of goods and services, even by twentieth-century standards. It was not the dollar that had been inflated. It was the standard of living.

There were so many things that a dollar could now buy. . . . And he had been buying quantities of them.

He could even, he discovered, have managed to live out his life on that quarter of a million dollars—just as he could have in 1969—provided he had lived at a 1969 level. No robot servants. No extensive medical services—above all, no use of the freezer facilities and their concomitant organ banks, prostheses, antientropic chemical flushings and so forth. If he had eaten no costly, custom-prepared natural foods, had not traveled, had acquired no expensive gadgets . . . if he had, to be exact, lived exactly the life of a twentieth-century suburban peasant, he could have made it last.

But not now. It was gone now. All gone, except for a few tens of thousands left in the account at the Nineteenth Chromatic, plus what the Sirian paid to his account every day. It was about enough to pay his standard joymaker fees for a couple of weeks, maybe. If he was careful.

But Forrester was resigned to the situation. He didn’t mind it particularly—at least, he didn’t mind his bankruptcy, since it lay within his power to work and make more money than he had ever dreamed of anyway. What he minded very much was the fact that he had been a joke—he and his quarter of a million dollars. And he minded most of all the fact that Adne had shared in that joke.

Because dimly, like a faint, predawn glow in the desert, he could see the foretaste of a time when Ande could be very important to him.

Was already very important to him, he thought wryly. At least in a potential sort of way. He wondered again what she had meant about that business of choosing a name . . . and why, he suddenly thought, had she not called him?

But what was important to him, Forrester realized, was not necessarily important to anyone else. For now, he was a sort of apprentice to life. For now, he would wait, and work, and learn. For now he would not push his luck.

Forrester had learned modesty, if he had learned nothing else.

Forrester had not yet discovered that, in one particular and quite unpleasant way, he was on his way to becoming the most important man in the world.

What mostly confused Forrester about his Sirian employer was that the creature seemed preoccupied. Forrester even asked his joymaker about it.

“Can you clarify your question, Man Forrester? What is there about the behavior of Alphard Four Zero-zero Trimate that puzzles you?”

“Just call him ‘the Sirian,’ will you? Anyway, he has a funny way of talking.”

“Perhaps that lies in my computation, Man Forrester. The Sirian language is tenseless and quasi-Boolean. I have taken the liberty of translating it into approximately twentieth-century English modes of speech, but if you wish I can give you a more literal rendering or—”

“No, it’s not that. He seems to have something on his mind.”

There was a pause of a second or two. Even Forrester knew enough to remark this occurrence; for the computer facilities to hesitate or search for an answer meant that the problem was something remarkable. But all the joymaker said was, “Can you give me an instance, Man Forrester?”

“Not really. Well, he has me doing some odd things. Is it right for him to want to hypnotize me?”

A pause again. Then the joymaker said, “I cannot say, Man Forrester. But I advise you to be cautious.”

Well, cautious he was, Forrester reflected. But he was also puzzled.

The Sirian did not repeat its suggestion about hypnotizing Forrester—“to secure in-depth referents, plus buried traumas of former time”—but it remained hard to figure out. It capriciously had him talking about the twentieth century at one moment, explaining the Arian-Athanasian wars of nearly two millennia before that at another. (Forrester had had to beg time out to research the heresies revolving around the distinction between the words “homoousian” and “homoiousian”; even so, he never really did get the problem straight.) It kindly volunteered to assume his joymaker costs as part of his expenses. It refused to allow him to charge as travel expenses a trip to the deepest vaults of Shoggo, where he had been looking up records of the abandoned pressure-dome settlements on Saturn. “Capricious” was the word.

It occurred to Forrester that the Sirian might simply be lonesome. But it rejected his offer to come visit it in its quarters. And, as far as he was able to tell, it showed no interest in the fate of its ten compatriots also in exile on Earth.

“You explain common-law marriage.” And, gamely, Forrester tried to describe to a Sirian the drives of sexual impulse and family needs, which had brought about a formal institution to regularize irregular conduct. “There exist trading stamps!” boomed the hollow, empty voice; and Forrester did his best to clarify the complexities of retail supermarket sales. “You have or have not violated legislative compulsion programs,” stated the Sirian; and that was the most prolonged session of all. Try as he would, Forrester could not seem to get across the idea of a personal ethic—of laws that one did not violate, because they were morally right, and of laws that everyone violated if they possibly could, because they were morally irrelevant.

He found himself feeling sorry for the Sirian. Its homework was even more arduous than his own.

But Forrester’s homework could not be neglected. He ordered his joymaker to display the records of the long-range reconnaissance of the Sirian planet.

He had been thinking of the Sirians as a paper tiger, but now he saw fangs. Englobed by fortresses, with fast and mighty vessels of war flitting about like wasps, the whole Sirian system was a vast network of armament. There were a dozen planets in all, two of them in Trojan orbit with Sirius B, the rest normal satellites of the great white star. All were inhabited. All were defended.

Earth’s reconnaissance drones had been lucky enough—or unlucky enough—to find themselves observing and taping what seemed to be war games. The Sirians took their war games seriously. Edited and compressed, the records showed a waste of creature and armament that only a massive war effort could justify. A hundred of the great ships were damaged, some destroyed. A fleet of them converged on an icy satellite of one of the outlying, planets . . . and the satellite was melted into glowing slag before Forrester’s eyes.

There was no more after that. Clearly, the operators of the drones had felt that enough was enough; it was less dangerous to leave the Sirians unwatched than to run the risk of attracting attention with the drones.

Forrester did not again offer to visit the Sirian in its quarters.

On the fifth day of his new life, Forrester arose to the promptings of his bed, ordered a standard low-cost breakfast (it was, as a matter of fact, far tastier than his hand-hewn specials), checked his messages, and started to work.

With some pride in his expertise, he commanded the joymaker to select and mark a course to the buried vastnesses of the American Documentation Institute. The green-glowing arrows sprang to life at his feet. He followed them out the door, into a sort of elevator cab (but one that moved laterally as well as up and down), out of the cab, into another building, through a foyer clattering with old-fashioned punch-card sorters, into a vault containing some centuries-old records in which his employer had shown a certain interest.

His joymaker said abruptly, “You will inform me about the term ‘space race.’ ”

Forrester took his eyes from the old microfilm viewer. “Hello, Sirian Four,” he said. “I’m busy looking up the beginnings of the Ned Lud Society, as you asked me. It’s pretty interesting, too. Did you know they used to break up computers and—”

“You will discontinue Ned Lud Society research and state motives that led two areas of this planet to complete in reaching the Moon.”

“All right. In a minute. Just let me finish what I’m doing.”

There was no answer. Forrester shrugged and returned to the viewer. The Luddites appeared to have taken themselves a great deal more seriously when they first started: where Taiko postured and coaxed, his predecessors had done the Carrie Nation bit with the axes, chopping up computing machines with the war cry, “Men for men’s jobs! Machines for bookkeeping!”

As he read he forgot about the call from his employer. Then—

“Man Forrester!” cried his joymaker. “I have two urgent notices of intention for you!”

It was the master computing center this time, not the deep, remote, echoless voice of the Sirian. Forrester groaned. “Not again!”

“Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major—”

“I knew it,” Forrester muttered.

“—states that he has reactivated his hunting permit. You are notified, Man Forrester, so please be guided accordingly.”

“I’m guided, I’m guided. What’s the other one?”

“Man Forrester, it is from Alphard Four Zero-zero Trimate,” said the joymaker; then, unbending slightly, “or, as you call him, Sirian Four. A notice to terminate employment. Guarantees are met, and notice paid. Reason: failure to comply with reasonable request of employer, to wit, research questions concerning early U.S. and U.S.S.R. space probe motivation.”

Forrester squawked, “Wait a minute! That sounds like—you mean—hey! I’m fired!”

“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “that is correct. You are fired.”

After the first shock had worn off, Forrester was not particularly sorry, although his feelings were hurt. He had thought he was doing as good a job as could be done. Considering the job. Considering the employer.

Nevertheless, it had had its disadvantages, including the barely polite remarks Adne and the children had been passing about working for the enemy. So with a light heart Forrester dismissed the Sirian from his mind and informed the joymaker he wanted another job.

Quite rapidly he had one: standby machine monitor for the great sublake fusion generating station under Lake Michigan. It paid very well, and the work was easy.

Not for twenty-four hours did Forrester discover that the premium pay was due to the fact that, at unpredictable intervals, severe radiation damage was encountered. His predecessor in the job—in fact, all of his predecessors—were now blocks of low-temperature matter in the great lakeside freezers, awaiting discovery of a better technique for flushing the radioactive poisons out of their cells; and the joymaker candidly informed him that their probable wait for thawing and restoration, which depended on the pace at which certain basic biophysical discoveries were likely to be made, was estimated to be of the order of magnitude of two thousand years.

Forrester blew his top. “Thanks!” he grated. “I quit! What the devil do they need a human being down here for anyway?”

“In the event of cybernetic failure,” said the machine promptly, “an organic overseer may retain the potential of voice connection with the central computing facility, providing an emergency capability—”

“It was only a rhetorical question. Forget it. Say,” said Forrester, punching the elevator button that would bring him up to the breather platform at the lake’s surface and thence back to the city, “why didn’t you tell me this job would kill me?”

“Man Forrester,” said the machine gravely, “you did not ask me. Excuse me, Man Forrester, but you have summoned an elevator. Your relief is not due for three hours. You should not leave your station unattended.”

“No, I shouldn’t. But I’m going to.”

“Man Forrester! I must warn you—”

“Look. If I read the plaque on the surface right, this particular installation has been in service for like a hundred and eighty years. I bet the cybernetic controls haven’t failed once in all that time. Right?”

“You are quite correct, Man Forrester. Nevertheless—”

“Nevertheless my foot. I’m going.” The elevator door opened; he entered; it closed behind him.

“Man Forrester! You are endangering—”

“Oh, shut up. There’s no danger. Worst that would happen would be that it might stop working for a while. So power from the city would come from the other generators until it got fixed, right?”

“Yes, Man Forrester, but the danger—”

“You argue too much. Over and out,” said Forrester. “Oh, except one thing. Find me another job.”

But the joymaker didn’t.

Time passed, and it still didn’t. It didn’t speak to him at all.

Back in his room, Forrester demanded of the joymaker, “Come on, what’s the matter? You computers don’t have human emotions, do you? If I hurt your feelings I’m sorry.”

But there was no answer. The joymaker did not speak. The view-walls would not light up. The dinner he ordered did not appear.

The room was dead.

Forrester conquered his pride and went to Adne Bensen’s apartment. She was not there, but the children let him in. He said, “Kids, I’ve got a problem. I seem to have blown a fuse or something in my joymaker.”

They were staring at him, bemused. After a moment Forrester realized he had blundered in on something. “What is it, Tunt? Another club meeting? How about it, Mim?”

They burst out laughing. Forrester said angrily, “All right. I didn’t come here for laughs, but what’s the joke?”

“You called me Tunt!” the boy laughed.

His sister giggled with him. “And that’s not the worst, Tunt. He called me Mim! Charles, don’t you know anything?”

“I know I’m in trouble,” Forrester said stiffly. “My joymaker doesn’t work any more.”

Now their stares were round-eyed and open-mouthed. “Oh, Charles!” Obviously the magnitude of the catastrophe had overwhelmed their defenses. Whatever it was that had been occupying their minds when he came in, they were giving him their whole attention now.

He said uncomfortably, “So what I want to know is, what went wrong?”

“Find out!” cried Mim. “Hurry, Tunt! Poor Charles!” She gazed at him with a compassion and horror, as at a leper.

The boy knew what practical steps to take—at least, he knew enough to be able to find out what Forrester had done wrong. Through his pedagogical joymaker, the boy queried the central computing facilities, listening with eyes wide to the inaudible response, and turned to stare again at Forrester.

“Charles! Great sweat! You quit your job without notice!”

“Well, sure I did,” said Forrester. He shifted uneasily in his seat. “All right,” he said, to break the silence. “I did the wrong thing, huh? I guess I was hasty.”

“Hasty!”

“Stupid,” Forrester amended. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry!”

“If you just keep repeating everything I say,” said Forrester, “you might drive me crazy, but you won’t be exactly helping me. I goofed. All right. I admit it.”

The boy said, “Yes, Charles, but didn’t you know you forfeited your salary? And you didn’t have anything much else, you know. A couple K-bucks sequestrated for the freezers, but not much loose cash. And so you’re—” The boy hesitated, forming the words with his lips. “You’re broke,” he whispered.

If those were not the most frightening words Forrester had ever heard, they certainly were well up in the running. Broke? In this age of incredible plenty and high-velocity spending? He might as well be dead, again. He sank back in his chair, and the little girl sprang helpfully forward and ordered him a drink. Forrester took a grateful swallow and waited for it to hit him.

It didn’t hit him. It was, of course, the best the girl could get for him on her own joymaker, but it had about as much kick as lemon pop.

He put it down carefully and said, “See if I’ve got this straight. I didn’t pay my bills, so they turned off the joymaker. Right?”

“Well, I guess you could say that.”

“All right.” Forrester nodded. “So the first thing I have to do is reestablish my credit. Get some money.”

“Right, Charles!” cried the girl. “That’ll fix everything up!”

“So how do I do that?”

The two children looked at each other helplessly.

“Isn’t there anything I can do?”

“Well, sure, Charles. Sweat, there’s got to be! Get another job, I guess.”

“But the joymaker wouldn’t get me one.”

“Sweat!” The boy gazed thoughtfully at his joymaker, picked it up, shook it, then put it down again. “That’s bad. Maybe when Mim comes home she can help you.”

“Really? Do you think she’ll help?”

“Well, no. I mean, I don’t think she’d know how.”

“Then what do I do?”

The boy looked worried and a little scared. Forrester was pretty sure he looked the same way himself. Certainly that was how he felt.

Of course, he told himself, Hara might help him once more; certainly he’d had the practice. Or Taiko might be sportsman enough to get over his snub and reopen the invitation to work for the Luddites.

But he was pretty sure that neither of these possibilities represented any very hopeful facts.

The little girl wandered thoughtfully away, not looking at Forrester, and began muttering into her joymaker—back to the game he had interrupted, Forrester thought with totally unjustified bitterness. He knew it was unjustified. These were only children, and he had no right to expect them to handle adult problems that at least one adult—himself—couldn’t handle at all. The boy said suddenly, “Oh, one other thing, Charles. Mim says Heinzie’s out after you again.”

“Don’t I know it.” But it didn’t seem such a threat, compared with the disaster of insolvency.

“Well, you see, you’ve got a problem there,” the boy said. “If you don’t have your joymaker you won’t have any warning when he’s around. And also there’s something about the DR equipment you might not know. You have to have some credit rating or they won’t freeze you at all if you’re killed. You know. There’s always the chance that you’ll do something that annuls the bonds, so Heinzie, or whoever, might protest payment—then they’d be in trouble. I mean, they don’t want to get stuck with a stiff that can’t pay up.

“I appreciate their difficulty.”

“I just thought you’d like to know.”

“Oh, you were right.” Forrester’s glance wandered. “Mim—whatever your name is. You! What are you doing?”

The girl looked up from her joymaker, her face flushed with excitement. “Me, Charles?”

“Yeah. Didn’t I hear you mention my name just now?”

“Sure, Charles. I was proposing you for membership in our club. You know, we told you about it.”

“Nice of you,” said Forrester bitterly. “Has it got a dining room?”

“Oh, it’s not that kind of a club, Charles. You don’t understand. The club will help you. Already they’ve made a suggestion.”

He looked skeptical. “Is that going to help?”

“Sweat, yes! Listen. Tars Tarkas just said, ‘Let him seek in the dead sea bottoms and the ancient cities. Let him join the haunted hosts of old Jasoom.’ ”

Forrester puzzled over the message drearily. “It doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said.

“Of course it does! Clear as the crawlers on the Farside coconut, don’t you see? He thinks you ought to hide out with the Forgotten Men!”

Eleven

It was only ten minutes walking from the children’s home to the great underbuilding plazas and warrens where the Forgotten Men lived. But Forrester had no guide this time, nor was there a joymaker to display green arrows to guide him, and it took him an hour. He dodged across an avenue of grass between roaring hovercraft, his life in his hands, and emerged under a hundred-story tower where a man came humbly toward him. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Stranger,” the man said, softly pleading, “Ah’ve had a turrible lahf. It all started when the mahns closed and my wahf Murry got sick—”

“Buddy,” said Forrester, “have you got a wrong number.”

