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A Scatter of Stardust by E. C. Tubb


THE BELLS OF ACHERON
Every planet has an atmosphere, a sense of magic unique unto itself, but some have more than others. Kalturia with its soaring mountains lashed by tumultuous seas, the towering escarpments naked and bare, reflecting the ruby light of a sullen sun in a sky so heavy and brooding that, standing there, you feel like a fly on the face of creation. Lokrush, soft and gentle with its woods and rolling hills, its flowers nodding in scented breezes, the red and green light of its twin suns merging and blending in an eternal kaleidoscope of shimmering wonder. Ragnarok with its snow and ice and incessant electrical storms and, at night, the flaming beauty of the aureoles filling the sky with sheets and curtains of colored fire. Acheron with its Singing Bells.
We covered them all on the Grand Tour, dropping down to spend a day or two while the passengers stared and marveled, then up again, the grav drive humming as it lifted us into space, the twisting wrench as the warp jumped us from star to star, then planetfall again and more natural wonders to dazzle the eye and numb the mind. It could have become routine but it was never that. The universe is too big, the worlds too many to ever allow of boredom. So that the crew rivaled the passengers in their eagerness to make planetfall, their reluctance to leave once landed and, having left, their impatience to land again somewhere new and strange.
Most of us had our favorite worlds. The captain, I knew, loved Almuri with its living crystals; the chief engineer had always to be watched when we reached Homeline with its fantastic seas and equally fantastic fish; and for me nothing could equal Acheron with its Singing Bells.
Holman was talking about them when I entered the lounge. It was his habit to discuss the next world we were to visit, to explain the natural phenomena in scientific terms and, in this way, to prepare the passengers for the wonders to come. It wasn't his job but he had made it so. Accidents were few, sickness rare and the warp jump often took as long as several days. Time, for the doctor as for all of us, tended to drag between the stars.
I moved softly about the lounge, collecting empty glasses, cleaning ash trays, arranging scattered books and magazines, doing all that a steward had to do. I didn't dislike the job. Menial though it was, the pay was sufficient, the tips sometimes generous and the work was not arduous. It served to pass the time and as long as we visited Acheron I was content.
"A strange world," Holman was saying. "For some reason animal life never evolved on Acheron and the flora is ascendant. There aren't even any insects."
"No insects?" Klienman frowned. He was a small, balding, aggressive man who had read much but knew little. "Then how about pollination?"
"The planets are bisexual," explained the doctor. "They are self-pollinating. The winds, of course, scatter the seeds."
"The Bells," said Klienman. "What of those?"
"The famous Bells." Holman paused and looked at his audience. They were all in the lounge, the thirty passengers we carried this trip. Old, mostly, for the Grand Tour is not cheap. A couple of young lovers on their honeymoon held hands and whispered to each other. A fat matron, her bulging throat ringed with diamonds, glared at her son, a gangling, vacuous youngster who stared with puppy eyes at an attractive ash blonde. She ignored his devotion. Laura Amhurst was a silent, self-contained woman who spoke little and smiled less.
"The Singing Bells of Acheron," continued Holman, and fedged a little closer. "They aren't bells at all, not really. Just a freak of evolution. The dominant plant form is a bush about twice the height of a man when fully grown. It has a continuous seed cycle and is usually covered with seed pods in various stages of ripeness. The pods are oblate spheroids, from about an inch in diameter to almost a foot, and each pod contains a half-dozen seeds."
"How disappointing!" A faded socialite pouted in a manner which had been fashionable when I was born. "I had imagined them to be real bells."
"Seed pods." Klienman snorted his disgust. "Is that all?"
"That's all." Holman glanced toward me. "Just a freak of nature." He smiled at the others. "But they are rather special at that. You see. there is a high silicon content in the soil of Acheron. So high, in fact, that no Terrestrial plant could survive."
"Nothing wonderful about that," said Klienman loudly. He seemed determined to make himself unpleasant. "Lots of worlds can't support earth type vegetation."
"True." Holman paused and I knew what he was trying to hide his annoyance. Men who knew little and thought they knew all were anathema to him. "The point," he continued evenly, "is that the seed pods, because of the absorbed silicon, are in effect fragile balls of glass. The seeds within them are loose, and when ruffled by the winds, they strike against their containers."
"Like a Japanese lantern," said Laura Amhurst suddenly. "Is that it?"
"Yes," said Holman, and again he glanced toward me. "Exactly like a Japanese lantern. There is absolutely nothing supernatural about the Singing Bells."
There was more, much more, a running cross fire of question and answer with Klienman trying to show off his book learning and belittle the doctor. Holman was patient. He was, after all, a member of the crew and he refrained from revealing Klienman as the fool he was. Only Laura Amhurst remained silent, her ash blonde beauty accentuating her pallor. Later, when the passengers had retired and the ship had settled down for the night, Holman sent for me.
"Sit down, John." He gestured to a chair in his small dispensary. "What do you think of the passengers?"
"As usual."
"Meaning not much, is that it?" He didn't really expect an answer and he was not disappointed. "What do you think of the blonde?"
"Laura Amhurst?"
"That's the one." He scowled at a cabinet of instruments. "She's a widow, John. Recent too. I don't like it."
I knew what he meant but made no comment. Some arguments remain evergreen while others pall after the first discussion. To me Acheron was something not to be discussed. I made a point of glancing at my watch and Holman took the hint.
"So you won't talk about it," he said, and his voice held defeat. "Well, I've done what I could and must now hope for the best. But she's a widow and I've been watching her." He shook his head with irritation. "Damn those rumors! Why can't people accept the real explanation?"
"Maybe she will." I rose and stepped toward the door. "You sounded very convincing."
"But not convincing enough, eh, John?" He looked hard at me from beneath his eyebrows. "I thought not." He sighed. "Well, tomorrow will tell. Good night, John."
"Good night, doctor."
A steward is always polite.
Acheron loomed before us the next morning and the shrill hum of the grav drive made a singing accompaniment to breakfast. The meal ended as we dropped into the atmosphere. The tables were all cleared before we grounded; the passengers ready to leave as the air locks opened. Holman, acting for the captain, gave his usual warning.
"There is nothing harmful on this planet," he said. "But there is one great danger. We land at the same spot each trip arid you will find well-beaten trails. Do not leave them."
"Why not?" Klienman, as usual, was being awkward.
"If there's nothing to hurt us, then where's the harm?"
"You may get lost," said Holman patiently. "The bushes are high and it is easy to lose your way. Remain on the beaten paths and you will avoid that danger." He smiled. "I can assure you that you will miss nothing by doing as you are asked."
There was more but he could have saved his breath. They took the warning as they always did, carelessly, indifferently, intent on having their own way. Holman watched them file through the air lock, the escorting crewmen following after a discreet interval. He must have seen my expression, for he came toward me, his eyes serious.
"Why don't you give it a miss this trip?"
"I can't."
"You could if you wanted to," he snapped, then spoke more softly. "What's the point, John? What good does it do?"
"Excuse me." I stepped away, not wanting to argue. "I have work to do."
The work didn't take long, I saw to that. I hurried through it as I always did when on Acheron, my thoughts elsewhere. Holman was busy when I'd finished. Three men, Klienman among them, had returned to the ship with badly cut hands. I heard the doctor's voice as he dressed their wounds.
"I warned you," he said. "Silicone is glass and glass is both hard and brittle. What happened?"
"I wanted some of the pods," said Klienman. "I tried to tear o|f a bunch." He swore, probably from the sting of the antiseptic. "It was like grabbing a handful of knives."
Holman's voice faded to a murmur as I hurried toward the air lock. A crewman turned, recognized me, then faced the acres of bushes surrounding the ship. A faint wind was blowing, scarcely more than a breath, but even across the clearing I could hear the Bells.
The sound increased as I ran toward the valley.
It was off the beaten trails but I knew the way. I slipped carefully between the tall bushes and halted only when I had reached the old, familiar spot. Before me the ground fell away into a deep valley every inch of which was covered with bushes, heavy and glistening with their pods. I waited, breathless with anticipation then. As the wind freshened, it came.
There are no words to describe the music of the Bells. Others have tried and failed, and I am no poet. It is something which has to be experienced to be understood and once experienced is never forgotten. The valley, with its thousands of bushes each bearing its hundreds of pods, acted like a sounding board. From it music rose like a cloud, a multitude of notes ranging all over the aural spectrum, singly and in combination, blending and weaving into an infinity of patterns. A medley which held all the sounds there ever were or ever could be.
A hand fell on my shoulder and I opened my eyes. Holman stared at me.
"John!"
"Leave me!" I struggled against his hand. "Why do you interfere?"
"It's late," he said. "I grew worried." He glanced down into the valley and I knew what he meant. "Let's return to the ship."
"No. Now leave me alone."
"You fool!" Anger roughened his voice. "How often must I tell you that it's all an illusion?"
"Does it matter?" I looked over the valley, hating the sound of his voice. "To me it is real enough. He lives down there, somewhere. I can hear his voice."
"Illusion," Holman repeated. "A dream."
"Yes," I said heavily. "A dream." I turned and my eyes met his. "Don't worry, doctor. I believe you."
"For how long?" He swore, savagely, bitterly. "Damn it, John, stop hurting yourself. Your son has been dead five years now, your ex-wife has remarried. Isn't it time that you stopped wasting yourself and got back to work?"
"Yes." I turned back to the path leading to the ship. "Work. I'll be missed."
"Not that work, your real work. Not acting as a nursemaid to a bunch of tourists but doing what you were trained to do." He gripped my shoulders and stared into my eyes. "One day you're going to forget that all this is an illusion. You're going to think it real. Do I have to tell you what will happen then?"
"No." I looked down into the valley. "You don't have to tell me."
"Then get some sense, John," he said flatly. "Go back where you belong. What good are you doing here?"
It was an old argument and one which I'd heard so often, but how could I go back to research? If I did I would lose the opportunity to visit Acheron and the Valley of the Singing Bells and listen to the familiar voice which waited so patiently for my return.
The Grand Tour was scheduled for a two-day stop at Acheron and with good reason. The Bells were at their best only at sunset and dawn when the morning and evening winds stirred them to vibrant life. A change came over the passengers as the hours slipped past. They became quieter, more thoughtful, less inclined to argue. After the first exploration no one tried to collect souvenirs. It wasn't fear of cuts from the glasslike fronds which stopped them, that could be overcome; rather it was a reluctance to despoil the planet of even a little of that which gave rise to such wondrous music.
The second night came and passed all too quickly. Dawn flooded the horizon with flaring streamers of red and gold and, as usual, the morning wind stirred the Bells and filled the air with their incredible beauty. Everyone listened to them. Every member of the crew and every passenger stood in the light of the rising sun and filled their hearts and minds with the beauty of Acheron..
Afterward, when the ship was readying for takeoff, Laura Amnurst was missing. Holman brought me the news, his eyes wide with anxiety.
"A widow," he said. "The Bells. Damn it, John, you should have been more careful."
"I'm not responsible for the passengers once they're outside the ship," I reminded. "Anyway, she—"
"The valley!" He cut me short. "I met her once heading in that direction. John! The valley!"
I raced from the ship, across the clearing and through the bushes, careless of the fronds which slashed my clothing, heedless of the music rising about me, the music created by the wind of my own passage. Haste was essential and by the time I arrived my body was lacerated and my clothing in rags. But I was in time. Laura Amhurst, eyes closed, arms extended was walking directly toward the rim of the valley.
"Laura!" I chased after her, caught her, slapped her face. Her eyes opened and shock twisted her mouth. I talked fast and loud, trying to drown the rising music, fighting the desire to concentrate and listen. .
"It isn't real. It's an illusion, all of it." I held her close to me, tightly so as to prevent any sudden movement. "Your husband?"
"You know?" Her eyes searched my face. "You do know. The rumors are true. The dead do live here. You can hear their voices."
"No." I searched for words to destroy her dream. I had heard them all a dozen times and more from Holman and others, but still they came hard. "It's a trick of the wind. You come here and you listen to all the sounds that ever were and from them you pick the ones you want most to hear. The prattle of a dead child, a husband's voice, the laughter and tears of those who are gone. The mind is a peculiar thing, Laura. It can take sounds and twist them into words and make them seem different than what they really are."
"I spoke to him," she insisted. "And he answered me. He is here, I know it."
"He is not here." I gripped her tighter as she tried to move, knowing that one false step and we would both topple into the valley. "You close your eyes and you concentrate and you hear the voice you want to hear.
You speak and it answers but all the time you are talking to yourself. You speak and your brain answers, picking words and tones from the sounds of the Bells. It is an illusion, less real than a photograph or a recording. The words you hear are from your own memory."
"It was my husband. He was calling to me. I must go to him."
"You can't!" I sweated at the thought of what would happen if she broke away. "Listen to me. You heard his voice or thought that you did and with your eyes closed you walked toward the sound. But the sound came from the bushes." I shook her. "Do you understand? The bushes!" •
She didn't understand.
"Silicone," I said. "Leaves like razors. The valley is covered with them and the ground falls sharply away. Two more steps and you would have fallen among them." I gripped her shoulders and turned her so as to face the valley. "There is a good reason why this place is out of bounds. Too many people act as you acted, believe as you believed." I pointed to where something white gleamed among the pale green vegetation. "We call this place the Valley of the Singing Bells. A better name would be the Valley of Death."
For a long moment she stared at the bleached bones. The wind had died and only a faint chiming rose from the valley, and when she spoke, her voice seemed very loud.
"You come here," she said. "Why?"
"For the sake of a dream." I gave her my reasons. "But now I know that I have wasted five years. Don't do the same, Laura. Don't live in the past. Live for the present and the future. Don't try to keep memory awake and hurting. Let the dead rest in peace."
"And you?"
"I'll follow my own advice."
I stared for one last time over the glistening expanse of the valley and, for perhaps the first time, saw it as it really was. Not, as rumor had it, the resting place of the departed, the one spot in the universe where they would return and speak in the old, remembered voices to those who had known them, but as Holman had emphasized again and again. The Bells were a natural wonder, no more. They were a freak of evolution utterly devoid of the supernatural, as obvious and as normal as a Japanese lantern.
Laura was smiling as we returned to the ship. I learned the reason for that smile long before we reached Earth.
I had forgotten that Holman was a psychologist. I had underestimated my own importance and ignored the fact that my acquired skill was not to be lightly cast aside. Not by the government which, apparently, needed me. But wanted me sane.
"It was a trick," said Holman during our last night in space. "I made no excuses, a practitioner does not have to justify his cures. Laura isn't a widow. She is an actress." He looked sharply at me. "Are you surprised?"
"No," I said truthfully. "I'm not surprised."
An intelligent man does not lose all his intelligence because one facet of it is dulled. I had had time to think, and little things, seen in a new light, had become obvious. Holman's hints, the coincidence of her being missing, even the doctor's conviction as to where she could have gone. She had heard me coming, of course, and had timed things well. She had never been in any danger but I hadn't known that. In my anxiety for her I had destroyed my own illusion, faced it and recognized it for what it was. But I had found in return something of infinitely greater value.
I smiled down at Holman and left him staring, his eyes perplexed. I could have enlightened him, but there was no time.
Laura was waiting.

ANNE
There is a place where there is no hurt, no sorrow, no fear, no regret. There has always been such a place. Some call it Heaven.
One man found it.
He fled the Cygni battle in a broken ship splotched with corrosive blue fire, the main drive screaming like a woman in pain as it kicked him through space away from the beams, the fire, the expanding flowers of atomic disruption. He wasn't old. Space fighter pilots are never old. He wasn't strong. He had no need of muscle. He was a scrap of soft, commanding jelly locked in the protective womb of his ship.
His name was Argonne.
He had chosen it himself after much searching through old books of forgotten wars. He wasn't alone in this. All his companions of that time had adopted the names of famous battles, driven by the notion that a thing takes on the attributes of its name. Earlier his type had chosen to wear the names of great heroes, later of noted weapons. All hoped to gain power and strength from their choice. Argonne had failed.
He was a coward. The warriors of the Pentarch do not run. They are either victorious or dead, and he was neither. He had fled the battle while he still had life, still had a ship responsive to his commands, still had an enemy large in his sights. He could have fought until his body and vessel joined the others in incandescent ruin but he had chosen to run.
He was still running..
He groaned as he lay on his couch before the controls, breathing red-misted air which stank of burning and tasted of char. Beneath a ruby patina his face was a mask of pain. The numbing hypnotic techniques had failed when he needed them most. He was quite alone. The
Hatachi beam which had pulped the lower part of his legs had caught his apprentice with undeflected force. The red mist in the air was his flesh and blood jarred to instant molecular disruption. The rest of him sprawled on his couch, naked bone flecked with red and gray, plastic clothing smeared with slime. He was amused. The skull bore a cheerful smile.
Argonne could not appreciate the humor. He frowned through his pain as he listened to the voice of the ship. Always before it had whispered with a soft, almost inaudible humming, a smooth, smug satisfaction. Not even when entering battle and the hum had deepened to a feral purr had it screamed as it did now. But never before had the ship been so badly hurt.
And neither had Argonne.
He sank his teeth into his lower lip, adding a small pain to the greater, concentrating on the cruel impact of his teeth in an effort to minimize the molten agony of his legs. He fumbled at the arm of the couch, pressed a familiar button, felt again the sick despair as the needle which should have brought oblivion failed to respond. Painfully he reached forward and wiped the instruments of their ruby film. Sweat made temporary trails over his face as he read their message.
The ship needed help.
Argonne gripped the sides of his couch and tensed the muscles in shoulders, back and arms. He heaved and tasted fresh blood as he fought the pain from his legs. Twice more he tried before admitting defeat. Sagging he gave up the struggle. He wiped his face and looked at the red wetness on his palm. He choked on the misted air. He was careful not to look down at his legs.
"I'm sorry," he said to the ship. "I can't do it. I can't help you."
It wasn't because he didn't know how.
Broken, battered and bleeding as the ship was he could still have helped. He could have blown away the contaminated hull, sealed the control room, changed the air filters, cut out the distorted power drive and repaired the seared insulation. He could have healed the crippled vessel and given back to its compviter nominal control. He had been trained to do that and he still retained his knowledge. But to use it he needed both dexterity and mobility. He still had dexterity. He had lost his mobility.
There was nothing he could do.
He was a failure as well as a coward.
The scream of the ship was a justified accusation. He blinked at the stinging of his eyes.
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I just can't help you. I'm crippled. I can't move. Please, you must understand."
Weakly he sagged back against the couch on which he lived and slept. He didn't blame the ship for screaming. It had reason to scream.
And so did he.
He couldn't remember the landing. He didn't know what star this planet circled or what slot had opened between dimensions to permit their entry but they must have landed, for the screaming was gone, the air was clean and he was no longer lying before the controls.
He was lying on a bed of cloud beneath a roof of purple in a room simply but tastefully furnished with vaguely familiar things. A bureau he had used at the academy? The books he had once owned when young? A painting he had cut from a magazine? He frowned and looked down at himself. He wore a single garment caught over one shoulder, belted at the waist, ending just above his knees. He looked at his legs—they were whole.
He looked up and saw the woman standing at his side.
"You have been asleep," she said. "Now you are awake. I am glad that you are awake."
He didn't answer, trying again to recall the landing, but all he could remember was noise and confusion and a red mist of pain. He looked again at his legs.
"We repaired you," said the woman. "You are perfectly well now."
He moveo* his legs, lifting his knees, feeling the shift and tension of muscle.
"And my ship?"
"In capable hands. The damage was extensive and medication will take longer. You see the hull was—"
"I know the extent of the damage," he interrupted. "But it will be all right?"
"Yes. It will be perfectly all right."
Her voice was soft and musical. The touch of her hand on his arm as he rose was warm and gentle. He stood upright and her eyes were just below the level of his own. Her hair was blonde and swept about the lines of her slender throat. She wore a garment as simple as his own. Her figure was superb.
He felt that he knew her, had known her for a long, long time.
"Where are we?"
"A place," she said. "A safe place."
He nodded, no longer curious as to where he was. He stared into her eyes.
"What is your name?"
"Anne," she said.
"Anne—with an V?"
"Yes," she said. "With an 'e/ How did you know?"
He had known as he knew the other things about her. As he sensed the warm, protective comfort of her presence. As he knew that she was wholly and utterly his. How he knew did not worry him. He seemed to have lost the capability of care.
They left the room. They did not walk or he had no remembrance of walking. One moment they were in the room with its vaguely familiar furnishings, the next they were standing beneath a summer sun in a garden bright with flowers. He was not surprised. Such mobility was simply the achievement of desire without the tedium of effort.
He halted before a bush "which bore fruit and bud and flower—a miracle of botanical engineering which ensured that here there could be no seasons of birth and death and decay. Here it was always summer. And winter?
"There are places where there is always snow and ice." said Anne. She seemed able to read his thoughts. "The sun is warm but the snow doesn't melt. Shall we go there?"
They went and played in the snow and slid on ice and sported in a world which was all white and blue and crisp. They went to a shallow beach which sloped to a rolling sea and swam in the surf, chasing finny creatures of remarkable agility before returning to their discarded clothes. They went to where a forest covered soaring hills in brilliant greens and somber browns and walked among giant trees while eating strange berries and succulent fruits. Then they returned to the garden.
It was still midday, still as if they had never left. Time here did not move on a relentless path from cradle to grave. There was only the joy of a moment stretched to eternity.
And they were alone.
Quite alone.
"Talk to me," said Anne. She rested beside him on a mossy bank which fell to a tinkling stream. The scent of her was a perfume in his nostrils. Argonne stirred and looked thoughtfully into the water.
"What about?"