The man stepped back a pace and looked him up and down. He was tall, lean, and dark, his face patient and intelligent. “Aren’t you the fellah Ah panhandled with those two little kids?” he said accusingly. “Gave me fifty bucks, Ah think.”

“You remember good. But that was when I had money; now I’m broke.” Forrester looked around at the tall buildings and the greensward. They did not seem hospitable. “I’d be obliged to you,” he added, “if you’d tell me where I can sleep tonight.”

The man glanced warily around, as if suspicious of some kind of a trick, then grinned and stuck his hand out. “Welcome to the club,” he said. “Name’s Whitlow. Jurry Whitlow. What happened?”

“I got fired,” said Forrester simply, introducing himself.

Jerry Whitlow commiserated. “Could happen to anybody, Ah guess. You know, Ah noticed you didn’t have a joymaker, but Ah didn’t think much about it. Figured, sweat, he’s just a damn greenhorn, prob’ly forgot to take it with him. But you got to get yourself one raht away.”

“Why?”

“Whah? Sweat, man! Don’t you know you’re fur game for anybody on the hunt? They come down here, take one look around, and they see you’re busted—hell, man, you wouldn’t last out the day.” He unclipped his own joymaker—or what Forrester had taken to be a joymaker—and proudly handed it over. “Fake, see? But it looks lahk the real thing. Fool anybody. Fooled you, Ah bet.”

It had, as a matter of fact. But actually, Forrester saw with surprise, it wouldn’t fool anyone at all, not at close range. It was far too light to be a joymaker, apparently whittled out of some organic plastic and painted in the pale patterns of a joymaker. “Of course, it don’t work,” Whitlow grinned. “But on the other hand Ah don’t have to pay rent on it. Keeps ‘em off pretty good. Didn’t have that, one of these preverts that get they kicks from total death’d come down here and tag me first thing.”

Gently he pulled it out of Forrester’s hand and looked at him calculatingly. “Now, you got to get one just lahk it and, damn, you hit lucky first tahm. Theah’s a fellow two houses over makes them to sell. Friend o’ mahn. Ah bet he’ll give you one for—hell! Maybe little as a hundred dollars!” Forrester started to open his mouth. “Maybe even eighty! . . . Seventy-fahv?”

“Whit,” said Forrester simply, “I haven’t got a dime.”

“Sweat!” Whitlow was awed. Then he shrugged. “Well, hell, Ah guess we can’t let you get killed for a lousy fifteen bucks. Ah’ll get you fixed up on spec.”

“Fifteen?”

Whitlow grinned. “That’s without mah commission. Come on with me, boy. You got some ropes to learn!”

The Forgotten Men lived on the castoffs of the great world overhead, but it did not seem to Forrester that they lived badly. Jerry Whitlow was not fat, but he was obviously not starving, either. His clothes were clean and in good repair, his attitude relaxed. Why, thought Forrester, it might even turn out that I’ll like it here, once I learn my way around. . . .

Whitlow was a first-rate teacher, even though he never stopped talking. He conducted Forrester through underbuilding mazes and footbridges Forrester had not even seen, his mouth going all the while. Mostly it was the story of his life.

“. . . Laid off at the mahns when Ah was sixteen. Out of work, Chuck, and me with a family to support. Well, we made out, kahnd of, until mah wahf Murry got sick and we had to go on the relief. So a gov’ment man came around and put me on the Aydult Retraining and gave me tests and, Chrahst, Chuck, you know Ah scored so hah Ah just about broke the scales. So then Ah went back to school and—”

He stopped and glanced apprehensively overhead. They were between buildings, under a tiny square of open sky. He grabbed Forrester and dragged him swiftly back into the cellar where the joymaker-maker had kept his shop.

“Watch out!” he whispered fiercely. “They’s a reporter up there!”

The word meant nothing to Forrester, but the tone carries the message. He ran one way, Whitlow the other. The joymaker-maker’s shop had been in a sort of vermiform appendix to the plumbing of an apartment complex, in an area where some installation had been designed into the plans, then was outmoded and removed, and the space left vacant. The little man who sold the joymakers occupied a sort of triplex apartment—three rooms on three levels—and out of it and around it ran, for some reason, a net of empty, four-foot-wide tunnels. Down one of them Whitlow fled. Down another ran Forrester.

It was dark. The footing was uneven. But Forrester hurried down it, stooped over to avoid banging his head, until the blackness was total and he fell to the rough floor, gasping.

He still did not know what he had been running from, but Whitlow’s fear was contagious. And it reawakened a hundred old pains; until this moment he had almost forgotten the beating he had taken the first day out of the freezer, but the exertion made every dwindling ache start up again. His sides pounded, his head throbbed.

He had now been a Forgotten Man for exactly two hours.

Time passed, and the silence was as total as the darkness. Whatever it was that Whitlow had feared it did not seem to be pursuing here. It would take a human stoat to pursue a human rabbit in this warren, he thought; and in the darkness maybe even the rabbit would develop claws. It had been bad enough when all he had to fear was the crazy Martian. Now. . . .

He sighed, and turned over on the rough, cast-stone floor.

He wondered wistfully what had become of all the furnishings and gadgets he had bought so recklessly for the apartment he no longer owned. Shouldn’t there be some sort of trade-in allowance?

But if there was, he did not have the skill to claim it. Nor did he own a working joymaker to help him with instructions. He wondered if Hara would help him out at this last juncture and resolved to go looking for the doctor. After all, it was in a way Hara’s responsibility that he was in this predicament. . . .

“No,” said Forrester in the darkness, aloud and very clearly.

It wasn’t Hara’s responsibility at all. It was his own.

If there was one thing that he had learned in his two hours as a Forgotten Man, it was that there were no responsibilities any more that were not his own. This was not a world where a protective state provided for its people. It was a world of the individual; he was the captain of his fate, the master of his soul—

And the prisoner of his failings.

By the time he heard Whitlow cautiously calling his name, Forrester had come to terms with the fact that he was all alone in a cold and uncaring world.

Cautiously they tiptoed out of the pipes, across a hoverway, and under a huge building that was supported on a thousand elliptical pillars, set in beds of grass. What light kept the grass growing came from concealed fixtures in the ten acres of roof over their heads.

Whitlow, regaining the appearance of confidence, led the way to one particular pillar that held a door, marked in glittering red letters EMERGENCY EXIT. He pushed it open, shoved Forrester inside, and closed it behind them.

“Whew,” he said cheerfully. “That was close, but we’re all raht now. You beginning to get hungry?”

Forrester had been about to ask questions, but that totally diverted his attention. “Yes!”

Whitlow grinned. “Figured,” he said. “Well, Ah’ve got just the thing for you, prob’ly. Ah’ve got a steady clah’nt in this building, fellow who used to work with me at the labs, back before. He’s on diet programming now, see, and he always manages to slip me something out of the expurimental allowance. So let’s see—”

He rummaged in a cupboard and emerged with a pair of thermal-covered hot dishes. They opened at a touch and displayed a steaming, fragrant dinner for two. “Damn, he done better than ever! Looks lahk smoked oysters Milanese! Sink your teeth in this, Chuck: Ah guarantee you won’t do better at the Senate of the Twelve Apostles!”

While he wolfed down the food, Forrester glanced about him to discover what sort of place he was in. It seemed to be an air-raid access to the underground park from the building above, no longer used because, since the beginning of the Sirian threat, complete new facilities had been excavated at the five-hundred-foot subterranean level. But this little forgotten vestige of a completely stocked shelter remained, and, as no one else had any use for it, Whitlow had taken it for his own. It was temperature controlled; it had lights and plumbing; and, as Forrester had already seen, it was provided with food storage facilities. All Whitlow had to do was furnish the food. Forrester leaned back, relaxed; trying to summon up the energy to eat a chocolate mousse and half listening to Whitlow’s stream of talk. “. . . So then when Ah got out of M. Ah. T. they weren’t vurry many jobs open for coal-mahning engineers, of course. So Ah went back and took mah master’s in solid-state electronics. Then Bell Labs sent they recruiter up to scout out prospects and he made me this offer, and Ah went into the labs at nahn thousand to start. Sweat, man, things looked good. Murry was puttin’ on weight, and the kids were fahn. But Ah’d had this little cough for some tahm, and—”

“Whit,” said Forrester, “hold off on that a minute, will you? I want to ask you something. Why did we hide from that reporter?”

Whitlow looked startled. “Ah’m sorry,” he apologized after a minute. “Ah keep forgetting what a greenhorn you are. You don’t know about these reporters.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, all you have to know is seeing one of them’s poison. Whah, that lahk a vulture hovering over a hill. You just know they’s going to be a corpse down below. See, they’ve got this Freedom of the Press thing, so when anybody takes out a killing lahcense he got to tell the reporters raht away. And he’s got to fahl a complete plan of action, see, so the reporters can be raht there when the blood starts flahing, because they tape it all and they put it on the view-walls. Specially if the killer’s in one of the tournaments. Fella from the National Open was here last week and, God, they was reporters hanging out of every cloud.”

“I think I understand,” said Forrester. “You mean if you can keep out of the way of the reporters, you can probably keep out of the way of the assassins, too.”

“Stands to reason, don’t it?”

“I don’t know what stands to reason,” Forrester said humbly. He was beginning to wish he had not been so quick to follow the advice of Adne’s children, so reluctant to wait and expose himself to more of Adne’s gentle scorn. He felt a quick surge of anger. How dare this world treat his life so lightly!

But if it had not been for this world he would not have a life at all; would have stayed dead with a lungful of smoke and fire, centuries before, his body now no more than a soft place in the ground. He leaned back and let himself be lulled by Whitlow’s continuing story of his own adventures.

“So then Ah went to the comp’ny doctor and he told me Ah had it, all rhat. The Big C. Well! Scared? But we had this comp’ny freezer plan at the labs, and Ah reported in to the medics. ‘Sheeoot,’ they said. ‘Lung cancer, hey? Well, you lay raht down here and we’ll freeze your bones—’ ”

Relaxing, half listening, Forrester found himself getting drowsy. It had been a very strange day, he thought; but then he stopped thinking and fell asleep.

In order to live successfully as a panhandler, you had to exercise special care in picking your “clients,” Whitlow said. The worst thing you could do was guess wrong. There was always the chance that you might sidle up to somebody and hit him for a touch—and then find out that he was some jet-set happy-boy looking for an economical murder to commit, one that might get him out of the problem of paying for the victim’s repairs, and one with double thrills, since there was always the chance that the victim would stay dead.

To avoid that, you had to study each prospective mark carefully. No one came down here on business. The best ones were the rubberneck tourists. They usually came in pairs; and, of any two, the one who was being shown around could safely be figured for a greenhorn—himself too fresh out of the freezers, or back from the starways, to be eager for murder as yet. The problem there was to make an accurate assessment of the one who was doing the showing. “That’s whah Ah picked you, Chuck. Ah wasn’t worried about the little boy. Though you can be vurry surprised sometahms.”

And, of course, everything they did was more or less illegal, so you had to watch out for the coppers.

The coppers would not trouble you unless they saw you actually breaking the law—or unless you were wanted for something. Then they would trouble you a lot. Forrester’s first contact with one of the coppers came as he was on the point of bracing a woman alone, Whitlow hiding behind a flowering lilac bush and coaching him in whispers. “See thur, Chuck, what she did? Threw away a cigarette butt. Well, that’s ten to one she’s from nahnteen eighty or earlier, so go get ‘er, boy!” But Forrester had taken no more than a single step before Whitlow’s piercing whisper stopped him. “Copper!”

The copper was seven feet tall, uniformed in blue, swinging what looked like a nightstick but was not Forrester had been warned: it was a sort of joymaker, full of anesthetic sprays and projectile weapons. And the copper had seen him.

It strolled right up to them, swinging the stick. It stopped and looked Whitlow in the eyes, right through the lilac blooms. “Good morning, Man Whitlow,” it said courteously and moved on to Forrester. It stared silently into his eyes. Then, “Nice day, Man Forrester,” it said, and moved away.

“How’d he know?” gasped Forrester.

“Retina pattern. Don’t worry about it; if he wanted you for anything he’d have you by now. Just give him a minute to get out of saht.”

The woman prospect was gone then. But there were plenty of others.

Keeping out of the way of coppers, trying to learn Whitlow’s skill at estimating the potentials of a mark, Forrester found that the time passed. Nor was it the most disagreeable way he had ever spent a day. The weather was warm and dry, the growing plants were scented, the people he hit up were no worse than the average run. Forrester took five dollars from a pretty girl in a sort of mirror-bright bikini, then fifty from a man who had brought his pet animal—it was a little silk-furred monkey—down to the underbuilding park to run free, and who seemed to accept Forrester’s touch as a form of rent for the use of the premises. Forrester paid back Whitlow’s outlay for the fake joymaker and found himself with cash money in his pocket. As he could see no particular need for spending much of it, he began to feel solvent again.

Then Whitlow’s hawk eyes brightened, and he whispered tautly, “Eeow! Look over thur, will you? We’ve got ourselfs a lahv one now!”

On the fringe of a bed of tall gladioli a man had stepped out of a hovercar and dismissed it. He seemed young, although you couldn’t really tell. He moved idly across the grass, like a sightseer. His gait was peculiar, and he wore an expression of grave joy as he minced toward them.

“Look how he walks!” exulted Whitlow.

“I am looking. What about it?”

“Whah, Chuck, he’s out of low-gee! Thur’s a fella just back from a long trip if Ah ever saw one, and prob’ly loaded with pay. Sic ‘im!”

Forrester accepted Whitlow’s diagnosis unquestioningly. He marched up to the spaceman and said clearly, “My name is Charles D. Forrester, and due to my ignorance of the customs of this time I’ve lost all my money and have no work. If you could possibly spare me some cash, I would be deeply indebted to you.”

Whitlow appeared magically at his elbow. “That goes for me, too, boss,” he said sorrowfully. “We both in pretty bad trouble. If you could be kahnd enough to help us now, we’d be eternally grateful.”

The man stopped, his hands in his pockets, neither surprised nor disturbed. He turned to face them with grave interest. “Sorry to hear that, gentlemen,” he said. “What seems to be your problem, sir?”

“Mahn? Well, it’s just about lahk Forrester here. Mah name’s Whitlow, Jurry Whitlow. It starts way back when Ah was first born, working in the mahns in West Virginia. They closed down, and—”

The spaceman was not only polite but patient. He listened attentively through all of Whitlow’s long story, and to as much of Forrester’s as Forrester thought worth telling. He commiserated with them, wrote their names down, and promised to look for them again if he ever came back this way. He was, in short, an ideal prospect—not only a spaceman, but a member of one of the rotating crews who manned the right-angle communications satellites that whirled out around the sun at ninety degrees to the ecliptic, furnishing interference-free relay facilities for the whole solar system. The job paid well, but that was only part of it. Because of the energy budget for matching orbits with the right-angle satellites, the crews were relieved only at six-month intervals, and they came back with a fortune in their pockets and a mad hunger for company; and Whitlow and Forrester walked away from him with two thousand dollars apiece.

That night they ate their dinner in a restaurant. Over Whitlow’s protests, Forrester insisted on standing treat.

The restaurant was a hangout for Forgotten Men—and Forgotten Women. It was something like a private home, something like an Automat. You had full joymaker service in it, but in order to make it work you had to feed money into a slot. The prices caused Forrester’s scalp to prickle, but he reassured himself that he was just learning the ropes and experience was worth paying for; so at Whitlow’s suggestion they started with a squirt of joy apiece (fifty dollars a shot), then cocktails (forty), then a clear, filling soup (twenty-five), then more drinks, and about then Forrester began to lose count. He remembered something that looked like meat but wasn’t—it seemed to be coated with a sort of vanilla fudge, although it was bloody inside—and then they began drinking in earnest.

They were not alone. The place was crowded. Whitlow seemed to know everyone there, an assembly that hailed from six centuries, seven continents, and one or two extraterrestrial planets and moons.