"Of yourself. Of your past. Of the things you once considered important."
"Of the Pentarch?" He turned and looked at her, wondering a little, then dismissing the doubt. What could she do against the massed might of Earth? "The Pentarch," he said slowly. "The Pentarch is the race of Man. The rule of five."
"Five what?"
"Five different categories of human beings: those who need metaphorical walls; those who must fight; those who must create; those who are content to build, and those who can do nothing but lead. Five interrelated and integrated branches of the human race. Five fingers of the same hand." He lifted his own and flexed the fingers before'closing them into a fist. "The Pentarch!"
"And?"
"And ■what?" He looked down at the glory of her hair. She smiled up into his eyes.
"And what were you?"
"A warrior." He was curt with a sense of guilt.
"A fighter?" She frowned. "Someone who destroys?"
"Someone who destroys the enemies of Man," he corrected. He looked at his clenched fist then slowly opened it. "The Hatachi!"
He had never seen one of the strange "other race" which had taken it on itself to defy the destiny of Man. They had always been flecks on a screen, the target for his missiles, the focus of his beams. They were the enemy and that was enough. They existed only to be destroyed.
He felt the sudden acceleration of his heart, the quickening pulse of his blood, the tension of his body as he thought about the Hatachi. Logic had nothing to do with it. He would have felt the same had he been a doctor fighting death and disease, or a pest destroyer waging war on vermin. He was born to fight. What didn't really matter.
"Don't!" said Anne. "Don't look like that!"
He ignored the woman. There was something wrong with this place. He had accepted everything too readily, had taken it at its face value, but his nature could not be passive. He frowned, again trying to remember the landing, but it was useless. Noise and confusion and shapeless images and then the wakening. And the woman.
Only the woman?
He had seen no one else. He had been here—how long? There was no way of telling. It was always midday, always summer. Always soft and warm and gentle. Time here did not exist.
And yet he was not content.
Something was missing.
He heard her scream and turned and saw it and felt himself grown suddenly calm. It was the enemy; it could be nothing else. The squat, amorphous shape did not belong in this place. Nothing so hideous could have belonged. It was a strangeness, perhaps an arrival lilce himself, or perhaps it had followed him; it didn't matter. It had to be destroyed.
Argonne rose to his feet and stepped toward it.
He was unarmed but the fact didn't disturb him. He advanced toward the enemy, nose crinkling at its stench of burning, the odor tasting like char. A tendril lashed at his lower legs the touch burning like acid. It screamed as it rushed to battle.
Argonne snarled his reply and extended his hands.
It was a peculiar struggle. The thing fought with fanatical strength but still he prevailed. He gripped something soft and tore at noisome flesh and heard the screaming through the sickening air. He lifted and swung the thing from the ground, hurling it toward the sun. It rose and fell, and a rain of ruby droplets spumed from the pulped body and misted the air. Argonne felt wetness on his face.
"Darling!" Anne was with him. Somehow she stooped over him, her hair a golden curtain about his face. The droplets had stained the whiteness of her skin.
"Darling!"
Her arms held him very close. So close they constricted his breathing.
"Darling!"
Her lips offered themselves to his.
"Darling!"
And then, as he reached for her, her face changed. It grew stiff and cold and impersonal. Only the red patina remained the same.
He looked at the instrument panel of his ship. 't
He lay for a long while, not moving, feeling only the numbing ache of tremendous loss. Around him the ship screamed its agony, but muted now as if finally accepting the fact that nothing could be done. Or perhaps his hearing was at fault. It didn't matter.
Neither of. them had any reason to hope.
His lower legs radiated pain and an icy burning reached to his hips. His skin glowed with fever. He was drowning in the blood-filled air. The instruments told him that the corrosive blue fire on the hull had almost eaten its way to his section of the ship. He could do nothing to help himself. He could do nothing to help the vessel. ,
But it had tried to help him.
He turned his head and looked at the dream cap which had somehow fallen from its catch into position above his head. The cap which provided the essential paradoxical sleep during his times of rest. How had it fallen from its catch?
Vibration, perhaps? More vibration to switch it on and thus provide an avenue of escape from this living hell. The only avenue of escape. He wondered what had happened to break the circuit and shatter his dream.
"Thank you," he said to the ship. "You did your best. Thank you."
But he was not sorry that the ship had failed, that the dream circuit had been broken. He would not have liked to lie in the safe, snug world of illusion while the ship had nothing of comfort. It is bad to die alone.
Argonne had lived a solitary, dedicated life, and it was natural for him to have followed ancient custom. The personalizing and naming of weapons is not new. He looked at the four letters mounted above the instrument panel.
"Anne," he murmured. "With an 'e.' "
The girl he had never had, the wife he would never get, the dream he would never know again. The ship he had tried to save by running from those who would hurt her.
Anne!
Who had shown him Heaven.
This time he did not try to blink away his tears. They belonged. For around him something beautiful was dying. .

RETURN VISIT
"You know," said the demon conversationally, "things have changed quite a bit since the old days."
"They have?" Despite the pounding of his heart and an unusual shortness of breath Chris managed to appear as nonchalant as he intended. "Do tell," he urged, and settling back in his chair lit a cigarette with fingers laudably steady. Which, all things considered, was quite a feat. The demon seemed appreciative.
"You're a cool one," he said admiringly. "You don't seem a bit scared."
"Why should I be scared?" Chris blew a careful smoke ring toward the pentagram he had chalked on his neutral colored Wilton. "You are the product of a carefully conducted scientific experiment and there is no more reason for me to be afraid of you than there would be for me to be scared of a bacteriological culture I may have bred on an agar plate. Had you not appeared when summoned I would have been disappointed. Why should I be terrified because my experiment was a success?"
It sounded logical enough and it would have been nice had it been wholly true, but it wasn't and for a variety of reasons. A nice, normal, twentieth century man just doesn't conduct experiments, scientific or otherwise, calling for chalk marks scrawled on the carpet, braziers burning a redolent mixture of exotic herbs, assorted entrails and gooey internal liquids of freshly defunct organisms. Still more, they don't conduct such experiments to the accompaniment of mystic gestures, symbolic sacrifices and memorized chants in a tongue-twisting language. And if they do, just for the curiosity of it maybe, or because they are bored enough or desperate enough to try anything once, and the experiment succeeds, then a little perturbation is to be excused.
Chris Neville was more than a little perturbed; he was scared from his scalp to his toenails. Sternly he reminded himself that there was absolutely no reason to be afraid. So what if his hidden guest did happen to look like a badly drawn impression of some medieval artist's conception of an attendant of the lower regions? He couldn't help the way he looked, could he? And his opening conversational gambit had shown promise.
"It's all a matter of logic," said Chris. "Logic and a scientific mind. After all, I expected you. That's what the ceremony was for." He inhaled again, letting smoke stream from his nostrils. The demon stared in frank admiration.
"Aren't you afraid of burning yourself?"
"With this?" Chris took the cigarette from his mouth and examined it. "No, why should I?" He chuckled at the demon's expression. "Of course! Tobacco smoking is comparatively recent; you wouldn't have known about it." He shook a cigarette from the pack, lit it and tossed it into the pentagram. "Try it for yourself."
Dubiously the demon picked up the little white cylinder and stuck it in his mouth. Bravely he puffed. The results, to Chris, were educational.
"Did you have to do that?" The demon went into a fresh spasm of coughing, waving a petulant talon before his face. His scaly hide was already greenish but his red-rimmed eyes watered in a familiar way. Chris almost felt sorry for him.
"Take it easy," he advised. "Don't inhale to begin with. You'll soon get used to it."
"Maybe." The demon puffed again, more cautiously this time. "Seems senseless to me," he grumbled. "Breathing in a lot of smoke and fouling up your lungs." He took a third puff. "Still, it's not too bad when you get used to it." He tried inhaling, held his breath, then grinned. "Hey! That's not bad at all! But you should have warned me what to expect," he said reproachfully. "You took me by surprise."
"Sorry," said Chris, registering his amazement. "But how was I to know that a little smoke would bother you?"
"That's the trouble with this business," snapped the demon. "No thought for others at all. There I was, just minding my own business when I get snatched away without so much as a by-your-Ieave. And when I arrive after a bitch of a journey, what happens? Nowhere to sit. Nothing to eat or drink. No courtesy, no consideration of my feelings at all." He sniffed and stared around the apartment. "Still, as I said, things have certainly changed since the last time I was here."
"So you said," reminded Chris. "Twice."
"So I have," chuckled the demon. He squatted on the caipet and looked regretfully at the butt of his cigarette. "Got any more of these things?"
"Help yourself." Chris tossed the package into the pentagram. "You have to set fire to one end and suck the other," he explained. "Want me to do it for you?"
"I can manage," said the demon. He held a cigarette in one talon, squinted down his nose and suddenly sent a tongue of flame spurting from between his lips. "Bet that surprised you," he said cheerfully from behind a cloud of smoke.
"Why should it?" lied Chris. Desperately he sought to retain his nonchalance. "I'd say that it was due to a simple matter of your metabolism. You probably generate free hydrogen in your stomach and have a deposit of spongy platinum in your mouth. When you belch the catalytic action of the platinum sets the hydrogen alight." He shrugged. "Simple."
"Clever, aren't you?" sneered the demon. He appeared crestfallen.
"Just logical," corrected Chris easily. "I've a scientific mind. I'm not like the old-timers you may have met."
"You can say that again," said the demon. "Things have certainly changed. The way you're dressed for one thing, no robes,, covered with all those odd designs and other junk. Horrible taste, I always thought." The demon puffed at his dwindling cigarette. "And you haven't got any unhygienic fuzz hanging down your chest. Lots of other little details. Yes, things have certinly changed."
"We're not talking about me," reminded Chris sharply. "We're talking about things."
"Well?" The demon seemed surprised. "The same thing, isn't it?"
"No," snapped Chris. He was beginning to feel annoyed. "It isn't the same at all. I'm a man," he pointed out. "Not a thing."
"Wrong," corrected the demon patiently. "I'm a man, you're a thing."
Logic, as Chris was discovering, had its drawbacks.
The demon was perfectly right, of course, it all depended on the point of view. It was a matter about which the early demonologists had probably ruptured blood vessels, but Chris was a modern man and could look at both sides of a problem. And it wasn't important, not really. If the demon wanted to think of him as a thing then that was all right by Chris—provided the demon brought home the bacon.
The bacon, naturally, being that which would enable Chris to live the sort of life to which he wanted to become accustomed.
He wasn't greedy, not more than normal, that is, but when a man is given the opportunity of getting everything and anything he wants then he can't refuse. If he could then he wouldn't be a man, he'd be a saint. And a saint, by definition, wouldn't be sitting in a modern, self-service apartment chatting conversationally with a real, live demon.
Chris didn't let the involved logic confuse him. He'd lost his initial fear of his guest. The demon, on closer acquaintance, seemed somewhat dumb, little better than a moron, certainly no match for an intelligent, sharp-witted product of the twentieth century commercial rat race. Striking a bargain with the visitor seemed, to Chris, to be about equal to the difficulty of stealing candy from a one-day-old baby. But even so he proceeded with due caution.
"It is true, isn't it, that you cannot possibly escape from the pentagram while it remains intact?" The ancient parchment had said so but Chris wanted to be sure.
"That's right." The fact didn't seem to worry the demon. "Now don't you get any bright ideas about breaking it," he warned. "If you do I'll come after you, snatch you up and fling you into an eternal furnace."
"Bunk," said Chris. "Who are you trying to scare?"
"You don't believe me?" The demon seemed abashed. "But it's true."
"How do you know?" Chris rose and stepped toward the chalked design. "I've been thinking about this and I've a notion all this snatching away business is plain propaganda. Let's just break the pentagram and find out, shall we?"
"Don't do that!" The demon was upset. "Please! If you do then you'll…"
"I'll kill you?" Chris nodded, satisfied. "I thought so. The old-timers were too scared to be able to think straight. They called you up and then sweated blood thinking up ways and means to control you. It should have been obvious that you were more afraid of them than they were of you."
"That isn't so," protested the demon. "Some of them were practically petrified. Why I remember one old man, Nostradamus I think he called himself, who almost threw a fit when he saw me." Talons gleamed in the electric light. "I was treated with respect in those days."
"That's finished ^vith," snapped Chris. "I'm your boss now and don't you forget it. One peep out of you and I'll break the pentagram and let you suffer." He resumed his chair, feeling a warm, inner glow of satisfaction. It was one thing to think that you were right but quite another to know it. Chris knew that he had the demon by the short hairs, if he had short hairs to have him by, that was.
"Smart guy," sneered the demon, but he was beaten and he knew it. "Well, let's get on with it. What do you want and what do you offer for it?"
"Not so fast." Chris had no intention of being rushed.
"Let's swap a little information first. Want anything to eat? Drink?"
"I could use some more tobacco," confessed the demon. "I've kinda caught the habit."
Chris dug out a box of cigars he'd been given for a Christmas present and never touched. "Try these, they'll last longer." He found a bottle of whiskey he'd been saving for an emergency; he'd been saving it for all of a week now and an emergency was long overdue. He opened it, took a sip, felt the impact of the demon's eyes. "Try some of this," he suggested. He found a tumbler and filled it with the golden spirit. "Stoke up your fires a bit. Here." He placed it together with the cigars just within the pentagram. His skin burned a little as he withdrew his hand.
"Thanks," said the demon, he seemed mollified by Chris's desire to please. A warty protuberance lifted over one eye as he tasted the whiskey. "This stuff comparatively recent, too?"
"You could say that," admitted Chris. He glanced down at the hand he'd placed within the pentagram. The skin was red and looked as if it had been dipped in a weak acid. "Force field," he said thoughtfully.' "I should have guessed."
"Uh?" The demon blinked over an empty glass. "You said something?"
"Just thinking," said Chris. He didn't want to give anything away, and what the demon didn't know couldn't hurt him. It was obvious now what all that mumbo jumbo, the spells, the smoke and chanting, the gestures had all been for. It was science, all right, but of rather a peculiar kind. Sounds, vibrations rather, coupled with guided mental energy and the use of unsuspected chemicals in unusual ways. Add them all together, regard them in the light of relationship symbology, stir in a little parapsychology and the demon was solely the product of natural forces.
A big game hunter, thought Chris. That's what I am. Sending out my trap to snare a denizen from a co-existing world. Wisk him back here trapped in an intangible force field limited by the pentagram. Break the pentagram and woof! Demon is exposed to an alien environment. Demon can't live in an alien environment so demon dies. Simple.
"Simple," echoed the demon. Chris stared at him with a sudden suspicion that the creature could read his mind. Hastily he put it to the test.
"If it's so simple then perhaps you can tell me how it is we can understand each other?" Grimly Chris concentrated on the multiplication tables.
"Something to do with the pentagram, I guess," said the demon. "All I know is that I'm talking normally and that you sound to me like me." He blinked and ran a forked tongue over his lipless mouth. "Some drink you've got here. More?"
"Sure." Chris looked at the whiskey, hesitated, then dug out a bottle of cooking rum some transient friend had passed off to him at a bottle party. He detested rum, even good rum, and this stuff was strictly for charity. He tossed the bottle toward his guest. "Help yourself."
Watching the demon attack the contents of the bottle made Chris more conscious of his power than before. Obviously the demon couldn't read minds; the force field must also act as a translating device. The ancients, whoever they had been, had certainly stumbled on something when they had devised the demon-calling ritual. Properly investigated and handled it could even solve the problem of interstellar flight. A shuffling from within the chalk marks brought Chris back to the business at hand.
The demon swayed a little as he squatted on the carpet, the empty bottle clutched in one taloned claw. A discarded cigar had burned a hole in the Wilton and a little pool of sweat had trickled down from the scaled forehead. In the battle between the demons rum had obviously won.
"Well,"snapped the creature pettishly. "What are we waiting for?' How about getting on with the business and letting me go home?"
It was, thought Chris, a good idea.
There were preliminaries. Aspirin, bicarbonate, strong black coffee, a hair of the dog which had bitten, and a couple of ice bags filled with cubes from the refrigerator. The force field seemed to be able to translate all these things to suit an alien metabolism; at least, the demon took them all, sullenly but taking them just the same. His recovery was amazing. While his guest muttered and mumbled to himself, Chris concentrated on making the most of his opportunity.
"I want," he said, when he thought that the demon was fit enough to sit up and take notice, "I want eternal youth, eternal health, eternal happiness and a charmed Me."
"Who doesn't?" snapped the demon. "Act your age, buster. Get sensible."
"Forgetting something?" Chris reached for a wet rag. "One wipe of this and you'll be food for worms."
"You think that worries me?" The demon nursed his brow. "Go ahead. Get it over and done with."
Nonplussed Chris dropped the wet rag. Threats having failed he tried logic. "Look," he reminded. "I'm your boss. Whatever I say you have to do. Right?"
"Wrong." Wearily the demon raised his head, the light seemed to hurt his eyes and he groaned, lifting a claw to shield them. "It was never like this in the old days," he mourned. "Lantern light or a couple of torches was all they had then and no one ever tried to poison me."
"You've got a hangover," said Chris impatiently. "I've had lots of them in my time. It'll pass."
"You mean that you've lived through this more than once?" The demon was startled. "From choice? How much punishment can a thing like you take?"
"Keep to the point," said Chris. "Why was I wrong when I said that whatever I asked you had to do?"
"No compulsion," said the demon. "Oh, you can threaten to break the pentagram, sure, but the way I feel now that's no threat." He brooded for a moment. "Now what's another thing which never happened before. The last thing those old-timers wanted was to break the pentagram. Of course, I'd have ripped them open before handing in my chips, the same as I would you, but where's the profit in that?"
"None at all," said Chris swiftly. He hadn't thought of the natural consequences of loosing the demon. He forced himself to smile. "Let's not talk about unpleasant things," he urged. "Let's keep this friendly."
"Let's," agreed the demon. "How about letting me go home?"
"Later." Chris narrowed his eyes. "You can't leave until I give the word, can you?" He didn't need the demon's sullen nod to verify his suspicions. "Well, there's your compulsion. Unless you obey me I'll keep you here until you starve."
"That'll take a long time," said the demon spitefully. Ive a longer life span than you and the field will collapse when you die or when you forget to maintain it." He settled himself on the carpet. "I can wait."
He lit another cigar.
Defeated, Chris glared at his guest. This was getting more complicated than he liked and he had the uneasy reeling that things were getting beyond control. Whether the demon knew anything about the necessity of sleep, Chris didn't know, but if the field were to collapse if ne forgot to remember to maintain it then its effectiveness was limited by his ability to stay awake. Like it or no« . t0 aPPeal for guidance.
All right," he said. "So we'll leave out the question ot compulsion. How else do I make you obey me?"
You can't," said the demon. He grew thoughtful. "Of course, there's always incentive, you know. Something for something."
"A trade?" Chris had expected it; the old legends were rull of tales of demon callers who'd outsmarted their guests. He relaxed a little. With his training it shouldn't be hard to get the better of any deal they might make. Right, he said. "I'll make a deal with you. You give me eternal ytmth^ coupled with eternal health and…"
Take it easy!" The demon began to show interest for the first time. "Let's be reasonable about this. I can't give you eternal anything. No one can. I'm limited, you know."
"You are?" Chris managed to hide his disappointment. It was logical, he supposed. If the demon had unlimited powers, he wouldn't have gotten caught in the first place. "A pity. About your limitations, I mean. Well, what can you offer?"
"Quite a lot." The demon hunched himself into a more comfortable position. "Women, for example, how about that?" Incredibly he became lecherous. "I can swap you a brew which will make any woman ready to fall into your arms at sight."
"You can?" Chris controlled his amusement. "Where is it?"
"You'll have to make it up," said the demon. "It isn't hard. Just take a few insects and dry them out in the sun. Then you powder them and mix the powder with
"I'm not interested in aphrodisiacs," interrupted Chris. "Anyway, I know all about the stuff." He sneered. "Is that the best you can offer?"
"You name it, I've got it," said the demon. He was getting restless. "Come on, buster," he urged. "Let's quit playing around. What do you want and what do you offer? I want to get home!"
Respect is usually founded on ignorance; the less you know about a thing the more you tend to give it qualities it doesn't possess. In the old days demonologists held what they summoned in the deepest respect and fear. They knew nothing of the natural laws governing what they did and implicitly believed in magical powers. Chris knew better and he was disappointed.
That aphrodisiac, for example. Probably some old-timer must have thought it the answer to his every prayer. A pinch of powder and youthful virility would be restored; ergo, the demon had granted the promised youth. Another pinch slipped in a cup of wine and the wench of his choice would be willing to fall into his arms. Naturally, he'd know nothing of the chemistry involved and, any later failures due to the wearing off of the dose would be attributed to heavenly intervention; a just punishment for bargaining with the powers of darkness. But, at the same time, he would have been convinced that his youth had been restored or that magic had solved the problems of his heart. Chris wondered just how much of a demon's so-called powers were in the same category.
"Money," he said, getting to the root of the matter. "How about getting me a nice, big, sackful of moola?"
"Moola?" The demon frowned; colloquialisms apparently didn't translate too well.
"Sure," said Chris. "You know, lettuce, spending stuff, coin, cash."
"Gold," said the demon brightly. "Now I'm with you. You want to know how to make gold?"
"I know how to make gold," said Chris. "The trouble is that you need a roomful of equipment, enough power to light a city and, when you've made it, it costs more than the natural article." He took a bill from his wallet. "Not gold, this stuff. Can you Supply me a vanload or two? And make sure that the numbers are different," he added hastily. "I don't want to get into trouble over this." Somberly the demon examined the note Chris had tossed into the pentagram, holding it up to the light and studying the fine engraving. Finally he threw it back and slumped on the carpet. "Sorry, I can't do that."