There was a huge red-faced man named Kevin O’Rourke na Solis Lacis, who gave Forrester a shock until they exchanged names, for he resembled Heinzie the Assassin. The reason was good, when Forrester found it out: they were both Martians. O’Rourke, however, was a poet. As a matter of principle, he refused to accept the bribes of what he called the iron-headed state. Probing, Forrester discovered that he was talking about foundation grants, which were available to poets in almost any quantity; but O’Rourke spurned them all. He had been briefly involved with the Ned Lud Society—but they were as bad as the iron-heads, he declared. All Earth was a disaster area. Let the Sirians take it away! “So why don’t you go back to Mars?” Forrester inquired, politely enough; but the Martian took it as an insult, glowered, and lumbered away across the room.

“Don’ worry ‘bout heem,” said the pretty little dark girl who had somehow come to be leaning against Forrester’s shoulder, helping him drink his drink. “He be back. Certainement.”

There was a certain United Nations quality to the gathering, Forrester was discovering. Apart from a few oddballs like the Martian poet, the bulk of the Forgotten Men seemed to come from nearly his own time. Had the hardest time fitting in, he supposed—and the hardest time earning money.

But it was not always that. The tiny dark girl, for instance, had originally been a ballet dancer from Czechoslovakia, shot as a Chinese Bolshevik counter-revolutionary in 1991, frozen at great peril by the Khrushchevite underground, revived, killed seven times since in one way or another, and revived each time. Her reasons for hiding out with the Forgotten Men had nothing to do with money—she was loaded, Whitlow whispered; had made a collection of gold and gems from admirers in a dozen countries, over the centuries, and owned them with their pyramiding value now. But one of her assassinations had produced some cell changes in the brain, and now she awoke each time convinced that Stalinist agents lurked abroad, waiting for her. She did not exactly fear them. She objected to the idea of being killed somewhat as Forrester, in the old days, had objected to going to the dentist: you didn’t really worry about it, but you were pretty sure it would be unpleasant. As someone who had seen each of seven centuries, Forrester found her fascinating—and she was beautiful as well. But she quickly became so drunk that her reminiscences stopped making sense.

He got up for another drink and found himself lurching slightly. Only slightly, he was sure, but somehow, when he got the drink, it spilled all over a lean, old, nearly bald man, who grinned and nodded and said, “Tenga dura, signore! E precioso!”

“You’re right,” said Forrester, and sat down beside him. Whitlow had pointed him out as they entered, as a sort of curiosity; he had actually been born before Forrester himself. He had been a hundred and seven years old when, in 1988, he had died of an embolism. The embolism could have been repaired at once, but the ravages of age could not. Not then. After six centuries in the dreamless, liquid-helium sleep, his original stake had multiplied to the point where the trustees of the freezer had decided to revive him; but there had been only money enough to give him operational youth. Not much had been done cosmetically; and it had taken everything he had. “I bet you’ve had an interesting life,” Forrester told him solemnly, finishing what remained in his glass.

The man gave him a grave nod. “Signore,” he said, “durante la vita mia prima del morte, era un uomo grande! Nel tempo del Duce—ah! Un maggiore del esercito, io, e dappertutto non mi dispiacciono le donne!”

Whitlow patted the old man on the shoulder and led Forrester away. “Forebrain damage,” he whispered.

“But he was talking in Italian.”

“Sure, Chuck. He can’t learn raht, that’s what he’s doing here. You know, they ain’t many jobs for a fella that can’t talk lahk the rest of us.”

The Martian lurched past them, his head twisted sidewise toward them. Whether he had been listening or not Forrester could not say, but he was declaiming, “Talk like de rest. Live like de rest. Live for de state, for de state knows what’s best.”

The whole party was coming to life, thought Forrester, flushed and happy. A small man in a green ruff—it seemed to be an imitation of the Sirian coloration—cried, “And what’s best? Adolf Berle asked it half a millennium ago: ‘What does a corporation want?’ And the state has become a corporation!”

The ballet dancer hiccoughed and opened glazed and angry eyes. “Stalinist!” she hissed, then returned to sleep; and Forrester dug deep for hundred-dollar bills and fed them to the joymaker slots for more drinks all around.

Forrester was perfectly aware that he was rapidly depleting his last thousand dollars. In a way, it pleased him. He was drunk enough, euphoric enough, to let tomorrow face tomorrow’s fears. However badly the next day began, it could not be worse than this one had been. He saw advantages even in being a Forgotten Man: you could spend yourself into pennilessness, but not into bankruptcy; you could never go into debt, since you had no credit to begin with. Wise Tars Tarkas! Excellent kids, to have found him such fine advice. “Eat!” he cried, shaking off Whitlow’s cautionary whisper. “Drink! Be merry! For tomorrow we die, again!”

“Domani morire!” shrilled the old Italian, uptilting his glass of heaven-knows-how-costly grappa that Forrester had provided for him, and Forrester returned the toast.

“Listen, Chuck,” said Whitlow uneasily. “You better take it slow. We don’t get a mark lahk that space fella every day.”

“Whit, shut up. Don’t be a grandma, will you?”

“Well, it’s your money. But don’t blame me if you’re broke again tomorrow.”

Forrester smiled and said clearly, “You make me sick.”

“Now, cut it out raht there!” blazed Whitlow. “Whur’d you be if it wasn’t for me? God damn, Ah don’t have to take this kind of—”

But the Martian with the Irish name interrupted them. “Hey, you fellows! Dat’s enough, dere. You got to buy drinks yet.” As Whitlow cooled off, Forrester turned to inspect him; something had been on his mind.

“You,” he said. “How come you talk like that?”

“Like what, ‘like dat’? You tink dere’s someting funny about de way I talk?”

“Yeah, matter of fact. Why?”

But something had occurred to the Martian. He snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute! Forrester, is dat what you said your name was?”

“That’s right. But we’re talking about you—”

“You should learn not to interrupt dat way,” reproved Kevin O’Rourke na Solis Lacis. “What I want to tell you is dis. Dere’s a Sirian been around looking for you.”

“Sirian? One of the green fellows?” Fuzzily Forrester tried to concentrate, but it was not much fun. “You mean S Four?”

“How de hell would I know his number? He came around in one of dem pressure-cloaks, but I could tell he was a Sirian. I saw plenty of dem.”

“Probably wants to sue me for breach of contract,” Forrester said bitterly. “He’s welcome; there’s plenty of others.”

“No, I don’t tink so, because—”

“Cut it out,” interrupted Forrester. “You know, I hate the way you Martians keep changing the subject. What I want to know is why you all talk like that. This other one that wants to kill me, he had the same kraut accent, but in his case it figured, because he had a kraut name. But you talk the same way and you’re Irish, right?”

Kevin O’Rourke stared at him disapprovingly. “Forrester, you’re drunk. What de hell’s ‘Irish’?”

How long the party lasted Forrester did not know. He remembered a long harangue in which the drunken ballet dancer was trying to explain to him that the accent was Martian, not German; something to do with six-hundred-millibar oxyhelium air, which got them out of the habit of hearing certain frequencies. He had a clear memory of reaching into his pocket one time and coming up empty; and a fuzzy, frightening recollection of something bad that had happened.

But it was all hazy and distant and it came back to him only in random patches.

What he knew for sure was that when he woke up the next morning he was back in the rough-hewn tunnel next to the joymaker shop. How he had gotten there he had no idea. And he was alone.

Except, that is, for the granddaddy of all hangovers.

He dimly remembered that Whitlow had warned him about that, too. There were no autonomic monitoring circuits on the public joymakers, Whitlow had said. He would have to decide for himself when he had had enough, because the joymaker would not stop service at the point of no return—not as long as the money held out.

Apparently it had held out too long.

He shook his head miserably. The movement sent cascades of pain down the back of his skull.

Something bad had happened. He tried halfheartedly to recall it, but all that would come to his memory was a mosaic of mass terror. Something had broken up the party with drunken men and women racing around in terror, even the Italian and the ballerina rousing themselves enough to flee. But what?

He was not sure; and he suspected that he would rather not remember, not just now.

He lurched to the end of the tunnel, climbed down metal steps, and pushed a door ajar. He stood gazing out over the plantings, touched by a warm breeze in which he took no pleasure at all. It was daylight, and, except for a distant swish of hovercar traffic, there was no sound of anyone around.

It was too soon to judge, on the basis of less than twenty-four hours’ experience. And no doubt his troubles were all his own fault. But Forrester was ready to concede that life with the Forgotten Men was not his place in this new world, either.

If he had any place at all.

By the time Whitlow showed up, looking fat and happy and as though hangovers had never existed in the world, Forrester had come to the conclusion that, since he was alive, he would have to go on living.

“Ev’thing all raht this morning?” Whitlow asked cheerfully. “Man! You were flahing hah when we parted.”

“I’m aware of that,” said Forrester glumly. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for the details. Whitlow, how do I go about getting a job again?”

“What for?”

“I think it’s about time I grew up,” said Forrester abjectly. “I’m not knocking you. But I don’t want to live this way.”

“You better start with some money,” Whitlow offered. “Won’t anybody hah’r you if you come in this way.”

“All right. So the first step is to panhandle a stake?”

“Raht!” cried Whitlow. “And that’s whut Ah came to tell you, Chuck! The flah-boy’s around again. Whahn’t you see if you can score again with him?”

They moved out across the broad green belt under the pylons, looking for open sky. Whitlow had seen the space pilot in a one-man flier, cruising aimlessly around; according to Whitlow, the man had looked as though he were about to land and stroll among the Forgotten Men again, but there was no sign of him. “Sorry,” Whitlow apologized. “But Ah’m sure he’s around somewhere.”

Forrester shrugged. Truth to tell, he was thinking, he wasn’t sure he wanted to panhandle anybody. When you came right down to it, he had been living off this society without contributing anything in return. Not even anything in terms of the peculiar values of the society itself; something that, it appeared could be as little as a membership in Taiko’s revolutionary society dedicated to its overthrow. With the endless flexibility of employment available, Forrester thought, surely there was something he could do—something that he would enjoy, and think worth his while to do. . . .

“Told you, Chuck!” Whitlow yelled. “See ‘im? There!”

Forrester looked upward, and Whitlow was right. A face looked down from the flier; it looked like the astronaut’s face, the eyes regarding them thoughtfully.

The figure picked up a joymaker and whispered into it. The flier dipped and slid away toward a landing.

“He’s landing,” said Forrester unnecessarily.

Whitlow was rubbing his chin, watching the flier descend toward the ground. He said abstractedly, “Uh-huh.” His eyes looked worried.

“What’s the matter?” Forrester asked.

“Huh?” Whitlow frowned at him, then back at the flier. “Oh, nothing, Chuck. Only Ah have a bad feeling raht now.”

“What about?”

“Well . . . Nothing, Chuck. Only you never know what these flah-boys will want to do for fun, an’— Listen, Chuck. Ah believe Ah want to get out of here.” And he turned briskly, catching Forrester’s arm to pull him along.

Alarmed only because Whitlow seemed to be alarmed, not yet comprehending what it was all about, Forrester went along. If he thought at all, he only thought that it was rather cowardly of Whitlow to be so fearful, and not untypical of this cowardly age, where the very hope of immortality had produced exaggerated fear of permanent death. It was not until he felt the rush of air overhead that fear struck him personally and acutely.

The flier had taken off again, was now circling over them.

“It’s him!” Forrester cried. “You’re right, he is after us!”

He turned and ran, Whitlow dodging away in another direction, the two of them scattering as the flier dipped and turned overhead. . . .

It was funny, Forrester realized tardily, but he hadn’t seen the man’s face looking out of the flier this time.

At that moment he heard Whitlow’s yell. The man hadn’t been looking out of the flier. He hadn’t even been in it; had sent the thing on its autonomic circuits into a hovering pattern, while he himself waited on the ground. And he stood there now, holding something that looked like a whip, directly in Whitlow’s path, under the skirt of a tapering yellow building.

Whitlow tried to turn again and run, but he never had a chance. The thing that looked like a whip was a whip. The spaceman seemed only to shake it gently, and its tip hissed out to touch Whitlow, then curled around his neck and threw him to the ground.

Forrester turned and ran. Directly behind him was the hoverway, with its hissing, rocketing, ground-effect cars following each other like tracer rounds out of a machine gun. If one of them struck him, he would die as surely as at the hands of any assassin; but he did not wait, he flung himself across the broad strip and miraculously missed them. A copper was standing, regarding him curiously, as Forrester turned to look back.

The spaceman was lifting the whip again, an expression of alert pleasure on his face. Over the whush of the hovercars Forrester could hear Whitlow’s scream. Their benefactor from space reached out again with the whip as Whitlow tried to rise; he was slashed back to earth again; he tried to get up once more, and his body shook as the whip flicked blood from the side of his head. He tried again, and was thrown down. And stopped trying.

Forrester turned away and found he was sobbing.

I have aright to be scared, he told himself, half crazed. No one could watch a friend whipped to death unmoved. Not when the death was so vicious and so pointless. Especially not when the victim could so easily have been himself.

Could still be himself.

Forrester started to run and blundered into the ruddy metal arms of the copper. “Man Forrester,” it said, staring into his eyes, “I have a message for you and good morning.”

“Let go!” shouted Forrester.

“The message is as follows,” said the copper inexorably. “Man Forrester, will you care to accept reemployment? It is from the one you know as Sirian Four.”

“Let go of me, damn you!” cried Forrester. “No. Or, yes—I don’t know! I just want to get out of here!”

“Your wishful prospective employer, Man Forrester,” said the copper, releasing him, “is nearby. He will see you now if you wish.”

“He will go plumb to hell,” snarled Forrester, shaking himself. He trotted away, only coincidentally in the direction in which the copper had faced him; but it turned out that no coincidence was involved. The copper had pointed him toward the Sirian’s waiting aircar. Forrester saw the aircar first, and outside of it something he did not immediately recognize. It looked a little like a glittering mushroom, a little like a chrominum ice cream cone. It rested on ducted jets that swept it across a bed of storm-tossed poppies toward Forrester. It moved toward him very fast, so fast that recognition was tardy; he did not realize it was a pressure suit until he was close enough to see within the bulge of the mushroom, behind an inset band of crystal, a ring of bright green eyes.

It was his Sirian. And it was reaching out to touch him with something that glittered and stung.

Forrester found himself lying on the ground, staring up at the suit that rode beside him on its jets.

“I never said I’d go back to work for you,” he said. It hung there unresponding, the long tendril that had stung him now dangling slackly by its side.

“I don’t need a job that bad,” he babbled, squeezing his eyes closed. He thought that whatever the Sirian had stabbed him with was something very peculiar indeed. For he could not move. And the Sirian seemed to be changing shape.

It no longer looked like a Sirian at all.

Twelve

At some later time Forrester realized that he could move again, and he found that he was in a flier, laughing to himself over something he had forgotten, staring down at a bright golden farm scene below.

A voice from behind him said, “Dear Charles, you are all right, it is true?”

He turned, grinning. “Sure. Only I’ve forgotten some things.”

“You will say what those things are, dear Charles?”

He laughed, “Oh, what happened to the Sirian. Last I remember, he did something to me—it felt as though he were giving me a hypospray of something. And where we’re going—would you believe it, I don’t even remember getting into this thing with you. And another thing, I don’t remember why you’re wearing that funny-looking suit, Adne.”

Adne said nothing, only regarded him roguishly through her circlet of green eyes.

He was no longer laughing. “It’s confusing,” he apologized. “I’m sorry if I’ve messed things up again.”

She still did not speak, although she was busy enough. With others of her eyes she was apparently studying the instrument board of the flier, which was marked off in terrain segments, showing their flight plan as they moved.

“Dear Charles,” she said suddenly, “you are ready to perform your programmed tasks?”

“What programmed tasks?”

But the question was a mistake. An explosion of pain formed under his skull and burst through his body to the tips of fingers and toes, where it recoiled and surged back and forth through his nervous system in dwindling echoes. He cried out. It was not the first time he had felt that pain; he remembered now. And he remembered his programmed tasks.

“You are Adne Bensen. As a joke you want me to smuggle you onto a starship. I must carry you aboard and plug in the command unit you have given me to the starship’s circuits and tell no one, or it will spoil the joke. And hurt me.”

“Dear Charles,” boomed the hollow, resonant voice, “you are ready to perform your programmed tasks.”

The pain was receding. Forrester leaned back, dizzy, sick, extremely confused. He wondered if his mind were breaking down. Certainly it would be no wonder if it were, after what he had been through.

It did not seem to him that Adne’s joke was very funny. But Forrester recognized that his mind was not very sharp at that moment, and perhaps it was his judgment that was at fault, not the joke. He felt as though he were crazy. He felt both unbearably sleepy and keyed up, like an insomniac glaring hatefully at the slowly brightening window of his room. His eyes were gritty and sore, but when he closed them they sprang open again. It was frightening.

And he was disoriented in space and time. He had no idea where they were. He realized with dismay that it was dark night outside the flier. When had that happened? Time passed that he did not mark in any way; he would look up to see Adne regarding him with her strangely bright green eyes, look again, and she was somewhere else; but he had not seen her move. Delusions. Had he not thought that Adne had stabbed him with something like a hypodermic? What possible motive would she have for that? Had he not seemed to remember her telling him who she was over and over? (As though he couldn’t recognize her!) Wasn’t there a memory of the girl, looking so strangely unlike herself in that Sirian spacesuit, repeating and endlessly repeating instructions on what he was to do at some later time, emphasizing them with jabs of that explosive pain?

He closed his eyes, groaning.

They flew open again, but curiously he was not in the flier any more. Dizzy and sick, he saw only in flashes, but the flashes told him that he was standing on hot, baked, dead grass; there was the whir of the flier’s idling rotors behind him, ahead of him a metallic whining of gears as a port opened, beside him a hiss of ducted gas. He found himself pushing the bobbing, silent figure in the cone-shaped spacesuit through the opening port; found himself connecting something flat and shiny to jacks on an instrument board. And then he was outside again, and under stars, and getting back into the flier.

But where was Adne?

He flung himself petulantly down on the seat. His head was splitting with pain. “Damn you,” he whispered, and slept.

When he woke up, the flier was standing at the side of the hoverway, across from the tapering yellow spire. The engines were stopped and silent. As best he could tell, it was at the exact spot where the Sirian had reached out for him with the thing that stung.

He staggered out and breathed deep. Whush of vehicles from the hoverway, scream of tires from another, more distant road. There was no other sound. It appeared to be morning.

He called tentatively, “Adne?”

There was no answer. In a way, he had not expected one, only hoped.

Twenty-four hours had disappeared out of his life, and he was very hungry. He searched his pockets, to see what might be left of the handout from his friend, the whip-murderer. Nothing. He had expected that, of course. His resources were dwindling all the time. His money was gone. His credit was destroyed. Whitlow, his mentor among the Forgotten Men, was dead—irrevocably dead, Forrester thought, making the distinction in his mind that this age made out of instinct.

He had only Adne left—if he had Adne. So he did what he had known all along he was going to do; he headed for Adne’s condominium.

He knew perfectly well, as he skulked through the underways and dodged passing fliers, that he had no real claim on her. She might not be home; she might not admit him if she was.

But she was home and did admit him, without much enthusiasm. “You look a mess,” she said, averting her face. “All right, come in.”

He sat down, ill at ease. The two children were there, staring with total interest at something on the view-wall. They barely glanced his way, then returned to their show. For that matter, Adne’s attention was on the wall as well.

Forrester cleared his throat. He was aware that, besides being hungry and broke, he was also far from clean. He cast about in his mind for some conversational gambit that would give Adne a chance to invite him to eat, or at least to wash up. “I, uh, had a funny experience,” he said tentatively.

She grunted over her shoulder, “Hold it, will you, Charles?” She seemed very upset over something, he thought, watching her as she fingered her joymaker and stared at the changing patterns on the view-wall.

He said desperately, “I thought you were with me yesterday. It was all dreamlike and crazy, and I’m worried. It wasn’t you, was it?”

“Charles, will you shut up a minute?” Her attention was on the wall. Forrester glanced at it. . . .

And saw a scene that he recognized. It was dried, seared grass on an open plain. There was a mark where something heavy had ground into the earth. A man s voice was saying, in tones of sonorous mourning, “The liftship appears to have evaded orbital patrols, and so it must be assumed to be on its way to Sirius itself. Radar-net surveillance detected it at launch, and appropriate challenges were issued. But there was no response. . . .”

Forrester swallowed a lump in his throat. “Did—did a Sirian—did one of them escape?”

The boy snapped, “Sweat, Charles! Where’ve you been? Happened hours ago!”

Forrester let his eyes close on his interior agony. The organ voice of the man narrating from the view-wall continued.

“Meanwhile, there is much concern at every level of authority. There can be no doubt that there must have been human complicity in the escape. Yet no joymaker monitors have registered any such event, nor can any motive be found. The Alliance for Solar-Sirian Amity has voluntarily offered all of its members for mind-probing; eight registered nihilist-obliterative organizations have been questioned about statements of policy suggesting that, in one formulation or another, all of humanity should destroy itself. No information suggesting complicity has emerged.

“But transcending any question of guilt are the considerations of consequence. One fact is beyond argument: a Sirian has managed to begin the long trip back to his home planet, undoubtedly carrying with him the information that Earth is the culprit in the destruction of a Sirian spacecraft. Experts in Sirian psychology declare that the result will be war. All over the world at this hour—”

“He’s looping it, Mim,” grumbled the boy. “We heard this part twice already. Can I shut it off?”

Adne nodded and sank back, her face tense and almost expressionless as the wall relapsed into a decorative jungle scene.

Forrester coughed.

“Oh,” said Adne. “I almost forgot you were here. Did you want to ask me something?”

“Well,” said Forrester, “I did, but it isn’t important now.

“Not compared to this,” she agreed. “What was it?”

“Nothing. It was just something about whether you were with me yesterday, but I don’t have to ask you any more. I know who was with me now.”

Thirteen

Once, many years before (it was actually several centuries, counting the deep-freeze time), little Chuck Forrester had caused a three-car auto smash that put two people in the hospital.

He had done it with his little slingshot, lying out in the tall grass next to his house in Evanston, taking shots at the cars on the highway. His aim was too good. He hit one. He got a state policeman in the eye. The cop had lost control, jumped into the opposite lane, sideswiped a convertible, and skidded into a station wagon.

Nobody died; the policeman didn’t even lose his eye, although it was close for a while; and, as it happened, they didn’t think to look around the neighborhood for kids with slingshots. The accident went down on the books as having been caused by a pebble thrown up by a passing car. But Chuck didn’t know that, and for a solid year afterward he woke up in a sweat of fear every night, and all his days were horrors of anticipating being caught.

It was just so now.

It was perfectly clear to Forrester that he was the one who had helped the Sirian circumvent the electronic defenses that kept the alien bound to Earth. He could work it out step by step in his mind. The Sirian had shopped around until it found a human being ignorant enough, and pliable enough, to be unsuspicious. It had contrived to inject him with some hypnotic drug; it had made him believe it was Adne Bensen, then induced him to fly it to the site of an obsolete, but still workable, spaceship—unconscious, or in whatever state in a Sirian passed for unconsciousness, so that the electronic alarms would register nothing. It had commanded him to load it aboard the ship and launch it into space, and he had done as he was commanded, in the fuzzy-minded suggestibility it had doped him into.

Perfectly clear! He could see every step. And, if he could, certainly others could. All they had to do was take the trouble to think it through. And certainly all the world was thinking hard about the Sirians. The view-wall was full of news: special investigating teams ransacking the site of the take-off for clues, a hundred new probes launched to guard the perimeter of the solar system, Condition Yellow alert declared, and everyone cautioned to remain within easy distance of a raid shelter at all times.

Forrester kept waiting for the hand to fall on his shoulder and the voice to cry, “You, Forrester! You are the man!”

But it did not come. . . .

Meanwhile, the flap over the escape of Sirian Four had had one good effect, and that was that Adne was so interested in the excitement that she became much more friendly to Forrester again. She even fed him, let him clean himself up in her bath, and, as the children were off on some emergency drill with their age-peers, gave him their room to sleep in when it became obvious he was near collapse.

Voices woke him—Adne’s and a man’s.

“. . . Mostly for the kids, of course. I’m not so worried for myself.”

“Natch, honey. God! At a time like this! Just when the society’s ready to swing.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad, but it makes you wonder about a lot of other things. I mean, really, how could they let that thing escape?”

A masculine growl: “Hah! How? Haven’t I been telling you how? It’s letting machines do men’s work! We’ve put our destiny in the hands of solid-state components, so what do you expect? Don’t you remember my White Paper last year? I said, ‘Guarding men’s liberties is a post of honor, and only the honored should hold it.’ ”

Forrester sat up, recognizing the voice: Taiko Hironibi. The Luddite.

“I thought you were talking about the coppers,” said Adne’s voice.

“Same thing! Machines should do machine work, men should do men’s—Hey, what’s that?”

Forrester realized he had made a noise. He stood up, feeling ancient and worn, but somewhat better than before he had slept, and was coming out toward them even before Adne answered Taiko. “It’s only Charles. Come in here, Charles, why don’t you?”

Taiko was standing before the view-wall, joymaker in his hand; his thumb was on one of the studs, and apparently he had just been giving himself a shot of one brand or another of euphoria. Even so, he glowered at Forrester.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” said Adne.

“Huh,” said Taiko.

“If I can forgive him, you can forgive him. You have to make allowances for the kamikaze ages.”

“Hah,” said Taiko. But the euphoria prevailed—either the spray from the joymaker, or the spice of danger that was sweeping them all. Taiko clipped the joymaker to his belt, rubbed his chin, then grinned. “Well, why not? All us human beings have to stand together now, right? Put ’er there.”

Gravely they shook hands. Forrester felt altogether ridiculous doing it; he was not sure just what he had done to offend Taiko in the first place, and was not particularly anxious to be forgiven by him now. Still, he reminded himself, Taiko had once offered him a job. A job was something he needed. Although, with the Sirian threat so urgent and imminent now, it was at least an open question whether the Ned Lud Society would need any more workers. . . .

It could not hurt to find out. Before he could change his mind, Forrester said rapidly, “I want you to know, Taiko, that I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. You were right, of course.”

Taiko’s eyes opened. “About what?”

“About the danger of the machines, I mean. What I think is, men should do men’s work and machines should do machine work.”

“There’s only one computer you can trust.” Forrester tapped his skull with a forefinger. “The one up here.”

“Sure, but—”

“It just burns me up,” said Forrester angrily, “to think that they left the safeguarding of our planet to solid-state components! If only they’d listened to you!”

With part of his attention, Forrester could hear a smothered giggle from Adne, but he ignored it. “I want you to know,” he cried, “that I’ve come to some conclusions over the last few days and I’m for the Ned Lud Society a hundred percent. Let me help, Taiko! Call on me for anything!”

Taiko gave the girl a look of absent-minded puzzlement, then returned to Forrester. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad to hear that. I’ll keep that in mind, if anything comes up.”

It took all of Forrester’s self-control to keep his expression friendly and eager; why was Taiko being so slow? But Adne rescued him. Suppressing her giggles, she said excitedly, “Say, Taiko! Why don’t you let Charles in the Society? I mean, if he’d be willing.”

Taiko frowned and hesitated, but Forrester didn’t give him a chance. “I’m willing,” he said nobly. “I meant what I said. Glad to help.”

Taiko shrugged after a second and said, “Well, fine, then, Forrester. Of course, the money’s not much.”

“Doesn’t matter a bit!” cried Forrester. “It’s what I want to do! Uh, how much?”

“Well, basic scale is twenty-six thousand.”

“A day?”

“Sure, Forrester.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Forrester largely. “I only want to serve any way I can.” And, exultant, he allowed himself to be given a drink to celebrate, which he enlarged to be a meal. Adne was tolerantly amused.

And all the while the view-wall was displaying scenes of alarm and panic, unheeded.

Forrester had not forgotten that he had betrayed Earth to the Sirians; he had only submerged that large and unpleasant thought in the smaller, but more immediate, pleasure of having escaped from the Forgotten Men. He drank a warm, minty froth and ate nutlike little spheres that tasted like crisp pork; he accepted a spray of a pinkly evanescent cloud from Adne’s joymaker that made him feel about seventeen again—briefly. Tomorrow would be time enough to worry about what he had done to the world, he thought. For today it was enough to be eating well and to have a place in the scheme of mankind.

But all his worries came back to him when he heard his name spoken. It was Taiko’s joymaker that spoke it, and it said, “Man Hironibi! Permit an interruption, please. Are you in the company of Man Forrester, Charles Dalgleish?”

“Yes, sure,” said Taiko, a beat before Forrester opened his mouth to plead with him to deny it.

“Will you ask Man Forrester to speak his name, Man Hironibi?”

“Go ahead, Forrester. It’s to identify you, see?”

Forrester put down the cup of frothed mint and took a deep breath. The pink cloud of joy might as well never have been. He felt every year of his age, even the centuries in the freezer. He said, because he could think of no excuse for not saying it, “Oh, all right. Charles Dalgleish Forrester. Is that what you want?”

Promptly the joymaker said, “Thank you, Man Forrester. Your acoustic pattern is confirmed. Will you accept a message of fiscal change?”

That was quick, thought Forrester, clutching at a feeling of relief; the thing only wanted to acknowledge his new job! “Sure.”

“Man Forrester,” said Taiko’s joymaker, “your late employer, now permanently removed from this ecology, left instructions to disburse his entire residual estate as follows: to the League for Interspacial Amity, one million dollars; to the Shoggo Central Gilbert and Sullivan Guild, one million dollars; to the United Fraternity of Peace Clubs, five million dollars; the balance, amounting to ninety-one million, seven hundred sixty-three thousand, one hundred forty-two dollars, estimated as of this moment—mark!—to be transferred to the account of his last recorded employee as of date of removal, to wit, yourself. I am now so transferring this sum, Man Forrester. You may draw on it as you wish.”

Forrester sank weakly back against the cushions of Adne’s bright, billowy couch. He could not think of anything to say.

“God bless,” cried Adne, “you’re rich again, Charles! Why, you lucky creature!”

“Sure are,” echoed Taiko, grasping his hand warmly. Forrester could only nod.

But he was not really sure that he was so lucky as he seemed. Ninety-one million dollars! It was a lot of money, even in this age of large numbers. It would keep him in comfort for a long time, surely; it would finance all sorts of pleasures and pursuits; it would remove him from the whim of Taiko’s pleasure and insure him against a relapse to the Forgotten Men. But what would happen, Forrester thought painfully, when somebody asked, first, who that late employer happened to be—and why that employer, before returning to his native planet circling around the star Sirius, had so lavishly rewarded Charles Forrester?

The news from the view-wall kept coming in, in a mounting torrent of apprehension and excitement. Forrester, watching Adne and Taiko as they responded to the news reports, could hardly tell when they were reacting with fear and when with a sense of stimulation. Did they really expect Earth to be destroyed by the retaliation of the Sirians? And what were they going to do about it?

When he tried to ask them, Taiko laughed. “Get rid of the machines,” he said largely. “Then we’ll take ’em on—any snake or octopus from anywhere in the galaxy! But first we’ve got to clean house at home.”

Adne only said, “Why don’t you come with us—and relax?”

“Come along and see,” she said.

Considering his own guilt in that area, Forrester did not want to attract attention by seeming especially concerned about the Sirians. But he insisted, “Shouldn’t somebody be doing something?”

“Somebody will be,” said Taiko. “Don’t worry so, boy! There’ll be a run on the freezers—people chickening out, you see. You know. ‘Leave it to George.’ Then, by and by, the Sirians’ll come nosing around, and the appropriate people will deal with them. Or they won’t.”

“Meanwhile, Taiko and I have a date to crawl,” said Adne, “and you might as well come along. It’ll rest you.”

“Crawl?”

“It’s everybody’s duty to keep fit—now more than ever,” Taiko urged.

“You’re being very good to me,” Forrester said gratefully. But what he really wanted was to sit in that room and watch the view-wall. One by one the remote monitoring stations of Earth’s defense screen were reporting in, and although the report from each one of them so far was the same—“No sign of the escaped Sirian”—Forrester wanted to stay with it, stay right in that room watching that view-wall, until there was some other report. To make sure that Earth was safe, of course. But also to find out, at the earliest possible moment, if the (hopefully) recaptured Sirian would give out any information about his accomplice. . . .

“Well, we’re going crawling,” said Adne. “And we really ought to take off right now.”

Forrester said irritably, “Wait a minute. What did they just say about Groombridge 1830?”

“They said what they’ve been saying for a week, dear Charles. That thing they spotted is only a comet. Are we going to crawl or aren’t we?”