"Why not?" Chris recovered the bill. He was getting tired and irritable, as a worker of marvels this particular demon seemed to be way down in the bottom grade. "Suppose you tell me what you can do? This is getting us nowhere."
"Then suppose you let me go home?"
"Not until I'm ready." Chris glared at his guest, his natural frustration mounting into an active dislike of the thing he had called into his presence. "You're supposed to be a demon with powers to grant the wishes of the person who*.has summoned you. Hell, the old books are full of propaganda about how good you are. And what's happened? You've got drunk at my expense, ruined my carpet with your cigar butts and all we've done is to swap a load of chitchat. As a demon you're strictly for the birds!"
"Now take it easy, buster!" The demon blinked red eyes and looked annoyed. "I didn't ask to come here, don't forget, and now that I'm here you'll have to put up with what you've got. What the hell did you expect, anyway? I'm just a normal man, not a miracle worker. The trouble with you things is that you expect too much. Not," he added with pride, "that I've ever failed before. Nostradamus had nothing to kick about. He wanted to know how to make gold and I told him. Same with Paracelsus and a character named Bacon. Same with twenty dozen others. They asked and I answered. How to restore youth; how to make a surefire love philter; how to make gold; how to master the elements; they asked and I answered. What more do you want?"
"The stuff itself," snapped Chris. "You probably fed those old-timers a load of formulas and left them to it. The love philters worked, sure they did, but did anyone ever manage to make gold? Like hell they did! You may have told them how but they lacked the technology to do it." Chris waved the bill he'd taken from his wallet. "Now why can't you deliver me a ton of this stuff?"
"Because I'm human," snapped the demon. "You think I usually walk around naked?" He glared down at his scaly hide. "When you whipped me into this trap I left everything behind. Hell, to copy that thing we'd need a complete printing shop, photographic equipment and a couple of skilled engravers. That's without having to get the right paper, ink and the rest of it. I can tell you how to do it, sure, but I can't do it for you."
"I know how to do it," said Chris peevishly. "I'm not dumb." He paused, thinking things over. It was logical, of course, and that seemed to be the trouble with this demon-summoning racket. Obviously the thing couldn't just wave a claw and deliver the goods. Djin could, perhaps, but this character was no djin. What he could do was to give information and, assuming that his own world was in advance of the Earth, that could be important. Correction, had been important. With the strides made lately the chances were high that the demon's world was way behind Earth's technology. Chris felt that he was in the position of a trader trying to make a deal with a tribe of aborigines. Nothing they could tell him could be better than what he already knew.
Which was probably why demonologists had long since faded from the scheme of things.
"You know," said Chris wearily, "you' demons are an overrated race. Squares. Peasants. Has-beens, no less."
The demon didn't answer. He slumped, apparently half-asleep, in the center of the pentagram. Chris couldn't really blame his lack of attention. For the past several hours he had been pumping his guest in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the ruins of his great scheme. What had come out was educational if not financially promising. His guess about the relative technologies had been correct. A physicist would have been very interested in the demon's method of making gold but, basically, it was no different from atom transmutation. And Chris had the suspicion that the demon spoke more from pure theory than actual practice.
"You don't need me," pleaded the demon. "How about calling it a day and letting me go home?"
"No." Chris was stubborn. He ran his eye down the list of items he had extracted from the creature, wondering which to plump for. None of them were extraordinary, but a couple looked promising. "What's this Eternal Youthful Beauty for Ladies of the Court?" he asked. Cosmetics were always a good line. The demon twitched.
"Hormone cream," he said sullenly. "You know about hormones?"
"Yes." Chris ran a pencil through the item. "How about Controlling of the Elements?"
"Carry • an umbrella," sighed the demon. "Keeps you dry when it's wet and cool when it's hot."
"And I suppose the rest of it can be classified under
air conditioning." Chris crossed off more items. "We know about Eternal Youthfulness for Gentlemen of the Court, don't we?" He didn't trouble to hide his sneer. The demon bristled.
"That's what you think," he snapped. "It wasn't enough just to give them virility, remember. I had to really work on that one."
"Oh?" Chris looked up, his pencil poised over the paper. "You really had to work?"
The demon nodded. "Some of those old-timers were in a bad way. I had to get them on a vitamin diet and tell them how to grow some more fuzz on their faces. By the time I was through they were more than satisfied."
"They were?" A tingle ran down Chris's spine. "You told them how to grow hair?" He forced himself to be casual.
"That's right." The demon preened himself. "You just take a little—" He broke off, a crafty light in his eye. "Trade?"
"Why not?" Chris shrugged, attempting to be offhand. "It's getting late and I guess that you want to be getting home. Tell you what I'll do. You give me the formula to grow hair and I'll trade you my soul."
"Your what?" The demon reared up on his lower limbs.
"My soul." Chris swallowed; he didn't care for the way the demon was showing his talons. "It's the usual thing, isn't it?"
"Is it?" The demon clicked his teeth. "How about showing me this'soul' of yours?"
"I can't. It's the hidden part of me, the real me, and when I'm dead you can take it for your very own." Chris forced himself to smile. "Incidentally," he added, "it's my most precious possession."
"So Faust told me," snarled the demon. "I let him sweet-talk me into trading him twenty years of subjective time for his 'soul.' " He paced the confines of the pentagram. "When I think of how that character rooked me! I slaved over him. I had him under controlled hypnosis for a solid week and gave him everything he wanted. And for what?"
"You mean that he didn't have a soul?"
"If he did then I didn't get it." The demon shoolc his head. "From his buildup I figured that it was something special. He seemed to think so, anyway. So I gave him twenty years of subjective high living, worked myself to a shadow doing it, too, and all for nothing." The demon brooded for a while. "Tell you what," he suggested. "You give me the spell formula and I'll made the trade. Is it a deal?"
"What do you want the ritual for?" Chris was cautious. "Haven't you one of your own?"
"That's beside the point," snapped the demon. "I'm sick of being whipped into this world at the whim of every character who wants something for nothing. You give me the papers and I'll give you the secret of how to grow hair." He folded his arms. "And that's my last word. Make the deal or I'll clam up until you send me home."
Chris pondered for a while then shrugged. It wouldn't hurt to give the demon what he wanted. He'd had photostats made of the parchment so it was no loss. And the hair restorer could be a gold mine.
"It's a deal," he said. "I'll get the parchment while you write down the stuff I need to grow hair." He tossed pencil and paper into the pentagram and went to find his share of the bargain. On the way back from his desk he switched on he radio, turning up the volume as far as it would go. He wasn't sure but he had the idea that there would be noise when the demon returned to his own world. Air displacement would cause it if nothing else, and he didn't want any snoopy neighbor coming in and seeing the mess. "Finished?" He held out his hand ■ for the formula.
"Just about." The demon was fascinated by the radio. "How ever did you find musicians small enough to fit into that box?"
"Made them," said Chris flippantly.
"Made them?" The demon blinked. "You mean that you took ordinary people and made them small enough to get inside that box?" He shook his head in baffled admiration.
"That's right," said Chris. He felt a contemptuous amusement. "Don't you have radio back home?"
"No." The demon looked envious. "I suppose—?"
"We've made our bargain," said Chris quickly. He didn't want his joke to backfire. "Have you finished writing out the formula yet?"
"Just finished." The demon tossed out the paper and pencil. "I've done the best I can with the terms I know. You shouldn't have any trouble getting the ingredients, the old-timers never seemed to complain." He snapped his talons. "The parchment, please."
"Just a minute." Chris scanned the paper. The list of essentials was ridiculously short; he supposed that much depended on using the right proportions. In any event it would be a simple matter for any proficient chemist to refine* strain and even synthesize the formula. He glanced up from his reading. "Are you certain that this stiff will grow hair?"
"On an egg," assured the demon. He sounded impatient. "Look, buster," he said. "Just for your information I don't lie. In fact I don't know what Iving is; that's how that Faust character managed to swindle me so easily." He brooded about it for a moment. "Oh, well, I guess that honesty is the best policy after all." He snapped his talons again. "Just toss in that parchment and let's get going. I've a heavy date and she won't wait."
"Help yourself," said Chris, and threw the envelope containing the parchment into the pentagram. "It's been nice meeting you," he said politely. "Drop in again sometime."
"Thanks," said the demon. He grinned from ear to ear. "I'll be seeing you." Then he vanished as Chris released the mental block retaining the force field. He had been. right about the noise.
To a man who has conversed with a demon normal life seems rather tame. During the next three days Chris fretted at everyday routine, waiting impatiently for a friendly chemist to make up the hair-restoring formula and spending his spare time going over the photostats of the parchment he had traded to his guest.
Having once broken the ice, as it were, Chris had no intention of calling a halt. Privately he considered that he'd had the best of the bargain. He'd swapped a moldy old paper for a modern gold mine, and what he'd done once he could do again. He had no doubt as to the value of his side of the trade. The demon seemed to have been forced to operate under an ethical code which made lying impossible. The poor goon had never had a chance.
Chris worried a little when he discovered that the envelope containing the parchment had been one bearing his name and address. The old texts were very firm on the fact that under no account should a demon be given such information. And, come to think about it, the demon had said that he was the only member of his race to be snared by the pentagram force field. It could have had something to do with the fact that he was always summoned by name.
The worry didn't last long. In the light of modern science demons were pretty poor adversaries. In fact Chris was feeling quite satisfied with himself when, entering his apartment, he suddenly felt himself falling into a cloying darkness. He recovered to find himself stark naked, squatting on a stone floor in a room which seemed to have one belonged to the Inquisition.
"Hello there!" said a hatefully familiar voice. "I told you that I'd be seeing you."
"No!" Chris shook his head, feeling the stunned bafflement of a man who has fust had his world, literally, turn upside down. "No, it can't be!"
The demon didn't answer, he didn't have to. He merely sat lounging in his chair, the torchlight shining from his scales, letting things speak for themselves. He was, Chris noticed, dressed in an elaborate costume of ornamented silks' and from time to time he puffed carefully at a shapeless roll of vegetable matter.
"Bit of a shock, isn't it?" He reached beside him, selected a second roll of leaves, carefully lit it and threw it toward Chris. "Have a cigar."
"Thanks." Numbly Chris sucked at the roll and felt his lungs curl inside his chest.
"You'll get used to it," soothed the demon. "Well, I suppose that you know why you are here?"
Chris coughed and shook his head.
"No? You surprise me." The demon blew a tattered smoke ring. "It's usual to pay a return visit. Or didn't you know that?"
"No," said Chris sickly. "I didn't know."
"Of course I have to be artful about it," continued the demon chattily. "I have to get a name, you know, sort of a reference for the ritual. If I can't get a name then I try to get hold of something personal. I thought I had you when you gave me that cigarette but the damned thing burned away. Usually I get them to sign the agreement in blood. They didn't used to mind that." He relaxed deeper in his chair. "All clear now?"
"Why?"
"Why the return visit? Well, it's all part of the game," explained the demon. "And it balances out the distortion of our respective universes. Something to do with the fifth law of entropy I believe."
"Why me?" croaked Chris. He wheezed out a lungful of smoke. "What do you want with me?"
"Not much," said the demon. "Just the usual trade."
"Is that all?" Chris felt much better. "I can only give you information, you know, we discussed that before."
"Nothing wrong with information," said the demon cheerfully. "Of course, I've really got the edge on you things. I live much longer and so can hold the force field intact for quite a while. I'll feed you and the rest of it, but I won't let you go, until we've struck a mutually satisfying bargain." He stooped and lifted a box from the floor. It looked awfully familiar. It was, Chris realized, a fair copy of the external appearance of his portable radio.
Til tell you what I want," continued the demon. I've made this as you can see. All you have to do is to tell me how to shrink musicians so as to fit inside."

THE SHRINE
The ship came from darkness, drifting down like a snow-flake, all cones and planes and spires of polished metal, spotted and mottled with patches of golden light. It feathered soundlessly and gently toward the tiny world and settled on a rolling green lawn, seeming to sigh as it settled, as the big engines which defied gravity muted into silence, as the metal of the ship relaxed after the journey.
The sigh was echoed in the control room.
"Journey's end." The captain wasn't human and he spoke Universal with a liquid sibilance, but he was intelligent and had about him something of the mystic. The navigator respected his mysticism.
"Journey's end," he echoed. He wasn't human either but his form was as different from the captain's as a man's is from a frog. He spoke with a harsh bark, and his native polysyllabic name, as translated into Universal, was Aarne. He glanced through one of the ports. "They improved the place," he commented. "Some new trees, a wider lawn, and wasn't that a swimming pool we saw on the way down?"
"Possibly."
"Money's been spent here," said Aarne. "A lot of money. All this refashioning of a hunk of dead rock into a miniature world." He stamped on the floor. "Gravity even, they didn't have all this in the old davs."
"They didn't have a lot of things." The captain sighed again as he stared through the port. He was wondering at the powersof faith. It was something, so he had once heard, which could move mountains. It had certainly, in this place, done more than that.
"Well?" said the navigator. He was of a young race and the weight of tradition rested lightly on his shoulders. "What now?"
"We wait."
"Is that all?" It was the navigator's first trip to this place; his knowledge was confined to an out-of-date solid-ograph. It was the captain's eighth, and the magic of it grew with each visit.
"We wait until the Pilgrims have done what they came to do," he explained. "Then we take them back to the place from which they came."
"And find more Pilgrims?"
"If we are fortunate enough, yes."
"I see." Aame was young and had the impatience of youth. He moved restlessly about the control room. "You like tnis," he blurted out suddenly. "You like this traveling backward and forward with the Pilgrims, don't you?"
"Yes."
"But why? They pay, that I'll admit, but you could earn more on any regular commercial run. What's so special about this route?"
"I like to see miracles," said the captain simply.
"Miracles?"
"You will see"
Deep in the bowels of the ship the Pilgrims were gathered. Unlike the captain and crew of the ship they were human; in fact it was all they had in common. Caris Weston, old, dried like a withered prune, her eyes brimming with the sense of a wasted life. Jud Murdock, crippled, his hands trembling on his cane. Joe Melish, young but bitter. Cynthia Hildergard, face pale and shoulders drooping; they and fifty more, all gathered in the bowels of this strange vessel, all human, all having that and one other thing in common.
All human and without pride of race.
"They sold me out," said Murdock fretfully. "Gave all my life to building up that store and then those Rigelians came and sold me out. It takes the heart from a man a thing like that."
*… knew I didn't have a chance the minute I saw that Vegan. An Earthman just isn't wanted when they've got others to pick from…"
"… said he loved me and then, when he found out just what I was, he didn't want to know any longer…"
"… guess it's bad enough not having a home world without them wanting to sit on a body…"
The complaints sighed like a wind in the motionless air, a dirge of misery and lack of confidence; the sound of the persecuted who are persecuted only in their imagination; the fretful cry of those without hope and without pride.
Don Carlin had heard it all before, so often before. These people were without faith and without purpose. He had found them, one by one, had talked to them and had persuaded them, one by one, to join him on this long trip out to the edge of the galaxy, far away from the warm, comfortable worlds.
So many worlds. So many races each with its own home, and one race, scattered now, with no home of its own. It was a peculiar feeling this, to be of a race without a home. Earthmen were wanderers, merging into little groups, keeping, despite themselves, their own heritage. They were a race without a planet, resident on any world with the tolerance to accept them, humble with the need of accepting charity.
And yet not all were humble. Some there were who could walk upright and lift their eyes to the stars and glow with the inner conviction that they shared something * wonderful and noble, something no other member of any other race could share. And those who could do that were respected and were the happier because of it.
A bell sounded and a voice requested his presence in the captain's cabin. He sighed. Kleenahn, as usual, was curious. It must be almost time for the Pilgrims to visit the shrine.
The captain was curious but his politeness overrode his curiosity. He gestured Don to a chair and the liquid sibilants of their common language rustled the air like the sportive leapings of many fish.
"You have been here many times, Earthman Carlin."
"As you well know, captain."
"As indeed I do." Kleenahn paused, searching for the right thing to say. "A strange place, this world. You call it a shrine?"
"Yes."
"A shrine, if my understanding is correct, is the repository of something sacred." I hat is so.
"Something sacred to Earthmen?"
"Yes."
There was a pause. The sounds of sportive fish died as they were touched by the wand of silence. Through the cabin port Carlin could see the figures of men, dwarfed by the distance, advancing over the low horizon toward the ship.
"I know the history of this place," said the captain abruptly. "Five thousand years ago it was discovered by men of your race. Their ship had wandered far from the regular space lanes, indeed, had wandered far from any inhabited sphere. There was no reason or logic for them to have come here. What brought them?"
"An accident. Their ship was not as this ship is. It was old, unreliable. They landed here for repairs. Some of them stayed."
"And Earthmen have remained here ever since." Kleenahn mused. His eyes were thoughtful. "Accident, Earthman Carlin?"
"It could be so termed, Captain Kleenahn. Providence would be a better word."
"Why is it that no person other than of Earth is permitted to visit the shrine?"
Carlin remained silent.
"Why is it that no Earthman who has visited the shrine will tell of what he saw?"
Again Carlin gave no answer.
"Earthmen!" Kleenahn gave a gesture which, in a man, would have been a shrug. "Will we ever be able to fully understand you? A homeless race, their own planet destroyed by war, wandering over a thousand worlds. You should have no pride, no ambition, and yet there is something within you which we can never know. The same thing, perhaps, which gave you the stars and yet destroyed your own world. This furious lust for progress, the driving pursuit of knowledge which should have waned by now but which has not."
"We are an old race," said Carlin.
"You are children," corrected the captain. "When you first ventured beyond your system we were there to greet you."
"You had space travel," admitted Carlin. "But we improved your ships. You had a stagnant culture. We exploded it into a thriving spate of commerce. You took ten thousand years to lift yourselves from steam to atomic power; we took a few decades. It does not become you or those like you to despise the people of Earth."
"The fault, I think, lies within yourselves," said Kleenahn mildly. "You despise yourselves and imagine that you are persecuted. Too many of your race lack pride. Too few remember their accomplishments."
"That is true." Carlin glanced again through the port; the figures outside were now very close. "The Custodians approach," he said. "Have the Pilgrims your permission to leave the ship?"
"Naturally."
Kleenahn sighed as Carlin went about his business, then rested an appendage on a button to summon the navigator. He felt a strange reluctance to be alone.
"They have been gone a long time." Aarne paced the room. "Are they always as long as this?"
"They have crossed half the galaxy; we should not be impatient."
"Odd." Aarne could not contain himself. "Did you see those Custodians?"
"Of course."
"The way they were dressed?"
"They dress in the way of a fashion five thousand years old." Kleenahn stared speculatively through the port. "In a sense we have traveled back through time. This place is sacred to Earthmen. They have kept a part of it isolated against change. Their clothes, other things."
"The shrine?"
"Especially the shrine."
"Odd," said Aarne again. "Very odd." He halted before the port. "Tell me, captain, have you never been tempted to join the Pilgrims?"
"Often, but it would be useless. I am not an Earthman."
"Some races look much, like that of Earth/' hinted the navigator. "It would be interesting to discover just what it is they keep in their shrine."
"Interesting? Perhaps." Kleenahn did not look at the other. "And perhaps dangerous as well. Remember, this is the only sacred thing the Earthmen possess."
"A tiny world, a superstition, a"ritual!" Aarne snorted. "The dying remnant of a dying race."
"You think that?"
"What else? You saw them leave the ship. Did they inspire respect?"
"They cannot inspire what they themselves do not possess," said Kleenahn. "When they left this ship the Pilgrims respected neither themselves nor their race."
"And when they return?"
"You will see."
The captain leaned forward toward the port. Outside the world was deserted. The Custodians and the Pilgrims had passed from sight in a long, straggling line. They had gone—somewhere. They would do—what? They would return—different.
That was all he knew. All he would ever know.
What they would do, where they had gone, how they would be altered, these things were questions an Earthman would die to answer. Kleenahn was not human; in him and his race the fires of curiosity burned low, an intellectual warmth rather than a consuming flame. Aarne, too, despite his apparent impetuosity, was the same. Of all the races in the galaxy none could rival that of dead Earth in the driving need to know.
That terrible lust for knowledge had lifted them to the stars, had destroyed their own planet and left them resident guests on tolerant worlds. The same need dragged them half across the galaxy to a place discovered only five thousand years before, in a segment of space which could never have been visited since Creation.
Such a race could never forget. Individuals, perhaps, but the race never. And yet the race was judged by the individual. Why then did so many individuals lack pride? Why then did the race as a whole command such respect?
Kleenahn sighed and waited as he had waited so often before.
And, after a long while, the Pilgrims returned.
They came over the low horizon as if they marched to soundless bands beneath the flutter of invisible banners. They came with faces set with purpose and with shoulders stiffened with pride. They had left the ship a defeated rabble. They returned a victorious army.
"Incredible!" Aarne stared at them, then at the captain. "They aren't the same people."
"I told you to expect miracles."
"But this!" The navigator shook his head. "I see it but I simply can't believe it."
"They have pride," said Kleenahn. "They left without pride, they return with it."
"Is that what their shrine does for them?"
"Perhaps."
"A thing which gives them pride?" Aarne shook his head, bewildered. "Can such a thing be?"
Kleenahn gestured toward the Pilgrims.
"I see them," said the navigator. "But how?"
Kleenahn flipped a switch. Mechanical ears on the hull aimed themselves at the marching Pilgrims. Voices trickled from_ the speakers like the. rolling surge of long trapped waves.
"… so old! That's what got me. So old!"
". . . ten rüillion years at least and there's no arguing about it, not with that deposit all over him. Can you beat that! Ten million years ago we…"
"… it shows who is the oldest. And did you see his eyes? Blue, just like mine. I wonder if, maybe, he and I could be…"
"… makes a man feel warm inside just thinking about it."
"… and he thought that I wasn't good enough for him! Why, the Johnny-come-lately, if he only knew…"
u. . . keep it to ourselves though. You heard what the man said, just keep it to ourselves. No sense in causing a lot of bad feeling. They've been good to us in their way and we don't want them to start feeling inferior, but___"
The voices died as if the Pilgrims had become aware of the mechanical ears listening to their excited words. The speakers rushed with a blur of meaningless sound. Kleenahn waited a moment then opened the circuit.
"Is it always like this?" Aarne had understood little.
"Always."
"Will it last?"
"It will last." Kleenahn gestured toward the Pilgrims. "You may meet these people again and, when you do, they will not have altered. A little quieter, perhaps, but that will be all. They will stand as straight and stare as hard and, within themselves, they will carry something stronger than anything we know."
"Pride?"
"More than that. Conviction, perhaps, I do not know."
Aarne looked at the Pilgrims through the port, wondering with the dull curiosity of his race, what it was they must have seen. He had up until now tended to feel a little sorry for the Earthmen, a little impatient and, sometimes, a little disgusted that they should be so devoid of racial pride. That had been on the journey out. The journey back, he knew, would be very different. The Pilgrims no longer regarded themselves as inferior.
"They are still a long way off," he said. "Shall I send the flitter out to them, captain?"
"No," said Kleenahn. "I like to see them march."

SURVIVAL DEMANDS!
Thebe was a new gibl at the desk, a pert young blonde with full lips and calculating eyes. They narrowed a little as I stated my name and errand.
"Captain Tolsen?" Her pause was as artificial as the routine checking of the cards. "I'm sorry, commander, but I'm afraid that he's on the restricted list."
"I know that." Surely the girl would have been briefed? "If you will look again," I said gently, "you will find that I am on the list of permitted visitors." Then, as she hesitated, "Contact Professor Malkin and inform him that I am here!"
She didn't like it, I could tell that. She considered herself too young, too beautiful for any man, let alone a grizzled old space commander, to have used that tone with her. But it had been a long journey to the Institute, my leg ached and I was short on patience. So I snapped at her as I would to a crewman and, like a crewman, she obeyed.
Malkin was pleased to see me. He crossed the reception hall, hand outstretched, his old, crinkled eyes beaming with pleasure. It was good to see that pleasure, good to feel the firm grasp of his hand.
"John! It's good to see you." He tilted his head toward the desk. "Trouble?"
"Bad liaison," I said. "She didn't know that I'm permitted to visit Tolsen."
"I'll fix that." He walked toward the desk and didn't trouble to lower his voice. "Commander Hamilton is permitted to visit Captain Tolsen whenever he wishes. Is that understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then mark it on your cards." He rejoined me. "A new broom," he explained. "Mary went off to get married and we've been saddled with this would-be tridi star. She thinks it smart to be awkward, but she'll settle down."
Knowing Malkin I could believe it. He ran the Institute as I ran one of my ships. We walked down white corridors, past green-tinted rooms, striding on the soft foam plastic of the floor, the air-conditioned atmosphere tinged with the scent of pine.
It was a quiet, restful place, a modern counterpart of a medieval monastery, though here men did not seek the salvation of their souls and the world by means of prayer. Instead they tried, by seeking understanding of the workings of the mind, to find a means of salvation of the human race.
Malkin talked as he always did, saying the same things that I had heard before but which both of us knew it was essential that I should never forget.
"A lot of people have the wrong impression of our work here," he said. "Our title is probably the cause of that. The Institute for the Study of Mental Aberration means only one thing to the majority; we care for the insane."
"The trick being to define insanity."
"As soon as any man or woman stops thinking as the majority thinks they should think, then that person is regarded as insane." Malkin sounded bitter. "So much for the tolerance of the human race." He paused before a door, slid open a panel, gestured for me to look inside.
It was a small room, the floor, walls, ceiling, even the furniture all thickly covered with green-tinted plastic foam. A woman sat on the low bed. She wore a loose smock which hid the lines of her body. Her hands rested limply in her lap. Her head was tilted back a little and her eyes, wide and unblinking, stared at something no one but herself could see."
"A dreamer," whispered Malkin. "A visionary, a woman divorced from reality—and one of the finest examples of prescience I have ever met. Insane? Or merely talented with unusual mental powers?"
He closed the panel, led the way down the corridor.
"There are others," he continued. "So many others.
All, in a greater or lesser degree, possessed of extrasensory powers. Precognition, levitation, telepathy, every parapychological faculty you can mention; we've got them all." His voice became even more bitter. "We have them and yet we haven't. We know what they have and what could be done with it but always there is something which eludes us. A matter of communication, of understanding, a failure to detect the undetectable with the instruments we possess."
"Could that be because most of them have a low intelligence?" It was a theory to which I had given much thought. "A man could be very bright in one field and absolutely dumb in another. Could it be that possession of these faculties hampers normal intellectual development?"
"Perhaps," his assent was grudging. "But the evidence isn't conclusive. And we have examples which deny that theory."
^Tolsen?"
"He and others, but Tolsen is the prime example. If only—"
Malkin was intelligent and one of the fairest men I had ever met, but he was human and could not wholly deny his heritage. I sensed the wash of anger, the radiated hatred of what had happened. I rested my hand on his arm.
"It couldn't have been avoided."
"I suppose not."
"We had no choice," I said. "No choice at all."
"There is always a choice," he said flatly. "Don't take the coward's way, John. You know better than that."
I felt my anger rising. I quelled it; anger had no right in a place like this. And Malkin was correct. There had been a choice, but it was one which I had not dared to take.
Tolsen sat in his usual position, leaning back in his chair, a magazine in his lap, his eyes staring through the window ^toward the fluify white clouds drifting against the blue of the sky.
He seemed normal enough, clean, neatly dressed, his mouth firm, his features placid, but it was the little things which betrayed what he was and why he was here.
Nothing of space had been permitted to enter this room. No picture of the planets, not even the wonderfully beautiful, heart-gripping pictograph of Earth as seen from the moon, a copy of which could be found in almost every household.1 Even the magazines had been vetted so as to eliminate all news of other worlds. The books were mostly historical romances or prespace novels. There were no souvenirs, no statues, no newspapers, even, with outerworld news. There was nothing to remind him.of his past, not even anything from his actual service with the fleet.
And on the table was the big bottle of tablets which had given his features that look of calm tranquillity.
He looked up as I entered the room, some of the calmness leaving his face and giving me a glimpse of the tormented mind beneath. But the drugs were strong and after that one betraying moment the defenses of his detachment returned to build a wall between us.
"John!" His smile was genuine. "I'm glad to see you. How's everything?"
"Much as usual. Work, work and still more work." I sat down, resting my leg, letting some of the peace of this place enter into me. "And yourself?"
He shrugged; it was answer enough.
I lit a cigarette, conscious of the trembling of my hands, hating myself for what I had to do and yet knowing that it had to be done. Memory is a tricky thing and the determination of yesterday becomes the compromise of today. Sometimes it is essential to return to that yesterday to bolster that determination. And Tolsen was my yesterday.
"We have contacted a new race," I said quietly. "The Lhassa. Small, humanoid, something like a furry monkey but with a highly advanced civilization."
He turned and stared out of the window. His features twitched. The wall of detachment between us showed the first crack.
"Preliminary investigations have been completed." I did not meet his eyes. "Soon now a fleet will be dispatched—you know why."
"Telepathic?" The crack widened.
"Yes."
"Like the Frenzha?" A segment of the wall crumpled into dust.
"Mentally, yes."
"My God!" It was a cry from the heart. "My God!"
"We want ta be friends," I said. "The fleet is—just in case."
"Dear God," he prayed. "Dear God, not again!" Now he met my eyes; the wall had totally vanished.
I looked at a man who lived in torment.
A man who had condemned an entire race to total annihilation.
It had begun when the first rocket reached for the moon, and after that there was no stopping. Never mind the reasons given at the time: the military expediency, the lust for prestige, the rivalry of opposed cultures. The bare fact was that man had broached a new frontier, and man, being what he is, had to go all the way.
The moon was the hardest; Jupiter and Saturn hard but not as hard as Mars and Venus. New drives had been invented by then, old problems solved and new ones recognized. It was only a matter of time before the AG drive gave us the stars. It was inevitable that man should discover that he was not alone in the universe.
The Frenzha were humanoid but stemmed from reptilian stock. They walked upright, had four limbs, smooth, rounded skulls and were totally devoid of hair. They spoke in a lisping series of sibilants—when they spoke at all. Normally they did not speak; there was no need. The Frenzha were a race of telepaths.
Earth and Frenzha met and faced each other like cat and dog. Diplomats were exchanged and some trade permitted. Commerce flowed for a time and then ceased, as both races came up against the same barrier.
The Frenzha were telepaths. Terrestrials were not. The Frenzha, used to honesty and understanding in their dealings with each other, were at a loss when it came to dealing with Earthmen. They could not go below the spoken word. They could not gauge the honesty and sincerity of a statement. That in itself would not have been an insurmountable problem. The thing they could neither understand or tolerate was the cruelty of the human race.
A man does not tolerate a boy pulling the wings off flies. The boy may think the insect had no feelings, the man knows better. A telepath is acutely sensitive to physical and emotional pain. The harshness, inconsideration, sheer disregard for others and the blind pursuit of self-gratification which is a part of the normal makeup of the human race sickened the Frenzha.
Five years after the first meeting, three years ago, I had commanded the fleet of ships which orbited the world of the Frenzha.
Tolsen, a newly created captain, was with me in control.
. "They think of us as cripples,"^ he said bitterly. He was young and had a Terrestrial's share of pride. "Insanely cruel and hopelessly vicious. They hate us, commander."
"Hate isn't enough," I said. "We have to be certain."
He nodded and slumped back, eyes closed in the effort of concentration. Looking down at him, feeling about me the humming life of the ship and, beyond the ship, the entire fleet, I felt aloof, distant, almost godlike. I could be excused that feeling. I had more power at my disposal than any other man in history. The power, literally, to destroy a world.
But Tolsen had the real power.
Tolsen was the one to pass judgment.
I had never met a telepathic human before. I had heard of them, read reports of what they could do. But they were rare and worked mostly at the Institute.
Telepathy, like the other parapsychological sciences, had been ignored and derided for so long that, even now, when concrete proof had been given as to their necessity, recognition was slow. True, Malkin had his Institute backed by government funds. He had chased down all the materials he could, but even so the results were poor. Tolsen was the best he could give me.
He opened his eyes and met mine.
"Well?"
He shrugged and held his head in his hands. I gripped his shoulder. "Listen," I snapped. "I know it's hard but it has to be done. You've been down there, met the Frenzha, caught their thoughts and probed their emotions. They can't read our minds and we can't read theirs. Only a few—"
"Freaks, commander?"
"—unusual types can do that." I ignored the interruption. It was too close to the truth to be comfortable.
"They hate us, commander. I told you that."
"We can live with hatred."
"They're afraid of üs."
"We can live with fear."
"They despise us." Tolsen bit his lip. "It wasn't pleasant learning the truth of how they feel about us. It makes me feel almost ashamed."
"How they feel about us isn't too important." Control was air-conditioned; I shouldn't have been sweating. "What do they intend doing about it?"
"They want to isolate us."
"And?"
"They want to have nothing to do with us, to expunge us from their memory. They want to pretend that we don't exist, have never existed; and yet they are a logical race. They know that denying the existence of something doesn't eliminate it." He stared at me, his eyes wild. "They feel revolted at ever having met us." So?
"They intend to destroy us."
It had come, the thing which had to be faced, the thing which I had hoped not to hear. The Frenzha were logical. To them we were a diseased race of mental cripples, cruel, thoughtless, hateful. So, like a surgeon deciding to cut out a malignant growth, they had decided to eliminate us.
"I see."
"They mean it, commander." Tolsen had misread my expression. "They can do it, too."
"I know that." I looked down at him, sitting slumped in his chair. A unique individual into whose hands fate had placed the destiny of a world. "Be certain," I urged. "You know what we're here for and what we can do. Check again. You may have made a mistake."
"There's no mistake."
"Check anyway."
He sighed and closed his eyes again and concentrated on the wash of mental emanations rising from the planet below. He had tried to explain to me how it felt, this reception of two billion minds. It was akin, I imagined, to hearing the distant murmur of a crowd, and yet it was more than that. Emotions came sharp and clear. Individual words were lost, but a telepathic race had a gestalt inconceivable to others. It was a crowd, perhaps, but a crowd with a single voice, a single emotion.
There had been no mistake. The Frenzha intended to destroy us, to eliminate us completely. Tolsen was certain of it.
So I gave the order which would eliminate them first.
And, as the bombs tore the very atmosphere from their world, Tolsen went insane from the dying impact of two billion minds.
It was something we had never even thought about. A telepath can read the mind of another telepath, can sense and share the emotions and pain of that other. Tolsen didn't stand a chance. He suffered the relayed sensations of two billion deaths and lived to know the guilt of a murderer two billion times over. And some of it, inevitably, washed over to those around him.
They, superficially at least, had recovered. Tolsen never would.
He was calm enough, drugs had seen to that, but drugs could only make it easier for him to remember, they could not make him forget. Even so his hand was shaking as he reached for the bottle with its tablets. I passed him water as he swallowed half a dozen and waited as he drank it.
"Not again, commander!" His eyes were those of a child who begs not to be beaten.
I lit another cigarette.
"You can't do it again," he said wildly. "You can't destroy another race just because they are like what we should be. Because we are mental cripples. Surely, now, that must be obvious. First the Frenzha, now the Lhassa, all telepaths. How many other races are there the same? How many like us?"
"Perhaps none." I studied the smoke of my cigarette. Space is a lonely place. It gives a man time to think. "Maybe, somehow, we took the wrong turning. Or perhaps we, as a race, had to work a little too hard for survival. Telepathy was a luxury we simply couldn't afford. You can't feel sorry for the animal you are killing for dinner. Both Frenzha and Lhassa are—were—soft worlds. The inhabitants herbivorous. They could afford to be gentle."
"But we are past all that now," said Tolsen. "Survival no longer demands that we kill and kill and keep on killing."
"I know that, but our heritage is a part of us. An unknown number of years, an unknown number of generations, all have gone to make us what we are. We couldn't afford the parapychological powers. We couldn't afford to be telepaths. We had to turn away from it in order to stay alive." I crushed out the cigarette, conscious that I was talking more than I should.
"Then—"
"There won't be another Frenzha."
I rose. It was time to go. My visit to yesterday had stiffened my determination. Malkin met me outside. ' "Well?" „.
"Will he recover? Fully, I mean?"
"Never." Malkin took my arm. "As an individual he is lost to us, but all is not lost. His seed bears the gene pattern which made him what he was. We'll find him a girl, one with the same talent if possible. Together they'll have children." He drew a deep breath. "No. Tolsen is not wholly lost."
"I'm glad of that."
"And you?"
"What do you mean?" I was deliberately casual.
"Rumor gets around. What of the Lhassa?"
"I am in command of the fleet which is being sent to Lhassa," I said slowly. "On the theory, perhaps, that what I have done once I can do again."
"John!"
"You said that I'd had a choice when dealing with the Frenzha," I said. "But it was no real choice and you know it. Did you expect me to permit the destruction of my race?"
"Do you think that you can avoid it?" Malkin was bitter. "We aren't alone in the universe. How many races do you think we shall be permitted to destroy before we are wiped out as the menace we appear to be?"
"Isn't that up to you?"
"How so?"
"You, not I, have the answer. It's up to you to produce the telepaths who will be accepted as 'normal' by the aliens. They must be our diplomats, our spokesmen. They must be our shield." I stared him full in the face. "Produce enough telepaths, and we are safe from retribution and everything else. No telepathic race could ever bring itself to destroy a similar culture. If you doubt that, then go and look at Tolsen."
"Is that why you came, John?"
"Yes," I admitted. "There won't be another Frenzha."
On the way out I stopped at the desk. The blonde was still there, still petulant, still hurt at the treatment I'd given her. She was snapping at someone on the phone. She looked up, her eyes wary.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I wish to apologize."
"For what?"
"For not understanding you."
"I don't-"
"I didn't know that you were new here. Someone obviously forgot to make out the correct list of permitted visitors. I shouldn't have lost my temper, but the truth is that I've a game leg and it makes me impatient."
She softened. Her eyes lost their strained wariness. She smiled. "I'm sorry to hear that," she said. "In space?"
"An accident. They gave me a plastic bone but it gives me hell at times. You know how it is."
"I know," she confided. "To tell the truth I'm at fault, too. but my shoes are killing me."
"Then you forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive."
We smiled at each other and parted. The exchange had reassured me by strengthening a theory. People can be easy to get along with providing they know more about you than you are normally inclined to tell. If they know your weakness as well as your strength.
As with people, so with races.
I would show the Lhassa more than the destructive might of Earth. I would show them why we needed it, show them how we had risen, driven by fear, unable to tell friend from enemy until, too often, it was too late. They were intelligent creatures. They would understand. And. in the meantime, Malkin would be working.
Earth needed telepaths. Other races were naturally telepathic, so it was logical to assume that humans, too, had those latent powers.
The need for survival had dictated against their development but that need was past. Now it was essential that we catch up.
Survival demanded it.

LITTLE GIRL LOST
They showed me the professor and then they told me what they1 wanted me to do. It wasn't a hard job, physicallv that is; but I could see that it would be more than wearing in other ways. I hesitated—they didn't seem to mind that—then took another look at the professor. That was easy because they had him behind one-way glass.
He was dressing a little girl's hair. He took his time about it, brushing, combing, weaving the hair into plaits. Two plaits tied with ribbon, and he made hard work of the bows. When he had got them just right he kissed her on the forehead, tickled her under the arms and then sent her out to play.
A nice, normal, everyday scene. The kind of thing every father does if he's lucky enough to have a little girl. The thing every father has to do if he's unlucky enough to have lost his wife. Nothing to it.
Only it was two in the morning in the heart of one of the most closely guarded places in the world. There was no brush, no comb, no ribbon.
And no little girl.
"It's all in his mind," whispered the colonel. He didn't have to whisper. The professor couldn't have heard him had he shouted, but he, like me, felt that he should lower his voice. "To him, she's still alive, his daughter, I mean. He simply can't accept the fact that she's dead."
"When?"
"Six months ago. Hit-and-run driver; we never did find out who it was."
"And the mother?"
"Died in childbirth." The colonel stared through the one-way glass. Inside the soundproofed room the professor had sat down at his desk and was busy with pencil and paper. The colonel sighed, and I limped after him as he led the way back to his office.
Cottrell, the psychologist, was waiting for us and he passed out cigarettes as we sat down.
"Well," he said tightly, "what's your reaction?"
"Must I have one?" I accepted a light from the colonel and blew smoke across the desk. "I assume that you've a reason for keeping him where he is and I also assume that you've a reason for offering me the job." I looked at the colonel. "Incidentally, why me?"
"Security whitewashed you. The air force didn't want you. You've had acting experience, and you happen to resemble the professor when he was young." Cottrell spoke before the colonel could answer. "Also, he has a natural sympathy for the afflicted."
It was too crude to be accidental. The incident which had blasted me out of the skies had left me with a smashed leg, and it isn't polite to remind a cripple of what he is. I guessed that Cottrell was sore at my getting the offer and said so. He shrugged.
"Sorry, but that's the answer. It's important that the professor likes you. He doesn't like me or any of us here. If you take the job, you'll have to be closer to him than his own skin and, above all, you mustn't upset him in any way. It won't be easy."
"That's obvious," I said. "But why? What's the point?" The colonel hesitated and I knew that I was treading on thin ice. Security ice, the sort which cracks if you so much as read the wrong newspaper. But the colonel was intelligent. He knew that no man can do a good job if he doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing. He took a chance.
"The professor is important," he said slowly. "I can't tell you how much or in just what way, but if I said that the future of this country depended on him I wouldn't be exaggerating. He was working on… something… when his daughter was killed. The accident upset him. It almost ruined his mind so that, to us, he was useless. He only began to work again when he'd established his delusion." He looked at me through the smoke of his cigarette.
"He refuses to work here any longer. We can't force him.'We can keep him here, yes, but only as an idiot. We don't want that. We want the genius of his mind, and to get it we have to play things his way. We have to let him go so that he can work where he likes and when "he likes, but we daren't let him go unprotected. So we want you to stay with him as both friend and bodyguard. You keep him working, you pass on his findings and, above all, you keep him happy.!' He sighed. "I know that "it sounds crazy, but if you know a better answer I'd be glad to hear it."
I had no suggestions, only a question. "Does he give any reason for wanting to leave here?"
"Yes." Cottrell was bitter. "He says that this is no place in which to bring up a young girl. He's perfectly right, of course, and as we've got to humor his delusion, we've no choice but to let him go."
"And," said the colonel, "we want you to go with him."
At first things were a little stiff. The professor liked me, yes, but he was not used to having me around, and it was important to break down the barriers of his isolation. The way I did it was to make friends with Ginney.
She was ten years old, a cute blonde with long, plaited hair, a freckled face and cheeky blue eyes. She had been around quite a bit, was full of the devil and loved fun. She also liked plenty of conversation.
She had been dead for six months.
It wasn't easy to make friends with a ghost. I studied her photographs until I saw her in my sleep. I watched the professor until I knew just how she looked to him. I made myself imagine her, talk to her, listen to her answers and then talk some more. I memorized her history so that we'd have points in common, and all the time I had to guard against a single slip which would have destroyed the professor's trust in me. That in itself wasn't too important, but I dared not injure his belief in his delusion. It was the only thing which kept him sane.