Taiko said humorously, “Charles is still a little dazed about his new loot. But look, old buddy, some of us have got things to do.”

Forrester took his eyes from the view-wall’s star map and looked at Taiko, who winked and added, “Now that you’re on the team, you ought to learn the ropes.”

“Team?” said Forrester. “Ropes?”

“I have to do a communication for the society,” Taiko explained. “You know. What you used to call a widecast. And as you’re on the payroll now you ought to come along and see how it’s done, because frankly—” he nudged Charles— “it won’t be too long before you’re doing them yourself.”

“But first we crawl,” said Adne. “So shall we the sweat get going?”

They hustled Forrester along, muttering and abstracted as he was, until he realized that he was attracting attention to himself, and he didn’t want to do that.

It might be, thought Forrester, that the right and proper thing for him to do was to go to someone in authority—if he ever found anyone in authority in this world, except maybe the joymaker—and say, frankly and openly, “Look, sir. I seem to have done something wrong and I wish to make a statement about it. Under what I guess was hypnosis I made it possible for that Sirian to escape, thus blowing the whole security of the human race forever.” Confess the whole thing and take his medicine.

Yes, he thought, some time I probably had better do just that; but not right now.

Meanwhile, he tried to look as much like everybody else as he possibly could, and if this required him to be thrilled but casual about the danger of an invasion fleet of Sirians appearing in the sky at any moment to crush the Earth, then he would do his best to seem thrilled but casual

“Well,” he cried gaily, “we sure had a good run for our money! Best little old masters of the planet I ever saw! But may the best race win, right?”

Adne looked at him, then at Taiko, who shrugged and said, “I guess he’s still a little shook.”

Dampened, Forrester concentrated on observing what was going on around him. Taiko and the girl were bringing him to a part of Shoggo he had not previously visited, south along the shore to what looked like a leftover World’s Fair. Their cab landed and let them out in a midway, bustling with groups and couples in holiday mood, surrounded by buildings with a queer playtime flavor. Nor was the flavor confined to the buildings. The place was a carnival of joy and of what Forrester at once recognized as concupiscence. The aphrodisiac spray that individual joymakers dispensed in microgram jolts was here a mist hanging in the air. The booths and displays were shocking to Forrester, at first, until he had taken a few deep breaths of the tonic, the invigorating air. Then he began at last to enjoy himself.

“That’s better,” cried Adne, patting him. “Down this way, past the Joy Machine!”

Forrester followed along, observing his surroundings with increasing relaxation and pleasure. In addition to its other attractions, the place was a horticultural triumph. Flowers and grasses grew out of the ground he walked on and along the margins at his sides; out of elevated beds that leaned out to the midway, heavy with emerald grapes and bright red luminous berries; out of geometrical plantings that hung on the sides of the buildings. Even on the walk itself, among the happy humans, there were what looked like shrubs bearing clusters of peach- and orange-colored fruits—but they moved, walked, stumped clumsily and slowly about on rootlike legs.

“In here,” said Adne, clutching at him arm.

“Hurry up!” cried Taiko, shoving him.

They entered a building like a fort and went down a ramp surrounded by twinkling patterns of light. The concentration of joymaker spray was a dozen times stronger here than in the open air. Forrester, feeling lightheaded, began to look at Adne with more interest than he would have believed himself able to show in anything but Sirians. Adne leaned close to nibble his ear; Taiko laughed in pleasure. They were not alone, for there was a steady stream of people going down the ramp with them, fore and aft, all with flushed faces and excited.

Forrester abandoned himself to the holiday. “After all,” he shouted to Adne, “what does it matter if we’re going to be wiped out?”

“Dear Charles,” she answered, “shut up and take your clothes off.”

Surprised, but not very, Forrester saw that the whole procession was beginning to shed its outer garments. Shaggy vests and film-and-net briefs, they were tossed on the floor, where busy glittering little cleaning creatures tugged them away into disposal units. “Why not?” he laughed, and kicked his slipper at one of the cleaners, which reared back on its wheels like a kitten and caught it in midair. The crowd rolled down the ramp, shedding clothes at every step, until they were in a sort of high-vaulted lounge and the noise of laughter and talk was loud as a lynching.

And then a door behind them closed. The cloying joymaker scent whisked away. Streams of a harsher, colder essence poured in upon them; and at once they were all standing there, nearly nude and cold sober.

Charles Forrester had had something less than four decades of actual life—that is to say, of elapsed time measured by lungs that breathed and a heart that beat. The first part of that life, measured in decades, had taken place in the twentieth century. The second part, measured in days, had taken place after more than half a millennium in the freezing tanks.

Although those centuries had sped by tracelessly for Forrester, they represented real time to the world of men: each century a hundred years, every year 365 days of twenty-four hours each.

Of all that had happened during those centuries, Forrester had managed to learn only the smallest smattering. He had not learned, even yet, what powers this century could pack into a wisp of gas. Playing with the studs of his joymaker or submitting to the whims of his friends, Forrester had tasted a variety of intoxicants and euphorics, wake-up jolts and sleepy jolts. But he had never before tasted the jolt that drugged no senses but sharpened them all. Now he stood in this room, Taiko on one side of him and Adne in the circle of his arm, surrounded by half a hundred other men and women; and he was fully awake and sensing for the first time in his life.

He turned to look at Adne. Her face was scrubbed bare, her eyes were looking at him unwinkingly. “You’re nasty inside,” she said.

What she said was the exact equivalent of a slap in the face, and Forrester accepted it as such. A cleansing anger filled his mind, He growled, “You’re a trollop. I think your children are illegitimate, too.” He had not intended to say anything of the sort.

Taiko said, “Shut up and crawl.”

Over his shoulder and without passion, Forrester said, “You’re a two-bit phony without an ounce of principle or a thought in your head. Butt out, will you?”

To his surprise, Adne was nodding in agreement; but she said, “Pure kamikaze, just like the trash you come from. Vulgar and a fool.” He hesitated, and she said impatiently, “Come on, kamikaze. Let it out. You’re jealous too, right?”

Theirs was not the only argument going on; there was a bitter rumble of insult and vituperation all around them. Forrester was only marginally aware of it; his whole attention was concentrated on Adne, on the girl he had thought he might be in love with, and his best efforts were devoted to trying to hurt her. He snapped, “I bet you’re not even pregnant!”

She looked startled. “What?”

“All that talk about picking a name! You probably just wanted to trick me into marrying you.”

She stared at him blankly, then with revulsion. “Sweat! I meant our reciprocal name. Charles, you talk like an idiot.”

Taiko shrilled, “You’re both idiots! Crawl.”

Forrester spared him a glance. Curiously, Taiko was down on his knees and for the first time Forrester realized that the floor was damp—not damp, muddy. A thin gruel of softly oozing mud was pouring in from apertures in the wall. Others were getting down into the mud, too; and, for possibly the thousandth time since being taken from the freezer, Forrester found himself torn between two choices of puzzles to try to solve. What was going on here, exactly? And what the devil did Adne mean by “our” name?

But she tugged at him impatiently, slipping down to wallow in the porridgy substance. “Come on,” she cried. “You’re not doing it right, but come on, you sweaty kamikaze.”

All the while the air was being recharged with the stimulant, if it was a stimulant, that had opened the gates of his senses for Forrester. It was like LSD, he thought, or a super-Benzedrine: he was seeing a whole new spectrum; hearing bat shrieks and subsonic roars; smelling, tasting, feeling things that had been out of his reach before. He perceived clearly that this was some sort of organized ritual he was in, understood that its purpose was to allow the release of tensions by saying whatever the inner mind had wanted to say and the outer censor in the brain had forbidden. Allow it? He could not stop it! He listened to the things he was saying to Adne and realized that, at a later time, in an undrugged moment, he would be appalled. But he said them.

And she nodded gravely and replied in kind. “Jealous!” she shrieked. “Typical manipulative ownership! Filthy inside, trashy!”

“Why shouldn’t I be jealous? I loved you.”

“Harem love!” sneered Taiko from beside him. The man was lying full length in the mud now—it had reached a depth of several inches and seemed to have stopped there. “She’s a brainless blot of passions, but she’s human, and how dare you try to own her?”

“Fake!” howled Forrester. “Go pretend you’re a man! Bust up some machines!” He was furious, but in one part of his mind he was alert enough and analytical enough to be surprised that he wasn’t impelled to hit Taiko. Or Adne, for that matter. What he was impelled to do was to say wounding things, as true and hurtful as he could make them. He looked around him and saw that he was the only one still on his feet. The others were all full-length in the mud, writhing and creeping. Forrester dropped to his knees. “What’s this damn foolishness all about?” he demanded.

“Shut up and crawl,” grunted Taiko. “Get some of the animal out of you.” And Adne chimed in, “You’re spoiling it for all of us if you don’t crawl! You have to crawl before you can walk.”

Forrester leaned down to her. “I don’t want to crawl!”

“Have to. Helps you get out the rot. The secrets that fester . . . Of course, you kamikazes like to decay.”

“But I don’t have—”

And Forrester paused, not because he had voluntarily chosen to stop talking just then, but because what he had been about to say was not true, and he simply could not say it. He had been about to say that he had no secrets.

He had, in fact, more secrets than he could count; and one very large one that appalled him, because his mouth wanted to blurt it out even while his brain screamed No!

If he stayed in this room one more moment, Forrester knew, he would shout at the top of his voice the fact that he had been the one to help the Sirian escape and thus had made it a good gambling bet that the whole world of men would be destroyed. Dripping mud, panting, mumbling to himself, Forrester climbed to his feet and forced himself to run—a staggering, broken-field run that dodged flailing limbs and leaped over writhing bodies, that carried him through the angry rumble of the crawlers and out into a dressing chamber, where he was sluiced down with fragrant spray, dried with warm blasts of air, and bathed in hot light. Fresh garments appeared before him, but he took no pleasure in them. He had forgotten for a moment, but now he remembered again.

He was the man who had destroyed Earth. At any moment he would be found out. . . . And what his punishment might be, he dared not think.

“Man Forrester,” cried the voice of a joymaker, “during the period of interrupted service, a number of messages accumulated for you, of which the following three priority calls are urgent.”

“Wait up,” said Forrester, startled. But there it was. Rummaging through the neatly folded heap of T-shirt and Turkish pants, he came upon the macelike shape of a joymaker. “Ho,” he said. “I’ve got you again, eh?”

“Yes, Man Forrester,” the joymaker agreed. “Will you receive your messages?”

“Um,” said Forrester. Then, cautiously, “Well, I will if any of them are of great urgency at this very moment. I mean, I don’t want somebody coming in here and blowing my brains out while I’m talking to you.”

“No such probability is evident,” said the joymaker primly. “Nevertheless, Man Forrester, there are a number of highly important messages.”

Forrester sat down on a warmed bench and sighed. He said meditatively, “The thing is this, joymaker. I never seem to get to the end of a question, because two new questions pop up while I’m still trying to find the answer to the first one. So what I would like to do right now, I would like you to get me a cup of black coffee and a pack of cigarettes, right here in this nice, warm, safe room, and then I would like to drink the coffee and smoke a cigarette and ask you some questions. Now, can I do that without dying for it?”

“Yes, Man Forrester. However, it will take several minutes for the coffee and cigarettes to be delivered, as they are not stock items in this facility and must be secured from remote inventories.”

“I understand all that. Just get them. Now.” Forrester stood up and drew the baggy pants over his legs, thinking. At last he nodded to himself.

“First question,” he said. “I just came out of a place where Adne Bensen and a bunch of other people were wallowing in mud. What was that all about?—I mean,” he added hastily, “in a few words, what is it called, and why do people do it?”

“The function is called a ‘crawl session,’ Man Forrester, or simply ‘crawling.’ Its purpose is the release of tensions and inhibitions for therapeutic purposes. Two major therapies are employed. First, there is a chemical additive in the air that suppresses inhibitors of all varieties, thus making it possible to articulate, and thus to relieve, many kinds of tensions. Second, the mere act of learning to crawl all over again is thought to provide benefits. I have on immediate access, Man Forrester, some thirty-eight papers on various aspects of the crawl session. Would you care to have me list them?”

“Not in the least,” said Forrester. “That’s fine; I understand that perfectly. Now, second question.”

There was a thunk; a receptacle opened beside him; Forrester reached in and took out a steaming and very large cup of coffee covered with a plastic lid. He worried the lid off, sought and found the cigarettes and lighter that accompanied the coffee, lit up, took a sip of the coffee, and said, “Adne Bensen said something to me about choosing a name. I interpreted this to mean that she was, uh, well, pregnant. I mean, I thought she meant a name for a baby; but actually it was something else. Reciprocal names? What are reciprocal names?”

“Reciprocal names, Man Forrester,” lectured the joymaker, “are chosen, usually by two individuals, less typically by larger groups, as private designations. A comparable institution from your original time, Man Forrester, might be the ‘pet’ name or nickname by which a person addressed his or her spouse, child, or close friend; however, the reciprocal name is used by each of the persons in addressing the other.”

“Give me a for instance,” Forrester interrupted.

“For instance,” said the joymaker obediently, “in the universe of Adne Bensen and her two children, the reciprocal names are ‘Tunt’—a form of address from one child to the other—or ‘Mim,’ when Miss Bensen addresses or is addressed by a child. As mentioned, this situation is not typical, since more than two persons are involved. A better example from the same demesne would be the relationship of Adne Bensen and Dr. Hara, where the reciprocal designation between them is ‘Tip.’ Are those adequate for instances, Man Forrester?”

“Yeah, but what’s this about Hara? You mean he and Adne have a pet name?”

“Yes, Man Forrester.”

“Yeah, but— Well, skip it.” Forrester glumly put down his coffee; it didn’t taste as good as he had thought it would. “Sounds confusing,” he muttered.

“Confusing, Man Forrester?”

“Yeah. I mean, if you and I have the same name, how do we know which one— Oh, wait a minute. I see. If you and I have a name, then if you use it, obviously you mean me. And if I use it, I have to mean you.”

“That is correct, Man Forrester. In practice it does not appear that much confusion arises.”

“All right, the hell with that, too. Let’s see.” Forrester frowned at his cigarette; it didn’t taste particularly good, either. He was unable to decide whether the reason was that he had lost the taste for coffee and cigarettes, or whether these were simply miserable examples of their kind, or whether what tasted bad was his mood. He dropped the cigarette into the rest of the coffee and said irritably, “Question three. Now that I have you again, and plenty of money, is there some way I can keep from foolishly losing it all again? Can we like work out a budget?”

“Certainly, Man Forrester. One moment. Yes. Thank you for waiting. I have obtained a preliminary investment schedule and prospectus of probable returns. By investing a major fraction of your holdings in the Sea of Soup, with diversification in power, computation, and euphoric utilities, you should have a firm annual income in excess of eleven million, four hundred thousand dollars. This can be prorated by week or by day, if you wish, and automatic limits placed on the amounts you can spend or hypothecate. In this way it will be possible—Man Forrester!”

Forrester was startled. “What the devil’s the matter with you?”

“Your instructions, Man Forrester! Urgent priority override: statement made earlier that you are in no immediate danger of death is no longer true. Man Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, having filed appropriate bonds and guaranties—”

“Oh, no!” cried Forrester. “Not that crazy Martian again!”

“Yes, Man Forrester! Coming through the crawl chamber right now, armed, armored, and looking for you!”

Fourteen

Forrester snapped tight the baggy trousers, tucked in the pullover, slipped his feet into sandals, and hooked the joymaker to his belt. “Out!” he barked. “Which way?”

“This way, Man Forrester.” An opening in the wall widened like a pair of parentheses, and Forrester bolted through it. A lounge, a ramp, an open double door, and he was out into the midway again, with the bright sun pounding down on him, the gay crowds staring at him casually.

He glanced around: yes, there was the DR vehicle, shining white overhead, its attendant with chin on hand gazing into space. “Where’s Heinzie?” he cried.

“Following, Man Forrester. Do you wish to fight him here?”

“Hell, no!”

“Where would you prefer, Man Forrester?”

“You idiot, I don’t want to fight him at all. I want to get away from him.”

He was attracting attention from the crowd, he saw. Their expressions were no longer vacant, but puzzled, and beginning to be hostile.

The joymaker said hesitantly, “Man Forrester, I must ask you to be specific. Do you wish to avoid combat with Man Heinzlichen permanently?