I passed the major hurdle one night in a little hotel near the border. We had been traveling south because, as the professor said, Ginney needed the sun. I shared a room with the professor. Another had been booked for Ginney, and he was getting her ready for bed. I'd watched the play a dozen times, the undressing and putting on of the nightclothes, the undoing of the ribbons and the brushing of the hair. I sat and watched as his hands, thin with thick blue veins, the fingers long and sensitive, clutched the invisble brush and smoothed the invisible hair. I leaned forward.
"Let me do that."
"You?" He hesitated, a flicker of doubt in his eyes.
"Why not?" I grinned, not at him. "You don't mind me brushing your hair, do you, Ginney?" I pretended to listen, then snorted. "Of course I won't hurt you. I brush my own hair every day and I'm an expert." My smile grew wider. "Look, I'll tell you what. If I catch a snag I'll tell you a bedtime story. Right?"
I listened, nodded, reached for the brush.
For a moment I thought that it wasn't going to work. The professor hesitated, moving his hand beyond my reach, the doubt growing in his eyes. Then, very slowly, he moved his hand back toward me.
I took the brush from his hand. I caught hold of Ginney and made her stand in front of me. I turned her and, carefully, I began to brush her hair.
It was the hardest thing I have ever done.
Because it wasn't enough to playact. I had to really brush the hair of a real girl, and that meant it wasn't enough just to pass the brush through the air. I had to turn it, to drag it, to move on the same plane, to avoid snags and to follow the contours of a head. I had to do that and, at the same time, control the wriggling of a cheeky ten year old. I had to do all this while being watched by a man who had based his sanity on a delusion which I was helping to maintain. A good pretense wasn't enough. It had to be perfect.
I was soaked with sweat by the time I had brushed the hair and my hands were trembling with strain. But there was more.
"You caught a snag" said Ginney in my mind.
'T#n sorry," I said aloud. "I didn't mean it."
"You promised me a story."
"I know and I'll tell you one."
"Now?"
"New." Deliberately I put down the brush. "Go and kiss your Daddy good night." I waited while the professor bent his head and then waited just long enough for her ^o return to me. I rose, stooped, picked her up and carried her toward the door. I opened it awkwardly, as a man would who carried a child, closed it and then, because I daren't for one moment relax from the pretense, carried her into her bedroom, drew back the covers, tucked her in and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Almost I yielded then, but a sound, it may only have been the creaking of a floorboard or it may have been the professor following me, urged me to continue. So, sitting in the darkness, I told her the story of "The Three Bears," then "Red Riding Hood," and then, just to make certain, the one about "Mother Goose."
When I left that room I needed a drink more than anything else in the world.
The professor was working when I rejoined him. He sat at the table and covered sheet after sheet of paper with abstruse mathematical symbols. The floor was littered with discarded sheets, each one of which I would have to gather and pass on. He smiled at me and laid down his pencil.
"Ginney asleep?"
"Like a top." I lit a cigarette. "You've a very fine girl there, professor."
"I know it, Tom." It was the first time that he had used my Christian name. "I'm glad that she's taken to you." He stared down at his hands, the veins were very prominent. "I'm really too old for her. Married late, you know, and missed the best part of life. I do my best, but Ginney's young and needs the company of young people."' He shook his head, sighing. "It isn't easy."
"I guess not."
"No." He poked at the heap of papers. "Odd, but now I feel as if I can really get down to work. You know what all this is about?"
"No." I was deliberately casual. I didn't want to know. I could see that he wanted to talk, but my job was to keep him working and he wasn't going to do that while I stayed. So I yawned, stretched, and made for the door.
Paper rustled as I closed it behind me.
Cottrell was waiting at the rendezvous. He didn't say anything as I got into the car, but he had a bottle and I took a long drink as he drove to the edge of town.
There he halted and, with the motor running, we talked.
"Any luck?"
"He's working." Neither of us were worried about my leaving him alone. The entire area was lousy with security men who would make sure that no one approached him but me. Cottrell reached for the bottle, tilted it, handed it back.
"How did you manage it?"
I told him and he nodded.
"Good. You've earned his trust and hell be dependent on you. A little more and you'll have him jumping through hoops. Making friends with his delusion was a bright idea. Don't forget to use the sympathy angle."
I looked at him in the light of the dashboard.
"You don't like me, do you?"
"I don't like what you're doing," he said harshly, and I caught the gleam of his eyes as he faced me. "I don't like what's being done to the professor. I'm a doctor of sorts and it's my job to heal. What would you think of a doctor who deliberately encouraged the growth of a malignant cancer in a man'because it increased his I.Q.P"
"Doesn't that depend on what he does with his increased I.Q.?"
"Maybe." He seemed torn between the desire to talk and caution against talking too much. Desire won. "I'm sticking my neck out in saying this, but I personally believe that the professor would be better off dead than the way he is. Oh, he's happy enough while he can maintain his delusion, but what about when it ups and hits him in th© f ace? Anything can do it, a stranger, an incident, any one of a thousand things, and he'll realize that he's been living in a dream. Then…" He made a chopping motion.
"The nut house?" He nodded. "So what? Would he be any the worse off?"
"If you can't live with a thing," said Cottrell tightly, "you escape from it. The only way the professor can escape is by forgetting. The trouble is he will never be able to forget enough. But hell keep on trying until he's forgotten everything. They call it dementia prae-cox. It isn't nice."
"Then isn't it better to let him keep his delusion?"
"Not if we want to save his mind." He looked away from me, his fingers drumming on the wheel. "Don't misunderstand me. With proper therapy he can be made to accept his loss and learn to live with it. He can be cured of his delusion and mentally he wouldn't be harmed. But that takes time, and they won't give him the time. They want what he can do now. So they let him have his dream until he's done the dirty work and then they'll drop him like a hot brick." He must have sensed my disbelief.
"Why not? What better way to safeguard that knowledge than by letting the brain which discovered it lapse into total insanity? What possible use could he be then to any foreign power?"
"It's too dirty. We wouldn't do anything like that."
"No?" He shrugged. "I've talked too much and you could get me canned if you wanted to. But I'm a psychologist and I know what makes men tick. One man wouldn't do it. A group of men would. Split responsibility which means that no one need blame himself and all manage to avoid guilt. Add the desire for security, fear, expediency, patriotism, the natural desire to take the easy path and the even more natural desire to be the top dog, and the professor doesn't stand a chance. You'll see."
He engaged the gears and let in the clutch. He didn't speak on the way back and I had plenty of time to think. I did a lot of thinking, too, not about what he had said but about something quite different.
About Ginney.
It's funny how you can get used to a thing. Once you convince yourself that what you are doing is right then the rest comes automatically. Actors have a name for it. They call an actor who can really live the part a darf-stella. Only such an actor doesn't really act at all. If he's supposed to be an old man, then he is an old man. He walks, talks, even thinks like one. It makes for wonderful acting but it's hard on the nerves. To do what I had to do I had to believe in a ghost. So I believed in it. I got so that I could really see Ginney, sense when she was near me, consider her in everything I did. I accepted the professor's delusion and in so doing it became my own.
We stayed at the hotel for ten days and the professor worked all the time. While he was working I took charge of Ginney, taking her out and showing her the town. It was a small town with a little old mission built during the Spanish occupation, the usual markets, the usual things for tourists to see. We saw them all. There were snags, of course, like the time I bought two ice cream cones, one for me and one for Ginney. I passed it to her and, naturally, it fell to the ground. It was a mistake, and I was lucky that the professor wasn't with me. I wasn't so lucky the time we all went out to eat.
Maybe security had fallen down on the job or maybe it was one of those things, but the restaurant we chose was pretty busy and seats were at a premium. We had a table and three chairs, one for the professor, one for me and, of course, the other for Ginney. We ordered. Ginney wasn't hungry so she just sat and watched, and while we were eating a man came up and started to sit in the empty chair. I stopped him just in time.
"Sorry, mister, but that seat's taken."
"Is it?" He looked at the empty place, then at the crowded floor, then back at the empty seat. He was a bigman, arrogant, and I could see that he was going to argue. I rose and pulled him away as he reached for the chair.
"I said that it's taken."
"In. a pig's eye it is! Look, mister, I'm hungry and I'm going to eat." He reached for the back of the chair.
I thought of Cottrell and what he had said about the fragility of a delusion. I could have compromised. I could have asked Ginney to sit on my lap or go out to play or done any of a dozen things to make the incident a logical outcome of a crowded restaurant. But I thought of the professor and how he would feel at seeing his little girl pushed around. And I wasn't keen on the idea myself. I jerked the man away from the chair.
It was a mistake. It was hot, he was bad tempered and he didn't like being pulled. He swung at me, his fist driving low into my stomach, and I gagged as the air rushed out of my lungs. He grinned and drew back his fist to finish the job, and I cursed my crippled leg as I tried to brace myself. It wasn't necessary. A waiter came rushing up, full of apologies, and caught the man by the arm. He didn't look strong, but there must have been something in the way his fingers dug against the nerves because the man winced and allowed himself to be led to a suddenly vacant table. Security, of course, but that didn't make me feel any better.
The professor was very quiet during the remainder of the meal.
"You know, Tom," he said over coffee, and I was glad that he'd broken the silence, "the world is full of nasty people."
"That character?" I shrugged and lit a cigarette. "Forget him." I winked at Ginney, very small and quiet in her chair. The professor took no notice.
"Your leg," he said. "Pardon me if it is a delicate subject, but how did it happen?"
"Hit-and-run driver," I lied curtly. "I never did find out who it was."
"You, too?" His knuckles turned white as he gripped his cup. "You know, Tom, the world is full of murderers and criminals who will never be punished. Sometimes I wish that something would happen so that they would all die. All of them!"
I was surprised at the emotion in his voice. It was the first time I had seen him really angry, and he was, burning with that helpless, frustrated rage which makes you feel all sick and twisted inside. I tried to change the subject.
"Don't think about it, professor. It takes all kinds to make a world. How's the work progressing?"
"It's finished." He didn't sound like a man glad to have ended a chore. "You can have the final results after we've eaten." He smiled at my expression. "That's what you want, isn't it? The last set of equations so that they can begin the tests for controllable fission of nonradioactive materials. Bigger and better bombs at a fraction of the cost. The fools!"
"Please!" I'd begun to sweat. There was no way of telling who could be listening, but one thing I was sure of. This was information which I wasn't supposed to know about. I crushed out my cigarette. "Let's get out of here and go for a walk or something."
"Yes," he said and rose from the table. "I'll give you the papers and tomorrow we'll leave. Will you buy a car? I want to drive myself for a change."
I nodded and we left. It wasn't until after he had given me the papers covered with their potential dynamite and I'd passed them on to my contact that I began to get worried. Not about the information. That would be flown straight back to the laboratories where they stood by to make the first tests. Not about the incident in the restaurant. Not even about the fact that we were leaving in the morning. But about Ginney.
The professor seemed to have forgotten all about her.
We left the hotel early next morning in a cheap coupe guaranteed to fall apart after ten thousand miles. It wasn't important. The car, like the professor, like me, like Ginney, was expendable. As long as it did its job I couldn't complain. The professor drove, handling the wl'teel with a surprising skill, and I slumped in the seat beside him, my hat over my eyes and those eyes glancing from time to time in the rear view mirror. Somewhere behind us, a spurt of dust on the horizon, Cottrell was still pn the fob. He would stay on until he received word that the tests had proved satisfactory, and then he would move in and take over.
Once I'd satisfied myself that the professor could handle the carl relaxed and busied myself with thoughts. I was still worried by the professor's lack of attention to his little girl. For the first time since I'd been with him he hadn't kissed her good night. He hadn't asked after her this morning, either, though I had made a point of settling her in the dickey with the baggage and asking her whether or not she was comfortable. But the professor seemed to have something else on his mind.
Strange about a delusion. I'd known others who had their own private belief, and to me it had always seemed that they had a trick of justifying or rationalizing away anything which tended to shatter it. Cottrell had said that the professor was different. He had warned me that a word could shatter his belief in Ginney and I wanted to discover why. The answer was surprisingly simple.
It was me.
My interference, my bolstering of the delusion, my own playacting so as to make fantasy a concrete reality. I had taken over as nursemaid, and by so doing I had relieved the professor of the need to adapt what wasn't to what was. I believed in Ginney. To me she was alive and so to the professor she was alive, too. No need for him to convince himself any longer. He could sit back and watch me do all the little things he'd had to do and, naturally, just as a mother with a trusted nurse no longer worries about her child, so the professor had ceased to work at his delusion. Because to him it was nothing but the proven truth. I saw her, didn't I? I talked to her, played with her, protected her. So he had returned to work freed of his anxiety and left me with the burden. But if I let him down, showed him that I thought it was all stark lunacy and that I'd been acting with my tongue in my cheek in order to get him to work then… ?
I straightened with a vague impression that something was wrong. I opened my eyes and stared at the speedometer. We were going fast, too fast, but I didn't realize just how much too fast until I looked at the scenery.
We were on a narrow road winding down the side of a succession of hills which, without any straining of the imagination, could have been called baby mountains. The road was bad and to one side it fell away toward the rocky bottom of a gorge. The car was slithering from side to side as the wheels strained to hold the loose surface of the road. Even as I watched we veered to the wrong side, sent dirt pluming over the edge, then drifted back to the stony verge. And we were going faster all the time.
What I did then was dictated by instinct. I cut the ignition and hauled on the hand brake. I grabbed the wheel and jammed my foot against the gear lever so that it couldn't slip out. I hung on while the engine compression helped to slow the car, and while I clung to the wheel, I prayed. We stopped three inches from eternity.
"You were going too fast," I said stupidly. "You might have killed both of us."
"I know." His face was dripping with perspiration. "I'm sorry."
I took over the wheel. He didn't argue about it and neither did I. He was shaken but not anywhere near as badly as I was, and I had the impression that he was disappointed about something. I drove slowly after that, handling the car like a matron on her first time out on the public highwav, and it wasn't until almost dark that we came to a village tucked away in the foothills. I stopped the car before an apology of a hotel and climbed stiffly from behind the wheel.
The proprietor was more dark than white but he made us welcome, and the native cooking blended with the local wine as good cooking should. After the meal the professor excused himself and went up to bed. I saw him to his room then went back downstairs and sat on the veranda, smoking, thinking and waiting for Cottrell to catch up. Something must have delayed him because it was almost midnight before he arrived.
"What happened?" He was hot, tired and annoyed. "It's a miracle I found you. You left the main road and buried yourself in these hills. I almost went over the edge twice following your trail."
"I know." I told him what had happened and his face went white.
"Are you'sure?"
"You think that I could ever forget?" I dropped my cigarette and lit another. A moth, a wide-winged thing, came fluttering toward the match and I knocked it aside. "I tell you he almost killed the pair of us. Hell! If I hadn't grabbed that wheel we'd both have been mincemeat."
"And after you stopped the car, what then?"
"I told him he was driving too fast and took over."
"Anything else?" He growled his impatience. "Did you say anything, do anything?"
I frowned, trying to remember. "No. I said that he was driving too fast and could have killed both of us. He agreed and apologized. I—" I broke off, staring at his expression. "What's the matter?"
"Both of us," he repeated sickly. "Both of us!"
And then it hit me right smack in the face. I'd totally ignored Ginney—and so had the professor.
"The death wish," said Cottrell. "He wanted to die but has the normal indoctrination against conscious suicide. Subconsciously he tried to commit self-destruction by driving so fast down the trail that an accident was certain. You stopped him just in time. But why should he want to die? Why?" He bit his lip then looked at me. "Did you do anything, say anything to shatter his delusion?"
"Not that I know of." I told him about the incident in the restaurant. "It's a funny thing though. He didn't seem to pay any attention to Ginney after that. I thought that it was because he'd left her to me."
"Maybe, or it could be that something reminded him that she was dead." He looked even more worried. "He gave you the finished work after that, didn't he?"
"Yes." I stared at the tip of my cigarette and felt as guilty as hell. Because I'd remembered something. I'd remembered the way he'd looked when I lied about my accident. If he liked me, and I was sure that he did, then that was just one more black mark for him to list against humanity. Or the coincidence may have reminded him of what had happened to Ginney. "Is it important?"
"I don't know. It's too late now anyway. The papers have arrived and they'll be hard at work making the tests." Cottrell shook his head. "I don't like it. I don't like the way he tried to kill himself." He rose to his feet. "I want to see the professor."
It was very quiet upstairs. The proprietor had gone to bed like an honest man and we seemed to be the only living beings in the entire universe. I led the way, favoring my bad leg and striking matches to guide Cottrell. We heard the voice just as I opened the door of the professor's room. Cottrell gripped my arm as I was about to call out and we stood there, alone in the darkness, listening.
"Ginney… Ginney… Ginney…" A mutter and a restless movement on the bed. "… with you soon, darling. We'll all be with you soon… me… mummy… Tom… you Kke Tom, don't you?" I started to say something and then changed my mind. "… world's rotten, darling. Murderers… criminals… fools… all rotten. Better dead… all dead… all the same… all together…"
I stepped forward and almost cried out with the pain in my arm. Cottrell gripped me without knowing what he was doing, and after I had pulled him back into the passage and lit a match, I could see his face ghastly white and shining with sweat. He didn't speak until we were back downstairs and then only after he had seared his throat with raw tequila.
"You can't fool the subconscious," he said grimly. "You can fool the conscious but that's all. He," a jerk of the thgmb told me who he meant, "knows that Ginney is dead. He tried to deny that knowledge and we, God forgive us, helped him do it. But deep down inside he knew that she had gone for good." He saw my expression and remembered that I was no psychologist.
"The professor is an intelligent man," he explained. "To remain intelligent his mind had to be efficient, and how efficient is a mind clouded with delusion? You relieved him pf the need of maintaining that delusion and so he could finish his work. But once you had done that, he had time to be objective. He could see you as others saw him and somehow he must have realized the futility of trying to resurrect the past." He sighed. "In other words he was on the road to a cure. But there was something else. They never found out who killed his daughter, and he wanted revenge. They never found out, so you said, who injured you, and you are his friend. He wants to be with his daughter and the only way he can do that is to die. But he can't commit conscious suicide. Conflict, Tom! Conflict leading to insanity and the desperate need to find an escape from opposed problems. "And this is the man who has worked out the means to create fission in nonradioactive materials!"
I'm not stupid and I don't need a drawing, but just now I wish I was a moron, or a moth, or something brainless and untormented with thoughts of what-might-be. Cottrell has gone, driving like a madman over those rutted trails, but he knows and I know that he can't possibly be in time. So I sit, smoking, thinking, listening to the cicadas and waiting for dawn.
Maybe Cottrell is all wrong and the professor has worked out a safe formula. Or maybe Cottrell is right and the professor wants the world to go up in atomic flame so as to revenge himself on the killer of his daughter and at the same time be with her in the only way he can.

THE EYES OF SILENCE
The cell was ten feet long, eight feet high and six wide. It held the bare essentials for sleeping, washing and sanitation. The walls were coated with a spongy green plastic, almost indestructable, seamless and soundproof. The single light came from behind a transparent panel in the ceiling. The door was a sheet of one-way glass perforated with countless holes for ventilation. There was no window. It "'as the modern version of a medieval oubliette. Ward Hammond had lived in it for two years.
He lay in the inevitable prison position, supine on the narrow cot, eyes fixed on the ceiling. He was a big man, pale, muscles wasted and skin soft. He wore a loose shirt and slacks of drab gray. He had no belt, no tie, no underwear. His feet were bare. The clothing was made of paper and renewed every ten days. It tore easily and had so little mechanical strength that a rope made from it broke at the slightest strain. Suicide was actively discouraged. Insanity was not.
It was easy to go insane when locked in a narrow cell twenty-four hours a day, divorced from all human contact, fed with concentrates wrapped in edible packages which arrived, like the clothing, through a blind trap in the wall. Society had come to the conclusion that people were sent to prison to be punished and that as long as physical hardship was avoided, the punishment was justified. So, for the prisoners, the world ceased to exist. Everything ceased to exist but the narrow confines of their cells, the constant light, the constant loneliness. Insanity, to them, was literal escape.
A whisper of sound came from the corridor and Ward tensed, twisting on the cot so as to bring his ear hard against the door. The sound was unusual, for a prisoner could scream his throat raw and be heard only by the monitor guard listening over the spy mikes in each cell. The whisper came closer, magnified by a trick of acoustics, the regular beat of hard shoes. They halted outside th$*door, and Ward sat upright on the cot as it slid aside. Two men entered the cell. Ward thought he knew what they wanted.
"More tests?" He moved along the cot, making room if the others wished to sit. One of them was a quiet man with a thoughtful expression and a uniform which matched the green plastic of the walls. He held a gas gun which he kept pointed toward the prisoner. The other man^was a civilian. He wore a dark business suit and carried a folder of papers beneath his arm. He did not look like a psychiatrist but appearances meant nothing.
"No tests, at least not in the way you're thinking." The civilian hesitated between sitting on the toilet or the cot. He chose the cot. "My name is Fromach."
"You know mine," said Ward. He glanced at the guard, standing just inside the relocked door. His companion couldn't be seen, but Ward knew that he would be waiting outside. It was the classic pattern, one guard inside ready to release a cloud of stunning gas if the prisoner made an aggressive move, the other to watch from absolute safety. There could be no escape from the prison.
"Ward Hammond, engineer, sentenced to a term of seven years imprisonment for fraud. It was a nonviolent crime and so you were not automatically lobotomized on conviction," said Fromach easily. "Correct?"
"You know it is." Ward looked at the civilian. "What's all this about?"
"You have served two of your seven years," said Fromach, reading from his papers. "During that time you have proved a model prisoner, showing a high index of stability and an intelligent acceptance of your environment." He lifted his head, smiling. "In other words you haven't flown into violent rages, tried to commit suicide, beat down the walls or anything equally stupid."
"Would it have done any good if I had?"
"None at all."
"That's what I thought," said Ward. He leaned back against the wall, enjoying the company, the sound of another voice, the feel of conversation on his lips and tongue. "Acting up is the quickest way to get certified for Iobotomy."
"And automatic release," reminded Fromach. "Don't forget that."
"I came into this place a man," said Ward tightly. "I intend leaving the same, not as a brain-slashed zombie."
"A lobotomized prisoner is deemed no longer to be the individual who committed the crime for which he was sentenced," pointed out Fromach. "You could volunteer for it."
"No." Ward was curt. "And they can't do it to me unless I'm judged insane by at least two doctors. Even a prisoner has some rights."
"They will be respected," assured Fromach. "You can stay in this cell for a further five years and, if you remain sane, you will not be touched." His eyes were meaningful. "If you remain sane."
"I will."
"I wonder?" Fromach examined the cell, the green walls, the opaque door. He prodded the mattress, solidly constructed as an integral part of the immovable bed. The sanitation arrangements did not trap water, and shaving was done by a nonpoisonous cream which removed hair and stunned the follicles for several days. Ward guessed his thoughts.
"Suicide is a symptom of insanity. That's out, too."
"Seventy-eight percent of all long-term prisoners eventually attempt suicide," said Fromach mildly. "Some of the methods employed are extremely ingenious. None are successful."
"So?"
"What makes you so certain that you are different from other men? Five years is a long time, Ward. A very long time."
"I like my own company." Ward looked at the guard then at Fromach. "What are you trying to do? Is it a part of my punishment that I should be mentally disturbed by your visits?"
"No." Fromach busied himself with his papers. "I'm he£e to offer you a choice. You can stay in this cell for the remainder of your term—or you can leave here within ten days."
"Leave!" Ward's face hardened as he fought the sudden'almost overpowering blaze of hope. "Is this your idea of a joke?"
"It's no joke," said Fromach, and now he was no longer smiling. "I'm perfectly serious. The choice is yours."
"All right;" said Ward flatly. "I believe you. What's the catch?"
The spaceship cabin was, if anything, worse than the cell, but Ward didn't mind. He lay on the bunk and looked at the curved segment of the hull beyond his feet and listened to all the little, manmade sounds which filtered through from the other parts of the ship. Footsteps, the hum of conversation, a cough, an occasional laugh. Mingled with the manmade sounds were others—mechanical clickings, the soft purr of the air-conditioners, the almost inaudible vibration of the engines.
The door clicked open and Fromach entered the cabin. He locked the door behind him, looking apologetically at Ward.
"Sorry, but you are still a prisoner and the regulations have to be obeyed."
"You'll have to start trusting me soon," reminded Ward. "Why not now?"
"I know," said Fromach. "There's no logic in it, but when has officialdom ever been logical?" He sat on the edge of the bunk. "No regrets?"
"No." Ward stared at the metal of the hull. "Some questions, though."
"Such as?"
"You explained why I was chosen. I've lived for two years in solitary confiement and remained sane. That's the sort of test you couldn't give to normal volunteers. But why not use more than one man at a station?"
"Two men are out," said Fromach. "The psychological tensions would be too great, and they'd be murdering each other before the first year. Three men are better but the tensions would still exist—with complications. Two of them would gang up on the third, or one of them would think the other two were against him. It comes to the same thing. Four men? Five? Seven? Seven would work, but then we run into the supply factor. The watch stations aren't big and a multiple of seven times essential supplies is out of the question."
"Is that the only reason?"
"No. There are two other reasons. One is that it costs a lot of money to staff a watch station. A man expects to finish his five-year term rich. The pay has to be high in order to attract volunteers and even then they demand a watertight contract. Free medical attention, free entertainment, free this and free that. And no matter what happens, we have to pay for the full term."
Ward grunted. "And you said that officialdom wasn't logical! What could be more logical than offering a prisoner the chance to work out his sentence on a watch station? No arguments about pay, no extreme demands, no trouble finding a source of volunteers. Simply offer to exchange a cell on Earth for a larger one somewhere in space. Throw in a few luxuries and who would refuse? Simple." *
"Not so simple," corrected Fromach. "We have to find the right man, someone with a basic understanding of engineering and electronics, someone who has proved that he can stand being on his own for a long period and who still has many years to go before release. There aren't too many of them."
"I should have asked for more money," said Ward. "A credit a day isn't much."
"A hundredth of what a normal volunteer would expect," admitted Fromach. "But better than nothing."
"Better than I was getting." Ward frowned up at the ceiling. "What happens to the volunteers when they break? They do break, don't they?"
"Yes."
"All the timer
"Yes." Fromach was casual. "The average volunteer lasts 4|ust under two years. We pick them up, provide a relief, fetch them back for treatment."
"Lobotomy?"
"Not necessarily. Lobotomy can only be given with the full consent of the patient or his relatives. Consent is rarely given."
"No," said Ward feelingly. "It wouldn't be." He paused, a small knot of fear gathering in his stomach. "How do I stand on that?"
"You are a prisoner," said Fromach delicately. "The fact that you have chosen to serve your sentence on a watch station instead of in a prison makes no difference to your status. If you break, you will automatically be lobotomized."
Protest was useless. Modern society wasted neither pity nor sentiment on its criminals. The answer, obviously, was to remain sane. Ward looked at Fromach. "Was that the second reason?"
"What?"
"You said there were two other reasons for choosing me. You've told me one of them. Have you told me the other?"
"In a way." Fromach rose and unlocked the door. He paused with the panel half-open. "The true reason, of course, contains all the others. You're no fool, you should be able to figure out what that is."
Alone, Ward relaxed as he had learned to relax during the past two years. He didn't have to wonder what Fromach had meant. The logic was inescapable. Criminals were expendable.
The watch station was a laminated dome set on the ice of Callisto. It held instruments connected to spatial probes, instruments for cosmiray counting, instruments to measure the variations in orbit of the other eight satellites revolving around the immense bulk of Jupiter. It held instruments to record everything which went on around it, together with more instruments to record the findings on permanent tape. It also held living quarters for one man.
"We've stations like this scattered over the entire solar system," said Fromach before he left. "We've got them on every satellite, most of the large asteroids and even some in free orbit. They do nothing but collect data, and we come on regular schedule to collect the filled tapes."
"How regular?"
"Maybe once a year, two years. It doesn't matter."
"Not to the machines, it doesn't," agreed Ward. "But what about me?"
"Your job is to keep watch on the machines. Call it general maintenance."
"Janitor's work." Ward was disappointed. "Is that all?"
"It's enough." Fromach held out his hand. "Goodbye, Ward."
"I'll be seeing you." Ward gripped the proffered hand. "A couple more questions. Any radio?"
"Only for ship to station communication. The static is too bad for any distance." Fromach was impatient to get away. "Anything else?"
"One thing. What do you do with all the data you're collecting?"
"We feed it into a big computer back home. One day, when we've enough data, we'll be able to find out everything about the corner of the universe in which we live." Fromach stepped to the exit port, was gone. Minutes later the ship left, too. Ward was alone.
He didn't let it worry him. He checked the instruments and found the repair manuals. He fixed some food and brewed some coffee. He found a small library of tattered books, some magnetic, three-dimensional jigsaws; other items collected over the years by previous attendants who had their own ideas of how to relieve the monotony.
He chuckled at the assortment. None of the previous attendants had had his experience. Two years in a small cell without company, books or recreation of any kind had made him indifferent to toys. To Ward five'years in this place promised to be a snap.
At first time passed easily enough. He examined the station, read everything there was to read, played with the three-dimensional jigsaw and other toys and sampled various combinations of food from the storeroom. He everi tried to regain his lost fitness with a series of self-invented exercises. He didn't succeed. The confined quarters and lack of equipment reduced his activities to a program of bends, push-ups and muscular tension, valuable back home but here, because of the low gravity, almost useless.
The first shock came when he tried to make a closer examination of the installations.
There were no tools in the entire station. There was nothing with which he could open the paneling, dismantle the machines and get at the wiring. No means by which he could effect repairs if ever they became necessary. He searched three times, moving everything movable and opening every cabinet and locker he could find; but the results were the same. No tools. He sat down to think about it.
Fromach had lied. Perhaps not all the way but certinaly some of it. A watch station attendant was supposed to be able to maintain the station in case of need, and no one could do that without the aid of tools, so Fromach had lied. Or?
Ward relaxed as he guessed an alternative reason for the lack of tools. The previous attendant must have gone off the beam. He, himself, had been dumped in a hurry without any apparent check being made of the station. Perhaps the previous attendant had disposed of the tools in some way, thrown them outside or something. He could have done it as a last gesture of sanity to prevent himself from wrecking the installation. It was a logical explanation, but it wasn't correct There was no way to leave the station. That was the second shock, and Ward thought about it during the next few months. The air lock was sealed and could not be opened from the inside. There was no space suit, so even had the lock been workable, he still couldn't have left the dome. There was no window, and the sanitation arrangements were incapable of passing anything hard, large or inflexible. It was a problem among other problems, and every now and again he worried about it. What concerned him most was the passage of time.
Fromach had said that the relief ship called about once a year, maybe once every two years. There was a calendar clock mounted on the main panel, and Ward took to staring at it, wishing that the hands would move faster. Finally, recognizing the danger, he covered the dial with a wrapping from a food container and tried to forget that the clock existed. His training helped there. Time is a variable; it passes quickly or slowly depending on the circumstances and the individual. Anticipate and it passes slowly; forget and it speeds up. Two years in a modern oubliette without clocks, calendars or sunlight had taught him to forget time.
Bur forgetting time, unanswerable problems, questions of motive and the previous attendants of the station left a void. It became filled with loneliness.
It was a loneliness unknown anywhere on Earth. For no matter where a man might be on his home planet, he is never really alone. Always around him there is life of one kind or another. A lighthouse keeper on solitary duty is not alone, with when he can signal for help, listen to living voices, see living pictures, keep familiar pets. A prisoner, even in an oubliette, is not alone when his every word is caught and heard by monitoring guards.
A man alone in a room is not truly alone when he is surrounded by people in the same house. But a man on a sterile world, millions of miles away from his own world, utterly divorced from his own kind, is really alone. And Ward, a product of civilization, had never been truly alone before.
It began to worry him. He began to imagine every result of every circumstance. He could trip and break a bone, fall ill, need medical attention. The food could go bagl^ the water, the very air. The power could fail, and he was helpless to do anything about it. The dome could spring a leak, the ice on which it was built begin to melt. The satellite could even fall from its orbit and spira] down toward Jupiter. And no one could help him. No one would know.
It was an uncomfortable sensation and he fought against it. He busied himself about the station, dusting, polishing, looking at the rows of signal lamps on the main panel. He tried the radio, receiving, as before, nothing but a surging wash of static. He listened to it then switched off, his skin goose-pimpling to the utter emptiness of the sound. There was nothing remotely human about it, just the sea sound of empty space, of radiating atoms, distant stars, planetary fields and cold, cold emptiness.
Time passed. He ate when he was hungry, washed when he felt dirty, slept when he was able. All the time the terrible sense of loneliness gnawed into his composure so that he wanted to run, to scream, to escape in any" way he could. The previous attendants must have felt like that. They had wanted to escape, too, and they had done so in the only way possible. He could follow their example.
But if he did, the result would be automatic lobotomy and the loss of his individuality. A living death.
Ward gritted his teeth and fought even harder. He filled every minute with endless repetitions of needless activity, stacking and restacking the food cartons, dusting and redusting, polishing and repolishing until his arms ached. But nothing could fill the emptiness of the universe. Nothing could give him dreamless sleep.
And then he began to get the impression of watching eyes.
The storeroom was ten feet long, eight feet high and six wide. It normally contained enough concentrates to last a man a long time. Now the cartons were stacked in a tidy heap outside the closed door. Fromach stared at them, then at the doctor standing at his side.
"Ready?"
The doctor nodded, lifting his hypogun and touching the release. A thin spray darkened the air, drugs expelled so fast that they would penetrate clothing and skin without pain.
"Then let's get it over." Fromach opened the door and stepped into the room, the doctor at his heels. Both men jerked to a halt as Ward sat up and smiled at them.
"You took your time," he said. "I expected you days ago."
"We had to come a long way," said Fromach absently. He stared at Ward as if unable to believe his eyes. "We didn't expect to find you like this."
"You thought that I'd gone insane." Ward moved along the cot so as to make rodm for the others. He had transferred it from the sleeping quarters into the cleared storeroom. "You had a right to think that. It was a near thing."
"I can't understand it." The doctor looked a little foolish with the unwanted hypogun in his hand. He slipped it into a pocket. "We expected to find you in catatonia."
"Like the others?" Ward shrugged. "You almost did, but my training," he gestured at the replica of his cell, "and the threat of lobotomy saved me. Even so the temptation to escape in the only way possible, back into childhood and then back even further until there is nowhere to go, was almost irresistible."
"You fought it," said the doctor, "You recognized the danger and fought it. Incredible!"
"You knew," said Fromach suddenly. "Or you guessed."
"No."
"But?"
"But I know now," said Ward. He stretched, relishing the company, the nearness of others. "You lied," he. said to Fromach. "All that talk of the others, the purpose of the station even, you lied."
Fromach didn't answer.
"Living in a cell can do peculiar things to a man," said Ward. "You get so that you can sense things. I could always tell, for instance, when the monitoring guard was concentrating on my cell. I don't know how or why, I just did. Maybe when you've nothing else to do, your senses become more acute. Maybe you develop senses you didn't know you had."
"Tell me about it," said the doctor. He was impatient for the answer. "What is it that drives men insane out here?"
"Loneliness."
"Just that?'"
"Don't underestimate it." Ward stared into distance.
"And don't think you know what I'm talking about. You don't. No one who hasn't experienced it could know. I can't describe it—we just haven't the words—but it's like beino; the last man left alive in the universe. The very last living thing left. It's the ultimate in dejection. It's—" Ward shook his head.
"Loneliness," breathed the doctor. "A thing as simple as that."
"Not simple," said Ward. "The only way you could understand it is to try it for yourself. Few men can live with themselves, fewer have to; and when that loneliness hits them they can't take it. They want to run, to escape, to hide themselves away. You know what happens then."
"Catatonia," said the doctor. "I know."
"Yes," said Fromach heavily. "We know only too well." He looked at Ward. "How did you find out that I'd lied?"
"The lack of tools gave me the first clue. It was obvious then that I was here for some other reason than maintaining the station. And there were other things. You were too vague about the ship schedule for one, and there was an apparent lack of logic behind it all. Things like that. I had a lot of time to think them over." Ward paused. "I was certain when I knew that I was being watched."
"The spy eyes? But they are soundless."
"I sensed them. I told you that after a period of isolation a man gets to sense things. I was lucky, I'd learned to live with myself. But what about the others? They hadn't had the advantage of two years in prison. They were alone, they knew it, and yet they sensed something watching them. I know the state of mind they must have been in. Faced with a situation like that what else couM they do but fall apart?"
"And then?"
"I guessed the setup. This is a watch station, sure, but not in the way you said. It's designed to watch the man inside, not events outside. It's a training cell for—what?"
"For what it should be but isn't," said Fromach bitterly. "For men to crew the ships we hope one day to send beyond where we are. To other stars across interstellar space. Long journeys requiring special ships and special men. And more than that. Men must learn to live with themselves if they are to live at all. We're out of the nest now, out of the cradle. It's time we discovered how to grow up."
"You can't change people," said Ward slowly. "I survived only because I had the sense to retreat to a familiar environment. One in which I'd learned to live alone. Others retreat back into the womb." He looked at his hands. "What happens now?"
"You're free. Special reduction of sentence for unusual duties."
"Thanks."
"You've earned it," said Fromach.
"And the problem?"
"We'll solve it. We'll—" Fromach broke off, staring at Ward, suddenly remembering that what a man knew he could usually teach. Ward had survived where the others had failed. "Ward?"
"We'll solve it," promised Ward.

ENCHANTER'S ENCOUNTER
Mark arrived late at the party. Two last minute patients and an urgent call from a would-be suicide had thrpwn his schedule to hell, so that when he arrived only a handful of people still sat in the big living room surrounded by the wreck of what had obviously been something to remember. Gloria would remember it later, that was ,qertain. She and Bill were generous, but generosity alone wasn't sufficient to clear up the mess. She squeezed his arm as he entered the flat.
"Mark! It's good to see you. I was beginning to think that you weren't coming."
"I'm sorry." He made his apologies. "Is Sandra still here?"
"She's talking to Doctor Lefarge." Gloria squeezed his arm again. "When's it to be, Mark?"
"Whenever I can persuade her that marrying me will compensate for all the tinsel she thinks that she'll be missing if she does." His tone was too bitter; he softened it as Bill thrust a glass into his hand. "Thanks."
Bill had a good memory. The vermouth and gin were just as he liked them and just what he needed. The hum of conversation from the group in the corner washed over him, a blur of words without meaning, the conversation subdued as if they talked of mysterious and secret things. It broke as Mark walked toward them.
"Mark!" Sandra rose, came toward him, proffered her cheek for his kiss. She was very young, very lovely, her pale skin and thick, black hair giving her the appearance of an Italian Madonna. "So glad that you could make it, darling. Have you met the company?"
Mark stood, feeling a little foolish, as she made the introductions. As usual she gave him a title to which he had no right; he doubted if she would ever learn that a psychiatrist and a psychologist were not the same, that the former requires a medical degree which he did not possess.
"Jim Taylor, he's an engineer," she rattled. "Sam Klien, advertising. Lorna Lamber, a medium. Ram Putah sells things from India, and this," she added triumphantly, "is Doctor Lefarge."
Mark disliked the man on sight.
He looked too much like Mephistopheles. Thin black hair hugged a narrow skull, sweeping down over a high forehead in an exaggerated widow's peak. Thick eyebrows had an upward slant. The moustache and beard were trimmed and pointed, the face itself cadaverous. He was, thought Mark sourly, a poseur, his appearance owing more to artifice than to nature.
"Doctor Conway?" His hand was slender, surprisingly strong as it gripped Mark's own.
"I'm not a doctor." As usual when Sandra effected the introductions, Mark had to explain himself. "I have no medical degree. Sandra is always making the same mistake."
"I understand." The eyes were black, deep-set beneath jutting brows, pouched with dark circles. "It is a common error. I am, myself, a doctor of philosophy." The eyes sharpened. "We have met before, Mr. Conway."
"I doubt it." Mark searched his memory. "No. I cannot say that we have."
"I assure you otherwise," insisted Lefarge. "Perhaps before long you will remember."
The group reformed, the others sitting like disciples at the feet of Lefarge, their drinks forgotten as they talked, their talk hinging on one subject It was a subject Mark found distasteful.
"I have yet to discover one single individual who has gained any benefit from the pursuit of esoteric knowledge," he said deliberately. "I omit those who have grown rich pandering to the whims of the credulous. With all due respect to the genuine mystics I feel that they have paid too high a price from their peace of mind."
"Such as?" Lefarge was interested.
"A withdrawal from reality. You must accept the world for what it is. To try and escape from it has only one ending."
"To you, then, the mystics are insane?"
"They are not normal. Abnormality is usually suspect."
"Isn't it necessary to first define 'normality'?" Ram Pu.tah said gently. Lefarge spoke before Mark could answer.
"There are many doors through which one may seek knowledge. It is not easy to determine which of those doors can yield the truth."
"And you, naturally, have discovered that door?"
If Lefarge caught the irony he didn't reveal it. He smiled, thin lips rising from too white, too sharp teeth. "I think that I have, Mr. Conway."
"Diabolism, perhaps?"
Again the smile, but there was no humor in it. Beside him Mark felt Sandra grip his arm as if in warning. The impression annoyed him, why was she so taken in by this posturing fool?
"Diabolism, Mr. Conway? May I ask what has given you that impression?"
For a moment Mark was tempted to tell him. Lefarge wouldn't have been the first man to try and gain power by imitation. The legend of Faust had a lot to answer for. Too many weaklings, striving after some outward show of strength, tried to emulate the so-called Prince of Darkness.
"I have met those who have made similar claims," he said carefully. "Many of them have been my patients."
"I see." Reflections from the subdued lighting made Lefarge's eyes glow as with an inner fire. "Tell me, Mr. Conway," he said. "If you were a medical man and a patient came to you badly injured from conducting amateur chemical experiments, would you deride chemistry?"
"Of course not." Mark recognized the trap. "The analogy isn't germane."
"Isn't it?" Lefarge shrugged. "There are many who would not agree with you. But, for your information, true knowledge has the same relationship to diabolism as medical science has to phlebotomy. Would you claim that it is never necessary to bleed a patient?"
Again Mark avoided the trap. "Truth is a thing of many facets," he said. "Each seemingly different and yet each belonging to the whole. To claim that there is only one path to knowledge is to make a false statement. In other words—to tell a barefaced lie!"
"What is truth?" Ram Putah lifted his hands. "The things we see, the things we feel, are they truth or illusion? I can dismiss them by closing my eyes. Can they then be real?"
"If I were to take a knife and stab you with it, you would have few doubts."
"Only because I have yet to reach the pure state of knowledge in which I could deny the reality of your knife."