“That’s the idea,” Forrester said bitterly. “But I see it’s a little late for that now.” Because the Martian was churning out of the double doors of the crawling building and heading straight for him. “Oh, well,” said Forrester. “Easy come, easy go.”

The Martian planted himself in front of Forrester, puffing. He said, “Hello, dere. Sorry I kept you waiting so long.”

“You didn’t have to hurry on my account,” said Forrester cautiously. He was scanning the Martian carefully for weapons, but there didn’t seem to be anything. He was wearing what looked like a wig, close blond curls that hugged his scalp, surrounded his ears and jawline, and went down in back to the nape of his neck, but otherwise he was unchanged in appearance from the last time Forrester had seen him. And he did not even carry a stick. His joymaker was clipped to his belt; his hands were empty and hung loosely at his sides.

“Vell,” said the Martian, “you were with de Forgotten Men, you know, and den I had other things to do. Anyway, here we are, so let’s get it over with. O.K.?”

Forrester said honestly, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Fight, you fool!” cried the Martian. “What de hell do you think you’re supposed to do?”

“But I’m not even mad,” Forrester objected.

“Dog sweat!” roared the Martian. “I am! Come on, fight, will you?” But his hands still hung at his sides.

Forrester shifted position cautiously, sparing the time for a glance around. The crowd was definitely interested now, forming a neat ring around them; Forrester thought he could see bets being made on the outcome. The DR man overhead was watching them carefully. At least, Forrester thought, if I let him kill me, they’ll just freeze me up again. And then they’ll put me back together later on. And maybe the freezer isn’t such a bad place to be for a while, until this business with the Sirians get straightened out. . . .

“Are you going to fight or not?” the Martian demanded.

Forrester said, “Uh, one question.”

“Vell?”

“The way you talk. I had an argument about that the other day—”

“What’s de matter with de way I talk?”

“It’s a sort of German accent, I thought, but this other Martian was Irish, and he talked the same way—”

“Irish? German?” Heinzlichen looked baffled. “Look, Forrester, on Mars we got six-hundred-millibar pressure, you understand? You lose some of de high frequencies, dat’s all. I don’t know what ‘German’ or ‘Irish’ is.”

“Say, that’s interesting!” Forrester cried. “You mean it’s not an accent, really?”

“I mean you wasted too much of my time already!” the Martian cried and leaped for his throat. And right there, in the bright midway with the ambulatory plants jolting past him and the crowds cheering and shouting, Forrester found himself fighting for his life. The Martian was not only bigger than he was, the damned skunk was stronger! Fleetingly Forrester blazed with anger: how dare the Martian be stronger? What about the supposition that light-gravity inhabitants would lose their muscle tone? Why was he not able to crush this flimsy, light-G creature with a single blow?

But he could not; the Martian was on top of him, systematically thudding his head against the paving of the midway. It was Forrester’s good fortune that the flooring was a resilient, rubber-like substance, not concrete; all the same, he was developing a headache, and his senses were spinning. And now the Martian added insult to injury. “Get up and fight!” he bawled. “Dis is no fun!”

That marked the limit of Forrester’s civilized control. He screamed in rage and surged up; the Martian went flying. Forrester was up and after him, flinging himself on top of him, a knee in the Martian’s throat; he saw the Martian’s joymaker loose by his side and caught it up—grabbed it like a club, smashed the macelike large end against the Martian’s skull. It rang like bronze. Even in his rage Forrester felt a moment’s astonishment; but clearly the close-cropped blond wig was not merely hair, it was a protective armor skullpiece. “Louse!” roared Forrester, enraged all over again; the Martian had prepared himself for this battle by wearing a helmet! He shortened his stroke and clubbed the Martian across the face. Blood spurted; teeth broke. Again and again, and the Martian tried to cry out but could not; again, again—

Behind him the voice of the attendant from the DR cart said, “All right, all right, that’s enough. I’ll take care of him now.”

Forrester rocked back on his haunches, panting hoarsely, staring at the terrible ruin he had made of the Martian’s face. He managed to gasp, “Is—is he dead?”

“They don’t come any deader,” said the DR man. “Would you move a little bit?—Thanks. All right, he’s mine now. Wait here for the copper, please; he’ll take care of filling out a report.”

What happened next for Forrester was hazy. He had a confused memory of returning to the lavatory facilities of the crawl room and getting cleaned up again, a shower, fresh clothes, a steam of reviving gases that woke him up and cleared his head. But when he was out of the room the fog returned; it was not the drain resulting from his efforts that muddled his thinking, or the aching pain in his head where Heinzie had bashed it against the pavement. It was pure psychic shock.

He had destroyed a human life.

Not really, he told himself at once. Not now. A short rest in the freezer and then he’s good as new!

But it didn’t register with him; he was still in shock—and puzzled. He could not decide: had he imagined it, or had the Martian not been fighting back?

Adne was waiting for him, with Taiko; they had seen the fight and had stayed to help him get straightened out afterward. Help him or help the Martian, Forrester thought bitterly. It probably didn’t matter to them which. Nevertheless, he was grateful for their help. Adne took him to her own home, left him there a minute, returned with the news that his apartment was ready for him again, and escorted him there. And left him with Taiko, who wanted to talk. “Nice fight, Charles. Shook you up, of course—hell, I remember my own first killing. Nothing to be ashamed of. But, listen, if you’re going to come to work for the society you’ve got to pull yourself together.”

Forrester sat up and looked at Taiko. “What the devil makes you think I want to work for the Luddites?”

“Come on, Charles. Look, take a shot of bracer, will you? That green stud, there on the handle—”

“Will you get out of here and leave me alone?”

“Oh, for sweat’s sake,” cried Taiko impatiently. “Look, you said you wanted to help out with the society’s program, right? Well, there’s no time to waste! This is the chance we’ve been waiting for, man! Everybody’s got the Sirians on their minds; they’ll be diving into the freezers so fast the teams won’t be able to handle them, and that’s when those of us who can face the world realistically will have a chance to take action. We can get rid of the machine menace once and for all if we—” Taiko hesitated and gave Forrester a thoughtful look. Then he said, “Well, never mind that part of it just yet. Are you with us or against us?”

Forrester contemplated the problem of trying to explain to Taiko that his interest in the Ned Lud Society had been only an interest in making enough money to live on, and that, when the Sirian had left him ninety-three million dollars, that interest had evaporated. It did not seem worth the effort, so he said, “I guess I’m against you.”

“Charles,” said Taiko, “you make me sick! You of all people! You, who have suffered so much from this age. Don’t you want to try to cure the evils of machine domination? Don’t you want—”

“I’ll tell you what I want,” said Forrester, rousing himself. “I want you to go away—fast!”

“You’re not yourself,” said Taiko. “Look, when you get straightened out, give me a call. I’ll be hard to reach, because— Well, never mind why. But I’ll leave a special channel for you. Because I know you, Charles, and I know that you’ll have to decide you want to end these cowardly times and give man back his— All right! I’m going!”

When the door had closed behind him, Forrester stared into space for more than an hour. Then he rolled over and went to sleep. His only regret was that sooner or later he would wake up.

Fifteen

What Forrester could not understand was why it was taking them so long to arrest him.

He began to see just why a criminal might give himself up. The waiting was hard to endure. Ten times an hour he reached for the joymaker to say, “I am the one who helped the Sirian escape. Report me to the police,” and ten times each hour he stopped himself. Not now, he said. Tomorrow, no doubt, or maybe even a few minutes from now; but not just now.

From time to time the joymaker informed him of messages—forty-five of them the first day alone. Forrester refused to accept them all. He didn’t want to see anyone until—until— Well, he didn’t want to see anyone at the moment. (He could not make up his mind at just what moment the world would so clarify itself to him that he would be willing to start living in it again; but he always knew that that time was certainly not yet.) He explored the resources of his apartment, the joymaker, and his own mind. He ate fantastic meals and drank odd foaming beverages that tasted like stale beer or celery-flavored malted milks. He listened to music and watched canned plays. He wished desperately for a deck of cards, but the joymaker did not seem to understand his description of them, and so solitaire was denied him; but he found almost the same anesthesia in reading and reading over again what scraps of written matter he had on hand. His late wife’s letter he practically memorized; his briefing manual for this century he studied until his fingers were weary from turning the pages.

On the second day there were nearly seventy messages. Forrester refused them all.

At his direction the joymaker displayed for him selected news pictures on the view-wall. The only subject Forrester would allow himself an interest in was the progress of the trouble with the Sirians. There was strangely little news after the first day— negative reports from drone patrols in every quadrant of the heavens, a diminishing flow of projections and estimates as to when an attack might be expected. The consensus seemed to be: not for several weeks at least. Forrester could not understand that at all. He remembered quite distinctly that Sirius was something like fifty light-years away, and the joymaker confirmed that no way had been found to exceed the speed of light. Finally he gathered that the Sirians were thought to have some sort of faster-than-light message capability, as did Earth for that matter; so that, even if the fleeing Sirian did not make it back to his own planet, he might send a message. And it was a possibility, at least, that some wandering Sirian war patrol might be near Sol.

But none made itself evident; and on the third day there were only a dozen messages for Forrester; and he refused them all.

What he did with most of his time was sleep.

He had ninety-three million dollars and perfect health. He could think of no better way to spend either of them.

“Joymaker! Tell me what I did wrong with Adne.”

“Wrong in what sense, Man Forrester? I have no record of antisocial acts.”

“Don’t split hairs with me. I mean, why didn’t she like me after the first few days?”

The joymaker began to answer with statements about hormone balances, imprinting, and the ineluctable components of emotions, but Forrester was having none of it. “Get me a beer,” he ordered, “and give me specific answers. You hear everything that happens, right?”

“Right, Man Forrester. Except when instructed otherwise.”

“All right. I offended her. How?”

“I cannot evaluate the magnitude of the offenses, Man Forrester, but I can list certain acts that would appear to be of greater significance than others. Item, you refused her offer of a reciprocal name.”

“That was bad?”

“It is offensive by social convention, Man Forrester, yes.” The glass of beer appeared by Forrester’s couch; he tasted it and made a face.

“No, not that,” he said. “What was that other thing, the beer with some kind of raspberry sauce?”

“Berlinerweisse, Man Forrester?”

“Yeah, get me one of those. Go on with the list.”

“Item, your actions when Man Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major filed intent to kill you were considered contemptible in certain lights.”

“Didn’t she understand that I just wasn’t used to the way things go now?”

“Yes, Man Forrester, she did. Nevertheless, she considered your behavior contemptible. Item, you allowed yourself to become improverished. Item, you criticized her for a relationship with other males.”

The large goblet of pale beer appeared along with a little flask of dark red syrup; Forrester decanted the syrup into the beer and sipped it. It too tasted terrible, but he had run out of things to ask for and he drank it. “It was only that I loved her,” he said irritably.

“There are ineluctable aspects to the syndrome ‘love,’ which we cannot distinguish, Man Forrester.”

“Hell, I don’t expect you to. You’re a machine. But I thought Adne was a woman.”

“I can only surmise from the evidence of her responses that she did not comprehend or accept your behavior either, Man Forrester.”

“I have to admit you’ve got a point there,” sighed Forrester, putting down the goblet and getting up to roam around. “Well, never mind.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then waved a hand; a mirror appeared, and he studied his face in it. He looked like a bum. Hair unkempt, beard beginning to grow again. “Oh, hell,” he said.

The joymaker made no answer.

What Forrester really wanted to know—whether anyone had come to suspect him of being the one who had let the Sirian escape—he dared not ask. The questions he did ask, on the other hand, turned out to have answers as confusing as the questions were. Even simple questions. He had asked after his friend among the Forgotten Men, Jerry Whitlow, for example. He had not been surprised to find out that Whitlow was dead—he had seen that happen; or to learn that his revival was problematical; but he still did not know what the joymaker meant by saying that Whitlow was “returned to reserve.” It seemed to mean that Whitlow’s body had been used as raw material, perhaps in one of the organic lakes like the “Sea of Soup,” from which the world’s food supplies came; but Forrester was too repelled by that notion to follow it any further, and even so he could not understand why Whitlow’s revival would then be “problematical.”

“How many messages today, joymaker?” he asked idly.

“There are no messages for you today, Man Forrester.”

Forrester turned to look at the thing. That was a welcome surprise—any change was welcome—but it was worrisome, too. Had everyone forgotten him?

“No messages?”

“None that you have not already refused, Man Forrester.”

“Doesn’t anyone want to talk to me?”

“As far as indicated by the message log, Man Forrester, only Man Hironibi wishes to talk to you. He left special instructions in regard to forwarding of communications. But that was six days ago.”

Forrester was startled. “How the devil long have I been here?”

“Nineteen days, Man Forrester.”

He took a deep breath.

Nineteen days! How little his so-called friends cared for him! he told himself with self-pity. If they really liked him they would have broken the door down, if necessary.

But it was not all bad. Nineteen days? But surely, if he were going to be arrested for helping the Sirian escape, it would not have taken this long. Was it safe to assume the heat was off? Did he dare go back into the world of men?

He made up his mind rapidly and, before he could change it, acted at once. “Joymaker! Get me cleaned up. Shave, bath, new clothes. I’m going outside!”

His resolve lasted him through the cleaning-up process and into the condominium hall, but then it began to dissipate.

No one was in the hall; there were no sounds. But to Forrester it seemed like a jungle trail with unknown dangers on every side. He ordered an elevator cab to take him to slideway level, and when the door opened he entered it cautiously, as though an enemy might be lurking inside.

But it too was empty. And so—he found a moment later—was the wide hoverway. There was simply nothing there.

Forrester stared around, unable to believe what he saw. No pedestrians—well, that was understandable. There were seldom very many, and he had no idea what time of day it was. No hovercraft? That was harder to accept. Even if for a moment none were in sight, he should be able to hear the hissing roar of their passage somewhere in the city. But to see no aircraft, no sign of life at all—that was flatly unbelievable.

Where was everybody?

He said, with a quaver in his voice, “Get me a cab.”

“One will arrive in two minutes, Man Forrester.” And it did—a standard automated aircab; and Forrester still had not seen a human being. He climbed in quickly, closed the door, and ordered it to take him up—not up to any place in particular, just up, so that he could see farther in all directions.

But no matter how far he looked, no one was there. Words forced themselves out. “Joymaker! What’s happened?”

“In what respect, Man Forrester?” the machine benignly asked.

“Where did everybody go? Adne? The kids?”

“Adne Bensen and her children, Man Forrester, at present are being processed for storage in Sublake Emergency Facility Nine. However, it is not as yet known whether space will be available for them there on a permanent basis, and so the location must be considered tentative pending the completion of additional facilities—”

“You mean they’re dead?”

“Clinically dead, Man Forrester. Yes.”

“How about—” Forrester cast about in his mind— “let’s see, that Martian. Not Heinzie, the one with the Irish name, Kevin O’Rourke; is he dead, too?”

“Yes, Man Forrester.”

“And the Italian ballerina I met at the restaurant where the Forgotten Men hung out?”

“Also dead, Man Forrester.”

“What the hell happened?” he shouted.

The joymaker replied carefully, “Speaking objectively, Man Forrester, there has been an unforecast increase in the number of commitments to freezing facilities. More than ninety-eight point one percent of the human race is now in cryogenic storage. In subjective terms, the causes are not well established but appear to relate to the probability of invasion by extra-Solarian living creatures, probably Sirian.”

“You mean everybody committed suicide?”

“No, Man Forrester. Many preferred to be killed by others; for example, Man Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major. He, you will recall, elected to be killed by you.”

Forrester sank back against the seat. “Holy sweet heaven,” he muttered to himself. Dead! Nearly the whole human race, dead! It was more than he could take in at once. He sat staring into space until the joymaker said apologetically, “Man Forrester, do you wish to select a destination?”

“No—wait a minute, yes! Maybe I do. You said ninety-eight percent of the human race is dead.”

“Ninety-eight point one, yes, Man Forrester.”

“But that means there are some who are still alive, right? Are there any I know?”

“Yes, Man Forrester. Certain classes are still in vital state in large proportion because of special requests made for their services—e.g., medical specialists working in the freezer stations. Also, there are others. One you know is Man Hironibi. He is not only in vital state but has, as you know, given special instructions in regard to receiving messages from you.”

“Fine!” cried Forrester. “Just take me to Taiko, right away! I want to see someone who’s alive!”