Mark shrugged. He had argued like this before and always it was the same. The feeling that he was chasing the moving rim of a circle, that the faster he ran the less progress he made. Long ago he had determined that to argue against faith was to argue against nature.
The drink in his hand had grown warm. He swallowed it, rose, crossed the where Gloria stood beside the cocktail cabinet. Behind him the hum of conversation sounded as before, low, muted, secretive.
He mixed himself a drink, swallowed it, helped himself to another. Gloria touched his arm.
"Don't let it get you, Mark."
"I won't." He jerked his head toward the group. "Where did you find him? I didn't think that you went in for weirdies, Gloria."
"Sandra brought him." She took his just emptied glass, refilled it, handed it back. "It's nothing serious, Mark, you know how she is."
"I know." He gulped half the drink. "Nothing normal is good enough for her. She's got to feel important, the top of the heap, and so she collects a gang of freaks and poseurs." He drained the glass. "Can't she realize that they're just using her?"
"She'll learn, Mark."
"Will she?"
He was bitter, angry, irritable and, he knew, a little jealous. Damn Lefarge for what he was and what he pretended to be. Theatrical makeup and a smooth line of gl$H ambiguous conversation, and he had power over all neurotics who found life too tough and hoped to find an easy way to what they wanted. And he used them, taking them for the fools they were.
"Don't blame Sandra." Gloria was concerned. Mark handed her his empty glass.
"I don't blame her. It's just that I'm in love with her."
"Then why don't you do something about it?"
"Like wfyat? I've asked her to marry me. She says to wait. Should I kidnap her? Hypnotize her? Drug her? Damn it, Gloria, I want her more than anything I know, but what's the good of my wanting her if she doesn't want me?"
"You're the psychologist, Mark. You tell me." She poured him a drink; it was almost pure gin. "You know," she said thoughtfully, "no woman likes to think that she's been made a fool of."
"So?"
"So you just telling her that she's a fool won't do any good at all. The more she thinks of you the less she'll want to admit that she's been wrong."
"Elementary psychology," he sneered, then immediately was sorry. "Forgive me," he apologized. "You're right, of course, but what can I do? Join up with that gang of self-deluders? Begin to practice black magic? Make myself over to look like the devil? Hell, Gloria, I can't do it!"
"No," agreed Gloria. "I suppose not." She glanced to where the group sat, heads close, almost whispering their conversation. Bill was out in the kitchen, probably making coffee. Mark finished his drink. Gloria poured him another. "Lefarge seems to know you," she said. "Does he?"
"No."
"But-"
"It's just a gimmick," he said savagely. "A trick. Claim that you remember something the other man doesn't and you have him at a disadvantage. Either he thinks you're lying or he doubts his own memory. If there is no point in you lying, then he'll just doubt his memory."
"And Lefarge?"
"He's lying. I've never seen him before in my life." He stared at Gloria. "You think that he isn't?"
"I don't know." She bit her lower lip. "It's just that before you arrived he announced your arrival and described you exactly. How could he have done that if he'd never seen you?"
"Sharp ears. You've a lift at the end of the passage. He could have heard it stop and made a guess. He knew that I was expected."
"But he described you. How could he have done that?"
"He knows Sandra, doesn't he?" Mark found himself trembling with rage. "She has a photograph of me—beside her bed."
"Mark!"
"Forget it!" He swallowed his drink. He felt a little giddy. He hadn't eaten and had been working under stress; the alcohol was taking quick effect.
Back in the group he found the conversation to be what he expected. He wasn't surprised. With a man like Lefarge it was the obvious topic. Magic, witchcraft, the uttering of spells and the ritual surrounding the whole, stunid business.
"We were talking of the meaning of truth," said Lefarge as Mark rejoined the group. "If we stipulate that truth is the opinion held by the majority, then magic is very real. There are even laws against it. Would there be laws against something which does not exist?"
"Possible," said Mark. "The Law's an ass, remember?"
"Since the dawn of history people have believed in magic," pointed out Taylor. "How long have they believed in the other sciences?"
"For a long time people believed that the sun went around the Earth. There must have been a hell of a lot of shifting around in space these past few years."
"You deride the true science," said Lorna. The medium closed her eyes as if wanting no part of the conversation.
"I deride only things worthy of derision." Mark felt his anger mounting. It was more than a personal anger; fools like this did more harm than they knew. "Now, I suoHose, you are going to say that witchcraft is also a thin<? to respect?"
Lefarge raised his eyebrows.
"Oh, I .know all about the sympathetic magic used to back witchcraft." snapped Mark. "Natives in Africa being hexed to death, stuff like that. All right, I'll grant you that it can happen and does. I'll admit that in cultures which believe in that power that power seems to exist. But not in our culture. Never that."
"They burned witches in Lancaster/' reminded Sandra.
"They burned dogs and hens, too. Were they witches? Fear caused that. Fear and revulsion. Witches!" Mark's laugh was ugly. "Filthy old women with their ridiculous ceremonies and their disgusting ingredients for their so-called charms. All the hogwash of secret societies: the covens, the adepts, the initiates, all the rest of it. And all the time each has to cover up for the other. Do you get chemists talking of their work in guarded whispers and ambiguous phrases. No. They come out with facts and can prove what they claim? Do witches? Ask and you get a lot of veiled nonsense, a jumble of double-talk and gobbledygook."
"Would you give a child a pistol to play with? Would you teach them how to make nitroglycerine?" Lefarge smiled as he posed the question. He was in full control of himself, the anger Mark had hoped to arouse had recoiled so that he was the one in a temper, not the other man.
"I expected that," he said bitterly. "Why don't you bring out the one about the powers of darkness? Or the dangers of the inexperienced toying with forces they do not understand?"
"Please, Mark!" Sandra was angry. "That has already been explained. You are only making yourself look foolish."
"I am?" He glanced at her, hating the way she looked at Lefarge. He looked at the others and hated them all. Anger burned within him like a flame. "We were talking of witchcraft," he said deliberately. "And that leads us to spells. Do you believe in the power of a spell?"
"Naturally," said Lefarge calmly. "As much as you believe in the healing power of a medical prescription."
"You always have an answer, don't you?" Mark tried not to let his anger dull his intellect. It wasn't easy. Between himself and Lefarge seemed to exist one of those immediate antagonisms so that, no matter what the man did or said, to Mark it was suspect.
"Yes," said Lefarge. He was smiling. "I always have an answer—as you should well know."
"Why should I? We are strangers."
"Not strangers." The too white, too sharp teeth shone from between the thin lips. "Certainly not strangers." He leaned forward, his eyes searching Mark's face. "Tell me, do you still not remember?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure." Mark blinked, conscious of the effect of too much alcohol taken too quickly, the power of suggestion and the impact of the dark eyes. He shook his head. Lefarge was only a man who tried to make himself impressive by his superficial appearance. The others were what they would always be, dupes for a stronger personality. He looked at the girl beside him. Sandra was so warm, so lovely, so entranced by the posturing fool with his theatrical airs.
And he thought of a way to end that infatuation.
"You believe in the power of a spell," he said abruptly to Lefarge. "That and the rest of the nonsense you talk about. Very well, I offer you a challenge."
"Indeed?"
"Put your hex on me. When it fails admit yourself for the charlatan you are."
"Take it easy, Mark." Gloria stood behind him. "Let's not get personal about this."
"I'm sorry." Mark remembered that he was a guest and that Lefarge was another. The common rules of politeness dictated that he restrain his emotions. "But I just want this character to understand."
"You leave no doubt as to that." Lefarge glanced at Sandra; was there triumph in his eyes? "Are you quite certain you know what you propose?"
"Quite certain. Put up or shut up. Do I make myself clear?"
"Quite clear." Lefarge was smiling, and Mark wanted to punch him in the mouth.
Then Bill' came in with the coffee and the tension was over.
Mark woke with a headache and a vague sense that something was wrong. He groaned and sat upright, fumbling for his cigarettes, inhaling the acrid smoke and sitting with his head between his hands as he waited for the pain to die.
It didn't die. If anything it grew worse until he felt like beating his head against the wall to ease the savage throbbing. He crawled out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom, filled the washbowl with cold water and plunged in his head. It helped but not enough. He straightened, water running from head to torso, soaking into his pajama jacket. He stripped off the garment, found aspirin, swallowed a dozen tablets. Blearily he looked at himself in a mirror.
Mark Conway, thirty-five years old, practicing psychologist and disbeliever in all forms of magic stared back at him.
And something looked over his shoulder.
He turned so fast that he almost fell, the pain in his head flaring to a pitch so intense that he clutched at the bowl for support. There was nothing behind him. He turned slowly, staring at every inch of the bathroom. Nothing but what he expected to see. He looked into the mirror again and fought the impression that, as he looked, something ducked down behind him.
Carefully he began to wash and shave.
The party last night, he remembered that. He remembered other things, too: Lefarge, Sandra's infatuation for the man, his own, ridiculous challenge. He paused, the toothbrush half raised, thinking about it. Idly he wondered what Lefarge would do. Go through the motions, he supposed; after all, what had he to lose? Perhaps he had already started. Well, if he had, so what?
So nothing, except that the impression that he was not alone grew stronger. Twice while dressing he imagined that he saw something in the wardrobe mirror. Three times he spun in a sudden, complete circle, eyes searching for what was not there. On the way to the office he had to make a conscious effort to stop looking over his shoulder. Myra, his receptionist, looked at him strangely as he entered the office.
, "Good morning, Mr. Conway." She looked at a point just above and beyond his right shoulder, blinked, re-focused her eyes.
"Anything wrong?"
"Why no, Mr. Conway. Why do you ask?"
"You look as if you've just seen a ghost." He picked up his opened mail, riffled it. "Did you?"
"Did I what, Mr. Conway?"
"Did you see anything when I came in? Anything unusual."
"Of course not. Nothing at all."
He dropped his mail. It was the usual collection of bills, circulars and pathetic letters from people who wanted help but who only wanted it on their terms. He glanced at his watch; the first appointment was about due.
"Anything wrong, Mr. Conway?"
He looked at Myra. "Why do you ask that?"
"No real reason." Her eyes strayed to a point over his right shoulder. "It's just that you look a little under the weather."
"Hangover." He rubbed his right eye. Something blurred the corner, as if he were trying to see something just beyond range of his vision. He resisted the impulse to turn. "That and a touch of liver, probably. Forget it."
He went into the inner office.
Mark loved his work. He enjoyed the responsibility, the sense of achievement, the fact that each new case was a challenge to his knowledge and skill. With his hands, his voice, with hypnotism and suggestion, with gentleness and understanding, with drugs, when he had to use them, administered by old Doctor Chandler down the hall, he fought to mend broken minds, restore shattered confidence, to tear down the walls of illusion and fantasy behind which so many of his patients hid themselves from reality.
His clientele was varied. He 'tva& Yvis sV>are oS neurotics who imagined that it was smart to waste their time and him on endless analysis. He suffered them because they paid the bills and because they genuinely imagined they needed help. He gave them the psychological equivalent of the placebos Chandler prescribed for his own hypochondriacs.
But it was the other cases which made his work worthwhile. The housewife who was on the verge of using the oven for purposes other than cooking. The man who was afraid of his family. The child who wet the bed. The impotent male. The frigid female. The temporarv amnesiac. The paranoiac. The manic and depressive. The man who was afraid of voices.
He sat and looked at Mark with scared, wild eyes. He was sullen, weary, defiant in a semishameful way. He expected to be laughed at.
"They made me come," he said dully. "They" were the magistrate and probation officer of the court to wMch he'd been taken after screaming abuse in a church. "They said I was to see you."
"I understand." Mark resisted the imrmlse to turn his head. The blur at the edge of his sight was growing annoying. "Now, how about tellino: me all about it?"
It was the old, familiar story. The voices echoing in the ears. The dreams. The mounting; sense of fear because of what was happening. The final, desperate appeal to perform the rite of exorcism. The anger and abuse when the priest had refused. Mark had heard it all, in one form or another, manv times before.
"Do you believe that T can help you?"
"They said you could." The man was sullen.
"Do you believe that I can?" Mark radiated friendliness. Unless this poor devil believed in the power of the psychologist then they would be both wasting their time.
"You're not a priest," said the man suddenly. "How can vou do anvthing?"
"I can exorcise vour trouble."
"But if you're not a priest how—?"
"They sent you to me," reminded Mark gently. "Would they have done that if I couldn't help you?"
The man reluctantly agreed. The power of Authority had been leveled against him; he had no further defense. A more intelligent man would have argued, but then, a more intelligent man would have realized that the voices were only the product of his own brain, the "spirits" things of his own imagination.
It would take a long time and tremendous patience to convince him of that.
Sandra phoned late in the afternoon. "Mark! Are you all right?"
"Of course I am." He relaxed at the sound of her voice. "Darling, will you marry me?"
"Please, Mark, I'm serious."
"So am I."
"I'm worried about you." She did not, he noted, pursue the subject. "Did you have a good night?"
"I had a hell of a night." After leaving the party he had consoled himself with a bottle. He heard the catch of her breath and explained himself.
"Nothing else?"
"Nothing. No bogeymen, no demons, no visitations. Did you expect anything different?"
"Are you sure, Mark?" Her voice was strained. "Are you sure that there isn't something you haven't told me?"
"Positive." He jerked his head in reflex action, the blur at the edge of his sight more pronounced than ever. tLooks as if Lefarge's hex, whatever it is, is a washout. Maybe he didn't use fresh baby fat or couldn't get any genuine virgin's blood."
"Please, Mark, don't talk like that."
"Why"not?" He caught himself about to look over his shoulder. "What have I got to be respectful about? Lefarge's hocus-pocus doesn't impress me one little bit. Personally I think the man is a fool."
"He could be'dangerous, Mark."
"Say's who?" He was jealous and he knew it. He forced himself to be calm. "Listen, darling, his theatricals may impress some people, but I can see right through them. Results are what count. So far I haven't seen any and I won't see any. You can tell your tame wizard that he's wasting his time."
For a moment he thought that he had gone too far and cursed himself for being a fool. Surely he knew enough of the workings of the human mind to avoid causing anger and irritation? Sandra was a mistaken idiot, but that was only a part of her facade. What inner weakness, he wondered, caused her to chase after such a phoney as Lefarge? What did he have, what could he give, that Mark himself lacked?
"Mark." He was surprised at the seriousness of her voice. "I want you to apologize to Doctor Lefarge."
"You what?"
"I want you to apologize to him. Please, Mark, do it for me."
"You must be insane!" His anger grew as he thought about it. "You must know that I could never do a thing like that."
"For me, Mark! Do it for me!"
"So that I can be proved wrong?" He felt sick as he realized the implications of what she was asking. "Does he mean so much to you? Would you have me crawl to beg his forgiveness? Damn it, Sandra, are you in love with him?"
The silence grew, legthened, so that he began to think she had left the phone. Then; "I'm afraid for you, Mark. So afraid."
"Answer my question. Are you in love with him?"
"Take care, darling," she whispered. "Please take care."
Then there was the click and hum of the broken connection. Slowly he replaced the handset Sandra! In love with that fool!
He blinked, the blur at the edge of his vision refusing to vanish. He blinked again, then jerked his head sharply to the right.
And saw what stood behind him.
Doctor Chandler put down the optometer and sat looking at Mark.
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
"Nothing to tell." Mark buttoned his shirt and knotted his tie. He was in Chandler's surgery, the glistening instruments and cabinets giving the room a clinical appearance. He didn't mind that. In this room he felt at home. It was a sane, organized, reassuring room. A room containing the fruits of logic and scientific reasoning.
"Nothing?" Chandler raised shaggy eyebrows. "Your yell could be heard all over the building. Myra rushes in here screaming that you're dead. I find you in your office in a dead faint. Revived you asked me to check you over and to test your eyes. And now you tell me there's nothing to tell."
He was offended. They had been friends for a long time, ever since Mark had taken office space down the corridor and had arranged with the medical man to administer the drugs and infections he was forbidden to by law. It was a friendship Mark valued; he tried to save it.
"Just overwork, I guess." He donned his jacket. "I went to a party last night and hit the bottle afterward. Woke up with a raging headache and haven't felt right all day. Guess I must have shouted as I fell."
"You guess?"
"I can't remember just what happened," said Mark. "I've been having a little trouble with my eyes, nothing much, but I thought I'd get you to look at them, seeing, as how I was here."
Chandler grunted. He opened a drawer and took out a bottle and two glasses. He filled them both, passed one to Mark and picked up the other.
"To health," he said. Then: "What are you afraid of, Mark?''
"Me? Afraid?"
"You fainted. There's nothing physically wrong with you." Chandler sipped at his whiskey. "I saw your face," he said casually. "What are you afraid of?"
"Nothing."
"And you a psychologist?" Chandler shook his head. "Why lie to yourself? Every man has something he fears. Snakes, insects, insecurity, each of us has a buried dread." He looked at the liquid in his glass. "You looked to me like a man who has suddenly met it face to face."
"Yes." Mark felt sweat bead his forehead.
"You know your trade," said Chandler. "You don't want me prescribing for you. But one thing I will prescribe. Go home. Go to bed. Get some rest."
"A good idea." Mark finished his drink. He almost dropped the glass as something edged his vision. He left before Chandler could ask more awkward questions.
The something didn't go away. It remained with him, riding at the very edge of sight, but this time Mark didn't swing his head to try and see it in full view. He had done that once and had seen what he wanted to forget.
Whiskey could help him do that He bought a bottle and took it up to his flat. The phone rang as he closed the door.
"Yes?"
There was no answer. The line hummed with a cold emptiness and, after a while, there was a click and the familiar burring of an open line.
Halfway through the bottle he began to grow cold.
It was an actual, physical coldness, with goose-pimples rising on his skin and his teeth chattering within his head. He swallowed another glass of whiskey, waited for it to warm his stomach and, when it didn't rose from his chair and looked out of the window.
It was late, almost midnight, but it was summer and the few pedestrians on the street wore light clothes. He went to a cupboard and found an electric fire. He plugged it in and watched as the elements grew red. He held his hands close to the glowing bar. It helped but not very much.
First the thing at the edge of his vision. Now the strange coldness. Lefarge?
Mark wished that he hadn't thought of the thing at the edge of his vision. He had been trying to forget, sitting with his back hard against a wall, drinking whiskey, letting his mind drift free. Good therapy, he told himself. Don't try to forget. You can never forget. Just don't try to remember. He had given that advice a thousand times. He wished that he could follow it.
He turned his head away from the blur at the edge of his vision. He closed his eyes and moved his head back toward the right. He opened his eyes and felt relief at seeing onlv the hatefully familiar blur. It was odd that he should feel relief, but it was better, far better, that the thing should remain a blur.
He shivered, not wholly from the cold.
He started at the sound of his doorbell. For a moment he hesitated, wondering what new thing was about to happen, then, as the ring was repeated, he rose, crossed the room and opened the door. Ram Putah stood outside.
"Good evening, Mr. Conway." His English was faultless. "I must apologize for the lateness of the hour. May I enter?"
"Sure." Mark waited until the man had entered then gestured with the bottfe in his hand. "Want a drink?"
"Thank you, no." The Indian gazed impassively at the electric fire. He turned, surveying the room, his eyes drifting to a spot just above and behind Mark's shoulder. They fell to't^e bottle he had subconsciously carried as a weapon. "Mr. Conway," he said abruptly. "I have come to warn you. Doctor Lefarge is a very dangerous man."
"You too?" Mark crossed the room to his drink and swallowed it. "Warnings seem to be the order of things today. Perhaps you would tell me—just how is that charlatan dangerous?"
"He is a man obsessed with the desire for power," said the Indian. "Such men are always dangerous." He glanced behind lvm, found a chair, sat down without invitation. "Mr Conway. you are a psychologist. Do you underrate" the power of the human mind?"
"Of course not."
"Lefarge has a powerful mind." 't
"So." X
"I would not like to see a man such as yourself burn himself on the heat of flames he does not understand."
"Interesting." Mark helped himself to more whiskey. The glass clattered against his teeth as he drank. It rattled as he set it down. The cold had grown to a point where he felt as if cased in ice. "Tell me, are you a friend of Lefarge?"
"No."
"So this warning isn't in the nature of a buildup? I mean, you aren't trying to scare me?"
"I am trying to warn you."
"Of what? Of spells, mumbo jumbo, incantations, witches' brews? Are you trying to warn me against things which do not exist?" Mark paced the floor. He found it impossible to keep still. The cold was too intense for that, but the exertion did little to warm him. Automatically he turned to the left, away from the blur in his sight.
"They exist, Mr. Conway, make no mistake about that. What you call magic is a very real thing. It would be foolish of you not to admit it."
"Are you trying to convert me?"
"Only to a realization of your danger. You are in danger, Mr. Conway, and I think that you know it."
"From Lefarge's hex? Rubbish!"
"Rubbish?" The Indian leaned forward. "Then tell me, Mr. Conway, why are you so afraid of what stands behind you?"
The streets were deserted, the lights few and far between, the night wasted until close to dawn. Mark walked on the pavement, hugging his overcoat tightly around him, staring straight ahead. The blur in his sight was clearer now, as if whatever caused it walked more to his side than behind. The same thing he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. The reason why he had fainted in the office. A hint of which Ram Putah had discerned with, so he had claimed, his mystic sight.
And the cold was a physical agony.
Cold and something horrible just behind him. Had Lefarge caused this?
Could magic be responsible?
Ram Putah had said that it could. He had said much more than that, talking in his faultless English, making the ridiculous seem normal. And, because he had no obvious ax to grind, Mark had listened and, finally, understood.
Magic was real.
But magic was what you chose to call it.
Utter a spell, close a switch and, lo! the demons of light brought forth brilliance. Electric light would have been magic to a bygone age. Mix a mess of sprouting mold, coat it on a wound, appeal to the spirits of healing—and penicillin would take care of the rest. Crush a toad and get a heart medicine, adrenaline, still used together with digitalis contained in the foxglove, another witches' standby.
Magic—or a fumbling pharmacopoeia?
Alchemists had mixed their brews to the accompaniment of incantations—and from alchemy had risen chemistry.
Magicians drew pentagrams and mathematicians drew equations, and both had their jargon.
Magic—or science?
Science Mark could understand, could use and respect. Magic he had always derided as a thing of arrant supersitition and wishful nonsense.
vfiut not everyone was a scientist. A child could play with wires and tubes and never manage to build a radio. A man could mix chemicals and never find the combination he sought, the results he desired. They would be working with the right tools but with insufficient knowledge.
And a child could electrocute himself. A man blow himself apart. Should electronics and chemistry be derived because of that?
Or because of failure to produce any results at all? The concrete was hard beneath his feet, but Mark welcomed the hardness. It spoke of reality, of things he knew and understood.
Not like the cold which chilled his blood.
The thing which lurked at the edge of his vision.
Had magic done that?
Had science?
He paused and looked up at the building in which Sandra lived. Sandra whom he loved almost to distraction and who said that she loved him but who probably now loved Lefarge instead. Sandra who believed in magic and who, in a way, was responsible for the cold and the thing at which he dared not look.
The outer door was open, the night porter asleep. Mark crept past the man and climbed the stairs. He made, no sound on the thick carpet, none as he walked down the corridor. He paused at her flat and tried the door. It was locked. He had expected that. He drew out his keys, found the one he sought and slipped it into the lock. Once she had given him her key and he had mislaid it. When he had found it, some subconscious impulse had urged him to keep it. The door opened silently inward.
The hall was dark, the air heavy with the scent of incense. Her bedroom was to the right, gently he opened the door and stared at the empty bed. A light glowed on the bedside table. His eyes flickered to it then back to the bed. It was smooth, the pillow unmarked. A nightdress lay over the counterpane.
He found her in the room she called the study and which he had never entered. Painted tapestries lined the walls; a parody of an altar stood against the backdrop of a Balinese grave cloth; chalk marks grimed the floor. The reek of incense was stifling; the flickering light of ebon candles the sole illumination.
In the fitful light Sandra looked like a corpse.
She wasn't dead. She lay outstretched on the floor, unconscious or asleep, he couldn't tell which. Heavy curtains masked the windows and he drew them, letting in the faint light of early dawn. The sash resisted at first, then opened with a bang. Cold morning air caused the flames of the candles to waver, eddied about the room, cleared it of the sickly stench of incense. Mark stooped over the girl. She was naked beneath a thin robe, the long, smooth lines of her body delineated by the silk. Her hair was disheveled; the thick, black strands stark against the pallor of her face. Her eyes were closed, the lashes looking like black butterflies on her cheeks. She was so lovely that it didn't seem possible.
Deliberately he raised his hand and slapped her cheek. "Sandra!"
She stirred, whimpering a little from the pain. Again he slapped her, the impact of his hand leaving red marks against the white. "Sandra! Wake up!"
"Mark!" She looked at him, startled, one hand lifting to touch her face. "What?"
"Get up," he said harshly. "Get dressed."
"But-"
"Do as I say."
Impatiently he lifted her to her feet and pushed her toward the door. Alone he stared about the room, feeling disgust and pity at what it told him. Sandra was a witch.
Not a good one, perhaps, not a skilled practitioner at her chosen art, but she had wished to emulate the masters, had hidden herself away to perform the rituals, conduct the ceremonies, go through the motions. Ip» this room she had debased herself, breathed air tainted with drugs, until emotional hysteria coupled with the vitiated air had resulted in a state of semiconsciousness and coma in which she had dreamed dreams and experienced nightmares.
But to her those dreams would have had the aspect of real experiences. She would have gained a false sense of power, of having intimate knowledge of things unguessed at by the normal world.
She was deluding herself. She was the child trying to build with components others had assured her would work, but she lacked the elementary knowledge of what she was trying to do. She was the amateur chemist who could blind or burn herself—by accident. But it went deeper than that.
She was a seeker after a path to power, and she dared not, for her own sanity, admit that the path she had chosen was anything but what she hoped it would be. But, believing in that path, her sanity was also in danger. For unless she gained concrete results, she would be forced to live in a world of illusion in which she would deny reality.
Schizophrenia was inevitable.
Mark walked about the room. He picked up a withered bunch of twigs and herbs. He threw it down and examined a murky bottle half-filled with what appeared to be ink. He discarded it for an ornate dagger razor-edged and hilted with brass. He stared at it for a long moment then slipped it into his pocket.
He blew out the guttering candles and wiped his foot over the chalked diagrams on the floor. He extinguished the smoldering incense and opened wide the door, so that the morning air could cleanse the room.
Sandra waited for him in the bedroom.
She had dressed and tidied her hair and had even applied makeup, so that her lips looked as if they had recently tasted blood. She sat on the edge of the bed, a cigarette between her fingers, her eyes on the floor. He put his hand beneath her chin and lifted her head.
"Why, Sandra?"
"I was trying to help you." Her voice was little more than a whisper. "I was summoning ppwers to guard you against—"
"Lefarge?"
"She nodded.
"Thank you for trying to help." He was gentle. "But I didn't mean that. Why do this at all?"
She didn't answer but he could guess. Lonely, without family or the security which a family could give, needing to feel wanted and important, chasing after the false glamour of being different. It was exciting to be a witch. It was novel and amusing, and it set her up above her friends. It gave her the comfort of possessing a secret knowledge and it supplied a jargon to talk with others of similar professed beliefs.
And, on the face of it, it was such a harmless thing to do. Who, in this day and age, would take witchcraft seriously? Everyone knew how harmless it was.
Harmless?
He shivered to the cold numbing his bones and felt terror as the blur in his sight began to advance across his vision.
He blinked and the blur retreated until it remained a blur. He took her hands and held them and fastened her eyes with his own.
"You have known Lefarge for a long time, haven't you?"
"Yes, Mark, a long time."
"You have talked to him. Told him about us. Told him all about me?"
She nodded.
"Why did you give him my photograph?"
Her eyes darted to the empty frame on the bedside table. They held guilt when they returned. He tightened his grip on her hands.
"Didn't you know what power you were giving him?"
"He took it, Mark. He demanded it and I couldn't refuse. He—"
"He threatened you with—something?" The pattern 't#as plain. Profess a belief in the power of spells and the threat of a spell will terrify. Sandra believed in witchcraft and so had made herself vulnerable to those she considered to be her superiors in the mystic arts. But there had to be something else. He probed, questioned, used all his trained skill to discover what it was. Lefarge must at one time have given her proof of his power. It came as a shock to find what it was.
"He made something for me." Like others, Sandra found relief in confession. "He—" She pulled free her hands, rose, went to a small cabinet. She returned with something in her hands. "He made this."
It was a bundle of thin twigs bound at each end with human hair and sealed with black wax. The twigs were wrapped around a variety of contents: a tie, a bloodstained handkerchiefrüair and fingernail clippings in transparent bags, threads of fabric from a suit. He held it in his hands and looked at her. He knew what it was. He had written a treatise on such things while at college, a psychological study on certain aspects of superstition.
It was a love charm.
Delicately he probed at the contents of the twig bundle. The tie he recognized; the handkerchief bore his monogram, his blood. He remembered when he had cut a finger and used it for a hasty bandage. Sandra had taken charge of it and promised to wash it for him. The hair? He could guess that it was his. The threads had come from one of his suits. The clippings? Sandra had once given him a manicure.
But there was only half a tie. The handkerchief had been ripped down the center.
"Lefarge made this for you? Why?"
"I wanted you," she said simply. "You didn't seem to be interested in me so—"
"So you had him make you a love charm," he said bitterly. "Did you honestly think that this was necessary? That it would work?"
"You love me," she pointed out. "You asked me to marry you—after the charm was made."
"I would have done that in any case," he said dully. Then: "Why didn't you marry me when I asked?"
"Because—" She bit her lip, tears glistening in her eyes. "Oh, Mark, can't you understand?"
Holding the thing in his hand, he could understand well enough. Burn the charm and the charm and the love it was supposed to generate would die with it. But Sandra hadn't destroyed the charm even though she had gained what she wanted, or what she had imagined she wanted. Did she refuse to marry him for fear that he didn't really love her, that he was attracted to her only because of the charm?
Surely she was woman enough to be wanted for herself alone? Was the charm, the thing she believed holding him to her, the thing which also kept them apart?
Mark hoped that it was.
He thrust the thing into his pocket and rose and looked down at her.
"Get your coat," he ordered. "Take me to Lefarge."
"But-"
"Take me to Lefarge."
It was a long way through narrow streets and winding alleys to a small house with a lowering roof and a door heavily carved in mystic symbols. The dawn had strengthened as they walked, the city-bred birds greeting it as enthusiastically as their country cousins, and it was early day when they arrived. Mark stared at the house. Two windows flanked the door. Three windows ran below the low roof. All were closely shuttered.
"Sandra, do you have a key?" /
"No. Shall I knock?"
"And warn Lefarge?" Mark stepped to one of the lower windows and tried to peer into the room. Thick curtains blocked his view. He took the dagger from his pocket and forced the blade beneath the sash. The wood was old, rotten. It yielded to the pressure of the steel. Mark strained, moved the dagger, strained again. The lock yielded with a snap.
The room was small, smelling of must and damp; a library from the books which lined the walls. Mark closed the window, drew the curtains and, by the flame of his cigarette lighter, found his way to the door. Sandra, breathing unevenly, was close at his side.
"Do you know where his workroom is? You know what I mean."
"Upstairs." She caught his arm. "Mark, do you know what you're doing?"
"I'm doing what has to be done." He wasn't exaggerating. The cold was like a nagging toothache and the hateful blur had drawn Jms nerves to screaming pitch.
Sandra was afraid. He could tell it from the way she clutched his arm as they crept up the stairs. Her breathing was harsh and, when he gripped her hand, he found it moist with perspiration. Perhaps she had reason for her fear. She believed in a terminology he found ludicrous, but change the terminology. He opened a door at the head of the stairs and stepped into the past.
The room was big, running the full length of the house, decorated and adorned with images and paintings, masks and idols which must have known the smoke of sacrificial fires in the darker parts of the world. A parody of an altar stood at one end, black candles beneath the horned visage of a goat, whose ruby eyes glittered as if from inner fires. Pentagrams and esoteric symbols marked the bare, wooden floor. Vigil lamps burned before nameless shrines.
Mark stood looking, reminded a little of Sandra's study, and yet to this her room had been a place of harmless make-believe. This place was vile. It reeked of animal waste and the smoke of pungent herbs. It stank of burnt offerings and smoldering incense. Things had been done in this room which no law, however tolerant, would have permitted.
The other half of the room reminded him of an old-fashioned apothecary's laboratory. Jars, boxes, containers were filled with powdered herbs, seeds, mummified remains of unidentifiable creatures, strange liquids and stranger pastes. Lefarge, Mark guessed, ran a prosperous business supplying the peculiar ingredients deemed essential to the proper observance of magical rites.
He hunted through the room as Sandra stood, wide-eyed, by the door, then paused, baffled. What he looked for wasn't in this room. It must be somewhere else in the house. The kitchen, perhaps?
He led the way downstairs to the region at the back of the house where the kitchen would normally be. Lefarge was waiting for them.
He looked just as Mark remembered. The same thin, black hair hugging the narrow skull in an exaggerated widow's peak. The same beard and moustache. The same deep-set eyes. He wore a dressing gown, tight belted around his waist. Embroidered slippers covered his feet. He was smoking a long, thin cigar.
"Sandra!" He made a little bow. "And Mr. Conway! How delightful."
"Is it?"
"Of course." Lefarge knocked ash from his cigar. He glanced at Sandra. "I confess that I had not expected this pleasure, my dear, but you are always welcome." His eyes moved to Mark. "You, of course, I have been expecting for some time."
"Then you are not surprised?"
"Naturally not. But this is no place for discussion. I suggest that we meet again this evening at the same place and with the same company as before."
"So that I can admit that I was wrong?" Mark shook his head. "Sorry, but I can't do that."
"Indeed?" The tip of Lefarge's tongue delicately moistened the corners of his mouth. "You know, Mr. Conway, I hardly think that you have any choice in the matter." He examined the tip of his cigar. "Don't you think that it's getting rather cold? Colder than, shalj.we say, last night?"
Mark shivered. Damn him, the man was right. He had been cold before but now it was growing worse. It took an effort to restrain his teeth from chattering. Sandra noticed it and caught at his arm.
"Mark. Why not do as he says?"
"No." Irritably he shook off her hand. "I brought you here for a reason," he said harshly. "I want to show you just how stupid a belief in magic is." He looked at Lefarge. ""All that rubbish upstairs; do you believe that its use is essential to gain concrete results?"
Lefarge shrugged. He leaned casually against the large refrigerator in a corner of the kitchen. Smoke from the cigar veiled his face. From the uncurtained window came the sounds of a waking world. Prosaic sounds. Comforting.
"I'll put it another way," snapped Mark. "Would you say that it was necessary for a radio engineer to utter an incantation every time he soldered a wire?"
"The two things are not the same," protested Sandra. "Mark, you—"
"I refuse to be dazzled by esoteric jargon." He didn't look at her. "If a thing serves no useful purpose to achieve a result then that thing is simply window dressing. Science is a method of dispensing with such window dressing. Magic will remain nonsense until such time as any magical experiment can be repeated at will and the results predicted—and then it won't be magic, it will be science."
"You are shivering, Mr. Conway." Lefarge's voice was a feral purr. "Do you still insist that magic is nonsense?"
"And your vision, isn't there a little something you would rather not look at? Still nonsense, Mr. Conway?"
"You have done nothing I could not do myself, Lefarge. Our methods may differ but the results would be the same."
"Hypnotism?"
"That and drugs and suggestion. I could hex a man so thoroughly that he wouldn't know hot from cold, night from day. I could convince him that he was blind, deaf, crippled. I could make him doubt his very existence and give him illusions which would send him out of this world. Magic, Lefarge, or science?"
"You are a stubborn man, Mr. Conway. How far must I go before you are willing to admit that in this world there are things you do not understand?" Lefarge leaned forward, pointing with the cigar, his back against the refrigerator. "I could kill you. You know that?"
"I know it."
"And still you deny the existence of my powers?"
"I only deny the existence of magic. I know exactly what you are doing and how you are doing it. I can break your hex, Lefarge, and I can do it without incantations, the mixing of witch brews, ceremonies or the summoning of invisible powers. I can do it now."
"Impossible!" Sweat shone on the high forehead. "My power is too great for such simple breaking. I have allied myself to terrible beings and their strength is as my own. Be humble, man, before it is too late!" He actually believed every word he said. Mark listened to the stark conviction of his voice and wondered just how close the man was to insanity. He put his hand into his pocket.
"You cannot break the spell which binds you," insisted Lefarge. "Only I can do that with the proper safeguards and precautions, which must be used if the power is not to recoil."
"You are wrong." Slowly Mark drew his hand from his pocket. Light from the window splintered against the polished blade, the brazen hilt of the dagger. "Magic is what you choose to call it," he said gently. "I have come armed with my own magic of cold steel. Stand away from that refrigerator, Lefarge."
"No."
"Stand away!" His patience was exhaused; the time for playacting over. Roughly Mark pushed Lefarge to one side. He jerked open the big, white-enameled door, He bared his teeth at what he saw within.
It was a flat board, painted, covered with lines, signs, symbols, none of which he understood. He lifted it from the frost-covered shelf and set it on the table. Something moved sluggishly, and he crushed it with his thumb. He was sweating despite the waning cold. The blur left his sight.
"How did you know I was terrified of spiders?" His eyes moved from Lefarge to Sandra. "Of course, you would have told him that/' Thoughtfully he studied the board.
His photograph stared back at him, rimmed with melting frost, half-covered by the remains of a bloodstained handkerchief, the shreds of half a tie. Mingled with the scraps were strands of hair and nail clippings. About the photograph, resting on various symbols, were oddly shaped pieces of stone, the dried seeds of some plant, fragments of animal tissue he was unable to identify.
Lefarge's hex.
It had worked, Mark could not deny that. By some means, not magical because magic was only the name given to the inexplicable unknown, an affinity had been established between himself and this board. An affinity so close that he had felt the numbing cold of the refrigerator, had sensed the horror of the spider glued by its legs to one side of his pictured eye.
The spider he had seen in tremendous magnification when Lefarge had passed it before the portrait.
Sympathetic magic some people would have called it, but Mark knew better. It had nothing to do with demons, incantations, ceremony, the mixing of esoteric brews, the exhortation of wizards and witches. It had nothing to do with mysterious powers with unpronounceable names. It was no more magical than hypnotism or dowsing for water. It was science, as yet a young and barely understood science, but a science just the same.
"You know what this is?" He looked at Sandra, ignoring Lefarge, who stood watchful beside the open refrigerator. "It belongs to a science which people are only just beginning to investigate. Paraphysical science. Already we know that the relationship of certain symbols and objects seem to have a special significance. Not strange, really, when you consider a printed circuit in a radio set. What else is that but the relationship of special symbols? Would you call a radio set magical, Sandra?"
"No."
"Then why assume that this thing, because as yet we do not fully understand it, is magical?" He reached out to touch the board and heard the sharp hiss of indrawn breath. Lefarge, eyes wide with fear, tensed where he stood. Mark gestured toward him. "Look at him, your magician, your wizard. Look how he trembles. Would a man, claiming to control infinite power, be afraid of a painted board—if he could do as he claimed?"
Lefarge made a choking sound.
"Why are you afraid?" Mark stared him in the face. The deep-set eyes glared back at him, foam appearing at the corners of the thin lips. The man was almost insane with hate. Or was it fear?
Mark smiled and, with slow deliberation, sliced off the pointed tip of Lefarge's beard. He hesitated, the point of the dagger against the lobe of the other's ear.
"Should I take a little blood, Lefarge? I might need it for future use, just as you anticipated a need when you obtained some of my blood and hair. Does Sandra mean so much to you that you had to impress her?" The point of the knife dug deeper, a spot of blood appeared. Mark wiped it away with the soft tuft of hair.
"Stay away from me, Lefarge," he warned. "If you don't I'll show you what hexing really means."
He stepped back, laughing as Lefarge ran from the room. Upstairs the sound of a slammed door echoed hol|pwly through the building. The wizard would be busy with his protective spells, Mark guessed, and said so. Sandra was not amused.
"What are you going to do with it, Mark?" She pointed toward the board.
"Keep it. Study it. Try to figure out just what it does and how it works, without any ridiculous appealing to demons. If Lefarge can use it, then so can I."
"Are you sure?"
"Perhaps 'not." He drew paper from his pocket, began to note down the exact positioning of the various objects. "A dowsing rod does not work for everyone, but dowsing still works. They even sell the rods as engineering equipment in order to locate underground pipes." He finished his scribbling, put away the paper. "Lefarge can prosecute me for its return if he likes. Somehow I don't think that he will."
"No, Mark, he won't prosecute."
"Not with what he's got upstairs, he won't." He stretched, feeling wholly comfortable for the first time since the party. It was good to feel warm, good not to have a blur in his sight. It was even better to know that he had been right all along and that magic did not exist aside from the conviction of its devotees. Lefarge had stumbled on something, a fragment of workable science which he had totally misunderstood, giving the credit to unnamed demons rather than to unsuspected natural law. He said so, then noticed Sandra's expression.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing, Mark. It's just that-" She looked helplessly at him. "It's just that you haven't proved anything. Not really. Nothing at all."
He should have known. All his experience should have told him but he, like a blind fool, had overlooked the obvious. He had tried to convince her that no such thing as magic existed, that witchcraft was nothing but a pastime for fools.
And he had forgotten that she was a witch.
You can't tell a person that what they believe in is ridiculous. You can't take away something without offering something to take its place. Try it and you will fail. Sandra had become a witch because of certain reasons, and those reasons hadn't changed. She was still what she had always been. Now, perhaps, she had lost her faith in Lefarge, but that was all. The big thing still remained. He had done nothing to shake her belief in that.
He could argue, but arguments could work both ways. Altering the terminology didn't alter the facts. She believed in certain powers, ridiculous things like spells and enchantments, hexes and love charms…
He slapped his pocket. The thing was still there. He took it out and smiled into her eyes.
"You believe in witchcraft," he said. "That means you must believe in the power of this charm. Correct?"
She nodded.
"And if I burn it my love for you will vanish?"
Again she nodded.
"I want you to marry me, Sandra," he said deliberately. "1 have asked you before and I ask you now and I will ask you again—when I have burned this."
"Mark! Please!"
"Do you honestly think I would do it if I wasn't sure?" He looked at her and felt the loveliness of her like a physical pain. He would never change. How could he ever change when he needed her so much?
A gas cooker stood in the kitchen. He lit the main burner, waited a moment, then threw the charm into the center of the flames. For a moment it held its shape, then the dry wood caught and burned with a leaping flame. In minutes the bundle was unrecognizable ash.
Mark turned off the gas and looked at his watch. It was getting late, he had to get home, wash, shave, change and snatch some breakfast before getting to the office. He had little time.
"Mark!"
He had forgotten Sandra. She stood looking at him, eyes, wide with anticipation. A nice enough girl, good skin, fine hair, not a bad figure either. A nice girl as girls went.
She would make someone a good wife.
He glanced at his watch again and hastily left the building.
A modern magician on a date to heal a soul.