Because—went the unspoken corollary—he didn’t want to see the ruins left by the dead. Not as long as he was so completely convinced that it was he himself who had killed them.

Sixteen

But, as it turned out, the cab did not take him to see Taiko after all.

It did what it could. The joymaker programmed it properly enough, and Forrester found himself high in a building of bright ruby crystal, in front of a door inscribed THE NED LUD SOCIETY. Inside was what he supposed was the latter-day equivalent of an office—although it was warm and damp and a fountain played among ferns. But no one was inside.

“What the devil’s the matter with you, joymaker?” he demanded. “Where’s Taiko?”

“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “there is an anomaly here. My records indicate Man Hironibi’s presence at this place, but clearly they are wrong. My records have never been wrong before.”

“Well, let me talk to him. You said he’d left special instructions about that.”

“Yes, Man Forrester.” Pause. Then Taiko’s voice came on. “That you, Charles? Glad to hear from you. I’m busy now, but I’ll be in touch when I get a chance—only don’t refuse my message this time, will you?”

That was all. “Wait a minute,” cried Forrester. “Taiko!”

The joymaker interrupted him. “Man Forrester, that was a recording.”

Forrester growled profanely. He walked around the office, examining it, but without finding anything that would help him locate Taiko. “Well, hell,” he said. “Let’s see. Is anybody else I know still alive?”

“Man Forrester, Edwardino Wry is also ambient. Do you consider that he is known to you?”

“I doubt it, because I never heard of the son— Wait a minute. Was he one of the ones that beat me up?”

“Yes, Man Forrester.”

“Well, I don’t want to see him. Forget it, joymaker,” said Forrester. “I guess I’ll just wait for Taiko.”

Three or four times he thought he saw people, but he was only able to get close to one of them, and it said civilly, “We are not human, Man Forrester. We are merely a special-purpose service unit diverted to aid at the cryogenic facilities.” It had looked like a pretty young blonde in a bikini, perhaps a barmaid somewhere, Forrester thought; but was too dispirited to inquire further. Apart from those, there was no one in sight in Shoggo.

He walked aimlessly, shaking his head.

His long days of self-imposed exile had let most of the guilt evaporate from him. He no longer felt either fearful of discovery or humiliated; the Sirian had used him as a tool, true, but if it had not been him, it would have been someone else. Anyway, he was more concerned about this world. The year 2527 was a great disappointment to him. He could think of no other age when the response of the populace to a threat of death would have been such universal suicide. It was simply crazy. . . .

Of course, he reminded himself, death was not the same to these people as it had been to his contemporaries. Death was no longer necessarily permanent. It was like fleeing to a neutral country to sit out a war, and heaven knew there were lots of twentieth-century examples of that.

Nevertheless, in Charles Forrester’s opinion the world of 2527 A.D. was chicken.

Forrester filled his lungs and shouted, “You are all cowards! The world’s better off without you!” His voice echoed emptily among the tall, hard building faces.

“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “were you addressing me?”

“I was not. Shut up,” said Forrester. “No, cancel that. Get me a cab.” And, when it came, he took it back to the broad hovercraft way where he and Jerry Whitlow had hidden out as two of the Forgotten Men. But there were no more Forgotten Men in evidence, not wherever he looked, no matter how loudly he called out. “Take me to Adne Bensen’s home,” he commanded, and the cab flew him into the entrance port at the midtower level of the building they had shared, but there was no one visible there, either. Not in the streets, not in the halls, not even in the apartment, after Forrester had commanded the joymaker to let him in.

He ordered himself a meal and sat on the edge of a sort of couch in the children’s room, feeling put-upon and sad. When he had finished eating he said, “Joymaker, try getting Taiko for me again.”

“Yes, Man Forrester. . . . There is no new message, Man Forrester.”

“Don’t give me that! Say it’s priority, like you’re always doing to me.”

“You do not have the authority to classify a message priority, Man Forrester.”

“I do if I say I’m planning to kill him,” Forrester said cunningly. “You have to notify him of my intentions, right?”

“I do indeed, Man Forrester, but not until you have filed appropriate bonds and guaranties. Until you have done so, your notice cannot be effective. Do you wish to file, Man Forrester?”

“Well,” said Forrester, thinking about filling out forms and signing documents, “I guess not, no. Isn’t there any way I can get through to him?”

The joymaker said, “I have a taped message from him, which I can display on the view-wall if you wish, Man Forrester. It is not, however, directly addressed to you.”

“Display the son of a gun then,” ordered Forrester. “And make it snappy!”

“Yes, Man Forrester.”

The view-wall lighted up, obediently; but what appeared on it was not Taiko Hironibi. It was a tall, largely built woman with a commanding presence, who said, “Girl Goldilocks and Terror of Bears!”

The joymaker said apologetically, “There is a malfunction, Man Forrester. I am investigating.”

Forrester was startled. “What the devil!” he cried. The voice went on. “Bears! Think of bears. Great biting creatures, shaggy-haired, smell of animal sweat and rot. A bear can kill a man—crunch, crush his head; smash, crash his spine; zip, rip his heart.” At every word the woman’s image acted out crunching, smashing, ripping.

“Hey,” said Forrester, “I didn’t order any bedtime stories!”

The joymaker said, in the same tone of apology, “Man Forrester, the technical difficulty is being analyzed. I suggest you permit this tape to finish.”

And meanwhile the woman was orating. “A girl child, little as you. Littler. Little as you used to be when you were little. Call the girl . . . give her a name. . . . Let her be called, oh, Goldilocks. Golden hair; locks of gold. Sweet, small, defenseless girl.”

Forrester snarled, “Will you turn this damn thing off?”

“Man Forrester,” admitted the joymaker, “I can’t. Please be patient.”

“Imagine this girl doing a naughty thing!” cried the woman. “Imagine her going where she should not go, where her mother/father told her not to go. Imagine her rejecting their wise counsel!”

Forrester sank back on the couch and said glumly, “If you can’t turn it off, at least get me a drink while I’m waiting. Scotch and water.”

“Yes, Man Forrester.”

The view-wall was showing real bears now, large and ferocious grizzlies, while the woman chanted, “And Goldilocks goes to the bear lair—roaring, biting, slashing bears! But they are not home.

“They are not home, and she eats their food. She sits where they sit, lies where they lie, and sleeps.

“She sleeps, and the bears come home!”

Forrester’s drink appeared; he tasted it and glowered, for it was not Scotch. As best as he could tell from the flavor, it was a sort of salty applejack.

“The bears come home! The bears come home, and their muzzles foam; the bears come back ready to attack, the bears come in with their jaws agrin!

“Red eyes glowing! (She sleeps, unknowing.)

“Claws that rend (is this the end?), paws that break (she starts to wake), teeth that bite—

“And Goldilocks opens her eyes, screams loudly, leaps to her feet and takes flight.”

The woman on the view-wall paused, staring sorrowfully straight into Forrester’s eyes. Her oratorial stance relaxed; her eyes seemed to lose their dramatic glow, and she said conversationally, “Now, you see? What a terrible thing to happen to a little girl, and all because she rejected her parents. She ran and ran and ran and ran, a long, long time, and then she got back to her father/mother and promised never to reject them again, and made a good adjustment. Now please prepare to answer questions on the theme: ‘Is it wise to take chances on going to places your father/mother do not approve?’ ” She smiled, bowed, and vanished.

The joymaker said, “Man Forrester, thank you for waiting. There are certain nexial recursions malfunctioning at the present time, and we regret any inconvenience.”

“What was that? One of Adne’s kids’ bedtime stories?”

“Exactly, Man Forrester. Our apologies. Shall I attempt to display the Taiko tape again?”

“I think,” said Forrester, with a sense of foreboding, “that I am beginning to feel kind of lonesome.”

“That is not due to any malfunction on our part, Man Forrester,” said the joymaker with dignity. “That is due to—”

Silence.

“What did you say?” demanded Forrester.

“That is due to— That is due to—Awk,” said the joymaker, as though it were strangling. “That is due to the flight of many persons to freezing facilities.”

“You sound as though you’re breaking down, machine,” said Forrester apprehensively.

“No, Man Forrester! Certain nexial recursions are not operative, and some algorithms are looping. It is a minor technical difficulty.”

The machine paused, then said in a different tone, “Another minor technical difficulty is that certain priority programs have not been executed on schedule. My apologies, Man Forrester.”

“For what?”

“For not delivering a priority notice regarding your imminent arrest.”

Forrester was jolted. “The devil you say!”

“No, Man Forrester. It is a true message. The coppers are coming for you now.”

Seventeen

The door opened with a thwack, and two coppers plunged into the room. One of them grabbed him, rather roughly, Forrester thought, and glared into his eyes. “Man Forrester!” it cried. “You are arrested on sufficient charges and need make no statement!”

As if he could, thought Forrester, whirled off his feet as the coppers flanked him, one on each side, and half carried him out into the corridor and down to the fly-in, where a police flier was waiting for him. He shouted to them, “Wait! What’s it all about?”

They did not answer, merely thrust him in and slammed the door. It must be the Sirian business, he thought sickly, staring back at them as they watched the flier bear him away. But why now? “I didn’t do anything!” he cried, knowing that he lied.

“That is to be determined, Man Forrester,” said a voice from a speaker grille over his head. “Meanwhile, please come with us.”

The “please” was totally sense-free, of course; Forrester had no choice. “But what did I do?” he begged.

“Your arrest has been ordered, Man Forrester,” said the quiet, unemotional voice of the central computation facility. “Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

“You bet!” Forrester stared around fearfully. There was no one at the controls, but there didn’t seem to be a need for anyone; the car was sliding rapidly through the air toward the lake front.

“Your arrest has been ordered, Man Forrester,” repeated the computer voice. “Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

“Damn it, I just said I did!” They were over blue water and moving fast. Forrester hammered the fleshy part of his fist against a window experimentally, but naturally enough the glass did not break. It was just as well, of course; there was no place for him to go.

“Your arrest,” said the computer voice calmly, “has been ordered, Man Forrester. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

Forrester swore furiously and hopelessly. They were approaching a metal island in the lake, and the aircraft was dropping toward it. “All I want,” he said, “is to know what the devil’s going on. Joymaker! Can you tell me what this is all about?” But the mace clipped to his belt only said, “We are all the same, Man Forrester. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

By the time the aircraft landed, Forrester had regained control of himself. Obviously something was wrong with the central computation facilities, but equally obviously there was nothing much he could do about it now. When two more coppers, waiting on the hardstand for the police car to alight, seized his arms and pulled him out of the door, he did not resist. The coppers’ grip was quite unbreakable, their strength far greater than his own.

He saw no human being and no other automata, while he was herded like livestock down through underground passages, under the lake waters, until finally he was pushed into a door that locked behind him.

He was in a cell. It held a bed, a chair, and a table, nothing else. Or nothing that was visible; its walls were mined with the usual electronic maze, however, because a voice said at once, “Man Forrester, message.”

“Drop sick,” said Forrester. “No, I don’t want a precis of the charge against me.”

But the message that followed was not the repetitious drone of the faulty machines. It was Taiko’s voice, and a wall of the cell sprang into light to show his face. “Hi, there, Chuck,” he said. “You said you wanted to see me.”

Forrester exhaled sharply. “Thank God,” he said. “Look, Taiko, something’s gone wrong with the machines, and I’m in jail!”

Taiko’s bland face creased in a smile. “Number one,” he said, “there’s nothing wrong with the machines—in fact, something’s going right with them! And, number two, of course you’re in jail. Who do you think brought you here?”

“Here? You mean you’re—”

Taiko grinned and nodded. “Not more’n fifty meters away, pal. Considering how messed up the computers are, the easiest way to get you here was to have you arrested. So I did. So now we come right down to it. Are you with the Ned Lud Society or are you against it? Because this is our chance. Everything’s so stirred up for fear of a Sirian invasion that we can straighten things out the right way. Know what I mean by the right way?”

“Smash the machines?” Forrester guessed. “You mean, you and I are going to break up the central computers?”

“Oh, not just you and I,” said Taiko triumphantly. “We’ve got a lot of help we didn’t have before. Would you like to see them?”

Taiko touched his joymaker, and the field of the view-screen widened. Forrester was looking into a fairly large room and a rather heavily populated one.

Taiko did indeed have a lot of help. There were perhaps a dozen of them, Forrester saw, but he did not count them very accurately. He was too shocked to count when he discovered that only one or two of the dozen “helpers” in the room were human.

The rest were not. They looked out at Forrester through eyes that were circlets of gleaming green dots. They were Sirians.

“You see, pal,” said Taiko easily, “it’s a matter of loyalties. Our friends here are kind of funny-looking, I admit. But they’re organic.”

Forrester goggled. The Sirians in their cone-shaped pressure suits looked exactly like his late friend and benefactor, S Four. The idea of making allies of them was hard to accept. Not only because they were potentially dangerous enemies, but because his own contact with S Four had left him with an unshakable conviction that men and Sirians were far from being able to communicate on any meaningful level.

Taiko laughed. “Takes you aback, eh? But it was obvious—only it took somebody like me to see how to make it work. These guys are geniuses on the electronic stuff, absolute geniuses. They’ve given us a chance to put the ideals of the Ned Lud Society into practice, once and for all. . . . Look, are you interested or not? Because I can send you back where you came from as easily as I brought you here.”

“I’m interested, all right,” said Forrester.

Taiko was sharp enough to catch a hint of double meaning. “Interested to work with us? Or to try to mess us up?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. He chuckled. “Makes no difference in the long run,” he said merrily. “What can you do? Come on up and talk it over, anyway. . . .”

And there was a faint click, and the door of Forrester’s cell sprang open, and a line of pale glowing green arrowheads appeared to point the way for him to walk.

I wish, he thought, that Adne were here to talk to.

But Adne was deep in the liquid-helium sleep of death, with her children, with nearly everyone else Forrester had met in this century. There was no one to tell him what to do.

He followed the tick of the arrowheads appearing before him as precisely as though they were the measures of a dance. It could not possibly be right, he told himself, to change the ways of the world with the aid of creatures from another star. It violated every principle of equity and human rights.

On the other hand, what Taiko was after made sense. Was it right to submit the destinies of the world to a cluster of computers?

For that matter, thought Forrester, tardily realizing how little of his homework he had done, was the premise right in that statement? Were the computers masters of the world? Who did make fundamental decisions?

Was it possible that a state had been reached in which fundamental decisions made themselves—not by the acts of a legislature, but by the actions of sovereign individuals, viewed en masse?

He shook his head. It was rather pointless to be considering these large questions, in view of his circumstances. He was several hundred meters under the surface of a lake, he reminded himself, in a world that had rejected him several times and was now dissolving around him.

The arrowheads ended at a door, which wheeled itself open as he approached, and he entered the room he had seen in the view-screen.

“About time!” cried Taiko, advancing toward him and clapping him on the shoulder. “You know, Charles, you should have confided in me. If it hadn’t been for my friends here—” he gestured at the Sirians in their conical suits—“I’d never have known how much you had to do with our success. Haw! You said you’d help the society if I’d let you join. I just had no idea how much!”

“So you know how S Four tricked me,” said Forrester.

“Don’t be modest! It was a noble deed—even if he had to, well, lean on you a little to make you do it. I can only wonder,” Taiko went on modestly, “why I didn’t think of it myself. Obviously, the way to make Ned Lud ideals real is to get enough people so chicken-scared that they light out for the freezers, leaving the rest of the world to take care of whatever happens next. Only there isn’t enough rest of the world still alive to matter. And while things are messed up, we move.”

One of the Sirians moved restlessly. Its circlet of green eyes winked like gems, dimmed only faintly by the sheen of the crystal band that kept it from the corrosive attack of Earth’s air. It did not speak, but Taiko seemed to understand what it was thinking.

“They don’t exactly want you here,” he said, turning a thumb toward the Sirian. “Not that they’re not grateful. Well, whatever a Sirian would be that you might call grateful. But there’s a lot riding on all this for them, and they don’t like to take chances.”

“Do you want me to promise not to interfere?” asked Forrester wonderingly.

“No! Who’d believe you’d keep a promise like that? Anyway, it isn’t necessary. What could you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nothing! We’ve already recircuited most of Central Computation—no communication anywhere, anymore. Except for the coppers—which are under our direct control—and the DR vehicles. Which I insisted on,” he pointed out, “because naturally I’m not going to hurt any human beings if I can help it. Sweat! I want to save them!”

“What about your friends here?”

“Forget them, Charles,” said Taiko easily. “Don’t fret yourself, they’re just technical advisors. I’m the one that’s running this show, and when we finish busting up the machines they’re going home.”

“How do you know?” Forrester demanded.

“Oh, sweat, Charles,” sighed Taiko. He glanced ruefully at the Sirians, shook his head, took Forrester by the arm. He walked him over to a view-wall and pointed.

“The pictures are a little random and fuzzy,” he apologized, “because naturally Central Computing isn’t monitoring the intercuts any more. But look. You see what the world looks like now?”

Forrester looked. One wall showed a broad hoverway with a single car on it, lying slantwise across the way and motionless; no one was around. The other wall changed as he watched from blank gray to a growing fire that seemed to be consuming most of the central part of a city. It did not look like Shoggo.

“You think the Sirians are going to worry about Earth without Central Computing?” demanded Taiko. “Sweat, no! Once the machine computation facilities are neutralized, they’ll be glad to go home. Earth won’t be a threat. And they’re not naturally warlike.”

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, come on, Charles! You have to take some things on faith!”

Forrester said carefully, “Are you all that good a judge of Sirian character? Please, I’m not trying to put you down. I want to know. How can you be sure?”

“It stands to reason!” snapped Taiko. “Oh, I know, Charles, you’re thinking of the way I’ve been acting, like a clown, an idiot, pushing an idea that not one human being in a hundred thousand gave a hoot about, warning about dangers most people thought were delights. . . . But I’m not stupid. I moved in fast enough when you gave me the break, right? I showed I was smart enough to grab a chance when it presented itself? So trust me. I’m smart enough to see that there’s nothing in it for the Sirians as far as fighting Earth is concerned. Why would they want to do that? They can’t live here without suits. There are a thousand planets that would be worth something to them; Earth doesn’t happen to be one of them.”

There was a sound from the voice-box of one of the Sirians. Taiko jumped. He turned to call out, “All right, just a minute.” And, to Forrester, “Well, that’s it. I’m a sentimental slob. I’d like to have you with us since you did us a favor—whether you knew it or not. But it’s up to you. In or out?”

“I don’t know,” said Forrester honestly.

“Take your time,” grinned Taiko. “The jail’s yours. Just remember, there’s nothing you can do to hurt us. No communications. No transportation. And damn near nobody.”

Forrester walked back out into the bright, empty corridors of Shoggo’s underwater jail. No one stopped him.

There were no green arrows to guide him. As he had come from the left, he turned to the right. He wanted to think. Was Taiko right? Judging from his own experience, this was at least a disconcerting society, filled with unexpected cruelties and cowardices. But who was Taiko to make the world’s decisions for it?

He saw a bright light ahead and walked toward it. It was sunlight! Sunlight shining down a shaft, and a white death-reversal car humming quietly to itself as it waited.

There was an attendant, but though it looked human enough it glared into Forrester’s eyes and said challengingly, “Man Forrester! Your arrest has been ordered. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

“Machine,” he said, “you’re a broken record.” Then he had a thought. “Take me out of here!” he commanded, climbing into the DR flier.

“Man Forrester! Your arrest has been ordered. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

It was hopeless, of course. He hoped, anyway, and sat there for minutes, while the machine that looked so like a human being glared unmovingly at him and the DR car remained motionless. Then Forrester sighed, got out, walked away.

“I might as well join them,” he said aloud.

But he didn’t want to. He didn’t merely not want to; he actively, passionately wished he could thwart Taiko’s plan. As soon as it become clear he had only one choice to make, that choice became abhorrent.

But there was nothing he could do. He considered possibilities, one by one. Nothing would work. His joymaker was mute. There was no way out of the jail. Even the DR car would take him away only if he were dead, not alive. . . .

If he were dead?

He took a deep breath and marched back to the DR car. As he had thought, the side of it was emblazoned with the caduceus of the WEST ANNEX CENTER.

He demanded, “Machine, are you really operating out of the West Annex Center?”

The robot glared into his eyes. “Man Forrester! Your arrest has been ordered. Would you like a precis of the charge against you?”

“What I would like,” said Forrester tightly, “is an insurance policy. But I guess I’ll have to take a chance this one time without one. Let’s hope it’s only your speaking circuits that are messed up!”

What he wanted he knew he would find in the flier. He reached into it, fumbled through the nest of first-aid equipment.

The thing he wanted turned up in the first case he opened: a four-inch scalpel, razor sharp. He stared at it glumly, hesitated, searched again until he found a writing stylus and a square of cardboard. Carefully he lettered a sign:

REVIVE ME AT ONCE!

I can tell you what the Sirians are up to.

He pinned it neatly to his shirt front. Then . . .

“Machine!” he cried. “Do your duty!” And with a rapid motion he slit his throat.

The pain was astonishing, but it lasted for only a moment. And then the world roared thinly at him and slipped dizzyingly away.

Eighteen

“I was dreaming,” murmured Forrester into the warm, comfortable darkness, “of committing suicide. Funny I should cut my throat, though. I want to live. . . .”

“You’ll live, Chuck,” said a familiar voice. Forrester opened his eyes and gazed into the eyes of Hara.

He thrust himself up. “Taiko!” he cried. “The Sirians! I’ve got to tell you what they’re doing!”

Hara pressed him back down on the bed. “You already told us, Chuck. They’re taken care of. Don’t you remember?”

“Remember?” But then he did remember. He remembered being awake, with a nightmarish pain in his throat, trying by gesture and sign language to communicate something, until at last someone had had the wit to bring stylus and paper and he’d written out a message. He laughed out loud. “Funny! I never thought that with my throat cut it’d be hard to tell you anything.”

“But you did, Chuck. The Sirians are under personal human guard, every one of them immobilized and cut off from communication. And Taiko’s talking as fast as he can to a computer team, telling them what he did so they can undo it. They’ve already got all the basic utilities back.” Hara stood up, fished in a pocket, proudly produced a pack of cigarettes. “Here,” he said. “See how your new throat lining stands up to these.”

Forrester gratefully accepted a light. It felt all right as he drew in; he reached up and touched his throat, found it covered with soft plastic film.

“That’ll come off today,” said Hara. “You’re about ready to go back to population. We’ve already revived close to twenty-five percent of the recent freezees. They’ll really be interested in you.”

“Oh,” said Forrester, dampened. “I guess they will, at that. What’s the penalty for letting the Sirian escape?”

“About equal to the reward for letting us know about Taiko,” said Hara cheerfully. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, how about if I worry about what the Sirians are going to do?” asked Forrester.

Hara waved a hand. “Be my guest,” he said. “Only bear in mind that Taiko’s little friends were pretty high when he was dismantling Central Computation, and they’re pretty low now. I don’t think they’ll find us an easy target.”

He turned toward the door. “Get yourself checked out,” he ordered. “Then I want to talk to you before you leave here.”

“About my throat?”

“About your girl,” said Hara.

Hours later, Forrester was standing where he had stood before, outside the main entrance to the West Annex Discharge Center. For old time’s sake he flipped a cigarette to the ground and watched the tiny bright cleaner robot whisk it up and away.

Clearly, Central Computation was back on the job.

He turned as Hara joined him. “What about my girl?” he demanded.

“Well . . .” Hara hesitated. “It’s tough to know how to talk to you survivors of the kamikaze era,” he said. “You’re sensitive about the strangest things. For instance, Adne said she thought you resented the fact that I was the father of one of her kids.”

“One of them!” Forrester squawked, severely trying his new throat lining. “Holy God! I at least thought they’d have the same father!”

“Why, Chuck?”

“Why? What do you mean, why? The girl’s a trollop!”

“What’s a trollop?” As Forrester hesitated, Hara pressed on. “In your time, maybe that was something bad. I don’t know; I’m not a specialist in ancient history. But you aren’t in your time any more, Chuck.”

Forrester gazed thoughtfully at Hara’s patient, weary face. But it was more than he wanted to accept. “I don’t care,” he said angrily. “I can’t help thinking maybe Taiko was right. Somewhere the human race took a wrong turning!”

“Well,” said Hara, “actually, that’s what I wanted to tell you. Chuck, there’s no such thing as a wrong turning. You can’t rewrite the history of the race; it happened; this is the result. If you don’t like it, there’s no reason why you can’t try to persuade the world to change again. To something different—anything! Whatever you like. But you can’t go back.”

He patted Forrester’s shoulder. “Think,” he advised. “Let your brain decide what’s right and wrong, not what’s left of your boyhood training. Because all that is dead. . . . And, oh, yes. One other thing,” he mentioned. “I checked the schedules. We’re reviving them pretty fast now, and it ought to be Adne’s turn in about two days.”

And he was gone.

Forrester stared after him. It would be hard, he thought, but it would be possible. And, after all, he had very little choice.

So Forrester hailed a flier and ordered it to take him to a suitable dwelling in Shoggo, determined to face the future. Which, as it turned out, was very fortunate, since he had a lot of future to face—not just a few days or years, but, with the help of a few more visits to the freezer, a fair number of millennia, in all of which he was alive, and active, and well.

For he lived happily ever after. And so did they all.

Author’s Note

Once upon a time, a quarter of a century or so ago, I was a weatherman for the United States Army Air Force in Italy. It was my first experience in the art of predicting real-time events—that is, in the kind of prediction where money, and lives, are bet on its accuracy.

This was a long time before the advent of the computer and the facsimile machine and TIROS and all the other handy little gadgets that have since come reasonably close to turning meteorology into an exact science. Still, we had our gadgets even then, quite a few of them. Our group weather officer, in my part of the Fifteenth Air Force, was a disheveled captain who smiled and nodded a lot, but rarely spoke. He would hum to himself for an hour or two as he pored over the teletype reports and the synoptic map and the adiabatic charts and the PIREPS. Then he would go out to the instrument shelter and swing the psychrometer and tap the aneroid barograph with his fingernail. And then he would climb on the roof of the station and perhaps he would see, off on the horizon, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand; and he would say, “Ha! Looks like rain,” and come back and make a bad-weather forecast for the pilots of the B-24s.

Actually, that’s the way to write science fiction. (Well, one kind of science fiction. There are many varieties of the science fiction experience!) First you do your homework with the books and the scientific journals. Then you talk to the astronomers and biochemists and computer people, and if you’re lucky perhaps they’ll let you play with their machines and look through their lenses. And then you get up on a high place and look at the world around you.

The Age of the Pussyfoot was constructed to those specifications. Little of it represents invention on my part, barring the personalities and some of the details of settings and events. Almost every aspect of it is visible right now, in July of 1968, as a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand; and I too am forecasting rain.

The joymaker? M.I.T.’s Project MAC was what made me think of the joymaker—well, that’s not quite true; I had thought of it before Project MAC ever existed, but certainly MAC is a sort of Jurassic ancestor of my toy. At M.I.T., two big IBM 7094s, plus half a dozen or so servant computers, are available to anyone with a remote-access console in his home or office. The console right now can be anywhere a telephone line will go—including Europe, if you like, or for that matter Antarctica. My only additional assumption is that it will be convenient to do the same thing by radio. The MAC consoles are presently about the size of biggish electric typewriters; my only change involves microminiaturizing them into portability—and, while you’re at it, fitting them with a few of such necessities of modern urban life as Miltown, contraceptive pills, aspirin, and the like. I also assume that the pharmacopeia of the next few centuries will be more extensive than our own, but that seems like a reasonably good bet.

Immortality through freezing? Robert C. W. Ettinger has been on a crusade for that for more than five years now. The funny thing about it is that it will probably work. (I offer no money-back guarantees, you understand, only an opinion. But it is an opinion shared by such prestigious men as Jean Rostand, France’s most illustrious biochemist.) The other funny thing about it is that there have been very few takers for this offer of immortality in the flesh—as Bob Ettinger says, many are cold, but few are frozen. There are fewer than half a dozen corpses currently in the deep freeze, although there are some hundreds of thousands of persons who would be, except that they haven’t yet happened to die. But the facilities are there, including some three competing lines of the man-sized thermos bottles with the liquid gas tanks that are now commercially available for those who would die and live to die again. I mentioned “death-reversal” equipment in the story. Several years ago, I saw an unpublished manuscript that stated, apparently on good authority, that the U.S.S.R. had such vehicles in service then; it implied that one of these had saved the life of the noted Russian scientist Lev Landau. (Who was dead four times, clinically, incontrovertibly dead, before he was brought to life again permanently enough to be released from the hospital.) And, three months ago, parked outside the headquarters of the New York Academy of Sciences, I saw the first American death-reversal machine. The New York DR vehicle is a truck; those in the story are helicopters. Otherwise they are much the same.

It is true, however, that no corpsicle has yet been thawed and returned to life, and there’s no firm estimate of when one will be. Yet it could happen tomorrow. The odds appear to be very great that it will happen sometime, and according to my personal reading of human psychology, the minute it does we will have a rush to the freezers comparable to no human migration since the opening of the Cherokee Strip. It strikes me that we are all, from birth, so often reminded that we are inevitably going to die that we cannot accept an offer of immortality when it is presented, until and unless it is shown to work. Demonstrate that it works one time, and we’ll grab for it as we’ve grabbed for few things before . . . and then the building of such installations as the West Annex Center will proceed apace.

The economic, social, and cultural “predictions” of the story are perhaps a little less defensible than the hardware. But I think the reason for that is that economics and sociology, et al., are at the present time rather less “scientific” than the hard sciences are. The money part of the story is pretty reliably stated. Obviously we will continue to have both of the two kinds of inflation that have been going on throughout history—both the devaluation of existing currencies (as the Romansolidus, worth several hundred dollars at least, was devalued over two thousand years into the French sou, worth not even a thank you); and the multiplication of things to spend money on, which is the psychological root of a good deal of the “poverty” of our own age and nation. (America’s poor usually do have enough money to survive on. It is the fact that they see around them so many desirable things, which they don’t have money to buy, that makes them really, miserably, unarguably “poor.”)

The notion of being paid a salary for things we might now consider to be properly unpaid, leisure-time activities is not particularly fanciful, either. Witness the proposals of the guaranteed annual wage and the negative income tax; witness institutionalized welfare programs; witness how many “leisure” activities have already become paying professions. Who would have paid a salary to a ski instructor in the Middle Ages? Already in America almost every large volunteer organization has a hard-core paid professional staff. (It is not quite as common in Europe—yet.) I am only suggesting that the memberships as well as the leaderships might as well be paid for what they do.

As to the mating customs, the interpersonal folkways and so on of my twenty-sixth-century characters, I confess I am on shakier ground. I am not sure that things will go exactly this way. But form follows function. There is a need for a family even now, as a sort of nest designed for the raising of children, and there no doubt will be such a need in the foreseeable future. I do not think it will be the same need as in the recent past, however. Then there was enough work at home to keep an able-bodied woman busy from dawn to dark, and enough work involved in earning a living to keep her husband away at the farm or factory almost every waking hour. With the increase in leisure time, in productivity of labor, especially in such external aids to child-rearing as schools and nurseries, the functional need for the family is somewhat different. Our social structure has not yet really caught up with that fact, although the signs are writ large; I am only assuming that in five hundred years it will have done so.

A similar defense could be made for almost every speculation in this novel, including the presence of Sirians. (Or, anyway, extraterrestrial creatures capable of doing the sort of thing that Sirians do in the story. There are more than one hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, and it is a dead-certain bet that at least some of them have inhabited planets.) But I should confess that there are two areas in which I am defenseless.

One of these includes the things I have left out. I have not taken into consideration the probabilities of large-scale disaster—through nuclear warfare, or lethal pollution of the air, or a runaway population explosion sufficient to starve us all back to the Neolithic. But there’s just so much you can discuss in one story, and I wasn’t happening to discuss those possibilities here.

And the other thing I can’t defend is the time scale.

If you put together Project MAC and Bob Ettinger’s freezers and the negative income tax, you have something that is really quite a lot like The Age of the Pussyfoot . . .constructed out of materials that are to hand right now. In the novel, the time scale is large: five centuries. Charles Forrester’s revival is as far in one direction along our time scale as Christopher Columbus’s voyage is in the other.

I don’t really think it will be that long. Not five centuries.

Perhaps not even five decades.

Frederik Pohl

Red Bank, New Jersey

July 1968

“The Age of the Pussyfoot” appeared in a shorter version in Galaxy Magazine.